QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

measured. Even if some people continued to maintain that humans also had either a soul or a
spirit, the influence of these was excluded from the areas investigated by natural science. In
place of Dualism, natural scientists generally adopted Monistic Materialism, according to which
deterministic and mechanical nature was the only reality. As a result of this alteration in worldview,
people’s conception of the meaning of life and the possibilities it offered became
increasingly secular. As nature was no longer viewed as a live vessel of the spirit, a source of
mystery and revelation, romantics such as Pope, Blake and Coleridge viewed Newton’s
Principia and his Opticks as diminishing the value of humanity. 285
The Englishman Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who travelled the continent of Europe in his
youth was fascinated by the new conquests of natural science. He made the “matter-in-motion”
the basis of his natural philosophy believing that also psychic phenomena were the result of
deterministic external influences. For example, the experience of colour was identical with
events taking place in the central nervous system, and the whole of psychology could be be
embedded within physiology, which in for its part was just a branch of general kinematics. 286
Hobbes is thought of as the classical Materialist whose extreme thinking affected the paths taken
by subsequent philosophers. From Materialist point of view, there was no justification for human
responsibility, free will or the division between people and animals pointed out by Aristotle and
Descartes.
In common with Epicurus in his time, Materialists have believed that in the last resort, thoughts
and knowledge should be described as the causal interaction of material particles: a structure
made up of specific materialistic elements should produce both the activity of mind and
subjective experiences. While a requirement of Epicurus’ conception of free will was that atoms
could, now and then, deviate from the direction in which they were travelling, Newton’s
deterministic laws of motion prohibited such exceptions. In Materialism, the traditional idea of
nature as a self-regulating system was in a way united to the new mechanical conception of
nature, in which events could be explained only in terms of physical bodies and the forces
between them. Within the mechanistic-deterministic framework, Materialistic Monism can be
viewed as an almost hopeless attempt to connect people with nature.
284 Aspelin 1995, 473-476, 504. All humanists did not approve of the scientific method. For example, the German
philosopher Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915) did not equate the scientific method with the methods used in the
natural sciences. While natural science was based on generalisations, the purpose in history was to understand
unique and individual phenomena. These thoughts were further developed by Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm
Dilthey. Aspelin 1995, 532-537.
285 White 1998, 291. Dijksterhuis1986, 431. Tarnas 1991, 367.
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