Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
It is this false philosophy, allied with an equally false theology, that misled for so many centuries those who accepted the new versions of Christianity that issued out of the Reformation. The second was the mechanistic system, or systems, the protagonist of which was Descartes.
But though the book has been called Christless, prayerless, hopeless, no mature person ever reads it without a deepened sense of the impotence of all mechanistic theories of sin, and a new vision of the intense reality of spiritual things. "The law we broke," in Dimmesdale's ghostly words, was a more subtle law than can be graven on tables of stone and numbered as the Seventh Commandment.
The profoundest and most meritorious truths of dynastic politics can on no provocation and by no sleight of hand be brought within the logic of that system of knowledge and appraisal of values by which the mechanistic technology proceeds.
He believed there was an "irrefragable physical barrier between organic and inorganic nature" that the molecules of an organism differed from those of a mineral, and for this difference he found a name. There seems to have been of late years a marked reaction, even among men of science, from the mechanistic conception of life as held by the band of scientists to which I have referred.
Direct proof of the mechanistic action of many of life's phenomena is lacking, but the proof is definite and final of the part that the brain-cells play in maintaining consciousness; of the fact that the degree of consciousness and mental efficiency depends upon the physical state of the brain-cells; and finally that efficiency may be restored by sleep, provided that exhaustion of the cells has not progressed too far.
The empiricism comprising the leitmotif of the macro-iconographic movement then became blended with, or, more often, submerged within, the new variety of rationalism; hence, mechanistic rationalism, divorced entirely or virtually from empiricism, characterizes embryology during the first half of the seventeenth century.
Having thus determined our standpoint with regard to the thermodynamic theory of heat and the law of conservation, we may proceed to the study, first of the phenomenon of thermal expansion, and then of the effect of heat on the various states of physical matter, by applying to them, unimpeded by any preconceived mechanistic idea, what we have learnt through our previous studies.
A mechanistic theory would maintain that the earth had been brought cart-load by cart-load; finalism would add that it had not been dumped down at random, that the carters had followed a plan. But both theories would be mistaken, for the canal has been made in another way.
His literary culture helped him to a literary interpretation of living nature, but not to a scientific explanation of it; it helped put him in sympathy with living things, and just to that extent barred him from the mechanistic conception of those of pure science.
It takes some of the cold iron out of the mechanistic theory of life if we divest it of all our associations with the machine-mad and machine-ridden world in which we live and out of which our material civilization came. The mechanical, the automatic, is the antithesis of the spontaneous and the poetic, and it repels us on that account.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking