"I Get Impressions From The Universe At Large"

I recently did a post about scientist and inventor George Washington Carver, whose story impressed me so much in my youth. Well, really Carver still impresses me. Carver expressed a sense of intuition that came to him through the avenue of the divine as expressed through nature.

 

Also in my youth I became familiar with another inventor scientist, Thomas Alva Edison. His name was familiar to me from youth because by great-grandparents on my mother's side of the family hailed from Michigan and my great-grandfather actually knew Edison. I never knew my great-grandparents, for they died before I was born, however my mom was very proud of the family connection to Edison and related it often. My great-grandfather actually visited Edison in his laboratory.

 

Thomas Edison was widely sought out for his views about almost everything. He seemed to have strong opinions of most things. He also expressed a view of intuition similar to Carver's:

 

I have never created anything, I get impressions from the Universe at large and work them out, but I am only a plate on a record or a receiving apparatus -- what you will. Thoughts are really impressions that we get from outside.  

 

Now that doesn't seem odd considering his overall outlook as expressed in the following quote:

 

I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the Universe.

 

Edison was not a believer in the popular notions of God and religion. He was good friends with the Great Agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll, whom he admired greatly. But he did hold, as the ancient Stoics tended to, that back of existence there is a mind or Logos. Evidently he felt, as do many intuitive scientists, that the reason the universe is understandable is because it is meant to be understood.

 

That is my view, too. For many of us that is enough.