And, I am not suggesting that these people go out and start studying mysticism, just that they accept their ignorance of it, and stop jutting their asses up in the air for all the world to see every time someone talks about mysticism.
This is hard to understand. I’m not sure that any first-rate scientist was all that critical of Newton over alchemy. Newton didn’t go at alchemy as a mystic but made experiments and drew conclusions from them. It is true that for a brief time he regarded the fact that substances either reacted or didn’t as a manifestation of the “sympathies” or “antipathies” of Hermetism but he soon abandoned that for the idea of attractive forces and repulsive forces which he thought, and rightly so, were amenable to mathematical treatment. And, it would seem that he got the idea of the ethereal “sympathies” and “antipathies” from the fact that bits of paper were attracted by a glass rod that has been rubbed by a piece of cloth. However, as I said, he abandoned the Hermetic approach quickly for the more useful idea of forces between objects.
So it’s possible, I guess, to credit all of Newton’s work with optics, colors, gravity and mechanics to mysticism if you don’t mind stretching things quite a bit out of shape.
Did he ever accept that it was bunk ? It’s not science if you refuse the results of your experiments.
A “true scientist” would bemoan Newton wasting so much time on a dead end. I see no evidence that it led him to anything of importance. At best, it was a waste of time.
There is no evidence that there is anything to be ignorant of. There’s plenty of evidence that, true or not, mysticism is worthless. There’s a reason planes are kept up with technology instead of spells.
Well, he did turn from chemistry to mechanics, gravitation and so on and never really was more than a dabbler in chemistry. For example he found, like so many others, that some things combined readily and some didn’t combine at all. Instead of follwing this up in a chemical sense, he used that to formulate his ideas of attractive and repulsive forces and applied that idea to mechanics and gravitation.
I think that the objection to mswas’ characterization of Newton is the claim that mysticism led him to great discoveries. The way I read it is that Newton first interpreted his chemical results according to the mystical Hermetic idea of “symathetic” and “antipathetic” particles but soon switched to the idea of “attractive” and “repulsive” forces and that let to the great discoveries. His mysticism didn’t lead him anywhere useful and was really a side issue that he never followed up.
No what I am saying is that Newton was involved in a mystical pursuit of knowledge, the ways and means of which are not relevant to that. Mysticism is not something that is in opposition to science. Now, you can say what you want about Hermetic studies, I know little of them, but judging mysticism by one school is like judging science only by Physics or Biology.
He found one tool to be less useful than another, I think you are drawing too many inferences from that. It doesn’t say anything about the utility of mysticism. Science can be performed as part of the mystical experience. There is no dichotomy. You keep assuming that there is, there is not. One can be both a mystic and a scientist all at once. The idea that Newton was a mystic one day and a scientist the next is ludicrous, he was both simultaneously 24/7/365.
And again, I am not making commentary on real scientists, I am making a commentary on fake ones that happen to inhabit a message board both of us like to post on.
Erek
Scientific study’s value is judged by the method used to acquire knowledge. A comparison of the methods used any supposed scientific field to those of physics or chemistry will allow judgement as to the scientific value of that field.
Mysticism is, to me, the belief that immediate knowledge is possible. That is, that we can know things directly and without any mediating agents, like the senses. In other words, the claim that to think something about the world and believe it is to have knowledge of the world. I think that is the claim and belief of all mystics and it is of no value in science. A scientist can be a mystic in all matters other than science and still be a good scientist. As soon as mystic methods are brought into his scientific work it isn’t science any more.
As to Hermetics, that was Newtons mysticism and Newton was your example.
Absolute disagreement here. You can acquire knowledge as a scientist and you can claim to acquire knowledge as a mystic but not about the same thing. You can knuckle your forehead and furrow your brow and imagine what would be the reaction from mixing two substances and stop there, but that will never be science and those who do it are not doing science.
And so am I, and Newton was a real scientist and he didn’t get knowledge from mysticism. He subjected his theory of universal gravitation to the experiment of computing the moon’s orbit using his inverse square law and comparing it to the actual orbit. And when the answers didn’t agree he waited over twenty years until they did agree (in his words “pretty nearly”) before publishing his theory.
David Simmons Ok, I do believe that one can get knowledge that way. So I guess that’s the essence of the difference in opinion. However, I don’t think that the Mystical pursuit and the Scientific pursuit need be mutually exclusive. That’s where I disagree. I think there is a third synthesis way, and that’s what I am interested in figuring out. One that doesn’t deny the material world and it’s usefulness, and one that doesn’t deny the access to direct knowledge either.
Erek