Wolfgang Smith Quotes

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

It is difficult, almost impossible, in fact, for the scientific community to recognize the fact that Cartesian bifurcation is a philosophic postulate, for which there is absolutely no scientific basis [...] It is not that they can conceive or imagine a scientific proof of that hypothesis; it is rather that they are unable to conceive that it might not be true.

A growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp.....moreover, for the most part these "experts" have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances, regretfully.

Yes, it is indeed by way of the mathematical forms that the physicist gains knowledge of the external world; Eddington's point, however, is that the forms in question have been artificially imposed: "The mathematics is not there until we put it there." And it is for this reason, and in this sense, that our knowledge of mathematical structures—our knowledge of the physical world!—is said to be subjective.

The so-called physical universe—"the world so described"—turns out to be constituted by mathematical structures which we ourselves have imposed; in a word, it proves to be "man-made." Yet this way of putting it is also misleading; for inasmuch as physical knowledge is partly objective, "the world so described" must be "partly objective" as well. One is left with a curiously equivocal conception, which may enlighten the wise but is bound to deceive the unwary

Hard science ... is ultimately self-corrective, and wiser, in a way, than the scientists who pursue it; in the end it is apt to lead us to the truth, if only we have 'eyes to see'. But science itself cannot give us this vision: science as such cannot interpret its own findings; and neither, I would add, can modern philosophy. What is called for, I maintain, is a grounding in the traditional metaphysical doctrines of mankind: the very tenets that have been decried since the Enlightenment as primitive, pre-scientific, and puerile. Strange as it may seem to modern minds, these teachings ... derive ultimately 'from above': from the Center of the circle, if you will. Originally formulated in the language of myth, they have served as a catalyst of metaphysical vision down through the ages; neither Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Aquinas invented their own doctrines: all have drunk from this spring—except, of course, for the pundits of modernity, who have rejected that heritage. By now, to be sure, one knows very well to what destination modernity leads: we have, after all, entered the disillusioned and skeptical era of postmodernism. The argument against the traditional wisdom has now run its course, and the way to the perennial springs is open once more. The time is ripe for a new interpretation of scientific findings based upon pre-Cartesian principles; what is called for is a radical change of outlook, a veritable metanoia. Whether the doctrines of science will conduce to human enlightenment or to the blighting of our intellect hangs in the balance.

Now I realize, of course, that not everyone accepts the Thomistic (or any other traditional) ontology, and that moreover a reductio to quantity constitutes in fact the definitive tendency of the modern age. One fact, however, is incontrovertible: as I have shown in The Quantum Enigma, it is possible to interpret all of physics—by virtue of its definitive modus operandi—in traditional (and thus non-Cartesian) terms, based precisely on a categorical distinction between the 'corporeal' (i.e., perceptible) and the 'physical' universe: the universe, namely, as conceived by the physicist. Everyone, of course, is free to disagree with the non-Cartesian interpretation of physics: what is NOT possible (by virtue of the above-said finding) is to do so on SCIENTIFIC ground. ("Taking Stock of a New Philosophy of Physics: The KKE Theory")

Interest in alchemy seems to be nowadays on the rise. Whereas the educated public at large remains no doubt skeptical and indeed disdainful of the ancient discipline, there is today a deepening awareness among the better informed that what stands behind many an “exploded superstition” may be in fact a long-forgotten wisdom. Although Carl Jung was obviously exaggerating when ! he suggested that four centuries after being expelled from our universities,- alchemy stands “knocking at the door,” a number of factors have conspired; to render the prospect of re-admission less remote, at least, than it had been ; during the heyday of materialism. In any case, no truly solid grounds for rejecting the ancient doctrine have yet been proposed. Take the case of the so-called four elements: earth, water, air and fire. One can be reasonably certain that these terms were not employed alchemically in their ordinary sense, but were used to designate elements, precisely, out of which substances, as we know them, are constituted. Somewhat like the quarks of modern physics, these elements are not found empirically in isolation, but occur in their multiple combinations, that is to say, as the perceptible substances that constitute what I term the corporeal domain. Now, as I have argued at length in The Quantum Enigma (Peru, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden, 1995), corporeal objects are not in fact mere aggregates of quantum particles; and this clearly suggests that there may indeed be elements of the aforesaid kind. It turns out that our habitual opposition to alchemy is based mainly upon scientistic prejudice: upon a reductionist dogma, namely, for which there is in reality no scientific support at all.

It is safe to say that with the discovery of DNA around the middle of the last century Darwinism was in effect disqualified as a scientific theory. With the publication moreover of Dembski's 1998 theorem regarding 'complex specified information' it has been rigorously disproved on mathematical grounds, and thus reduced from a bona-fide scientific hypothesis to the status of a sociological phenomenon.

There is reason to believe that, to some extent at least, the physical universe is actually ‘constructed’ by the intervention of the physicist, which is the reason John Wheeler refers to it as ‘the participatory universe’, and why Heisenberg states that physics deals, not with Nature as such, but with ‘our relations to Nature’.

What saves the day for physics ... is the fact that the experimentalist does not accept the Cartesian philosophy, which is to say that he treats his apparatus not as a mathematical structure, but as a perceivable object. Even as there are said to be 'no atheists in the trenches', so indeed there are no bifurcationists in the laboratory. All knowledge of the external world begins in the perceptible realm: deny the perceptible object, and nothing external remains.

I find it surprising that [Eddington] seems not to recognize the incongruity of sitting on [a chair described as] an aggregate of quantum particles, especially after we have been told that these aggregates are 'partly subjective': how can one sit on a 'partly subjective' chair? And for that matter, how can one sit on a 'mathematical structure'? My colleagues in mathematics would find this hard to comprehend. What is missing in mathematical structures, of course, is *substance*: the very thing that has been 'filtered out' by the physicist. A chair without substance, it turns out, cannot be sat upon.

Descartes himself, as one will recall, experienced great difficulty in overcoming his celebrated doubts, and was able to do so only by way of a tortuous argument which few today would find convincing. Is it not strange that tough-minded scientists should have so readily, and for so long, espoused a rationalist doctrine which calls in question the very possibility of empirical knowledge?

It behooves us ... to consider the fateful formula E = mc2, which almost everyone in the world attributes to Albert Einstein's theory [of relativity]. Despite the fact, however, that Einstein did derive this formula from his special theory of relativity, it stems actually from [the] classical part [of the theory]: i.e., from the Maxwell equations for electromagnetic fields, which goes back to 1865. The famous formula has consequently no bearing whatsoever on relativistic physics, a fact Einstein himself admitted in 1950. Obviously, however, in the interim that fateful formula came to be viewed worldwide as the consummate vindication of Einstein's theory: what indeed could be more convincing than the explosion of an atom bomb?

Having accepted a graduate fellowship in the Department of Philosophy at Cornell, I duly presented myself to begin studies for a Ph.D. One of our assignments during the first semester was to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason from cover to cover, along with Norman Kemp Smith's commentary thereon, which was almost as voluminous. Pondering this literature, it did not take me long to conclude that these Kantian ratiocinations, brilliant though they may be, have little to do with that Sophia—that more-than-human Wisdom—of which authentic philosophy, by its very designation, is literally the love. And so, three weeks into the semester, I resigned my fellowship and left Cornell University. "I had always been attracted to the natural world, to forests and mountains especially; and so I resolved to proceed to the great Northwest, henceforth to earn my keep as a lumberjack. No doubt I had an unrealistic and overly romanticized conception of what this entails; but in any case, at that point fate abruptly intervened. I had made my intentions known to my brother, who at the time was studying chemical engineering at Purdue University. He immediately proceeded to the chairman of the physics department to tell him about my case, going so far as to put my letter in his hands. The verdict was instant: 'Tell you brother to present himself in my office Monday morning to assume his duties as a teaching assistant.' It seems the voice of Providence had spoken: despite my very mixed feelings regarding the contemporary academic world, I was destined to pass most of my professional life in its precincts—but not in departments of philosophy!

THE DIFFICULTIES AND INDEED PERPLEXITIES which beset us the moment we try to make philosophic sense out of the findings of quantum theory are caused, not just by the complexity and subtlety of the microworld, but first and foremost by an adhesion to certain false metaphysical premises, which have occupied a position of intellectual dominance since the time of René Descartes.

¿Cuáles son esos supuestos? Para empezar, está la concepción cartesiana del mundo externo constituido exclusivamente por las llamadas res extensae o «entidades extendidas», que se asume que están desprovistas de todo atributo cualitativo o «secundario» como, por ejemplo, el color. Todo lo demás se relega, de acuerdo con esta filosofía, a las llamadas res cogitantes o «entidades pensantes», cuyo acto constitutivo, por así decirlo, no es la extensión sino el pensamiento. Así, de acuerdo con Descartes, cualquier cosa en el universo que no sea una res extensa es, por lo tanto, «un objeto de pensamiento», o como diríamos en otras palabras, una cosa que no existe fuera de una res cogitans particular o mente.

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Su clara distinción entre lo físico y lo corporal, que es uno de los principales aportes del libro, acoge el ámbito ontológico que trata la física moderna dentro de la jerarquía universal del ser. Asimismo, libera al mundo corporal y sus ciencias cualitativas asociadas del dominante yugo estrangulador de una ciencia puramente cuantitativa, y destruye de una vez por todas el reduccionismo cientificista, que es uno de los pilares de las visiones del mundo moderna y posmoderna.

Pero entonces, si se ignora este impasse epistemológico —o si se finge haberlo resuelto— se puede sacar partido del aparente beneficio que confiere el cartesianismo: pues, como ya he señalado, la simplificación del mundo externo que resulta de la bifurcación hace que se pueda pensar en una física matemática de alcance ilimitado. Pero, en cualquier caso, la pregunta no es si la bifurcación es ventajosa en algún sentido, sino simplemente si es cierta y realmente sostenible. Y este es el problema que es preciso resolver en primer lugar; todas las demás cuestiones pertinentes a la interpretación de la física son obviamente consecuentes con esto y, por lo tanto, han de aguardar su turno.

Como acertadamente observó el obispo Berkeley, decir que un objeto corpóreo existe no implica que esté siendo percibido, sino que cabe percibirlo en las circunstancias apropiadas. Esta verdad vital y a menudo olvidada subyace en su justamente famosa máxima «esse est percipi» («ser es ser percibido»), pese a que una afirmación tan elíptica se puede de hecho interpretar en el sentido de un idealismo espurio. Este peligro —del cual fue víctima el obispo irlandés7— surge, además, principalmente de la circunstancia de que el percipi de la fórmula de Berkeley fácilmente se puede malinterpretar. Como ya he señalado, la percepción se puede malinterpretar, como si no fuera más que sensación; y así es como la tomaron la mayoría de filósofos, desde los tiempos de John Locke hasta el siglo veinte, cuando las principales escuelas escudriñaron y descartaron esa perspectiva tosca e insuficiente.

Lo que hemos de comprender por encima de todo es que nada en el mundo «simplemente existe», sino que existir es precisamente interactuar con otras cosas —lo que finalmente incluye observadores—. El mundo, por tanto, no ha de concebirse como una mera yuxtaposición de numerosas entidades individuales o autoexistentes —ya sean res extensae, «átomos», o lo que se quiera—, sino que se ha de ver como una unidad orgánica, en la que cada elemento existe en relación con los demás y así pues en relación con la totalidad, que incluye también necesariamente un polo consciente o subjetivo. Además, este descubrimiento fundamental, que muchos en nuestros días asocian a los recientes hallazgos en el dominio de la física cuántica —o ya que estamos, al misticismo oriental—, se puede hacer fácilmente «a simple vista», por así decirlo, pues pertenece tanto al mundo corpóreo percibido con los sentidos como al recientemente descubierto dominio cuántico; lo que sucede es que durante varios siglos se nos ha impedido ver el primero sin los prejuicios y distorsiones producidos por los prejuicios de tipo cartesiano.

quedarán agradecidos a Wolfgang Smith por haber realizado un trabajo de excepcional significado que destruye las extravagantes afirmaciones del cientifismo, al mismo tiempo que desentraña el enigma de la mecánica cuántica a la luz de las doctrinas perennes que siempre han ofrecido los medios para resolver los enigmas y acertijos de la existencia humana a lo largo de todas las edades.

Asombra ver cuán diferente aparece el mundo cuando deja de observarse con gafas cartesianas. Por regla, se descubre que al exponer y eliminar la confusión que subyace al pensamiento científico contemporáneo, se despeja el camino hacia la integración de auténticos hallazgos científicos en órdenes de conocimiento pertenecientes a lo que a veces se ha llamado la sabiduría perenne de la humanidad.

Este trabajo es el primero llevado a cabo por un científico calificado que no aporta una filosofía racionalista o empírica, sino que pone en juego metafísica, ontología y cosmología tradicionales con respecto a la mecánica cuántica a fin de proveer la clave para comprender el auténtico significado de esta ciencia física fundamental.

En total oposición a la creencia corriente, el cartesianismo insiste en que no «miramos al mundo externo»; de acuerdo con esta filosofía, en realidad estamos confinados, cada uno en su propio mundo privado, y lo que normalmente tomamos como si fuera parte del universo externo no es, en verdad, más que una ilusión, un objeto mental —como un sueño— cuya existencia no se extiende más allá del acto perceptual.

Lo que hemos de comprender por encima de todo es que nada en el mundo «simplemente existe», sino que existir es precisamente interactuar con otras cosas —lo que finalmente incluye observadores—. El mundo, por tanto, no ha de concebirse como una mera yuxtaposición de numerosas entidades individuales o autoexistentes —ya sean res extensae, «átomos», o lo que se quiera—, sino que se ha de ver como una unidad orgánica, en la que cada elemento existe en relación con los demás y así pues en relación con la totalidad, que incluye también necesariamente un polo consciente o subjetivo. Además, este descubrimiento fundamental, que muchos en nuestros días asocian a los recientes hallazgos en el dominio de la física cuántica

The knowledge, therefore, that is symbolized by the forbidden fruit is a partial and fragmentary knowledge, a knowledge which fails to grasp the absolute dependence of all things upon their Creator. It is a reduced knowledge which perceives the world not as a theophany but as a sequence of contingencies: not sub specie aeternitatis but under the aspect of temporality. And it is only in this fragmented world wherein all things are in a state of perpetual flux that evil and death enter upon the scene. They enter thus, on the one hand, as the inescapable concomitant of a fragmentary knowledge, a knowledge of things as divorced from God; and at the same time they enter as the dire consequences of'disobedience' -the misuse of man's God-given freedom-and so as 'the wages of sin'.

Meanwhile all the ideal aspects of human culture, including all values and norms, have become relegated to the subjective sphere, and truth itself has become in effect subsumed under the category of utility. Transcendence and symbolism out of the way, there remains only the useful and the useless, the pleasurable and the disagreeable. There are no more absolutes and no more certainties; only a positivistic knowledge and feelings, a veritable glut of feelings. All that pertains to the higher side of life-to art, to morality or to religion-is now held to be subjective, relative, contingent-in a word, 'psychological'. One is no longer capable of understanding that values and norms could have a basis in truth.

...Burtt’s treatise: Wherever was taught as truth the universal formula of gravitation, there was also insinuated as a nimbus of surrounding belief that man is but the puny and local spectator, nay irrelevant product of an infinite self-moving engine, which existed eternally before him and will be eternally after him, enshrining the rigor of mathematical relationships while banishing into impotence all ideal imaginations; an engine which consists of raw masses wandering to no purpose in an undiscoverable time and space, and is in general wholly devoid of any qualities that might spell satisfaction for the major interests of human nature, save solely the central aim of the mathematical physicist. [10-11]

… he is coming visibly under the influence of another idea, which was somehow gaining a hold upon the European mind: the idea of mechanism. As historians of science have pointed out, this conception was already beginning to express itself during the fourteenth century in the form of a remarkable craze for the construction of gigantic astronomical clocks. ‘No European community felt able to hold up its head unless in its midst the plants wheeled in cycles and epicycles, while angels trumpeted, cocks crew, and apostles, kings and prophets marched and counter-marched at the booming of the hours… by the seventeenth century the concept of a ‘clockwork universe’ had become very much a part of the European intellectual scene, and was exercising a considerable scientific influence. [22]

Every measurement of a quantum system constitutes a cosmogenetic act which 'participates' in the single Act of creation. Whether the physicist realizes it or not, in the phenomenon of state vector collapse he is 'picking up' the cosmogenetic Act, not hypothetically, in some stipulated explosion that is supposed to have occurred so many billion years ago, but actually, in the here and now.

Quantum physics has discovered an ontological level approaching the primordial 'waters', which remain in place even after the Spirit of God has 'breathed upon them' to bring forth our world. I contend that quantum indeterminacy — the partial chaos of quantum superposition— can indeed be viewed as reflective of the primordial Chaos, or even more concretely as a remnant of this underlying 'disorder'.

The recognition that places us at the very heart of Christianity, and ipso facto at the veritable antipode of the Vedic religion. To put it in the plainest possible terms: instead of man shedding his human nature to return to God, as in the Vedic religion, it now is God assuming human nature to unite himself with man

Even the tiniest plant that blooms for a fortnight and then is seen no more is vaster in its metaphysical roots than the entire cosmos in its visible form: for these roots extend into eternity. And how much more does this apply to man! "Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew the" (Jer. 1:5)