An act of pouring ourselves into these things by relying on them [04.05.98]

‘We are born to live in our body and to feel that we are relying on it for our existence, but the more skillful uses of our body - however elementary - have to be acquired by a process of learning. For example, the faculty of seeing things by using our eyes is not inborn; it has to be acquired by a process of learning.

Hence when we get to know something as a clue, as a particular of a whole, as a tool, as a word, or as an element contributing to perception, by learning to rely on it, we do so in the same way as we learn to rely on our body for exercising intellectual and practical control over objects of our surroundings. So any extension of the area of reliance by which we enrich our subsidiary knowledge of things is an extension of the kind of knowledge we usually have of our body; it is indeed an extension of our bodily existence to include things outside it. To acquire new subsidiary knowledge is to enlarge and modify our intellectual being by assimilating the things we learn to rely on. Alternatively, we may describe the same process as an act of pouring ourselves into these things by relying on them.’

[Michael Polanyi. Scientific Thought & Social Reality: Essays by Michael Polanyi - In ‘Psychological Issues’, Vol. VIII. No. 4, Monograph 32. 1974.p. 122-3]