Perhaps it takes someone like Jacob Bronowski with interests balanced in science and literature to see and say it like this:
Every stage in the domestication of plant and animal life requires inventions, which begin as technical devices and from which flow scientific principles. The basic devices of the nimble-fingered mind lie about, unregarded, in any village anywhere in the world. Their cornucopia of small and subtle artifices is as ingenious, and in a deep sense as important in the ascent of man, as any apparatus of nuclear physics: the needle, the awl, the pot, the brazier, the spade, the nail and the screw, the bellows, the string, the knot, the loom, the harness, the hook, the button, the shoe—one could name a hundred and not stop for breath. The richness comes from the interplay of inventions; a culture is a multiplier of ideas, in which each new device quickens and enlarges the power of the rest.
This holds equally for the culture of ideas in one’s mind; each new idea quickens and enlarges the power of the rest. So never lose an idea; it should gain power as new ideas come.
(Quoted from page 59 of The Ascent of Man, by Jacob Bronowski. BBC Books, 2011.)
For a brief biography of Jacob Bronowski, click here. For images of or relating to Jacob Bronowski, click here.
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