Christian Thomas Kohl The Metaphysical Foundations of Buddhism and Modern Science

for the expression of high abstractions, the sort of abstractions usual in
current conversation where the presupposed background is ignored.
But it is evident that even the appeal to mathematics is too narrow, at
least if mathematics is taken to mean those branches hitherto developed.
The general science of mathematics is concerned with the investigation
of patterns of connectedness, in abstraction from the particular relata
and the particular modes of connection. It is only in some special
branches 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