#pg 122

… [Descartes’s] conclusion immediately follows that, in perception … all that is perceived is that the object has extension and is implicated in a complex of extensive relatedness with the animal body of the percipient. Part of the difficulties of Cartesian philosophy, and of any philosophy which accepts this account as a complete account of perception, is to explain how we know more than this meagre fact about the world although our only avenue of direct knowledge limits us to this barren residium. Also, if this be all that we perceive about the physical world, we have no basis for ascribing the origination of the mediating sensa to any functioning of the human body. We are thus driven to the Cartesian duality of substances, bodies and minds. Perception is to be ascribed to mental functioning in respect to the barren extensive universe. We have already done violence to our immediate conviction by thus thrusting the human body out of the story … But when we have gone so far, it is inevitable to take a further step, and to discard our other conviction that we are perceiving a world of actual things within which we find ourselves. For a barren extensive world is not really what we mean. We thus reduce perceptions to consciousness of impressions on the mind, consisting of sensa with ‘manners’ of relatedness.

“You blessed madman! You killed him, didn’t you? Renoux—you killed him and replaced him with an imposter.”

Not everything that happens during the day is an omen portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has a meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth. The breadth of Creation makes it impossible for us to step back far enough to see the story that the tapestry tells; the intricacy of it, from the macro to the micro to the subatomic, makes it impossible for us to comprehend the megatrillions of connections between the threads in just one small fragment of a whole.