Poirot,
uin evolutionary terms your quote reminds me of theories of evolution like punctuated equilibrium, which Dawkins had some agreeable disagreeability with Stephen J Gould over.
The essence of dialectics is synthesis, or resolution, and a new direction taken thereafter--but that doesn't make it less derivative and I think you'd be hard pressed to to show where in the history of thought reason has broken genuinely radical new ground. Even when it does stumble upon novelty, it's as much a process of predictibilty and exclusion as anything else--including of stuff that might be useful WmTrevor Banjo Paterson.
The modern priests of reason ask their religious forebears to accept the Copernican revolution--that we're not the centre of the universe--but they refuse to accept the Copernican revolution of the psyche--that neither is it the centre of being--or experience. Human being is de-centred--we are cultured beings and experience the world and "meaning" vicariously, as it were--through cultured meaning and the passions.
The path to wisdom seems to be an evermore demeaning one.

I just want to elaborate the point that it surely can't be denied that we are not born with sophisticated, worldly minds...
We might be born with excellent brains, but the software is not pre-installed--is it?.
Even the operating system is downloaded piecemeal.
If the rationalists think they have objectivity on their side, then they're still religious.
On the other hand, the human heart does not yearn for awe; this is merely programming, a virus--or conceit.

Squeers, Banjo Paterson, WmTrevor,

On the subject of rationality, a little more from Koestler on science and the unconscious.

"There is a popular superstition, according to which scientists arrive at their discoveries by reasoning in strictly rational, precise, verbal terms. The evidence indicates that they do nothing of the sort. To quote a single example; in 1945, Jacques Hadamard organised a nation-wide inquiry among eminent mathematicians in America to find out their working methods. The results showed that all of them, with only two exceptions, thought neither in verbal terms, nor in algebraic symbols, but relied on visual imagery of a vague, hazy kind. Einstein was among those who answered the questionaire; he wrote:

'The words of the language as they are written or spoken do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought, which relies on more or less clear images of visual and some of muscular type. It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limited case which can never be fully accomplished because consciousness is a narrow thing'

Einstein's statement is typical. On the testimony of those original thinkers....not only verbal thinking but conscious thinking in general plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself. Their virtually unanimous emphasis on spontaneous intuitions and hunches of unconscious origin, which they are at a loss to explain, suggests the role of strictly rational and verbal process in scientific discovery has been vastly over-estimated since the age of enlightenment. There are always large chunks of irrationality embedded in the creative process, not only in art (where we are ready to accept it) but also in the exact sciences as well. The scientist, who, facing an obstinate problem, regresses from precise verbal thinking to vague visual imagery, seems to follow Woodworth's advice: 'Often we have to get away from speech in order to think clearly.' Language can become a screen between the thinker and reality; and creativity often starts where language ends, that is, by regressing to pre-verbal levels of mental activity."

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Dear Squeers,

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My previous post to WmTrevor was an attempt to highlight HIS definition of an "original idea".

Call it parody if you will. It is twenty thousand leagues from my own thoughts on the question.

In all honesty, one of my greatest regrets in life is that I consider that I have never, ever, succeeded in having one single original idea.

No doubt I am wrong in thinking it would have justified my passage on earth.

Obviously I have missed the point.

I probably still have a bit of time to think that over. So all is not yet lost.

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Banjo Paterson,

I didn't mean to mention your name in my last. It was rather rushed and I'd deleted a comment about one of your posts above, because I felt I hadn't done it justice. So I really wasn't addressing your posts at all, though I was having a pot-shot at WmTrevor, I just neglected to remove your name. I'm with you, actually, the older I get the less I know, and despite what I've said above I'm by no means convinced of the validity of any of it.
Poirot,
that's another interesting contribution but I'm sceptical. How do we separate impressions from language? How do we make sense of impressions without language?
Lacan insisted "the unconscious is structured like a language", in that meaning consists in the signifying chain, rather than resting passively in the signified. Sounds like gobbledigook but worth considering. Signification/meaning in language is not straightforward, but arises from the play of ramifying signification within the context. Unconscious impressions are possibly similar. Indeed if we are true rationalists, how can we attribute impressions to anything mystical? They must be generated by the subject, though not rationally, and the subject draws inspiration from the culture. How can there be an inner self? Rather than essential, the self is surely retroactively produced; that is, cultivated.

Thanks too Dan for your generous comment above, which I failed to acknowledge.

Squeers,

I'm with you on the nebulous concept of feeling that we "know". I think Einstein might well have agreed also. He maintained that we were like babes in our understanding.

"Lacan insisted 'the unconscious is structured like a language' in that meaning consists in the signifying chain...." still leaves room for a language of visual imagery.
If we're explaining Einstein's realisation of space-time being described as a "fabric", then it's useful for us to imagine a bowling ball on a trampoline - and the curve if its impression on the fabric of the trampoline. Introduce a ping-pong ball to the image and note its seeming attraction into the curve towards the more massive ball. We can visualise how it is drawn into the curve that the larger ball has provided. This gives a clear visual idea of Einstein's concept of gravitational curves in space-time.

When Einstein visualised space and time as connected and conceived their combination as a fabric, it may have been an example where bi-association leaped from the unconscious and formed a new signifying chain?...all of which leads back to Koestler's view that great leaps are the sum of combinations, reshuffling of already existing but separate ideas, facts, perceptions and concepts. ("Forgive me, Newton" was Einstein realising he had toppled something Newton had perceived, yet most of Newton's ideas remain)

I don't think we necessarily toss out language when we create visual impressions. I think we lossen the strictures and allow analogous visual representations to dance around - and the "spark" of perception/creation is probably something only possible in respite from rigid rationality.

Perhaps.....