Question: Good morning, Mr. LaRouche. I'm going to quote a paragraph from one of your books, "How Bertrand Russell Became an Evil Man,” which says, "You have to recognize that the postulates and axioms of the so-called Euclidean geometry are wrong. You have to adopt circular action instead of such Euclidian axiomatic assumptions of the point and the line. You have to understand the idea of limitless phase-space, and we have to accept the ideas of Nicholas of Cusa, Kepler, and da Vinci, of a boundary that is defined.” My question is, what do you mean by boundary, a finite boundary? Thank you.

LaRouche: This is the question of sense-perception versus knowledge. Take two discoveries. I refer to this, and the answer which I'll give you is a summary of an answer included in this paper on "Visualizing the Complex Domain.”

There are two great modern principles of modern science which separate all earlier science from modern science, that is, true modern science. This work is based on the influence centered around Nicholas of Cusa, in the 15th Century, and by the influence of two of his followers, Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci. Then you have the work of Kepler, at the close of the 16th Century and beginning of the 17th Century. So, Kepler discovered a principle of universal gravitation, a concept which did not exist in human knowledge prior to that time.

Subsequently, a follower of the work of Kepler, Fermat in France, a famous physician and mathematician, conducted an experiment which demonstrated that the universe does not function physically on the basis of a pathway of shortest distance, but rather functions on the basis of a pathway of quickest time, the so-called principle of refraction.

These two principles exemplify modern science as opposed to empiricism, the empiricism of Aristotle, or the reductionism of Aristotle, the empiricism of Paolo Sarpi, Galileo Galilei, and so forth. That's the great modern fight.

Now, the point is, a universal principle, such as gravitation, or a principle of universal least action, which is the implication of Fermat's discovery, does not exist as an object of sense-perception. You can not see it, you can not smell it, you can not touch it. Yet, we're able to demonstrate that these principles actually control the behavior of the visible universe.

So, therefore, there's something which the mind can encompass, called a universal principle, which controls the universe, as if from outside the objects of sense-perception. This ability of mankind to discover such principles--and this same ability was demonstrated by the Pythagoreans, by Plato and so forth, earlier, in their dialectical method for geometry--this method distinguishes man fundamentally from all forms of animal life. This is the so-called noetic principle, as described by Vernadsky. The ability of mankind, the mind of man, is superior to life and non-living processes in the universe, in its power and authority.

So, that's the notion of immortality.

Now this leads to the question of, not only what is man? If you say that man is only a beast of the senses, then you are degrading man to a beast. When you degrade man to a beast, as Russell does, you are committing a Satanic act of evil. All fanatical materialists, including empiricists, are evil, because they degrade man to a mere beast, by denying the existence of that which separates man from the beasts: the ability to discover and control the universal physical principles of the universe.

Now the concept of the universe, which is ancient, comes from astronomy. It comes from what the Pythagoreans called "spherics,” in which they saw the starlit night as a kind of great extended sphere, the interior surface of a great sphere, and looked at the motions of stars and planets on this sphere. And this was the idea of universe, that which encompasses the Earth, which encompasses the existence of man.

What we know by universe, we equate in modern science with those principles which are universal. Now, we know that there probably are an indefinite number of universal physical principles of the universe, of which we know only some. Hopefully, we are discovering and mastering more as it goes along. But we know that the universe is composed of nothing but these physical principles, which correspond to the universal principles, in the sense that we use "universe” to describe the stellar system, the visual stellar system. We're saying that nothing exists outside the universe, as defined by universal physical principles. In other words, you can not make a sense-perceptual determination of what a universe is. You must deal with the universe as only man can know the existence of a universe, in terms of universal physical principles.

Now, what we say is, nothing exists outside the universe, as defined by man's actual and potential knowledge of universal physical principles. That is, that there is nothing outside the universe. Secondly, there is nothing that occurred before the existence of that universe. Third, nothing will exist after the existence of that universe. This is what Einstein means mathematically, by saying that the universe is finite, but without bounds: It's boundless. There is no external casing of the universe. The universe is finite. That is, it is limited by the domain of universal physical principles, of which we know only some. We are looking for more, but that universe, so implicitly defined, is what exists, and no other universe exists.

Thus, only man--with a sense of immortality, associated with the discovery of universal physical principles and their application--only man is capable of conceiving the universe. That is why Christianity argues, in epistemology, that man is made in the image of the Creator, because man is the only created existent being which has the same qualities which are necessarily attributes of the Creator.

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