``The truth is that the brain is continuous with the body, and the body is continuous with the rest of the natural world. Human experience is an act of self-origination including the whole of nature, limited to the perspective of a

``We are in the world and the world is in us. Our immediate occasion is in the society of occasions forming the soul, and our soul is in our present occasion. The body is ours, and we are an activity within our body. This fact of observation, vague but imperative,

``The moral of the tale is the power of reason, its decisive influence on the life of humanity. The great conquerors, from Alexander to Caesar, and from Caesar to Napoleon, influenced profoundly the lives of subsequent generations. But the total effect of this influence shrinks to

Back after a month's vacation & here's some more Whitehead :p ``[T]here is a dual aspect to the relationship of an occasion of experience as one relatum and the experienced world as another relatum. The world is included within the occasion in one sense,

``Since, on all plausible accounts, any concrete moment of human experience is construed as embodying a finite locus within the world, the said experience and the remainder of the world must be outside each other.

``If contact with the world consists of physical stimulation of these receptor interfaces located on the body, how is it that individuals experience a world of features “out there” that extends away from them and among which they negotiate?

``Understanding is self-evidence. But our clarity of intuition is limited, and it flickers. Thus inference enters as means for the attainment of such understanding as we can achieve. Proofs are the tools for the extension of our imperfect self-evidence'' [Whitehead, Modes of Thought].

``The thesis that I am developing conceives proof, in the strict sense of that term, as a feeble second-rate procedure. When the notion of proof has been uttered, the next notion to enter the mind is halfheartedness. Unless proof has produced self-evidence and thereby rendered

``There are two sides to nature, as it were, antagonistic the one to the other, and yet each essential. The one side is development in creative advance, the essential becomingness of nature.

``It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. ... But of course, a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one. Also action in accordance to the emotional lure of a proposition is more apt to be successful if the proposition be true.