The Metaphysical Foundation of Buddhism and Modern Science

anches of mathematics that notions of quantity and number are
dominant themes. The real point is that the essential connectedness
of things can never be safely omitted. This is the doctrine of the
thoroughgoing relativity which infects the universe and which makes the
totality of things as it were a Receptacle uniting all that happens.
The Greek doctrine of Composition and Harmony has been vindicated by
the progress of thought. Yet the vivid fancy of the Greeks was also apt
to invest each factor in the Universe with an independent individuality,
for example, the self-sufficient realm of ideas which dominated Plato’s
earlier thought, and which intermittently intrudes into his later
Dialogues. Bu we must not blame the Greeks for this excess of
individualization. All language witnesses to the same error. We habitually
speak of stones, and planets, and animals, as though each individual thing
could exist, even for a passing moment, in separation from an
environment which is in truth a necessary factor in its own nature. Such
an abstraction is a necessity of thought, and the requisite background of
systematic environment can be presupposed. That is true. But it also
follows that, in the absence of some understanding of the final nature of
things, and thus of the sorts of backgrounds presupposed in such
abstract statements, all science suffers from the vice that it may be
combining various propositions which tacitly presuppose inconsistent
backgrounds. No science can be more secure than the unconscious
metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes. The individual thing is
necessarily a modification of its environment, and cannot be