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Updated: May 4, 2025
The unquestioned acceptance of the Aristotelian logic has led to an ingrained tendency to postulate a substratum for whatever is disclosed in sense-awareness, namely, to look below what we are aware of for the substance in the sense of the 'concrete thing. This is the origin of the modern scientific concept of matter and of ether, namely they are the outcome of this insistent habit of postulation.
In these latter ages, though the old animosity against a prattler is still retained, it appears wholly to have lost its effects upon the conduct of mankind; for secrets are so seldom kept, that it may with some reason be doubted, whether the ancients were not mistaken in their first postulate, whether the quality of retention be so generally bestowed, and whether a secret has not some subtile volatility, by which it escapes almost imperceptibly at the smallest vent; or some power of fermentation, by which it expands itself so as to burst the heart that will not give it way.
Psychologically, it seems to me that Fechner's God is a lazy postulate of his, rather than a part of his system positively thought out. As we envelop our sight and hearing, so the earth-soul envelops us, and the star-soul the earth-soul, until what?
Whatever the point of view adopted, whether we regard the proposition of M. Perrin as the corollary of another experimental postulate, or whether we consider it as a truth which we admit a priori and verify through its consequences, we are led to consider that in its entirety the principle of Carnot resolves itself into the idea that we cannot go back along the course of life, and that the evolution of a system must follow its necessary progress.
So mind acts upon matter; and it will be seen that there is an increasing density of structure, and that just in proportion to this density is mind incapable of affecting matter directly. We must, it seems to me, always postulate some sort of etheric medium through which mind acts, in order to affect and move matter organic or inorganic.
Science, therefore, has been correctly defined as “the knowledge of system.” Its aim is to ascertain the laws of phenomena, to define the “order in things.” Its fundamental postulate is that order exists, that all things are “lapped in universal law.” It acknowledges no exception, and it considers that all law is capable of final expression in quantity, in mathematical symbols.
If any person should censure the process of giving objective validity to a moral postulate, he has only to imagine some extra-human intelligence making a study of human nature; to such an intelligence our moral postulates would be objective facts and have the value of objective evidence.
But the doctrine of The Critique of Practical Reason is intended to negate those transcendent elements generally believed to be the distinctive portions of religion. God is not known to us as an objective being, an entity without ourselves. He is an idea, a belief, which gives meaning to our ethical life, a subjective necessity. He is a postulate of the moral will.
Let us then for the moment accept the position that Science ridding itself of redundant theory postulates Energy as the real thing-in-itself, in terms of which it frames its statement of physical phenomena, and let us examine briefly the effects which the acceptance of this new postulate is likely to have on philosophic speculation.
Naturalism is everywhere determined to have its own: if knowledge comes from the senses, then morality must be rooted in self-interest; whoever confines natural science to the search for mechanical causes must not postulate an intelligent Power working from design, even to explain the origin of things and the beginning of motion has no right to speak of a free will, an immortal soul, and a deity who has created the world.
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