Buddhist Romanticism

human society in general, and of the universe at large. This meant that in
exploring themselves from within, they believed they were gaining
objective knowledge that put them more in touch not only with themselves,
but also with their fellow human beings and with nature as a whole.
The image of a microcosm draws directly from the currents in late 18th
century science that distinguished it from the science of the earlier part of
the century. The huge gulf created by these shifting currents can be
illustrated by a simple image. Immanuel Kant, writing in 1789 and resisting
most of the new currents in scientific theory, spoke of looking up at the
nighttime sky and being inspired by the sublime sense of order he saw
there in the stars. Friedrich Schleiermacher, writing ten years later, spoke of
looking up at the same stars and seeing chaos.
SCIENCE
Isaac Newton, in the 17th century, had set forth his laws of motion with
such rigor and clarity that they influenced European thought far beyond the
realm of pure science. They promoted a view of the universe as a vast
machine, operating in line with strict, invariable laws. The invariable nature
of these laws promoted the idea that the universe was essentially static. The
stars were fixed in their places, the planets in their orbits, and the
coordinates of space had not been altered since the beginning of time.
Matter was inherently inert, as it could not move unless something else
moved it. God’s role in the universe was reduced to that of a watchmaker
who assembled the cosmic watch, wound it up, and left it to run on its own
while he apparently turned his attention elsewhere.
The mechanical and universal nature of these laws promoted the idea
that causality in every area of life was also mechanistic. This idea then led
to a controversy in philosophy as to whether there was such a thing as free
will and, if so, how it could have an impact on a material world whose
motions were already determined by fixed causal laws. Either the human
mind was nothing more than matter itself, in which case free will was a
total illusion inasmuch as matter was totally passive and inert; or it was
radically different from matter, in which case it was, in a famous phrase, a
ghost trapped in a machine. And if it was a ghost in a machine, there
remained the question of how it could have any influence on the controls.
Toward the end of the 18th century, however, scientific thinkers began
81