Page Text
________________
THE CLAIMS OF SCIENCE and through Plato and Aristotle to Lucretius. Not a few of the pre-Socratics were distinguished in mathematics, physics, and astronomy, as well as in philosophical speculation. Thales won more fame when he predicted an eclipse of the sun by means of mathematics applied to problems of cosmology than he ever gained among his contemporaries by declaring water to be the primary element of the universe-an idca that had been common to various earlier mythologies. Pythagoras, similarly, is celebrated as the discoverer of certain basic principles of acoustics. Aristotle writes of the followers of Pythagoras that they "applied themselves to the study of mathematics and were the first to advance that science."16 Regarding the principles of number as the first principles of all existing things, Pythagoras, by experiment, discovered the dependence of the musical intervals on certain arithmctical ratios of lengths of string at the same tension; and the laws of liarmony thus discovered he applied to the interpretation of the whole structure of the cosmos. Thus in ancient Greece, as in Europe today, philosophical speculation concerning the structure and forces of the universe, the nature of all things, and the essential character of man was already largely actuated by a spirit of scientific inquiry; and the result was a dissolution of the archaic, established, mythological and theological ideas about man and the world. Traditionalism based on revelation and timehonored visions became discredited. A scries of intellectual revolutions followed, which were in part the cause and spiritual prototype of the collapse, centuries later, of our established social systems-from the French Revolution in 1789 to the Russian and Central European revolutions of the present century, and, last but not least, the recent upheavals in Mexico, South America, and China.
Indian philosophy, on the contrary, has remained traditional. Supported and refreshed not by outward-directed experiment, but by the inward-turned experiences of yoga-practice, it has in
16 Aristotle, The Metaphysics I. v. (Loeb Classical Library, Vol. I, p. 33).
33
| 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 |