Science and the Modern World

mind-and-cognition

• Scientific realism based on mechanism conjoined with belief in self-determining organisms: this radical inconsistency accounts for much that is half-hearted in our civilisation.

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• Juggling with abstractions can never overcome the confusion introduced by the ascription of misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century.

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• The intolerant use of abstractions is the major vice of the intellect — not wholly corrected by recurrence to concrete experience.

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faith-and-doubt

• Wordsworth expresses a conscious reaction against the mentality of the eighteenth century — acceptance of scientific ideas at their full face value.

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transformation

• The scientific field of thought is now too narrow for the concrete facts before it; a wider field of abstraction standing nearer to intuitive experience is required.

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• An event mirrors within itself modes of its predecessors as memories fused into its content — and anticipation of the future it has already determined.

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