If you get all the facts, your judgment can be right: if you don’t get all the facts, it can’t be right.
-Bernard Mannes Baruch
Gathering and adhering to facts is important. We need to be factulators – punctilious about studying the details of a subject before we make decisions or sprout forth on a particular topic. However, knowledge without intuition is dead. It is simply details. Facts, punctiliously gathered and analyzed, which are then accompanied by the mysteriously elusive, exciting, transcending feelings that emanate from our own hunches – outside the bounds of research – leads to creative originality and fresh ways of thinking. It contrasts with mindlessness – unexamined existences – far removed from any creative thinking.
“There are many people who gather details without any intuitive or creative interpretation, and without knowing the difference between the relevant and the trivial. They therefore give over-attention or equal attention to relevant and irrelevant matters, thus minimizing what is really important. Isaac Asimov called the details “bits,” and said that we have probably all met detailed people lacking in deductive ability, insight and intuition “who are intensely educated, but who manage to be abysmally stupid, nevertheless. They have ‘bits,’ but the ‘bits’ just lie there. These bits are unconnected. Yet creativity is about connectivity.” (HAVE YOU EVER HAD A HUNCH? The Importance of Creative Thinking)
Details are important. The gathering of and the pondering over their meaning are essential elements in educating ourselves and others. As much as our assumptions and assertions need substantiation, they also need to be touched by our hunches. If Gregarious of THE WORLD OF GLIMPSE, who, impressively, is a flying encyclopedia, was not only devoted to the importance of enumeration and verification, just imagine the novel ideas he could generate and the creative heights he could reach! Just imagine if he also allowed intuitions to accompany the abundance of his punctiliously-observed details!
Gregarious…You need to learn about all my perfectabilities today:
Computation,
categorization,
enumeration,
detailization,
and itemization… because…
I have a circumrotating head
which spins round
collecting information,
of my surroundings
in any location:
This location that location…
I never forget…
ANYTHING
I observe
EVERYTHING.