Excerpts from Book that I read

All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. I shall call these words a person's "Final Vocabulary" It is "final" in the sense that it doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argument recourse. Those words are as far as we can go with language; beyond them there is only helpless passivity or a resort to force. A small part of the final vocabulary is made up of thin, flexible, and ubiquitous terms such as "true," "good," "right," and "beautiful." The larger part contains thicker, more rigid and more parochial terms, for example, "Christ," "England," "professional standards," "decency," "kindness," "the Revolution," "the Church," "progressive," "rigorous," "creative." The more parochial terms do most of the work. ~ Page 73

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The Hunter’s waking thoughts, lucky the leaf Unable to predict the fall, lucky indeed The rampant suffering suffocating jelly Burgeoning in pods, lapping the grits of the desert, But what shall man do, who can whistle tunes by heart, Knows to the bar when death shall cut him short like the Cry of the shearwater, What can he do but defend himself from his knowledge? W.H.Auden

The word encyclopedia comes from the Koine Greek ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία, transliterated enkyklios paideia, meaning "general education" from enkyklios(ἐγκύκλιος), meaning "circular, recurrent, required regularly, general and paideia (παιδεία), meaning "education, rearing of a child" it was reduced to a single word due to an error by copyists of Latin manuscripts. Together, the phrase literally translates as "complete instruction" or "complete knowledge". (Source Wikipedia) . . . first published in France between 1751 and 1765 and best known as the “Encyclopedie,’ which endeavored to summarize all human knowledge in its 18,000 pages of text, 75,000 different entries, and 20 million words. Its primary editor, Denis Diderot, was one of the heroes of the Enlightenment and indeed the ‘Encyclopedie’ reprsents a culmination of Enlightenment thought which valued reason, science and progress what we know -- above all else . . . Page 5 “HOMO MYSTERIOUS” Author David P. Barash, Phd

A spectacular Gutenberg Bible reproduction of Die Zweiudevierzigzellge Bible, Johannes Gutenberg, Mainz 1450-1453 facsimile; Leipzig, Insel-verlag 1913-1914 - 2 volumes On display a bejeweled facsimile reprint of Gutenberg's 42 lines Latin Bible, the first book printed with movable metal type. The binding is by Emanuel Steiner of Basel and was copies from an original in the Standisch Landesbibliothek at Fulda, Germany. The leather uses in clasps and corners etc., are chased silver and the stones are blue malachite and onyx.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yossY8i8l5w www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BPc1WBEmmA

Watch a TV documentary set in an African game park and the response of prey animals like a herd of gazelle to the presence of predators seems unbelievably strange from the human viewpoint. If a lioness is lying at the edge of the herd, watching intently, picking out a target, this fearsome predator is likely only to be eyed briefly, if nervously, but its potential victims before the gazelle return to cropping the coarse grass. We would be thinking, "I've got a problem here. That lioness could hurt me or even kill me. I think I'll sneak away, just in case. Or at least I'll make sure there's a fatter, slower gazelle between me and the lioness." But this ability to project into the future, to be aware of potential circumstances and analyze consequences, isn't present in the gazelle. It is only when the attack commences that a flight response is triggered. ~ Page 9

Carl Woese compared the genetic sequence of many different organisms, especially, microbes, to construct phlogenetic tree of life. He found three distinct branches of life, including the previously unrecognized Archaea. The majority of the most deeply rooted organisms are extremophiles living at high temperature