Christian Thomas Kohl The Metaphysical Foundations of Buddhism and Modern Science

mentioned. That notion is so obvious that it has haunted language so far
as we can trace history backwards. Finally in the seventeenth century it
was given a new precision for the purposes of physical science. Also
physical science, thus re-conditioned, proved an overwhelming success
for three centuries. It has transformed thought, and has transformed
the physical activities of mankind. It seemed that at last mankind had
achieved the fundamental notion for all practical purposes, and that
beyond it in the way of generality there lay mere aimless speculation. But
in the twentieth century this great notion, as shaped for use by Galileo
and Newton, has completely collapsed so far as concerns its use as a
fundamental notion for physical science. In the modern science, it is a
limited notion confined to special purpose.
This collapse of nineteenth century dogmatism is a warning that the
special sciences require that the imaginations of men be stored with
imaginative possibilities as yet unutilized in the service of scientific
explanation. The nearest analogy is to be seen in the history of some
species of animal, or plant, or microbe, which lurks for ages as an obscure
by-product of nature in some lonely jungle, or morass, or island. Then by
some trick of circumstance it escapes into the outer world and
transforms a civilization, or destroys an empire or the forests of a
continent. Such is the potential power of the ideas which live in the
various systems of philosophy.