§ The Metaphysical Horizon

• Idea told to me by Dr. Alistair Lockhart at Churchill College, Cambridge.
• Humans are cognitive subjects, perceiving an unfathomed cosmos that surrounds them.
• Cultural activities (including science) are cultutal activities that are cognitive attempts to understand the cosmos.
• Since the culture (including science) is public, everyday items of human life are connected to the cosmos in the same way religious symbols are.

From this point of view,
learning is more important than knowing,
and the creation of a work of art is more important
than the appreciation of it when it is finished.

All are to be thought of, not merely in terms of the artist,
the thinker, and the reformer, but in terms of those hints and implications
upon the horizon of present experience that serve as incitements to advance.

Horizon facts are those whose connection with the fully experienced is clear enough,
but not their connection with what may yet be exeperienced (and is not yet).
They are such aspects of the real world which attract the the attention of an
imaginative scientist, and, as it will be argued later, of all artists.
They are of all kinds: The implication of a dream, the unsolved mathematical problem,
the new light on a chair, and the attractiveness of some situation never felt before.

§ References

• Spiritual, but not religious: Understanind Unchurched America
• The interpretation of Cultures
• The Sense of the Horizon
• Feeling and Form
• Philosophy in a new Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art.