The one who supplied the Cosmology was named Isaac Newton, born on Christmas day, 1642, the year that Galileo died. His major text, “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” was published in 1687. His text was like a bolt of lightning, piercing the Medieval Darkness. A poet of that time, Alexander Pope, would exclaim: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:/ God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.” Newton even invented the mathematics that would hold his “grand synthesis” together, that is, Calculus, while one of the “giants” before him, upon whose shoulders he stood, Rene Descartes, invented Analytic Geometry that made Calculus possible.
The metaphysics that overlay the physics was the Philosophy of Mechanism: that magnificent clockwork universe, consisting of small particles, the atoms, attracting and repelling, according to Newton’s laws of motion. Since big things are made of small things, the clock seemed to account for everything, from the stones beneath our feet, the feet themselves, to the stars above our heads, as well as the heads the stars were above. David Hume, in his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” concisely gives the picture of the mechanistic universe in the process of demolishing the so called “argument from design,” otherwise known as the “teleological argument” for God’s existence. He has one of his characters, Cleanthes, say the following: “Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions…. All these various machines…are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them….”
David Hume fine-tuned the third component in our bag, that is, Epistemology, or theory of knowledge, a theory which goes by many names, such as “Phenomenalism,” “Sensualism,” or “Empiricism.” All variations on the same theme. Just as rather then use the word, “Enlightenment,” as above, I could ,just as well, used the expression, “Scientific Materialism.”
Yet certain problems ensued: some items from the old world (B.B. — “Before the Bag”) would not go away, still found among the ruins of the broken walls of Medieval Christendom. Notions like “Soul” or “Mind” or “Feeling” didn’t seem to fit the picture. Then a rift transpired, causing, in time, a great divide in the land and confusion among the inhabitants.
In 1835, a German writer, Heinrch Heine, published a marvelous essay entitled, “A contribution to the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany.” (Therein he denotes the “rift” I am discussing as that between “Spiritualism and Sensualism” or “Idealism and Materialism,” depending on the context.) Heine, in the third part of his essay, tells the story of an Englishman, a “mechanician,” who was so good at mechanical things that he decided to build a mechanical man (in those days, I suppose, mechanical women were not allowed). Heine calls the result an “automaton” — what today we might call an “android.” Well, the mechanician did a fine job; except for one thing, he could not supply his masterpiece with a soul. When the android found out he was missing this crucial item, he pestered his maker day and night, exclaiming, “Give me a soul. Where is my soul?”
Things got so bad the mechanician finally left his home and country, to be free of the constant demands of his creation. But the android followed him, wherever he went. Now, says Heine, you can see them in almost any country; two men, one pursued and the other the pursuer, like a shadow, yelling out, “Where is my soul? Give me a soul!”
Puzzle
1. Can you take the digits, 1, 3, 4, and 6, and write an arithmetic expression that is equal to 24? You must use every digit, each one once only, and only the operations of division and subtraction. As many parentheses as you want.
Answer to last week’s puzzle
1. $18.56
