Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy: Five EssaysSantayana, George
Philosophy
Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy: Five Essays
Santayana, George
Locke, John, 1632-1704; Philosophy, Modern
energy of each chosen centre, as well as its career and encounters, hang
on the collateral existence of other centres of force, among which it must
wend its way: yet the only witness to their presence, and the only known
property of their substance, is their "radio-activity", or the physical
light which they shed. Light, in its physical being, is accordingly the
measure of all things in this new philosophy: and if we ask ourselves why
this element should have been preferred, the answer is not far to seek.
Light is the only medium through which very remote or very minute
particles of matter can be revealed to science. Whatever the nature of
things may be intrinsically, science must accordingly express the universe
in terms of light.
These reforms have come from within: they are triumphs of method. We make
an evident advance in logic, and in that parsimony which is dear to
philosophers (though not to nature), if we refuse to assign given terms
and relations to any prior medium, such as absolute time or space, which
cannot be given with them. Observable spaces and times, like the facts
observed in them, are given separately and in a desultory fashion.
Initially, then, there are as many spaces and times as there are
observers, or rather observations; these are the specious times and spaces
of dreams, of sensuous life, and of romantic biography. Each is centred
here and now, and stretched outwards, forward, and back, as far as
imagination has the strength to project it. Then, when objects and events
have been posited as self-existent, and when a "clock" and a system of
co-ordinates have been established for measuring them, a single
mathematical space and time may be deployed about them, conceived to
contain all things, and to supply them with their respective places and
dates. This gives us the cosmos of classical physics. But this system
involves the uncritical notion of light and matter travelling through
media previously existing, and being carried down, like a boat drifting
down stream, by a flowing time which has a pace of its own, and imposes it
on all existence. In reality, each "clock" and each landscape is
self-centred and initially absolute: its time and space are irrelevant to
those of any other landscape or "clock", unless the objects or events
revealed there, being posited as self-existent, actually coincide with
those revealed also in another landscape, or dated by another "clock". It
is only by travelling along its own path at its own rate that experience
or light can ever reach a point lying on another path also, so that two
observations, and two measures, may coincide at their ultimate terms,
their starting-points or their ends. Positions are therefore not
independent of the journey which terminates in them, and thereby
individuates them; and dates are not independent of the events which
distinguish them. The flux of existence comes first: matter and light
distend time by their pulses, they distend space by their deployments.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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