Roland in Moonlight

by David Bentley Hart

“If you believe that everything arises from an infinite act of mind—the rock over there no less than the intelligence in you—then you believe that there’s the presence of a… of an infinite knowing logos within the discrete logos that constitutes each thing as what it is.

There is one who knows what it’s like to be a rock. And wouldn’t that infinite personal depth have to express itself, almost of necessity, in a finite personal interiority of sorts? Surely the knowledge of what it is to be a rock is already the spirit of the rock as a rock—the rock knowing itself.

But nothing so excites the modern materialist as the possibility of proving that consciousness is reducible to physiology, that freedom is an illusion, that mind is a ghostly epiphenomenon of unconscious metabolisms. It seems that every aspiring young materialist dreams of growing up to be a robot.”