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ca0b051
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Why, if evolution were a free for all, restrained only by selection for fitness, why did Australia not produce some of the bug-eyed monsters of science fiction? The only moderately unorthodox creation of that isolated island in a hundred million years are the kangaroos and wallabies; the rest of its fauna consists of rather poor replicas of more efficient placental types-vatiations on a limited number of archetypal themes.
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Arthur Koestler |
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434c62e
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Complexity of thought is no measure of originality.
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Arthur Koestler |
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027eeca
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The distance between the library and the bedroom is astronomical
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intelligentsia
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Arthur Koestler |
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fab7eac
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One conclusion which emerged from this imaginary operation was that all changes in electric and magnetic force (for instance, those caused by an oscillating circuit) sent waves spreading through space; and that these waves had the same transverse character, and the same speed, as light. 'We can scarcely avoid the inference', he wrote in a monumental sentence, 'that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the..
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Arthur Koestler |
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41713b8
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Lastly, he hit on the idea of transferring the observer's position into the centre of the world, and to examine the variations in angular velocity, regardless of distance, as seen from the sun. And lo! it worked. The results were even more gratifying than he had expected. Saturn, for instance, when farthest away from the sun, in its aphelion, moves at the rate of 106 seconds arc per day; when closest to the sun, and its speed is at maximum,..
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Arthur Koestler |
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c471be4
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The eight sin, deadlier than all- self transcendence through misplaced devotion-is not included in the list.
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Arthur Koestler |
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33ce3cd
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Every year several million people are killed quite pointlessly by epidemics and other natural catastrophes. And we should shrink from sacrificing a few hundred thousand for the most promising experiment in history? Not to mention the legions of those who die of under-nourishment and tuberculosis in coal and quicksilver mines, rice-fields and cotton plantations. No one takes any notice of them; nobody asks why or what for; but if here we sho..
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Arthur Koestler |
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f39b9e6
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The Eureka act proper, the moment of truth experienced by the creative individual, is paralleled on the collective plane by the emergence, out of the scattered fragments, of a new synthesis, brought about by a quick succession of individual discoveries-where, characteristically, the same discovery is often made by several individuals at the same time.
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Arthur Koestler |
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10d676f
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In the immortal parable of the Cave, where men stand in their chains backs to the light , perceiving only the play of shadows on the wall, unaware that these are but shadows, unaware of the luminous reality outside the Cave-in this allegory of the human condition, Plato hit an archetypal chord as pregnant with echoes as Pythagoras' Harmony of the Spheres. But when we think of Neoplatonism and scholasticism as concrete philosophies and prece..
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Arthur Koestler |
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820fbad
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For Pythagoras as for Kepler, the two kinds of contemplation were twins; for them philosophy and religion were motivated by the same longing : to catch glimpses of eternity through the window of time.
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Arthur Koestler |
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821fe8e
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If Nature abhors the void, the mind abhors what is meaningless. Show a person an ink-blot, and he will start at once to organise it into a hierarchy of shapes, tentacles, wheels, masks, a dance of figures.
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Arthur Koestler |
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c059786
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Matrices vary from fully automatized skills to those with a high degree of plasticity; but even the latter are controlled by rules of the game which function below the level of awareness. These silent codes can be regarded as condensations of learning into habit. Habits are the indispensable core of stability and ordered behaviour; they also have a tendency to become mechanized and to reduce man to the status of a conditioned automaton. The..
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Arthur Koestler |
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b2c10cd
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The growth of the nervous system from beginning to end is dominated by 'a totally integrated matrix, and not a progressive integration of primarily individuated units'. The organism is not a sum of its reflexes, but on the contrary 'the mechanism of the total pattern is an essential component of the performance of the part, i.e. the reflex'. The stimulus-response scheme cannot explain even embryonic behaviour, because movements appear long ..
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Arthur Koestler |
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c07dc00
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Generally speaking, words like 'agent of,' 'Democracy,' 'Freedom,' etc. meant something quite different in Party usage from what they meant in general usage; and as, furthermore, even their Party meaning changed with each shift of the line, our polemical methods became rather like the croquet game of the Queen of Hearts, in which the hoops moved about the field and the balls were live hedgehogs. With this difference, that when a player miss..
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Arthur Koestler |
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e99957a
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The addiction to the Soviet myth is as tenacious and difficult to cure as any other addiction.
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Arthur Koestler |
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53d9676
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rwbshf akhrynbr khh bh zndn ftdh bwd brh khtkh khwrdh bwd, wly drbrhy yn rwsh (shkhnjh) fqT shy`ty shnydh bwd. yd grfth bwd khh hr drd jsmnyi shnkhthshdhy qbl tHml st. gr khsy pyshpysh bdnd khh dqyq chh blyy qrr st srsh byyd, mytwnd an r mnnd ykh `ml jrHy -mthl khshydn dndn- tHml khnd. khbrhy wq` bd fqT khbrhy nshnkhthnd khh bh frd hych frSty bry pyshbynyi `khsl`mlh w hych mqysy bry mHsbhy Zrfyt mqwmtsh nmydhd. w z hmh bdtr trs z yn bwd khh..
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Arthur Koestler |
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da2bd5d
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Good things can be created from bad.
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Arthur Koestler |
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0fd1b9d
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We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see.
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Arthur Koestler |
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92806a3
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Should we sit with idle hands because the consequences of an act are never quite to be foreseen, and hence all action is evil?
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Arthur Koestler |
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edadbfc
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Die in silence.
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Arthur Koestler |
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55eee06
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Truth is what is useful to humanity, falsehood what is harmful. In the outline of history published by the Party for the evening classes for adults, it is emphasized that during the first few centuries the Christian religion realized an objective progress for mankind. Whether Jesus spoke the truth or not, when he asserted he was the son of God and of a virgin, is of no interest to any sensible person. It is said to be symbolical, but the pe..
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Arthur Koestler |
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4371bab
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Experience teaches," said Gletkin, "that the masses must be given for all difficult and complicated processes a simple, easily grasped explanation. According to what I know of history, I see that mankind could never do without scapegoats. I believe it was at all times an indispensable institution; your friend Ivanov taught me that it was of religious origin. As far as I remember, he explained that the word itself came from a custom of the H..
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Arthur Koestler |
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f60be68
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We have seen how laughter is sparked off by the collision of matrices; discovery, by their integration; aesthetic experience by their juxtaposition. Snobbery follows neither of these patterns; it is a hotchpotch of matrices, the application of the rules of one game to another game. It uses a clock to measure weight, and a thermometer to to measure distance. The creative mind perceives things in a new light, the snob in a borrowed light; his..
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Arthur Koestler |
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3664e3c
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But the history of science teaches that most discoveries were made by several people independently from each other, at more or less the same time; and this fact alone (apart from all other considerations) is sufficient to show that when the time is ripe for a given type of invention or discovery, the favourable chance event which sparks it off is bound to occur sooner or later.
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Arthur Koestler |
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43c1888
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As we ascend to the hierarchies of living matter, we find, even on the lowest level observable through the electron microscope, sub-cellular structures-organelles-of staggering complexity. And the most striking fact is that these minuscule parts of the cell function as self-governing wholes in their own right, each following its own statute-book of rules. One type of organelles look as quasi-independent agencies after the cell's growth; oth..
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Arthur Koestler |
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b25c4ac
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Whatever the nature of organizing relations may be,' J. Needham wrote in 1932, 'they form the central problem of biology, and biology will be fruitful in the future only if this is recognized. The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon compounds to the equilibrium of species and ecological wholes, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.
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Arthur Koestler |
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ceb8bdc
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The satirist's most effective weapon is irony. Its aim is to defeat the opponent on his own ground by pretending to accept his premises, his values, his methods of reasoning, in order to expose their implicit absurdity. 'All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.' Irony purports to take seriously what it does not; it enters into the spirit of the other person's game to demonstrate that its rules are stupid or vicious. It is..
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Arthur Koestler |
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541c909
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Numbers are eternal while everything else is perishable; they are of the nature not of matter, but of mind; they permit mental operations of the most surprising and delightful kind without reference to the coarse external world of the senses-which is how the divine mind must be supposed to operate. The ecstatic contemplation of geometrical forms and mathematical laws is therefore the most effective means of purging the soul of earthly passi..
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Arthur Koestler |
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aebfad7
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El odio, como el amor, solo florece donde hay algo en comun, donde existe un comun denominador.
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Arthur Koestler |
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01e6e45
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He shivered. A picture appeared in his mind's eye, a big photograph in a wooden frame: the delegates to the first congress of the Party. They sat at a long wooden table, some with their elbows propped on it, others with their hands on their knees; bearded and earnest, they gazed into the photographer's lens. Above each head was a small circle, enclosing a number corresponding to a name printed underneath. All were solemn, only the old man w..
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Arthur Koestler |
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d002b3c
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We are indeed a blind race,' wrote a contemporary scientist, 'and the next generation, blind to its own blindness, will be amazed at ours.
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Arthur Koestler |
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b7df1d0
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The working of the central nervous system is a hierarchic affair in which functions at the higher levels do not deal directly with the ultimate structural units, such as neurons or motor units, but operate by activating lower patterns that have their own relatively autonomous structural unity.
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Arthur Koestler |
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cd5ddc3
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Coghill has shown that the motor patterns of the animal develop prior to the development of sensory innervation.
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Arthur Koestler |
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621e11f
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the integration of matrices is not a simple operation of adding together. It is a process of mutual interference and cross-fertilization, in the course of which both matrices are transformed in various ways and degrees. Hidden axioms, implied in the old codes, suddenly stand revealed and are subsequently dropped; the rules of the game are revised before they enter as sub-rules into the composite game. When Einstein bisociated energy and mat..
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Arthur Koestler |
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e1c8ebf
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Helen Spurway concluded from the evidence of homology that the organism has only 'a restricted mutation spectrum' which 'determines its possibilities of evolution'.
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Arthur Koestler |
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0209877
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In the first place, a new synthesis never results from a mere adding together of two fully developed branches in biological or mental evolution. Each new departure, each reintegration of what has become separated, involves the breaking down of the rigid, ossified patterns of behaviour and thought. Copernicus failed to do so; he tried to mate the heliocentric tradition with orthodox Aristotelian doctrine, and failed. Newton succeeded because..
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Arthur Koestler |
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921aea5
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All efforts of persuasion by reasoned argument rely on the implicit assumption that homo sapiens, though occasionally blinded by emotion, is a basically rational animal, aware of the motives of his own actions and beliefs-an assumption which is untenable in the light of both historical and neurological evidence. All such appeals fall on barren ground; they could take root only if the ground were prepared by a spontaneous change in human men..
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Arthur Koestler |
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5145fbd
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The Copernican system was not a truly heliocentric one; it was a vacuo-centric system, so to speak.
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Arthur Koestler |
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7820bbe
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This experience of partness within a dynamic whole leads to a temporary suspension of individual responsibility-which is replaced by unconditional subordination to the 'controlling centre', the leader of the crowd. It further entails the temporary effacement of all self-assertive tendencies: the total surrender of the individual to the collectivity is manifested in altruistic, heroic, self-sacrificing acts-and at the same time in bestial cr..
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Arthur Koestler |
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f4252e8
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So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the party line to be followed in Ind..
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Arthur Koestler |
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33795f5
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At each step biochemical triggers and feedbacks determine which of the alternative developmental pathways among several possibles a group of cells will actually follow.
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Arthur Koestler |
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52b3352
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The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of noting; it uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills. The more familiar the parts, the more striking the new whole. Man's knowledge of the changes of the tides and the phases of the moon is as old as his observation that apples fall to earth in the ripeness of time. Ye..
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Arthur Koestler |
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9125625
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Theoretical physics is no longer concerned with things, but with the mathematical relations between abstractions which are the residue of the vanished things.
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Arthur Koestler |
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45d7a04
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Could some similar paradox be responsible for the crisis in modern physics - some unconscious blockage which prevents us from seeing the 'obvious', and compels us to persist in our own version of wavemechanical double-think?
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Arthur Koestler |