This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way all over again.
Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.
Art | Ends | Entertainment | Imagination | Truth |
If the subjective constitution of the senses in general were removed, the whole constitution and all the relation of objects in space and time, nay, space and time themselves, would vanish... As appearances they cannot exist in themselves but only in us. What objects are in themselves, apart from all the receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them - a mode which is peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared in by every being.
Nothing | Sensibility | Space | Time |
Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.
Knowledge | Nothing | Object | Sensibility | Thought | Understanding | Think |
One might say that the American trend of education is to reduce the senses almost to nil.
The divine nature is created and creates in the primordial causes; but in their effects it is created and does not create. And not without reason, since in these effects it establishes the end of its descent, that is, of its appearance. In the scriptures, therefore, every corporeal and visible creature which falls under the senses is generally called - and not inappropriately - an outermost trace of the divine nature.
Appearance | Nature | Reason |
By anticipation we suffer misery and enjoy happiness before they are in being. We can set the sun and stars forward, or lose sight of them by wandering into those retired parts of eternity when the heavens and earth shall be no more.
Anticipation | Earth | Eternity | Happiness |
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only when we have it - when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed... In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come to be the sheer alienation of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being has been reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world.
Absolute | Alienation | Object | Order | Poverty | Property | Sense | Wealth | World |
The overcoming of private property means the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it means this emancipation precisely because these senses and qualities have become human both subjectively and objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object derived from and for the human being. The senses have therefore become theoreticians immediately in their practice. They try to relate themselves to their subject matter for its own sake, but the subject matter itself is an objective human relation to itself and to the human being, and vice versa. Need or satisfaction have thus lost their egoistic nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use.
Means | Nature | Need | Object | Practice | Property | Qualities | Vice |
Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
When our senses of sight and hearing are distracted by the things outside, without the participation of thought, then the material things act upon the material senses and lead them astray. That is the explanation. The function of the mind is thinking: when you think, you keep your mind, and when you don’t think, you lose your mind. This is what heaven has given to us. One who cultivates his higher self will find that his lower self follows in accord. That is how a man becomes a great man.
Apela Colorado, aka Pamela Colorado
The data from indigenous science are not used to control the forces of nature; instead, the data tell us ways and means of accommodating nature... The purpose of indigenous science is to maintain balance... Indigenous science is holistic, drawing on all senses including the spiritual and psychic realm. Indigenous science collapses time ands space, with the result that our fields of participation and inquiry extend into and overlap with past and present.
Balance | Control | Inquiry | Means | Nature | Past | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Science | Space | Time |
The soul circumscribes all things. It contradicts all experiences. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable.
Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic.
A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, or in the realm of intuitions and duty.
Duty | Ideas | Imagination | Life | Life | Man | Thought | Understanding |
He is a strong man who can hold down his opinion. A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, namely, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, in the realm of intuitions and duty.
Duty | Ideas | Imagination | Life | Life | Man | Opinion | Thought | Understanding |
The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.
Imagination | Time |
I will now close my eyes, I will stop my ears, I will turn away my senses from their objects, I will even efface from my consciousness all the images of corporeal things; or at least, because this can hardly be accomplished, I will consider them as empty and false; and thus, holding converse only with myself, and closely examining my nature, I will endeavour to obtain by degrees a more intimate and familiar knowledge of myself.
Consciousness | Knowledge | Nature | Will |