[PREV - STEADY]    [TOP]

WHOLE_IN_ONE

                                          October 20, 2009

The many and the one, the details and the divine...

Freeman Dyson compares the approach toward
knowledge of Sir Francis Bacon and Decartes:

    There are two kinds of science, known to
    historians as Baconian and Cartesian, Baconian
    science is interested in details, Cartesian
    science is interested in ideas.  Bacon said:

      All depends on keeping the eye steadily
      fixed on the facts of nature, and so
      recieving their images as they are.  For
      God forbit that we should give out a dream
      of our own imagination for a pattern of
      the world.

    Decartes said:

      I showed what the laws of nature were,
      and without basing my arguments on any
      principle other than the infinite
      perfections of God I tried to demonstrate
      all those laws about which we could have
      any doubt, and to show that they are such
      that, even if God created many worlds,
      there could not be any in which they
      failed to be observed.

    Modern science leapt ahead in the seventeenth century
    as a result of fruitful competition between Baconian
    and Cartesian viewpoints.

That's all from Dyson's "In Praise of Amateurs", collected
in "The Scientist as Rebel" (2006), p. 180.




Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Plato; or, the Philosopher":

    "The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many
    effects; then for the cause of that; and again
    the cause, diving still into the profound:
    self-assured that it shall arrive at an
    absolute and sufficient one,-- a one that shall
    be all.  'In the midst of the sun is the light,
    in the midst of the light is truth, and in the
    midst of truth is the imperishable being,' say
    the Vedas.  All philosophy, of East and West,
    has the same centripetence. Urged by an
    opposite necessity, the mind returns from the
    one to that which is not one, but other or
    many; from cause to effect; and affirms the
    necessary existence of variety, the
    self-existence of both, as each is involved in
    the other.  These strictly-blended elements it
    is the problem of thought to separate and to
    reconcile.  Their existence is mutually
    contradictory and exclusive; and each so fast
    slides into the other that we can never say
    what is one, and what it is not.  The Proteus
    is as nimble in the highest as in the lowest
    grounds; when we contemplate the one, the true,
    the good,-- as in the surfaces and extremities
    of matter."

        --p. 300, Viking Portable edition.



--------
[NEXT - HANDJOB]