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THE MEETING OF EAST AND WEST Hindu physics, botany, or zoology can compare with the mature achievements of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Eratosthenes, and the scientists in Hellenistic Alexandria. Indian reasoning has remained uninfluenced by such criticism, new raw material, and inspiration as the Occidental thinkers have continually received from sources of this kind. And if the Indian natural sciences cannot be said ever to have equaled those known to Europe even in the time of the Greeks, how much greater is the inequality today!
Under the impact of the sweeping achievements of our laboratories, modern philosophy has completely refashioned its conception of its problems. Without the development of a modern mathematics, physics, and astronomy, through the work of GaliIco, Touicelli, and their contemporaries, the new way of thought represented by Descartes and Spinoza would never have been sound. Spinoza earned his livelihood as an optician, making lenses-a modern, advanced tool of the newest sciences. The versatile lilework of Leibnitz exhibited most conspicuously the close interrelationship, nay fusion, of mathematics and physics with seventeenth-century philosophy. And one cannot study Kant without becoming aware of Newton. During the nineteenth century, science found its counterpart in the positivistic, empiristic philosophies of Comte, Mill, and Spencer. Indeed, the whole course of inodern Western thought has been established by the pacemaking, relentless progress of our secularized, rational sciences, from the day of Francis Bacon and the rise of the New Learning, even to the present moment, when the staggering theories of Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck, Eddington, and Dirac. on the structure of the atom and the universe, have projected the new task for the philosophers not only of today but of generations to come.
Absolutely nothing of this kind will be found in the history of India, though in classical antiquity a corresponding situation is marked by the grand sequence from Thales to Democritus,
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| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell |
| Publisher | Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1953 |
| Total Pages | 709 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 34 MB |