I saw this quote on the Internet recently:
I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light. [Sir Isaac Newton]
Newton knew how to think. In Thomistic terms, serious thinking is an intentional process, that is a process of growth or development. Or both in most cases. It must be an ongoing process, working at conscious and unconscious levels.
I was intending, that is, growing towards an explanation of my work which would be more revealing than my prior explanations, by a minuscule amount, but this quote from Sir Isaac Newton speaks of the same explanation from a different angle. What’s missing from Newton’s quotation is a more explicit recognition that this process he was speaking of is not that of a preformed mind somehow inching towards the truth but rather a mind in formation as it learns to respond to reality and to think the truth.
If you would come to a better understanding of Creation, then be always thinking, be always revising and enriching and expanding your understanding of created being in its limited and more particular forms and of Creation in its entirety.
Keep the subject of your inquiry constantly before you.
Keep the subject of your inquiry before you when you participate in the rituals of worship and when you participate in the rituals of cooking. Keep it before you when you fish or when you contemplate the wonder of young children splashing in a pool.
And remember that the goal is to make sense of what really is. There is no transcendental realm of building-block truths which somehow come into your awareness. God is Himself transcendental but we can only know as much of His life as He chooses to tell us. The deepest truths of Creation are to be found in the most abstract regions of created being and those abstract regions are found by the sorts of inquiries I’ve written of, the sorts of inquiries Newton was describing. As I understand Newton’s words, he was telling us that the process of getting at the truths in empirical reality is not a controllable process of applying predetermined methods to data but rather a process of living in that reality in the fullest sense and shaping your thoughts, ultimately your mind, to that reality.