I hope you are enjoying a meaningful Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It’s a necessary effort to stop oneself from longing too much for the great men and women of the past, even just the past century. In today’s public life, our own powerful people seem so small by comparison. King’s greatness extended beyond civil rights and racial equality. He also thought deeply about the nature of reality. A new brief video from Discovery Institute notes his reflection on the design behind nature:
He cited physicist James Jeans (1877-1946), a philosophical idealist, in an address delivered in 1934 and published in Jeans’s book Physics and Philosophy. The larger quotation from Jeans is:
I incline to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe… In general the universe seems to me to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine.
It’s a beautiful idea — and the primacy of idea over material fits well with Dr. King’s advocacy, unfashionable today, of character over skin color. Enjoy the video and please consider sharing it widely.