Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 73 LECTUEE III. UNIVERSAL MATERIALISM. In the infancy of philosophical speculation, as in the Early Hei- early years of each man's life, it is the world of solid tempts to and extended things what can be seen and touched that is apt to be regarded as the one only reality, and as what alone is entitled to be called a substance. So it was that in the pre-Socratic era, among early Hellenic inquirers, the mystery in which we all find ourselves, when we look before and after, seemed to be relieved as soon as some sort of material could be detected, out of which it might plausibly be conjectured that things and persons originally issued. They were satisfied when they thought that they could answer the final question about the universe and man, by resolving the whole into some sort of presentable substance, into one of the crudely conceived elements of matter water, air, fire, as it might be. The totality of real existence was thus finally identified with matter; but without analysis of what matter as perceived in sense means, or a distinct conception of its outwardness in relation to self-conscious mind. The objects of sense were thus tacitly credited with powers which seemed to supersede the other two factors in the three primary postulates. It was among things that appeal to the senses, so conceived, that Thales, Anaximander, and other contemporaries found satisfaction, when their crude experience of existence gave rise to their philosophic wonder. This pre - Socratic cosmological materialism, latent in the universal flux of Heraclitus, but developed in the atomism of Democritus, was idealised, and may be seen at its best, in the magnificent poem of Lucretius. Material- Our own nineteenth century finds millions trying to ism in the, . .,, , , ..,, . nineteenth get...
Synopsis
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