Principles and aims of the New Atlantis Foundation

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we take can represent the whole of the reality which our names and words are trying to describe, every verbal description necessarily involves contradiction and every fiction we use is self-contradictory. Hegel formalised this inevitability of contradiction in the assertion that every thesis or statement produces its own antithesis or contradiction. Rudolf Eucken traced the history of the most persistent contradictions in human thought and showed the futility of trying to reconcile them intellectually. They could, he affirmed, be resolved only by living them through.

We thus live in two contradictory worlds, the world of continuous motion and the world of relatively fixed things. They are both real to us, and our life is a constant reconciliation of these two worlds. We ourselves have to exercise a continual Third Force between the opposites of reality in order to live.

To these three factors in our experience, the first two being mutually contradictory and the third being the reconciliation of these two, our own human constitution, both psychologically and physically, has three corresponding aspects. Physically there are in the operation of the human body three predominant systems: the metabolic, which is the whole system by which nourishment is taken into the body and substantially transformed and waste matter excreted; the nervous system, which receives sensations from the outer world; and the respiratory and circulatory system, which breathes in air, extracts oxygen and sends nourishment to the whole body through the blood circulation. The centre, or as it were the headquarters, of the metabolic system is in the belly; the centre of the nervous system is in the brain; and the centre of the respiratory and circulatory system is in the heart. But all three systems permeate the whole body and everywhere interweave one another.

They can be likened to the three main aspects of our social life, namely economics, culture and politics respectively, since economics is concerned with our physical well-being, culture with our consciousness, which is supported by the brain, and politics with the relationship between the two. And in the realm of economics they can similarly be compared with its three main aspects, namely production, with the factory in the belly, into which the raw materials are delivered and processed and from which waste is disposed of; distribution of the processed nourishment through the blood stream; and consumption, since it is the nervous system which is the ultimate consumer of what has been produced and distributed. The ultimate consumption is in consciousness.

The human psyche, which depends on the physical body, can also be regarded as an organic whole, In the broadest sense it can be said to consist of