common sense is a very tricky instrument; it is as deceptive as it is indispensable.

A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents.

the wide discrepancy between reason and feeling may be unreal; it is not improbable that intellect is a high form of feeling - a specialized, intensive feeling about intuitions.

The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.

Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of "felt life", as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures.

The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. That is the real sense of Aristotle's definition of Man as "the rational animal".

Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more. Since he has learned to esteem signs above symbols, to suppress his emotional reactions in favor of practical ones and make use of nature instead of holding so much of it sacred, he has altered the face, if not the heart, of reality.