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Jeans, Sir James - The Mysterious Universe - The Bell Rope
Identifier
002964
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Sir James Jeans – The Mysterious Universe
[Using the example of a bell rope]…. We can understand how pulling a material rope can cause a material bell to ring, because there is a material connection all the way. But it is far less easy to see how a disturbance of material atoms can cause a poetic thought to originate, because the two are so entirely dissimilar in nature.
For this reason Descartes insisted that there could be no possible connection between mind and matter. He believed they were two entirely distinct kinds of entity, the essence of matter being extension in space, and that of mind being thought. And this led him to maintain that there were two distinct worlds, one of mind and one of matter, running, so to speak, independent courses on parallel rails without ever meeting.