The title of this "post" once adorned a table in the DFW airport that I manned with colleagues of my erstwhile association with the "LaRouche organization." Now, if an anthropological empiricist from any extant institution of "higher learning" were to perform a statistical analysis of the passersby's reactions to said polemic they might be edified that their assumptions about the bifurcation of left brain/right brain ( one might say yin yang) dualism were overwhelmingly and exhaustively proven correct. For the reactions from those passersby were always either/or. I.e., they apparently understood one word or the other, but never both. For none with the exception of myself and co-thinkers had any inkling of what that sign meant.
Yet, E. A. Poe's fictional character Dupin would at once have given assent to the principle at play. As Poe so ironically put it:
And I rest so composedly,
Now, in my bed
That any beholder
Might fancy me dead-
Might start at beholding me,
Thinking me dead.
But the mind of humanity is immortal. As Leibniz so rigorously demonstrated there are no parts to the immediacy of conscious thought. That being the case, thought itself cannot be of the nature of things that are finite and capable of death or entropic. For those finite things must have parts that can wax or wane.
Now "ideas" may of course be finite and indeed false or relatively true. But they are not equivalent to the overarching and omnipresent human mind. For as Shelley once wrote:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
For the open secret to life everlasting is simply an inexhaustible striving to become less imperfect. Not for the sake of the rewards of the mere here and now, but rather to bequeath to our progeny a potential to do the good for their own futurity. And that is the principle of agape.
