Pictures often bring back memories, same applies to music, or for that matter any comparable visual/audio/sensory inputs. So, spend enough years listening to heavy metal, and overlap those very same years with motorcycle rides, odds of them converging increases. Basically certain riffs are now for time travel, to some motorcycling experience! Listening to opening riffs of Bleak rewinds time back to that 2:00 AM lonely highway ride, actually journeying to this small college town for seeing Opeth live. Jazz-fusion like bass lines in Surface’s Echoes brings back late autumn rides, and glimpses of peninsula sunsets. Honeycomb is a lot about early summers, exploring forts around Port Townsend. Frankly, it’s not an exhaustive list; somehow these experiences got overlaid in memory. One begets the other. But, this is not intentional and they don’t happen all the time.

Often such recurring patterns motivate study of the underlying cause. Seems like modern scientific mentality was to discover these underlying causes, theorize and apply them in multiple diverse contexts. For instance, inferring Pythagoras theorem from a triangle of particular dimension is a simple such example. To paraphrase Louis Rougier, it’s a mentality to move from specific to the abstract. This idea seems relevant in every sphere.

For instance, moving from specific rules to abstract rule of law is an illustration of same concept. Instead of directing everyone to specific duties, we enabled a framework to exercise free will. Instead of celebrating good rulers, we started seeking good laws. Movement from Magna Carta to American federalism is sort of that steady evolution from specific to the abstract. In fact, seems like Federalism adds one more layer to that dispersed rule-of-law framework within multiple states, sort of higher level instrument to institutionalize development of good laws even across the states. In that spirit, if we see legislation with specific directives assigning us tasks, it’s safe to say they are primitive artifacts in an otherwise sophisticated system.