LOGIC

the dead leaf from a distance looked like a live cautious insect ... this misperception was a misapprehension of the most momentous kind ... a category mistake confusing a system with a soul ... the living with the dead ... like calling the universe a spirit when you mean to say it has a soul ... or saying we're children of gaia mother earth who gave us birth ... a category mistake ... like mixing terms and concepts and words ... the private with the public with the physical ... or the physical with the mental and the spiritual ... what a talk soup it becomes ... we become ... lumpy half-cooked indigestible creatures of our own disordered dyspeptic minds ... why should it surprise us that our discourse is filled with hot air empty space and off-color smells ... that we sometimes say the thought in my head is as real as the lamp on the post ... but not the lamp or the post the brain or the thought can hold a candle to the photon and the atom the real heroes of time ... but that time itself marks no real divisions between imaginary entities shifting shapes babies and abortions life or death

cf kreeft, socratic logic, ch one