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“[T]here is no escape from metaphysics, that is, from the final implications of any proposition or set of propositions. The only way to avoid becoming a metaphysician is to say nothing. This can be illustrated by analysing any statement you please; suppose we take the central position of positivism itself as an example. This can perhaps be fairly stated in some such form as the following: It is possible to acquire truths about things without presupposing any theory of their ultimate nature; or, more simply, it is possible to have a correct knowledge of the part without knowing the nature of the whole. Let us look at this position closely. … The question is not about its truth or falsity, but whether there is metaphysics in it. … In the first place it bristles with phrases which lack precise definition, such as “ultimate nature”, “correct knowledge”, “nature of the whole”, and assumptions of moment are always lurking in phrases which are thus carelessly used. In the second place, defining these phrases as you will, does not the statement reveal highly interesting and exceedingly important implications about the universe? Taking it in any meaning which would be generally accepted, does it not imply, for example, that the universe is essentially pluralistic (except, of course, for thought and language), that is, that some things happen without any genuine dependence on other happenings; and can therefore be described in universal terms without reference to anything else? Scientific positivists testify in various ways to this pluralistic metaphysics; as when they insist that there are isolable systems in nature, whose behaviour, at least in all prominent respects, can be reduced to law without any fear that the investigation of other happenings will do more than place that knowledge in a larger setting. … Now this is certainly an important presumption about the nature of the universe, suggesting many further considerations. … [T]he lesson is that even the attempt to escape metaphysics is no sooner put in the form of a proposition than it is seen to involve highly significant metaphysical postulates. For this reason there is an exceedingly subtle and insidious danger in positivism. If you cannot avoid metaphysics, what kind of metaphysics are you likely to cherish when you sturdily suppose yourself to be free of the abomination? Of course it goes without saying that in this case your metaphysics will be held uncritically because it is unconscious; moreover, it will be passed on to others far more readily than your other notions inasmuch as it will be propagated by insinuation rather than by direct argument. … Now the history of mind reveals pretty clearly that the thinker who decries metaphysics will actually hold metaphysical notions of three main types. For one thing, he will share the idea of his age on ultimate questions, so far as such ideas do not run counter to his interest or awaken his criticism. No one has yet appeared in human history, not even the most profoundly critical intellect, in whom no important idola theatri can be detected, but the metaphysician will at least be superior to his opponent in this respect, in that he will be constantly on his guard against the surreptitious entrance and unquestioned influence of such notions. In the second place, if he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful. … Finally since human nature demands metaphysics for its full intellectual satisfaction, no great mind can wholly avoid playing with ultimate questions, especially where they are powerfully thrust upon it by certain vigorous extra-scientific interests, such as religion. But inasmuch as the positivist mind has failed to school itself in careful metaphysical thinking, its ventures at such points will be apt to appear pitiful, inadequate, or even fantastic.”
~ Edwin Arthur Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, 1924, pp. 227-229
“The real turning-point in the history of astronomy and of science in general … took place when Copernicus … began to think, and others, like Kepler and Galileo, began to affirm that the heliocentric hypothesis not only saved the appearances, but was physically true. It was this, this novel idea that the Copernican (and therefore any other) hypothesis might not be a hypothesis at all but the ultimate truth, that was almost enough in itself to constitute the scientific revolution’ … It was not simply a new theory of the nature of the celestial movements …, but a new theory of the nature of theory; namely, that, if a hypothesis saves all the appearances, it is identical with truth. … Geometry, applied to motion, produces the machine. … Our collective representations were born when men began to take the models, whether geometrical or mechanical, literally. The machine is geometry in motion, and the new picture of the heavens as a real machine, where the new theory of inertia (in its early form of ‘impetus’) assumed, for the first time in the history of the world, that bodies can go on moving indefinitely without an animate or psychic ‘mover’. It was soon to be stamped indelibly on men’s imaginations by the circumstance of their being ever more and more surrounded by actual artificial machinery on earth. The whole point of a machine is, that, for as long as it goes on moving, it ‘goes on by itself’ without man’s participation. To the extent therefore that the phenomena are experienced as machine, they are believed to exist independently of man, not to be participated and therefore not to be in the nature of representation. … All this is not of course to say that science today conceives of nature as a machine, or even on a mechanical model. It is to say that the ordinary man has been doing just that for long enough to deprive the phenomena of those last representational overtones … which still informed them in the Middle Ages, and to eliminate from them the last traces of original participation. In doing so, he has produced the mechanomorphic collective representations, which constitute the Western world today.”
~ Arthur Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 1957, pp. 51-53
“Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about. … [I]t is habitually thought that the certainty of mathematics is a reason for the certainty of our geometrical knowledge of the space of the physical universe. This is a delusion which has vitiated much philosophy in the past, and some philosophy in the present. … In the age of Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, and Leibniz, mathematics was an influence of the first magnitude in the formation of philosophic ideas. … [The] rise of algebraic analysis was concurrent with Descartes’ discovery of analytical geometry, and then with the invention of the infinitesimal calculus by Newton and Leibniz. … Apart from this progress of mathematics, the seventeenth century developments of science would have been impossible. Mathematics supplied the background of imaginative thought, with which the men of science approached the observation of nature. … The answer … which the seventeenth century gave to the ancient question …, ‘What is the world made of?’ was that the world is a succession of instantaneous configurations of matter … [T]he configurations determined their own changes, so that the circle of scientific thought was completely closed. This is the famous mechanistic theory of nature, which has reigned supreme ever since the seventeenth century. It is the orthodox creed of physical science.”
~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1925, pp. 23-53
“With [Galileo], the physical world begins to be conceived as a perfect machine whose future happenings can be fully predicted and controlled by one who has full knowledge and control of the present motions. With man eliminated from the real world, the latter appeared bound by mechanical necessity. … Now God is relegated to the position of first cause of motion, the happenings of the universe then continuing in æternum as incidents in the regular revolutions of a great mathematical machine. Galileo’s daring conception is carried out in fuller detail. The world is pictured concretely as material rather than spiritual, as mechanical rather than teleological. The stage is set for the likening of it, in Boyle, Locke, and Leibniz, to a big clock once wound up by the Creator, and since kept in orderly motion by nothing more than his “general concourse.” … Now the world is an infinite and monotonous mathematical machine. Not only is his high place in a cosmic teleology lost, but all these things which were the very substance of the physical world to the scholastic—the things that made it alive and lovely and spiritual—are lumped together and crowded into the small fluctuating and temporary positions of extension which we call human nervous and circulatory systems.”
~ Edwin Arthur Burtt, Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, 1924, pp. 96-124