Surfaces and Essences

Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander

And thus, a curieux French male might well wonder what it feels like to be heureuse — but he would do so in vain! A man simply cannot be heureuse!


From this perspective, the making of analogies is a cognitive activity that only a small number of extremely inventive spirits engage in; it happens only when a mind dares to explore highly unlikely connections between concepts, and it reveals relationships between things that no one had ever before thought of as being related.