Rough Notes: The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (E.A. Burtt)

THE METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN PHYSICAL SCIENCE
E.A. Burtt (1925)

“Many books that were well received when originally published ultimately fail the test of time and seem hopelessly outdated, or even silly to future generations. Occasionally, a book seen as a solid effort when it was written is found later to be the definitive work on the subject. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science by Edwin Arthur Burtt is such a book.” Amazon Review

No one in the learned world could be found
to save the brilliant mathematical victories over the
realm of physical motion, and at the same time lay
bare the big problems involved in the new doctrine
of causality, and the inherent ambiguities in the tentative,
compromising, and rationally inconstruable form
of the Cartesian dualism that had been dragged along
like a tribal deity in the course of the campaign. EA Burtt

Those violate the accuracy of language which ought to be kept precise, who interpret these words [space, place and motion] for the measured quantities. Nor do those less defile the purity of mathematical and philosophical truths, who confound real quantities with their relations and sensible measures. Moreover since body is here proposed for investigation not insofar as it is a physical substance endowed with sensible qualities but only insofar as it is extended mobile and impenetrable I have not defined it in a philosophical manner but abstracting from sensible qualities I have postulated only the properties needed for local motion so that instead of physical bodies you may understand abstract figures in the same way they are considered by geometers when they assign motion to them. Isaac Newton

Introduction

*In the last analysis it is the ultimate picture which an age forms of the nature of its world that is its most fundamental possession. It is the final controlling factor in all thinking whatever.

As to the modern mind what are the essential elements in that picture, and how did they come there ?


*To the Middle Ages an explanation in terms of the relation of things to human purpose was accounted just as real as and often more important than an explanation in terms of efficient causality, which expressed their relations to each other. Rain fell because it nourished man's crops as truly as because it was expelled from the clouds.

*Quantitative differences were derived from these teleological distinctions. Inasmuch as a heavier body tends downward more strongly than a lighter, it will reach the earth more quickly when allowed to fall freely. Water in water was believed to have no weight, inasmuch as it was already in its proper place.

*One hardly philosophizes to-day in the true sense of the word unless one understands how it was that this veritable upheaval in the main current of intelligent thought has historically come about.


*A philosophy akin to Russell's in the relevant essentials, ventures to-day to call itself by the name ‘naturalism’, implying the assurance that a frank facing of the facts by a normal mind, free from malicious inner distortions, will inevitably lead to acquiescence in his results.


*Instead of treating things in terms of substance, accident, and causality, essence and idea, matter and form, potentiality and actuality, we now treat them in terms of forces, motions, and laws, changes of mass in space and time, and the like. Pick up the works of any modern philosopher, and note how complete the shift has been.

*Philosophy came to take science, in the main, for granted, and another way to put our central theme is, did not the problems to which philosophers now devoted themselves arise directly out of that uncritical acceptance ?

*Newton, while scrupulously avoiding metaphysics in his experimental work, gave or assumed definite answers to such fundamental questions as the nature of space, time, and matter ; the relations of man with the objects of his knowledge ; and it is just such answers that constitute metaphysics.

*We need to understand more clearly the nature of modern thinking and judge more accurately the validity of the contemporary scientific world-view.

*That the astronomical realm was fundamentally geometric was taken for granted, what wasn't was whether the universe as a whole, including the earth, was fundamentally mathematical in its structure. Because this shift in the point of reference gives simpler geometric expression of the facts is it legitimate to make it? To admit this point is to overthrow the entire Aristotelian physics and cosmology.

*At the time there were other metaphysical systems that were more amenable to this astonishing mathematical movement. Recall the synthesis of Christian theology and Greek philosophy in the middle ages was in the latter case of a Neo-platonic cast. The Pythagorean element if very strong in Neo-platonism which describes its phenomena in terms of number theory. This was the major point of conflict with the dominant Aristotelianism of the later Middle Ages.

*A universal mathematics of nature was legitimate, the universe if fundamentally geometrical, its ultimate constituents limited portions of space, as a whole it presents as a beautiful, geometrical harmony.

*For the orthodox Aristotelian school quantity was only one of ten fundamental predicaments not the most important. Mathematics was given an intermediate dignity between metaphysics and physics. NATURE WAS FUNDAMENTALLY QUALITATIVE AS WELL AS QUANTITATIVE; the key to the highest knowledge must therefore be logic rather than mathematics.

*For an Aristotelian it would have seemed ridiculous to seriously suggest his whole view of nature be set aside in the interest of a simpler more harmonious geometrical astronomy. For a Platonist more natural but still radical, involving as it did a homogeneity of substance throughout the visible cosmos. Copernicus had definitely placed himself in the dissenting Platonist movement.


*Kepler seized upon Copernicus‟ work as a student and went further than aesthetic contemplation of geometric fancies and mystical manipulation of numbers (Pythagoreans) and relied upon the great Tycho Brahe - the first great mind to feel ardently the passion for empirical facts.

*It was the observed world about which he was philosophising “without proper experiments I conclude nothing”. He speaks of his accomplishments as having revealed a new form of causality, the necessary connection of facts formerly held distinct, as mathematical reason. This is the Aristotelian formal cause reinterpreted in terms of exact mathematics. Essence/substantial form morphe blueness, bounciness, maleness, etc

[Aristotle learned that perfection was not to be confined to the mathematical abstractions, to which Plato had at first directed the attention of his pupils, but had come to recognize that the visible heavens themselves could be accepted as the embodiment of the divine. With the declaration of this intimacy between the deities and the work of their hands in the material universe, Aristotle issued his manifesto, which is an optimistic affirmation of the values of this world; simultaneously he rejected the Platonic doctrine that the soul is imprisoned in the body and in need of struggling free from the bonds of matter. It was by this stroke that Aristotle established his own identity in the history of thought. Britannica]

[Aristotle's teleology seems to be based entirely on empirical observation. It has nothing to do with a belief in divine providence and is not, as some modern critics believe, at variance with the law of causality. It forms the foundation, however, of Aristotle's ethics and political theory. Aristotle was an avid collector of empirical evidence. He induced his students, for instance, to make collections of the laws and political institutions (and their historical developments) of all known cities and nations in order to find out how they worked and at what points their initiators had been mistaken regarding the way in which they would work. In later times, Aristotle came to be considered (and by many is still considered) a dogmatic philosopher because the results of his inquiries were accepted as absolutely authoritative. In reality, however, he was one of the greatest Empiricists of all times.]

*Duns Scotus stressed the contingency of the universe and its total dependence on God's infinite creative will. He adopted the traditional Franciscan voluntarism, elevating the will above the intellect in man.

Formal cause: organizing principle of matter, where matter is figure, extension, mass, etc.

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*Causality, to repeat, becomes reinterpreted in terms of mathematical simplicity and harmony. Reducing all features to mathematics excludes therefore sensible features like colour, odour, taste and feel. And a denigration of secondary qualities in favour of the primary one – quantity; upon which mathematics operates.

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*Now such a mathematico-aesthetic conception of causality and hypothesis already implies a new metaphysical picture of the world ; in fact, it is just these ideas that made Kepler so impatient with certain well meaning Aristotelian friends who advised him to treat his own and Copernicus' discoveries as mathematical hypotheses merely, not necessarily true of the real world.


*Kepler's position led to an important doctrine of knowledge. Not only is it true that we can discover mathematical relations in all objects presented to the senses ; all certain knowledge must be knowledge of their quantitative characteristics, perfect knowledge is always mathematical.

*All this is thoroughly Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic in cast, it is the realm of the Platonic ideas suddenly found identical with the realm of geometrical relationships.

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*Swept onward by the inherent necessities of this mathematical metaphysic, Galileo, like Kepler, was inevitably led to the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, only with the Italian genius the doctrine appears in a much more pronounced and developed form.


*The Copernican astronomy and the achievements of the two new sciences must break us of the natural assumption that sensed objects are the real or mathematical objects. They betray certain qualities, which, handled by mathematical rules, lead us to a knowledge of the true object, and these are the real or primary qualities, such as number, figure, magnitude, position, and motion, which cannot by any exertion of our powers be separated from bodies qualities which also can be wholly expressed mathematically. The reality of the universe is geometrical ; the only ultimate characteristics of nature are those in terms of which certain mathematical knowledge becomes possible. All other qualities, and these are often far more prominent to the senses, are secondary, subordinate effects of the primary.

Of the utmost moment was Galileo's further assertion that these secondary qualities are subjective.

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*In Kepler there had been no clear statement of this position ; apparently for him the secondary qualities were out there in the astronomical world, like the primary, only they were not so real or fundamental. Galileo fell definitely in line with the Platonic identification of the realm of changing opinion with the realm of sense experience, and became the heir to all the influences emanating from the ancient atomists which had been recently revived in the epistemology of such thinkers as Vives and Campanella.

*The confused and untrustworthy elements in the sense picture of nature are somehow the effect of the senses themselves. It is because the experienced picture has passed throughthe senses that it possesses all these confusing and illusive features. The secondary qualities are declared to be effects on the senses of the primary qualities which are alone real in nature. As far as the object itself is concerned, they are nothing more than names.

*Certainly the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, with causality lodged in the atoms as above portrayed, exhibits strong marks of a Democritanism brought up to date and fitted into the new mathematical programme.

*This form of the primary-secondary [qualities] doctrine in Galileo is worth a moment's pause, for its effects in modern thought have been of incalculable importance.


*Nature has an independence quite apart from man, who is no longer integral whose purposes are not found to be satisfied by her, for there are no ends only motion in nature.

*Now, in the course of translating this distinction of primary and secondary into terms suited to the new mathematical interpretation of nature, we have the first stage in the reading of man quite out of the real and primary realm.



*Obviously man was not a subject suited to mathematical study. His performances could not be treated by the quantitative method, except in the most meagre fashion. His was a life of colours and sounds, of pleasures, of griefs, of passionate loves, of ambitions, and strivings. Hence the real world must be the world outside of man; the world of astronomy and the world of resting and moving terrestrial objects.

The features of the world now classed as secondary,
unreal, ignoble, and regarded as dependent on the
deceitfulness of sense, are just those features which
are most intense to man in all but his purely theoretic
activity, and even in that, except where he confines
himself strictly to the mathematical method.

*In place of the teleological categories into which scholasticism had analysed change and movement, we now have these two formerly insignificant entities given new meanings as absolute mathematical continua and raised to the rank of ultimate metaphysical notions. The real world, to repeat, is a world of mathematically measurable motions in space and time.


*With respect to time, there are features in Galileo's work of particular significance for modern metaphysics.

*..the substitution of the entity [time] for the old categories of potentiality and actuality involved a radically new view of the universe, a view such that the very existence of a being like man became one enormous puzzle.


*To put this in modern terms, the present exists unmoved and continually draws into itself the future. That this sounds absurd to our ears is because we have followed Galileo and banished man, with his memory and purpose, out of the real world.


*Kepler’s mathematical beauty as the cause of the effect replaced Aristotelian formal cause. Galileo’s force replaced final cause. Accelerated motions require some force, simple uniform motion could be reduced to formal rather than dynamical explanations.


*God thus ceases to be the Supreme Good in any important sense ; he is a huge mechanical inventor, whose power is appealed to merely to account for the first appearance of the atoms, the tendency becoming more and more irresistible as time goes on to lodge all further causality for whatever effects in the atoms themselves. In Galileo, however, this step is not clearly taken.

*Instead of causal explanation in terms not unsuited to a metaphysic which regarded man as a determinative part of nature and a link between matter and God, we now, after his banishment from the real world, explain causality solely in terms of forces revealing themselves in the mathematically expressible motions of matter itself.


Res extensa and res cogitans: material and thinking substance

*Why, now, are we sure that the primary, geometrical qualities inhere in objects as they really are, while the secondary qualities do not ?


*Primary qualities are merely those capable of mathematical handling. This metaphysics suited the powerful momentum of the new mathematical science of nature.


DESCARTES

*No mathematical object is a more cogent item of knowledge than the 'cogito ergo sum '; we can turn our attention inward, and abstracting from the whole extended world, note with absolute assurance the existence of a totally different kind of entity, a - thinking substance.

*..only those features of the world in terms of which we get certain and consistent knowledge open before us what is indubitably and permanently real. The real world is a world of quantitative characteristics only ; its differences are differences of number alone.

*Descartes does not even invoke final causes (intentionality) to the motions of the mind. The interaction between the res cogitans and the res extensa was an enormous problem and God invoked, as an explanatory filler. The empirico-mathematical project had things to do. Lead ultimately to positivism.


*To the scholastic scientist the world was: clearly and fully intelligible, being immediately present to the rational powers of his mind, it was composed fundamentally of, and was intelligible through, those qualities that were most vivid and intense in his own immediate experience colour sound beauty joy heat fragrance cold, and its plasticity to purpose and ideal.

*The work of Descartes had an enormous influence throughout all Europe during the latter half of the seventeenth century, largely because he was not only a great mathematician and anatomist, but also a powerful philosophical genius, who treated afresh, and with a remarkably catholic reach, all the big problems of the age by hitching them up in one fashion or another to the chariot of victorious mathematical science.

Hobbes: materialist and nominalist.

*We should note that in a certain respect Hobbes represented a counter-tendency to the work of Galileo and Descartes ; he is trying to reunite the sundered halves of the Cartesian dualism and bring man back into the world of nature as a part of her domain.

*Purpose and reasoning are admitted, but they appear not as ultimate principles of explanation, which had been their significance for the scholastic psychologist ; they represent merely a certain type of phantasm or group of phantasms within the total compound. This treatment, aided by the decline of the notion of God as Supreme Good, set the fashion for almost the whole modern development of psychology.

Locke’s psychology follows Hobbes.


*From now on it is a settled assumption for modern thought in practically every field, that to explain anything is to reduce it to its elementary parts, whose relations, where temporal in character, are conceived in terms of efficient causality solely.



*The ascription [from Henry More; Cambridge Platonist] of this remarkable list of epithets to space is a significant illustration of how religious spirits in sympathy with the new mathematical movement found in infinite space the true substitute, in terms of the geometrical view of the universe, for the Pure Form or Absolute Actuality of Aristotelianism. On the continent this religious corollary of the new order found its great champion in Malebranche, to whom space became practically God himself.

*Ralph Cudworth, the second most influential of the Cambridge thinkers [after More], did not venture to adopt More's bold hypothesis of the spatiality of God . . his religious interest expresses itself not in an attempt to force a theistic metaphysics into the categories of the new science at any cost, but rather by a return to Platonic and Aristotelian thought. But it is interesting to observe how, even in a thinker essentially conservative and failing to share the dominant interests of the main current of his day, certain of its significant results had taken firm root.


*He adopts the doctrine of the mechanical structure of the material universe and the notion of primary and secondary qualities approvingly, observing that the real difficulty is not to explain forms and qualities in terms of magnitudes, figures, motions, and the like, but how to account for souls and minds on any such basis. He is confident that a consistent pursuit of the mechanical philosophy would inevitably lead to the admission of incorporeal beings, especially one supreme spiritual Deity.


*Cudworth is thus thinking in general conformity with the main outlines of the Cartesian dualism, and for him, as for every one else in the century with the possible exception of Hobbes, all ultimate difficulties, metaphysical or epistemological, are resolved by the appeal to God.

BOYLE

*"nature does play the mechanician"; mathematical and mechanical principles are the "alphabet, in which God wrote the world"; which for Boyle is a conclusion justified for the most part by the undeniable fact of the successful explanation of things through the use of these principles.

*Galileo and Descartes had been eager to banish man from the mathematical world of nature into a secondary and unreal realm to be sure Descartes had maintained the independence of thinking substance but the whole effect of his work, like that of Galileo, was to make man's place and importance seem very meagre, secondary, dependent.

*Confronting this seemingly irresistible tendency to read man out of nature and belittle his importance, Boyle is eager positively to reassert the factual place of man in the cosmos and his unique dignity as the child of God. Hence the primary qualities are not more real than the secondary; since man with his senses is a part of the universe, all qualities are equally real.



EPISTEMOLOGY

*We might well ask, as we examine the metaphysics of the age with its prevalent conception of the soul located within the body, where it is affected by the primary motions coming to the various senses and promulgated to its seat in the brain how any certain knowledge at all is possible of the real corporeal world outside, with which the soul is never in contact?

*How is it possible for it to build up an orderly system of ideas that shall truly represent a world forever inaccessible to it ?

*But now Boyle raises the doubt, still rather naively and innocently, on the basis of the new psychology, and it is vital to our purpose to observe that he readily abandons the more consistent form of Descartes' dualism in favour of important elements from Hobbes; he pictures the soul as entirely shut up within the brain.

*Boyle’s thinking takes up Hobbes’ positivism.

*Very hard for thinkers to believe in action from a distance at this point.

*Even More had to have an extended God in order to show how he could exert his power at any point of space he pleased. According to this conception, the ether was naturally conceived as a homogeneous, phlegmatic fluid, filling all space that was not occupied by other bodies, and possessing no characteristics that could not be deduced from extension. Its other function was to account for curious phenomena like magnetism, in which forces were apparently at work of a unique kind, such as could not be reduced to those universal, orderly, mechanical motions, for the propagation of which the ether in its first function was called upon.


*if we think clearly we see that no one could possibly project a mechanical order so all-embracing that it would not as a whole still be the object of a conceiving mind.


*. . do we not empirically note that every object of mind is likewise a means for the realization of further ends ? Among the irreducible logical relations of a thing known, is there not its relation to a more valuable end which it may be made to serve ? If this be the case, then purpose is as ultimate a fact as knowledge and feeling, and mind, embracing by this term such knowing, appreciating, and purposive activity, must find its total explanation beyond the material world.


*That material world in its spatial expanse seems to be an object of mind, but not its cause nor its complete stimulus. To fall back again upon the old Greek triad in lack of anything better:


(1) it is the object of cognition as a marvellous system of orderly mathematical relations ;

(2) it is the object of aesthetic joy as a gloriously beautiful harmony ;

(3) it is the object of purpose as a vast yet absolutely regular and dependable means for the ever- increasing enrichment of life and the achievement of ideal ends.



*Mind appears to be an irreducible something that can: know the world of extended matter; in the light of a still more attractive and commanding good - love ardently its order and beauty; transform it continually




CONCLUSION


*It was worth several centuries of metaphysical barbarism to possess science. [!!! sic]

*Why, again, did none of them see the tremendous difficulties involved ? Here, once more, in the light of our study, can there be any doubt of the central reason ? - these founders of the philosophy of science were mathematical pragmatists, of a rather extreme type.
Metaphysics they tended more and more to avoid, so far as they could avoid it ; so far as not, it became an instrument for their further mathematical conquest of the world.

*Any solution to the ultimate questions which continued to pop up, however superficial and inconsistent, that served to quiet the situation, to give a tolerably plausible response to their questionings in the categories they were now familiar with, and above all to open a free field for their continued mathematical exploitation of nature, tended to be readily accepted and tucked away in their minds with uncritical confidence.

*With final causes and secondary qualities banished from the world of science it mattered not how rough their treatment.


*Had their intense enthusiasm for the reduction of nature been tempered by a more zealous and theoretic approach as to how to deal with this unique creature who was winning this conquest – they could not failed to have seen the matter through to its depths and remained satisfied with their answers.


*God’s mind connected the soul and thinking substance with the spatio-temporal world . . as long as theism lasted.


*. . . as long as theism lasted, men felt intellectually at home in their world ; God's mind was the connecting link between the realm of masses and the imprisoned soul, supplying the possibility of communion and the guaranty of truth.



*But surely if all things are immediately and fully present to God's mind, those which are the objects of our thought and knowledge must be present to ours [too]. Otherwise we shall be hard pressed to prove the existence of any God who is more than an idea inside our brains.

The very prevalence of these curious metaphysical
notions of modern times would seem to be a pathetic
testimony to the fact that people at large are not
successful metaphysicians. And convictions as to
man's place in the universe have inevitable emotional
corollaries ; for most, also, though illogically, important
ethical consequences.