Christian Thomas Kohl The Metaphysical Foundations of Buddhism and Modern Science

moves about amid a fragmentary system like a man dazed by his own
penetration.
A few main doctrines stand out and they are of priceless importance for
science, in the largest sense of that term. As to their coordination into a
system, he is undogmatic and can only tell ‘the most likely tale’. Indeed, in
his seventh Epistle (Cf.341, C.) he denounces the notion that a final
system can be verbally expressed. His later thought circles round the
interweaving of seven main notions namely, The Ideas, The Physical
Elements, The Psyche, The Eros, The Harmony, The Mathematical
Relations, The Receptacle. These notions are as important for us now, as
they were then at the dawn of the modern world, when civilizations of
the old type were dying. From their point of view the Athenians were
right to condemn Socrates. After the coalescence of Greek and Semitic
thought the old order of life was doomed. Western Civilization acquired a
new intellectuality, clarified, humanized, moralized.
Considering the Ideas by themselves, Plato points out that any selections
are either compatible for joint exemplification, or are incompatible. It
thus follows, as he notes, that the determinations of compatibilities and
incompatibilities are the key to coherent thought, and to the
understanding of the world in its function as the theatre for the