In his final Sophia Lecture, “Finitude and the Infinite,” Dr Iain McGilchrist grapples with the vital role that the imagination plays in the perception of reality, and what this power can disclose about reality itself. He shows that imagination has the capacity to make contact with an illimitable, irreducible, and inexhaustible world, one that presents itself to us under the aspects of finitude and infinitude.

Beginning with the English Romantic poets, McGilchrist shows how these artists resisted the habits of perception that can be associated with the brain’s left hemisphere. This part of the brain is adept at rendering, representing, and modeling, but it does so at the cost of simplifying whatever it constructs. Poets like Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Blake strove to remove the film of familiarity from their vision. For them, imagination was the power that made intuitive connections and integrative “leaps,” giving access to a richer, unbounded reality not subject to the strictures of reductive categories.

In dialogue with physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians, McGilchrist ultimately shows how the vision of the world offered by the Romantic poets lays claim to the infinite and the eternal. For these artists, eternity is “adverbial”: it is a way of being, a manner, and a modality. McGilchrist convincingly shows us that we, too, can decline to see the world through categories that are measurable, predictable, and countable—but finally lifeless; like the poets whom he takes as his main interlocutors in this lecture, we can, instead, open ourselves to reality’s boundless, vital, and infinite character.

Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

William Wordsworth - Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Biographia Literaria
Percy Bysshe Shelley - A Defence of Poetry
Max Scheler
William Blake
Richard Feynman
James A. Shapiro
Denis Diderot
Barbara McClintock
William James
Albert Einstein
Leonhard Euler
William Wilson Morgan
Richard Feynman
The Ancient of Days (William Blake, 1794, watercolor etching)
Nicholas of Cusa - De Docta Ignorantia
Jason Padgett
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Galileo Galilei
David Hilbert
Henri Bergson
Richard Wagner
Isaac Luria - Lurianic Kabbalah
Edward Nelson
Alfred North Whitehead
Eugène Minkowski
Heraclitus
Jordan Peterson
Zeno of Elea
John Milton
John Keats
Jorge Luis Borges
Martin Heidegger
Tao-te Ching
William Blake - “The Tyger”
Emily Dickinson
Marianne Moore
Robert Browning - “Two in the Campagna”
Bhagavad Gita
Peter Cook
John Polkinghorne
Mary Midgley
René Descartes
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
J. B. S. Haldane
Lee Smolin
Eugene Koonin
Hildegard of Bingen - The Choirs of Angels
Christ Pantocrator and Signs of the Zodiac
C. S. Lewis
Johannes Kepler
Jesus