Christian Thomas Kohl The Metaphysical Foundations of Buddhism and Modern Science

of the civilized thought of the epoch in question. They are intuitions
which, apart from their use in science, ordinary language rarely
expresses in any defined accuracy, but habitually presupposes in its
current words and expressions. For example, the words 'tables', 'chairs',
'rocks', presuppose the scientific notion of material bodies, which has
governed natural science from the seventeenth century to the end of the
nineteenth.
But, even from the point of view of the special sciences, philosophic
systems with their ambitious aims at full comprehensiveness, are not
useless. They are the way in which the human spirit cultivates its deeper
intuitions. Such systems give life and motion to detached thoughts. Apart
from these efforts at coordination, detached thoughts would flash out in
idle moments, illuminate a passing phase of reflection, and would the
perish and be forgotten. The scope of an intuition can only be defined by
its coordination with other notions of equal generality. Even the
discordance of competing philosophic systems is a factor essential for
progress. The history of European thought, even to the present day, has
been tainted by a fatal misunderstanding. It may be termed The
Dogmatic Fallacy. The error consists in the persuasion that we are
capable of producing notions which are adequately defined in respect to
the complexity of relationship required for their illustrations in the real
world. Canst thou by searching describe the Universe? Except perhaps
for the simpler notions of arithmetic, even our more familiar ideas,