THE FLOW OF THOUGHT ■ 125form discrete events into universal categories. The power of the word
is immense. In Genesis 1, God names day, night, sky, earth, sea, and all
the living things immediately after He creates them, thereby completing
the process of creation. The Gospel of John begins with: “Before the
World was created, the Word already existed.. and Heraclitus starts
his now almost completely lost volume: “This Word (Logos) is from
everlasting, yet men understand it as little after the first hearing of it as
before... All these references suggest the importance of words in
controlling experience. The building blocks of most symbol systems,
words make abstract thinking possible and increase the mind’s capacity
to store the stimuli it has attended to. Without systems for ordering
information, even the clearest memory will find consciousness in a state
of chaos.
After names came numbers and concepts, and then the primary
rules for combining them in predictable ways. By the sixth century B.C.
Pythagoras and his students had embarked on the immense ordering
task that attempted to find common numerical laws binding together
astronomy, geometry, music, and arithmetic. Not surprisingly, their
work was difficult to distinguish from religion, since it tried to accom
plish similar goals: to find a way of expressing the structure of the
universe. Two thousand years later, Kepler and then Newton were still
on the same quest.
Theoretical thinking has never completely lost the imagistic, puz
zlelike qualities of the earliest riddles. For example Archytas, the fourth-
century-B.C. philosopher and commander-in-chief of the city-state of
Tarentum (now in southern Italy), proved that the universe had no
limits by asking himself: “Supposing that I came to the outer limits of
the universe. If I now thrust out a stick, what would I find?” Archytas
thought that the stick must have projected out into space. But in that
case there was space beyond the limits of the universe, which meant that
the universe had no bounds. If Archytas’s reasoning appears primitive,
it is useful to recall that the intellectual experiments Einstein used to
clarify to himself how relativity worked, concerning clocks seen from
trains moving at different speeds, were not that different.
Besides stories and riddles all civilizations gradually developed
more systematic rules for combining information, in the form of geomet
ric representations and formal proofs. With the help of such formulas
it became possible to describe the movement of the stars, predict pre
cisely seasonal cycles, and accurately map the earth. Abstract knowledge,
and finally what we know as experimental science, grew out of these
rules.