The whole life lies in the verb seeing.
Pierre Teilhard De ChardinRead
From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that humanity poses the greatest mysteries to science, more so than any other entity or phenomenon.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin highlights the complexity and enigma of human existence from a scientific perspective. He implies that while science seeks to understand various phenomena, the nature of humanity remains uniquely challenging and puzzling, thus emphasizing the limitations of positivist viewpoints in fully grasping what makes us human.
In practice
In a discussion about the limits of scientific understanding at a university lecture.
The whole life lies in the verb seeing.
Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge - the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.
The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.
We may, perhaps, imagine that the creation was finished long ago. But that would be quite wrong. It continues still more magnificently, and at the highest levels of the world.
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth.
If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions. There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me - I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction.
We pick out a text here and there to make it serve our turn; whereas , if we take it all together, and considered what went before and what followed after, we should find it meant no such thing.
Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.
Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless.
I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.
My father, a bookkeeper who never earned more than $11,000 a year in his life, sat there, writing out a $25 check to the NAACP. When I asked him why, he said discrimination against anyone is discrimination against us all. And I never forgot that. Indeed, his philanthropy was a gift, not just to that organization, but to me.
O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.
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