QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

possible. 242
3. The Mechanistic-deterministic Conception of Reality
Among the numerous modifications that human understanding and scientific thought concerning
nature have undergone over the centuries, it would be difficult to point to one that has had a
more profound and far-reaching effect than the conception of the world that is usually called
’mechanical’ or ’mechanistic’. Instead of treating things in Aristotelian terms such as substance,
accident, essence, form and potentiality, we now treat them in terms of forces, motions, laws,
changes of mass in space and time and the like. The mechanisation of physical science has
become much more than an internal question of method in natural science, since the modes of
thought inherent in the conception have also penetrated philosophical thought about man and his
place in the universe. 243 The mechanical and deterministic conception of the structure of the
universe and the natural laws that direct natural events have formed a new scientific world-view
which has, over the centuries, left its mark in educated humans concerning their conception of
their surroundings. 244
Newton’s Principia was understood as the foundation of physics before the end of the 1600s in
British Isles, and in the European continent had replaced the Cartesian way of thinking by the
middle of the 1700s. Modern people following Francis Bacon’s doctrine believed they had found
the keys to knowledge that would enable them to exploit the power of nature. Newton’s great
synthesis gave science a mandate to lead society into a new epoch. As a consequence of the new
natural science, humans now lived in a world whose laws they had learned to understand.
Metaphysics lost its hegemony as modern knowledge and world-view were trustworthy
constructed in the laboratory of natural science. In Newton’s work, classical science attained an
independent role that has affected both human society and the history of culture in many ways:
the whole conception of reality was changed. 245
Empirical observations confirming Newton’s laws legitimised the widely-held confidence that
nature could be investigated as an lawful object independent of human subject. After Principia,
for by the accelation of Jupiter was explained by Laplace in 1786. See Enqvist 2003, 80-82.
242
Trusted 1991, 101-105. White 1998, 351-352. Dijksterhuis 1986, 491.
243
Dijksterhuis 1986, 3, 463. Burtt 1980, 26, 303.
244
von Wright, 1987, 9-10.
92