United States or China ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
By this they mean that the atomistic ideas forced upon us by an almost obligatory induction based on very exact experiments, enable us to co-ordinate a considerable amount of facts, to construct a very general synthesis, and to foresee a great number of phenomena.
In speaking of Socrates he introduces with approval an epitome of the Athenian sage's argument, which we have already considered, and, in combatting the atomistic theory of the origin of the world, he asserts that neither atoms nor the "Nature" of Lucretius can account for the adaptations in the actual world; and the phenomena of mind, especially, proclaim an intelligent Providence.
The atomistic evolution of the ancients, accepted by one school of speculative thought, which sought to overthrow the mythical representation of the world, was only an isolated anticipation of a few philosophers; it has now become a scientific evolution, common to all modern civilization.
Shall we conceive of these last as atoms, as void space, or as the motion of atoms? There really seems to be no place in the world for them, and these are the mind so far as the mind appears to be revealed they are mental phenomena. It does not seem that they are to be identified with anything that the Atomistic doctrine admits as existing. They are simply overlooked.
They do not eat after sunset, and carefully dust any place before sitting down upon it, that they may not crush even the tiniest of insects. Both systems, or rather both schools of philosophy, teach the theory of eternal indestructible atoms, following the ancient atomistic school of Kanada. They assert that the universe never had a beginning and never will have an end.
In a later age Lucretius criticised the whole system of Greek religion in terms of the atomistic and mechanical cosmology of Epicurus: For verily not by design did the first-beginnings of things station themselves each in its right place guided by keen intelligence, nor did they bargain sooth to say what motions each should assume; but because many in number and shifting about in many ways throughout the universe they are driven and tormented by blows during infinite time past, after trying motions and unions of every kind at length they fall into arrangements such as those out of which this our sum of things has been formed.
Fascism replaces therefore the old atomistic and mechanical state theory which was at the basis of the liberal and democratic doctrines with an organic and historic concept.
It is because they have heard of her persistently atomistic constitution, of her tolerance of exceptionality and eccentricity, of her devotion to the principles of individual vocation and choice. It is because you cannot make single one-ideaed regiments of her classes. The true Church was always the invisible Church.
Some sixty years after Dalton had established, purely hypothetically, the theory of the atomistic structure of matter, scientific research was led to the observation of actual atomistic phenomena. Crookes found electricity appearing in his tubes in the form of discrete particles, with properties hitherto known only as appertaining to mass.
As her intellectual abilities increase, the forms of her old religious life will become increasingly unacceptable to the people at large. If, in rejecting the obsolete forms of religious thought, she rejects religion and its sanctions altogether, atomistic individualism can be the only result, and with it wide moral corruption will eat out the vitality of the national life.
Word Of The Day