"Every time we play tennis we are prophets without knowing of the future position of the ball which is conceived of as present. In the human stage we have extended mostly backwards as memory, our immediate prevision being limited by lack of scientific knowledge."

Rating:

  rate this quote
Topic: none  help us select a topic for this quote

More quotes from: John Desmond Bernal

• "A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead ..."
• "Altering in any perfectly sound physiological or surgical way the functionings of the body will ..."
• "Anticipation of movement, through muscular innervation and memory, by its retention of nerve impulse images, ..."
• "As experimentation becomes more complex, the need for the co-operation in it of technical elements ..."
• "As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the ..."
• "Bertrand Russell, in one of his Skeptical Essays, predicting the approaching end of the scientific ..."
• "By the intimate intercommunication of minds, the very existence of the ego would be impaired ..."
• "Feeling, or at any rate, feeling-tones, will almost certainly be under conscious control a feeling-tone ..."
• "However they appear to the pessimist of the present day, it is not in specialization ..."
• "Hunger and sex still dominate the primitive mammalian side of human existence, but at the ..."
• "It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence ..."
• "It is here that prediction is most difficult and most fascinating. Under the influence of ..."
• "It is now rapidly increasing, but is not usually accepted as prevision because it is ..."
• "It is pretty clear that they are ineffective in stopping the course of thought at ..."
• "It should be possible so to improve educational methods, that mental activity, the capacity to ..."
• "Marxists have some way of analyzing the development of affairs which enables them to judge ..."
• "Naturalism aimed at giving the primitive wishes full play but failed because these wishes are ..."
• "Obviously certain considerable psychological displacements or perversions must occur to balance the physiological perversions. "
• "Pedantry and bureaucracy - symptoms of an unintelligent respect for the past - are at ..."
• "Perhaps after all it is hope that really determines whether an age is or is ..."
• "Political and social events must also be effective, but not in a very obvious fashion. ..."

• "Rationalism strove to make the super-ego the dominant partner; it never succeeded, not only because ..."
• "Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real ..."
• "Scientific corporations might well become almost independent states and be enabled to undertake their largest ..."
• "Specialization is brought about by the wideness of the field in which science operates, but ..."
• "That prospect should please both sides it should satisfy the scientists in their aspirations towards ..."
• "The consciousness of solidarity - and even more, the unconscious emotional identification with the group ..."
• "The human mind evolved always in the company of the human body, and of the ..."
• "The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the ..."
• "The problem is essentially that of communications to an army in action. After a rapid ..."
• "The psychology of a complex mind must differ almost as much from that of a ..."
• "The recognition of the art that informs all pure science need not mean the abandonment ..."
• "The relevance of Marxism to science is that it removes it from its imagined position ..."
• "The task which the scientists have undertaken_the understanding and control of nature and of man ..."
• "The uncritical acceptance of this, however, leads many into believing that Marxism is simply another ..."
• "There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's ..."
• "This we can vaguely adumbrate when we think of the conflicts involved between ego and ..."
• "To talk of the contribution of Marx to science seems almost superfluous, for Marx himself ..."
• "Up to the present the cumulative edifice of science has been erected by assistance as ..."
• "Viewed from the standpoint of the present the carrying out of such a program of ..."
• "We do not really expect or want the probable; all, even the least religious, retain ..."

• "We shall be forced to attempt planned and directed research employing hundreds of workers for ..."
• "We shall have very sane reactionaries at all periods warning us to remain in the ..."