Ideas and Themes
The science section explains that, apart from the wizards, this is probably how humanity and science developed; the imagination that peopled the night with terrors went on to create a story in which there was a reliable light source, and made that story reality. While Roundworld does not, as explained in the first book, contain any narrativium, human belief that it should has created something very similar.
The book concludes with: "The we've got have brought us a long way. Plenty of creatures are intelligent but only one tells stories. That's us: Pan narrans. And what about Homo sapiens? Yes, we think that would be a very good idea ..."
Read more about this topic: The Science Of Discworld II: The Globe
Famous quotes containing the words ideas and, ideas and/or themes:
“We can remember as easily as the day we were born
The maggots we passed on the way and how the day bled
And the night too on hearing us, though we spoke only our childish
Ideas and never tried to impress anybody even when somewhat older.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“It is certain that the only hope of retroductive reasoning ever reaching the truth is that there may be some natural tendency toward an agreement between the ideas which suggest themselves to the human mind and those which are concerned in the laws of nature.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)