The multitude of books

Adrien Baillet in Jugemens des savants sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs in 1725.

We have reason to fear that the multitude of books that are increasing every day in a prodigious manner will put the centuries to come into as difficult a state as that in which barbarity had put the earlier ones after the fall of the Roman Empire. Unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not.

Be quite candid with ourselves and with the facts

From William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with ourselves and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind superior to others, is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different reasons. It is either because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life.

Canonical Milestones

From The Limits of Complexity by Theodore Modis, an attempt to define and measure complexity. Modis attempts to identify the most significant milestones in history: "The 28 'canonical' milestones, . . . generally represent a cluster of many milestones events." See the article for his methodology which is necessarily open to criticism, but it is an interesting attempt. Below are the 28 inflection points of history which he identifies from a larger complilation from a variety of sources.

1) The Big Bang and associated processes: 15.5 billion years ago
2) Origin of Milky Way, first stars: 10 billion years ago
3) Origin of life on Earth, formation of the solar system and the Earth, oldest rocks: 4 billion years ago
4) First eukaryotes, invention of sex (by microorganisms), atmospheric oxygen, oldest photosynthetic plants, plate tectionics established: 2 billion years ago
5) First multicellular life (sponges, seaweeds, protozoans): 1 billion years ago
6) Cambrian explosion, invertebrates, vertebrates, plants colonize land, first trees, reptiles, insects, amphibians: 430 million years ago
7) First mammals, first birds, first dinosaurs, first use of tools: 210 million years ago
8) First flowering plants, oldest angiosperm fossil: 139 million years ago
9) Asteroid collision, first primates, mass extinction (including dinosaurs): 54.6 million years ago
10) First hominids, first humanoids: 28.5 million years ago
11) First organutan, origin of proconsul: 16.5 million years ago
12) Chimpanzees and humans diverge, earliest hominid bipedalism: 5.1 million years ago
13) First stone tools, first humans, Ice Age, Homo erectus, origin of spoken language: 2.2 million years ago
14) Emergence of Homo sapiens: 550,000 years ago
15) Domestication of fire, Homo heidelbergensis: 325,000 years ago
16) Differentiation of human DNA types: 200,000 years ago
17) Emergence of "modern humans," earliest burial of the dead: 105,000 years ago
18) Rock art, protowriting: 35,800 years ago
19) Invention of agriculture: 19,200 years ago
20) Techniques for starting fire, first cities: 11,000 years ago
21) Development of the wheel, writing, archaic empires: 4,907 years ago
22) Democracy, city-states, the Greeks, Buddha: 2,437 years ago
23) Zero and decimals invented, Rome falls, Moslem conquest: 1,440 years ago
24) Renaissance (printing press), discovery of New World, the scientific method: 539 years ago
25) Industrial revolution (steam engine), political revolutions (France, USA): 25 years ago
26) Modern physics, radio, electricity, automobile, airplane: 100 years ago
27) DNA structure described, transistor invetned, nuclear energy, World War II, Cold War, Sputnik: 50 years ago
28) Internet, human genome sequenced: 5 years ago

An order that always refers to limited aspects of reality

Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation, p. 253

Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.

Pleasure has no fellowship with virtue

Cicero, De Sectute -

The most noble and excellent gift of heaven to man is reason; and of all the enemies that reason has to engage with, pleasure is the chief. . . . Pleasure has no fellowship with virtue.

Always a child

Cicero:

Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.

They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations

From William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second, What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential judgment or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a Werthurtheil, or what we may, if we like, denominate a spiritual judgment. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the mind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding them together.