Children's Song

We live in our own world,

A world that is too small

For you to stoop and enter

Even on hands and knees,

The adult subterfuge.

And though you probe and pry

With analytic eye,

And eavesdrop all our talk

With an amused look,

You cannot find the centre

Where we dance, where we play

Where life is still asleep

Under the closed flower,

Under the smooth shell

Of eggs in the cupped nest

That mock the faded blue

Of you remoter heaven.

R.S. Thomas

Ali Farka Touré "Roucky"

from the album "The Source"

Song

Wandering, wandering, hoping to find
The ring of mushrooms with the wet rind,
Cold to the touch but bright with dew,
A green asylum from time's range.

And finding instead the harsh ways
Of the ruinous wind and the clawed rain;
The storm's hysteria in the bush;
the wild creatures and their pain.

R.S. Thomas

mental

It is commonly said that Descartes attempted to derive all human knowledge from premises whose truth was intuitively certain: but this interpretation puts an undue stress on the element of psychology in his system. I think he realized well enough that a mere appeal to intuition was insufficient for his purpose, since men are not all equally credulous, and that what he was really trying to do was to base all our knowledge on propositions which it would be self-contradictory to deny. He thought he had found such a proposition in ‘cogito’ , which must not here be understood in its ordinary sense of ‘I think’ but rather as meaning ‘there is a thought now’. In fact he was wrong because ‘non cogito’ would be self-contradictory only if it negated itself : and this no significant proposition can do. But even if it were true that such a proposition as ‘there is a thought now’ was logically certain, it still would not serve Descartes’s purpose. For if ‘cogito’ is taken in this sense, his initial principle ‘cogito ergo sum’ is false 'I exist' does not follow from 'there is a thought now'. The fact that a thought occurs at a given moment does not entail that any other thought has occurred at any other moment, still less that there has occurred a series of thoughts sufficient to constitute a single self. As Hume conclusively showed no one event intrinsically points to any other. We infer the existence of events which we are not actually observing, with the help of general principles. But these principles must be obtained inductively. By mere deduction from what is immediately given we cannot advance a single step beyond. And consequently any attempt to base a deductive system on propositions which describe what is immediately given is bound to be a failure.

from "Language, Truth and Logic" by A.J. Ayer