United States or Jamaica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Parallelism. The independence and underivability of the psychical, the incomparability of its uniformities with those of mechanical or physico-chemical laws, has proved itself so clear and incontrovertible, notwithstanding all the distortions of naturalism, that it is now regarded as a self-evident fact, not only among philosophers and epistemologists, and technical psychologists, but for the last decade even among all thinking men, and “materialism” is now an obsolete position.
The whole history of nations, or what is called universal history, must therefore be explicable by means of natural selection, must be a physico-chemical process, depending upon the interaction of adaptation and inheritance in the struggle for life. And this is actually the case."
Transformations of matter, with which the chemist deals, and transformations of energy, with which the physicist deals, are all that is comprised in the phenomenon of life; and mind, intellect, soul, personality, the ego, are mere functions of the physico-chemical process of life, vanishing when this process ceases, but are not a part of the transformations of matter and of energy.
It may be that, by and by, philosophers will discover some higher laws of which the facts of life are particular cases very possibly they will find out some bond between physico-chemical phaenomena on the one hand, and vital phaenomena on the other.
What does science actually tell us when we let it speak instead of prescribing to it answers which conform to our preferences? Vitality, at every point of its becoming, is a tangent to physico-chemical mechanism. But physico-chemistry does not reveal its secret any more than the straight line produces the curve. Consider the development of an embryo.
Thus our logic is valid as infinitesimal analysis, just as the geometry of the straight line allows us to define each state of curve. It is thus, for example, that vitality maintains a relation of momentary tangency to the physico-chemical structure. If we study this relation and analogous relations, this fact remains indisputably legitimate.
We have obtained an insight into the German research preparations, which leaves no doubt as to their intention. There is evidence that the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the physico-chemical institute near by were employed for this purpose as early as August, 1914.
In his "Natural History of Creation," Vol. I, page 170, Häckel frankly calls the whole history of the world a physico-chemical process. Whoever refers to a view of another person, is in duty bound to enter into that view, if possible objectively, even if he does not agree with it.
All three doctrines are intimately connected, and each is applicable to the whole physical cosmos. But, as might have been expected from the nature of the case, the first two grew, mainly, out of the consideration of physico-chemical phenomena; while the third, in great measure, owes its rehabilitation, if not its origin, to the study of biological phenomena.
In his “Theory of Dominants,” Reinke, the botanist of Kiel, has attempted to formulate his opposition to the physico-chemical conception of life into a vitalistic theory of his own.
Word Of The Day