/lit/ - Literature

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Anonymous Wed Oct 16 01:31:42 2019 No.14001463 [Reply] [Original]

"If one were to compare ancient physics, not with what the moderns call by this name, but with the totality of all the natural sciences as at present constituted— for this is its real equivalent— the first difference to be noticed would be the division it has undergone into multiple ‘specialities’ that are, so to speak, foreign to one another. This however is only the most outward side of the question, and it is not to be supposed that by joining together all these particular sciences one would arrive at an equivalent of ancient physics. The truth is that the point of view is quite different, and therein lies the essential difference between the two conceptions referred to above: the traditional conception, as we have said, attaches all the sciences to the principles of which they are the particular applications, and it is this attachment that the modern conception refuses to admit. For Aristotle, physics was only ‘second’ in its relation to metaphysics— in other words, it was dependent on metaphysics and was really only an application to the province of nature of principles that stand above nature and are reflected in its laws; and one can say the same for the Medieval cosmology. The modern conception on the contrary claims to make the various sciences independent, denying everything that transcends them, or at least declaring it to be ‘unknowable’ and refusing to take it into account, which in practice comes to the same thing. This negation existed de facto long before it was erected into a systematic theory under such names as ‘positivism’ or ‘agnosticism’, and it may truly be said to be the real starting-point of all modern science. It was however only in the nineteenth century that men began to glory in their ignorance— for to proclaim oneself an agnostic means nothing else— and claimed to deny to others any knowledge to which they had no access themselves; and this marked yet one more stage in the intellectual decline of the West."

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