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The Outline of History

Note 193 — BOOK IV JUDEA, GREECE, AND INDIA (continued 2)

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Jung in his Psychology of the Unconscious is very good in his chapter I on the differences between ancient (pre-Athenian) thought and modern thought. The former he calls Undirected Thinking, the latter Directed Thinking. The former was a thinking in images, akin to dreaming; the latter a thinking in words. Science is an organization of directed thinking. The Antique spirit (before the Greek thinkers, i.e.) created not science but mythology. The ancient human world was a world of subjective fantasies like the world of children and uneducated young people to-day, and like the world of savages and dreams. Infantile thought and dreams are a re-echo of the prehistoric and savage. Myths are the mass dreams of peoples, and dreams the myths of individuals. The work of hard and disciplined thinking by means of carefully analyzed words and statements which was begun by the Greek thinkers and resumed by the scholastic philosophers of whom we shall tell in the middle ages, was a necessary preliminary to the development of modern science.

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