Chapter 3. html

Science and Ontology
3.1.1.
In the last chapter (2.4.) we gave it as our belief that a successful cosmology, if it is attainable at all, can come onlythrough a synthesis of ontology (metaphysics) and science - rational cosmology and empirical cosmology. But for much the greater part of cosmological history – that part covered by this chapter - science was too rudimentary to make more than a minor contribution. Cosmology gradually emerged out of myth during the first half of the first millennium B.C. That it should so greatly have preceded science as a cosmological method was due almost entirely to its much simpler methodology,
requiring for its effective practice nothing like so high a level of materially organised social life. It was the coincidence ofa (for its time) technologically advanced society with the belief that purely speculative cosmology, having reached a dead end, needed a massive injection of fact, that finally gave rise to science.
3.1.2.
But these new facts, and the methods for systematically acquiring them, as well as their coherent conceptual organisation, appeared to favour some extant cosmological theories and to discredit others. Hence, however much, as an ideal, the new science may have wished to unearth new facts uncontaminated by theory, in actuality it was rooted in the pre-scientific past by virtue of this past’s providing certain basic ontological and methodological organising conceptions. So that in order properly to understand the relation between science and ontology as it has manifested historically, it is first necessary for us to survey this pre-scientific cosmological epoch - that is, all cosmology up to the late sixteenth century.

3.2.1.
Our aim in this and the following two chapters is to place the cosmological theory advanced in this work in its historical context. This is the more necessary in view of what I see as the monumental errors built into our current orthodoxy - itself, of course, a product of the same history as this work. In this brief overview of cosmological history I shall be displaying it very much in the form of an ongoing struggle for supremacy between truth and falsity - which is as much as to say, between rational and irrational conceptions.
3.2.2.
In discussing pre-scientific cosmology in so small a space, we make no attempt to offer a potted history. Instead, true to our purpose of exhibiting cosmology to date as a perpetual struggle between rational and irrational thought, we shall first, with the help of our ontological schema (2.2.), identify the basic rational cosmological conceptions (of which there are but three) and their interrelationship - in effect, on the most abstract level, give the form that a rational, and therefore true, conception of the universe must take. Then, before looking at how these rational conceptions fared historically, we shall name and briefly discuss what I see as six modes of irrational, and hence false, thinking which exerted the greatest effect on preventing the attainment of the most rational theory of the universe of which scientifically unaided ontology was theoretically capable. Only then shall we embark on a brief overview of pre-scientific cosmology, couched almost entirely in terms of the advent and subsequent fate of these great truths at the hands of these widespread errors. This will stand us in good stead for the cosmological survey of our own epoch in Chapters 4 & 5, in which essentially the same battle has continued, though this time with a very different outcome, thanks to "the inseparable propriety of time, which is ever more and more to disclose truth." [Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Bk. II, XXIV].

3.3.1.In our outline of ontology (2.2.), we saw that all parts of the universe - all entities - must be interconnected, and that all these connections must be rational: a necessary consequence of the natures (which is to say, structures) of the entities connected. Since the entities connected are unified by the connection, they must form a synthesis. When, therefore, we are seeking to discover such internal connections within some complex entity, we are both analysing the entity into its constituents and synthesising these constituents to form the comprehensive association that is the complex entity. Hence, rational explanation is basically analytico-synthetic in form: analytic, from complex entity to constituents; synthetic, from constituents to entity. However, it should not be thought that the above implies that the structure of the universe must be a straightforward affair of nesting hierarchies, the more simple entities combining to form the more complex, these combining to form others still more complex, and so on. Another general arrangement between simpler and more complex is perfectly feasible. It might be that, by virtue of collectively possessing some unifying ground, certain entities form a complex system; and then, for some of these members to form some more complex entity by virtue of their collective possession of some further ground of unification not shared by the others. In short, the more basically numerous, but less highly organised entity, may include all the constituents of the more highly organised entity. Numerous combinations of these two basic modes of organisation are possible.
3.3.2.
But however intricate the precise forms of their association, complex entities are always composed of rational associations of the less complex. And we saw (2.2.7.) that this necessarily implies the existence of simple entities (simples). But how can such simples be rationally interconnected? This is equivalent to asking for some unifying ground. The only rational way of supplying this is to postulate that all these simples are, ultimately, different modifications of some sole absolute simple; that they have arisen from this Absolute by some kind of modifying or qualifying process. That is, that this absolute ultimate simple gives rise, by a process of necessary implication, to indefinitely numerous qualified ultimate simples, natural associations of which constitute all complex entities.
3.3.3.
So that a rational, and hence true, theory of the universe has to conform to three basic criteria: (i) intelligibly to define the Absolute simple, (ii) show how this, by a process of rational implication, creates an indefinitely numerous host of qualified simples; (iii) show how, as a consequence of their natures, these form all manner of associations (the complex entities). And, in addition to fulfilling these three rational criteria, a satisfactory theory of the universe must, on an adequate level of detail, identify all the entites of our empirical world as such associations. To the extent, then, that a theory can fulfill these four conditions, the truer it is. It is, of course, in the fulfilment of the last condition that science is so necessary, since "the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding". [Bacon, The New Organon, Bk.1, X].
3.3.4.
Note that this true theory can be approached from either direction: by analysis from experience, or by synthesis from an ultimate One, postulated on the quasi-rational insight that an ordered world must have issued from, and be sustained by, some underlying unity. In practice, of course, most thinkers have worked towards it from both ends. Note also that since every complex constituent of the universe is ultimately an association of simples - simples which are themselves steps in a process (that is, events) - ontology effectively reduces to the analytico-synthetic unravelling of event-structures. Our experience consists of these event-structures, for the most part implicitly; so that what ontology does essentially is to translate into the explicit analytico-synthetic forms of reflective consciousness, the implicit forms of unreflective, lived experience.
3.3.5.
To the extent then, that ontological theories conform with this general schema, they are rational and therefore true. And, as we shall shortly see, most cosmologies have conformed with this schema in one way or another. But all alike fell victim to some fatally irrational mode of thought along the way. And it is to the most important of these that we now turn. We identify six of these, which we name the subjectivist, the theistic, the atomistic, the teleological, the analogical, and the abstractionist errors, and shall consider them in that order.

The Subjectivist Error
3.4.1. Ontological philosophy has its origins in an infra-philosophic world, which, for our purposes has two great components: religion, and the practical, commonsense world of everyday life. The first is the source of the theistic error, which we deal with in the next section. The second is what concerns us here. For everyday practical purposes, we all - philosophers and non-philosophers alike - live in a world composed of enduring solid bodies of widely varying qualities and properties, interacting within all-embracing three-dimensional space. The essence of the subjectivist error is to confuse this world-as-perceived (phenomenal world), with the world-as-it-exists-in-itself (noumenal world). This confusion is, without doubt, the most fecund source of cosmological error. Naive realism, out of which ontological philosophy emerges, is the extreme case of this confusion, since it uncritically assumes that the world exists just as we perceive it. And, as Schopenhauer says, the attainment of basic philosophical wisdom is the realisation that there exist two sets of entities: on the one hand, the perceiving subject's perceptions of the external world (phenomena); on the other, the external world itself (noumenon). The naive realist has not yet made this distinction, because it has not yet occurred to him that there must be more than the one set – viz, the world which he experiences. But we, the experiencing subjects, do not experience the world; we experience only our own perceptions of it. That is, we experience only the effects of unknown external sources upon ourselves, the perceivers.
3.4.2.
Now, even if the cosmologist realises all this, he has still taken only the first step towards a correct conception of the entities of the external world. As we noted earlier (2.3.3), we cannot arrive at this correct conception directly, by some magical process of self-transcendence. We can only do so, if at all, by a process of inference. One would naturally infer that there must be some form of orderly correspondence between the two sets of entities, the phenomenal and the noumenal (subjective and objective), otherwise how could we find our way about in the world as effectively as we do? And this inference is the more justified the more we can establish that we, with our perceptions, have emerged as distinct experiencing beings within the world, as products of its law-abiding processes. But this does not take us very far since correspondence is not identity; nor, conceivably, anything approaching it. Words bear some correspondence with things, but this does not mean that the word 'table' is anything like a table. It is not difficult, as we have seen (2.3.4.), to avoid what Newton called, "the vulgar error" of believing that the so-called secondary qualities are attributes of the external sources themselves. But it is with the so-called primary qualities that the main difficulty lies, the natural but fatal tendency being to make the external world in these respects more similar to our perceptions than it actually is. Or, what comes to the same thing, significantly underestimating the part played by ourselves, the experiencing subjects, in constructing the world-as-perceived.

The Theistic Error
3.4.3.Religion antedates philosophy by many thousands of years, and, unlike philosophy, is available to all humanity. The sources of religion are many: mystical, paranormal, and psychedelic experience, the tendency to project human feelings on to natural objects and processes, the dawning realisation that the world is mysteriously ordered by unseen and intangible agencies, the need to propitiate, and curry favour with, these agencies, the projection on to them of childhood feelings for parents, feelings of awe and dread welling up from the depths of the psyche, and so on. When ontology, or the attempt to reflect rationally upon the general nature of the world, finally emerged, it did so from within this religious context. And throughout its history it has not found it easy fully to extricate itself therefrom. Partly this has been because the importance accorded religion in his community has pressured the ontologist into treating theistic conceptions with far more seriousness than their purely intellectual substance would merit.
3.4.4.
The essence of the theistic position is to ascribe the creation and sustaining of the world to gods: Beings possessing, on a far higher plane than ours, such human attributes as intelligence, motivation, goodness, and so on. This is a profoundly irrational, and hence, wildly erroneous theory. As an explanatory theory, theism is based upon the willed, purposive actions of human beings as causal agents within the world, despite the fact that just how a mental intention translates to a physical act has so far proved an insoluble problem. On the analogy of humans making and interacting with things in order the better to fulfill their purposes - always the satisfactions of their appetites and desires - the theist envisages some supersensible, cosmically scaled-up quasi-human beings creating the world and interacting with it in the interests of achieving some divine purpose.
3.4.5.
But it is immediately obvious that there are two things wrong with this analogy. Firstly, humans create things by rearranging the constituents of already existing things, whereas gods are credited with necessarily creating the world ex nihilo; secondly, humans share materiality with the bodies with which they interact, whereas gods are supposedly immaterial. But there are much stronger objections to theism than this. A true explanation must seek to account for the more complex as some natural associaion of the simpler. But here we have the precise opposite, since presumably these gods are more complex than their creation. How, then, to account for them - by postulating supergods in an endless hierarchical series? Moreover, any attempt to show how the gods engage in sustaining their creation, presumably through the laws of nature, must inevitably exhibit these laws as intrinsic to the gods' own being. In which case the question naturally arises: Are these gods anything more than these laws and the substantial content ordered by them? In short, to explain the gods we must explain the laws of nature, but the more successful we are in such explanation the less we need to invoke any gods - gods being, in short, no more than stop gaps for our rational shortcomings. The only rationally satisfactory theism is pantheism, where gods, completely absorbed into 'their creation', are supererfluous to requirements. However, I should like to stress that, in all this, I am in no way denying the existence of discarnate superhuman intelligences; but only that any such intelligences could, any more than ourselves, be the creators and sustainers of the universe.

The Atomistic Error.
3.4.6.The essence of this error, that "cardinal principle of error and delusion" as Bradley called it (Principles of Logic Bk.I, Ch. II, § 64) - is to overlook the effect of their interconnectedness on the entities so connected. For practical, commonsense man the world consists primarily of enduring bodies of widely varying attributes, located and interacting in space. Though these bodies are, of course, bringing about all manner of changes in one another, common sense tends to view such changes as essentially secondary to their basic independence: that all other bodies could vanish and yet leave the remaining one essentially unchanged. This naive mind-set is carried over into ontology by the atomistic thinker.
3.4.7.
For purposes of reflecting upon the world, we divide it up, via what we see as natural lines of separation, into innumerable pieces. The atomistic thinker is one who overlooks the possibility that any one of these pieces in isolation may be essentially different from what it is in its natural relational context. In extracting the entity from this context, he may have severed numerous relations which are essential to its nature. In which case he has artificially created a self-contradictory situation: conferring upon isolated entities attributes that they can possess only in their relations with others. And, in a rationally interconnected universe, this is precisely what he has done. Now, virtually by definition, the more rationally grounded the thinker, the more he will have outgrown this error. But the fallacious arguments that involve it are very apt to appeal to the dissecting, scientific type of intelligence.

The Teleological Error.
3.4.8.We saw earlier that the most irrational of all cosmological theories, the theistic, was a scaled-up version of goal-directed human behaviour. But there is another type of cosmological theory similarly based, which, though no less irrational, offers a superficially more presentable philosophical front. This is teleological theory. Human behaviour is largely goal-directed. And so, to all appearances, is animal. Now, the teleologist contends that all orderly process is goal-directed, the universe itself tending to " ... one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves."1 (Teilhard’s "omega point"). But, further, he believes that every such process is, in some way, directed by the goal itself, although, of course, in the paradigm case of the human being, introspection informs us that it is not the goal which directs our behaviour but only our mental conceptions of both it, and its means of attainment, both modified memories of our past experience in a highly repetitive world.
3.4.9.
The teleologist offers three kinds of explanation of this literally goal-directed behaviour. The first is that the goal is operative in the present: future and present co-existing in an eternal Now. But this is an explanatorily empty conception, since it attempts to explain the future in terms of the present, and the present in terms of the future. The second is that the goal exists in the present in the form of a potentiality, the process being thought of as an unfolding of potentiality into actuality. But this is no more than a truism, a mere 'analytic' restatement of the facts, not an explanation of them. The third is that the future already exists in the mind of God, and the person, or animal or planet or whatever as imbued with God's purpose - this constituting its essential nature - and hence moving naturally towards its goals. But if God is no more than the universe it tells us nothing; and if He is something more, then we are back to theism with its host of irrationalities.

The Analogical Error.
3.4.10. There is a way of mentally organising the world that derives more from the internal workings of the psyche, more specifically the association of similars, than from ordered interaction between the bodies of the external world. And this is reinforced by that seemingly direct operation of mind on mind we now call telepathy, and which would appear to be involved in sympathetic magic. On a cosmic level, this way of organising the world tends to assign great structural importance to symbols, analogies, correspondences, concordances of every kind: between the external world of bodies in space and the internal world of ideas and feelings, between the microcosm of the human body and the macrocosm of the universe, between the sensible world of incarnate, and the supersensible world of discarnate intelligences, and so on. Now, the facts of memory and telepathy certainly imply that similarity, or resemblance, does indeed play a profoundly significant part in the organisation - which is to say, the structure - of the universe. But what may seem similar from the phenomenal standpoint may be far from similar noumenally. And it is, of course, this latter which counts where the organisation of the universe is concerned. So that the error here is not the notion that similarity possesses structural relevance - on the contrary - but rather (i) the uncritical predication of profound structural significance to what may be no more than superficial resemblance, and (ii) the predication of false attributes to the little known, on the strength of the resemblance of what we do know about them to the well-known.

The Abstractionist Error.
3.4.11. This is simply the reification of abstractions: putting the attributes of concrete entities (bodies) on an ontological par with the entities themselves. The domain of everyday human experience from which this error derives is, primarily, language. Basically, for purposes of communication, we name - attach a verbal label to - innumerable recurring features of our experience. These can be bodies (physical things), qualities of bodies, relations between bodies, events, situations, states of mind, feelings, sentiments, attitudes, etc. etc., all of any degree of generality, (what degree, being settled by usage). This very act of distinguishing and labelling confers a partial isolation, and hence independence, upon whatever is thus designated. Moreover, the word, in both its written and spoken forms, simply as a sign, irrespective of the nature of its designatum, is a certain complex of sensations - visual, auditory, and two kinds of kinaesthetic (from speaking and writing) - and this also contributes to its concretisation. But the principal attribute of language which leads to this error syndrome is the verbal description of a particular existential situation by means of a particular grammatically inflected and syntactically ordered selection of general words. The fact that philosophical theories are expressed in words, and that words are combined in this manner - expressing the particular as a particular combination of the general - provides a constant opportunity for the more verbally minded thinker to fall into the error of conceiving that the world is structured in the same way. The notion that the world is constructed out of a comparatively small number of abstract universals possesses a powerful aesthetic appeal for the naive scholarly idealist.
3.4.12.
And this brings us to the most important feature of this error: the feature which has tended to conceal its essential absurdity from the great majority of thinkers. Abstractionism can thrive only because of our altogether woolly and incohate notions of that substance underpinning the perceptual world in which the qualities of things must inhere. Our perceptions of these things are really processes whose basic neural events are both too rapid and too minute to be individually distinguishable in consciousness. In each case we experience the order in these neural processes holistically, in the form of a quasi-uniform quality. The quality is our way of experiencing the concrete event structure, and thus can no more exist apart from this structure than a house could exist independently of the bricks composing it.

3.5.1. It will be recalled (3.3.3) that a satisfactory theory of the universe must be able to fulfil four conditions: (i) intelligibly define the Absolute; (ii) show how this, by logical necessity, gives rise to a generative process, whose ultimate constituents are simple events; (iii) show how these, by their very natures, form unified groups or syntheses - that is, complex entities; (iv) account for all the entities of the empirical world as such syntheses. Pre-scientific cosmology could theoretically have fulfilled the first two of these conditions satisfactorily, made something of the third, and vaguely outlined the fourth. Yet, as a matter of historical fact, it did not; though this is not to say that it contained nothing of value. On the contrary: at widely different times and places it grasped a number of profound cosmological truths, but (so far as I am aware) no thinker succeeded in organising these into a coherent synthesis, even on a pre-scientific level of generality.
3.5.2.
We said earlier (3.3.4.) that a rationally coherent conception of the universe can, theoretically, be arrived at from both directions: analytically from experience, or synthetically from a postulated ultimate One (which also, of course, is ultimately an inference from experience). But, in actual fact, the synthetic route could not be pursued exclusively, because the possible groupings of the derived simples are so numerous as to defeat anything approaching a comprehensive ordering. For any significant success, the cosmologist is obliged constantly to turn to empirical knowledge for guidance. And, of course, in the pre-scientific era, the guidance thus offered was vague, parochial, unsystematic, and unreliable. So that, in surveying this pre-scientific epoch, we are concerned with resolutions of the first two ontological problems, and making a start, in the form of genuinely analytical theories, however rudimentary, in the case of the third and fourth. The scientific epoch of course, belongs almost wholly to modern Europe. But our overview of the pre-scientific, although concentrating on the cosmological tradition out of which the scientific era emerged, namely, that of the Greeks, must also take account of theories originating in India and China, which, in certain respects, were superior to those of Greece.

The Ultimate One
3.6.1. At the very point of emergence of rational conceptual thought from the mythopoeic womb, Vedic monism (v. Rig-Veda, Bk.10, Hymn 129) postulated that the fons et origo of the universe is a simple That One (Tat Ekam) in which the whole universe in all its complexity is latent, emerging from it in the form of a dynamic process of self-realisation. This basic truth, or, at any rate, something not unlike it, made many reappearances in ancient thought: as Brahman in the Vedanta, as T'ai Chi (the Great Ultimate) in the Tao, and by various names in Greek philosophy, from Anaximander's Apeiron (indeterminate) to Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, and Plotinus' One. Indeed, it is conceivable that, expressed in the pre-conceptual language of myth and symbol, this theory of the universe's origin in a single impersonal emanatory source, was at the heart of aboriginal religion throughout the world.
3.6.2.
"The God to whom thought leads, from whom the world has issued, is as close to Nothing as thought can make him, for he must come before any determination; yet he must have in himself the power to bring forth the world and all it contains in determination: he must be, strictly speaking, all and nothing in one. Some such paradox occurs inevitably whenever speculation ventures deep enough into the foundation of things." Giorgio de Santillana. The Mentor Philosophers; The Age of Adventure. p.211). Faced with this dilemma, many thinkers, Plato, the Stoics. and Plotinus among them, succumbed to theism, irrationally giving the Absolute attributes like intelligence or goodness or knowledge or volition. No less unsatisfactorily, others, Aristotle chief among them, emptily defined the Absolute in terms of pure potentiality, as possessing no attribute save that of being the origin of the universal emanatory process. Now, it is of course, true that, to be meaningful, any definition of the Absolute must refer to some attribute of experience. But this does not mean that it can be defined only in terms of what issued from it. It must be defined self-referentially; but, to be meaningful, this defining attribute must be the minimal realisation of what the process to which it gives rise - the totality of its logical implications - continually deepens or enriches as it unfolds.
3.6.3.
One kind of answer, first put forward by Anaximander (c.610 - 545 B.C.) is that the process of unfolding is essentially one of the separating out of opposites, which, as it were, cancel one another out in the Absolute. But this is no solution, since these opposite attributes are still part of the Absolute, and there is no explanation as to how they got there in the first place. This theory obviously rests upon the fallacy that nothing can be the sum of two opposites; whereas the true state of affairs - inapplicable in this context - is that the resultant effect of two opposites on a third may be nothing. The Greeks came up with no remotely adequate answer to this problem of the universe's origin.
3.6.4.
Chinese cosmogony alone approached the truth as to how an ultimate simple one could be determined to a multiplicity. In addition to T'ai Chi, the Great Ultimate or Absolute One, Taoism also postulated a Non-Ultimate, Wu Chi, from which two it asserts, the world in all its infinite variety derives. Possibly, as the I-Ching suggests, it saw the process of derivation, and the world so derived, as some kind of patterned alternation of T'ai Chi and Wu Chi; if so, it was very close to the truth. Its later doctrine of the universe as a balanced interlocking of a passive and an active principle, yin and yang, is (like Plato's theory of universals) to have succumbed to abstractionism. Still later, Chu Hsi (1130-1200) in putting forward the theory that the world was composed of ch'i (matter) and li (form), was doing no more than reformulating the central idea around which, a millennium and a half earlier, Greek philosophy had revolved.

3.7.1.The great Greek contributions to cosmology came more from the direction of analysis. We have seen that, in a rational universe, all complex entities are syntheses of those less complex, and ultimately of simple entities. So that all are different forms or structures or patterns or arrangements or associations or syntheses or systems of these ultimately simple entities. Now, in our everyday experience we are familiar with three basic types of arrangement. In the outer world we see arrangements, often indissolubly fused, in time and in space; and in our inner world, dominated by memory, we find, in addition to that spatio-temporal ordering we term contiguity, association by similarity. In a rational universe, the natures of things will depend on the particular structure of association of the simples, which will ultimately depend upon the natures of the simples themselves. These are all variants of the Absolute, their natures depending on their positions in the implicative process. So that all the variety of the world is due to differences of arrangement of similarly derived ultimate elements. Hence, the key to making sense of the bewildering variety of the empirical world is the realisation that all this variety is variety of arrangement of closely related simple elements. In short, that being is form. This profound truth was grasped early in Greek philosophy, and the Greeks, no less aesthetes and mathematicians than cosmologists, wholeheartedly embraced it for what it was: a profound truth about the general nature of the world. Henceforth, it was at the centre of all their thinking, concerned with the various problems it inevitably poses relating to the nature of the ultimate constituent entities (matter), the manner of their arrangement (form), and the causal relations obtaining between matter and form.
3.7.2.
The first attempt to formulate this truth is usually accredited to Pythagoras (c.570 - 500 B.C.), who postulated that what gives a thing its individual nature is less the material units of which it is composed, than their geometrical structure, or form. The variety of the world is thus accounted for by the endless variety of such forms rather than any variety in the units collectively assuming them. Now, we have seen that since these simple units are elements of a process emanating from the absolute, it is clear that arrangement must, at bottom, be temporal rather than spatial. Thus this key formulation of Pythagoras was a great advance in understanding, while ensuring that this advance would necessarily be brought to a halt by an impassable barrier. In conceiving arrangement as essentially spatial, Pythagoras set a precedent adhered to by many of his successors, chief among them Plato (428 - 348 B.C.) and The Atomists [Leucippus (c. 450 B.C.), Democritus (c. 460 - 370 B.C.), Epicurus (341 - 270 B.C.)]. Of course, all these essentially spatial thinkers conceived their elementary entities as involved in processes; but all these consisted solely of their changes in spatial location relative to one another. In all such processes the ultimate entities themselves were regarded as intrinsically unchanging. Whereas a rational universe requires that these spatially elementary entities are intrinsically changing; that is, they are changing in time, and are therefore processes.
3.7.3.
Plato, alone among the Greeks, ascribed a major structural role to similarity, viewing similar things, events, and situations, as fleeting instances of universal forms. But he abstracted the forms from their instances, thereby falling into the abstractionist error. As Bacon put it, "But it is manifest that Plato, in his opinion of Ideas, as one that had a wit of elevation situate as upon a cliff, did descry that Forms were the true object of knowledge; but lost the real fruit of his opinion, by considering of Forms as absolutely abstracted from matter, and not confined and determined by matter; and so turning his opinion upon theology, wherewith all his natural philosophy is infected". (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, II, VII, 5). For all that, Plato (geometrically oriented, like Pythagoras) was very sympathetic to The Atomists, making the sensible, if untrue, suggestion that the only shapes the atoms could take were the five regular solids. This had the added advantage that it could accommodate the element theory of Empedocles (490 - 430 B.C.). This postulated that matter was composed of just four elements and that the great variety of the world arose from the great variety of proportions in which these four could mingle. Plato suggested that four of the five regular solids were the four elements (and hence the four kinds of atom), with the fifth (the dodecahedron) giving the shape of the world. In thus tying up atomism with element theory, Plato anticipated modern science. We shall defer any further consideration of atomism until our section on cosmology in the scientific age; atomism being, along with Empedocles' element theory, the only Greek cosmological theory to be significantly incorporated into scientific thought.

Greek
3.8.1.The most eminent Greek thinkers whose cosmological theories were essentially process theories, were Heraclitus, Aristotle, and Plotinus. Heraclitus (c.536- 470 B.C.) was correct in seeing change as primary, with seeming permanence of bodies due not to unchanging persistence through time, but to repetitive or cyclic change, presumably as a consequence of the operation of fixed laws of change. But he never said what these changes consisted of, nor did he believe that the world had any beginning. Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C.), to his great credit, rejected atomism, as had Parmenides (c.515 - 435 B.C.) and Anaxagoras (c. 430 B.C.) before him, on the grounds of the absurdity of the void - extended nothing. But his creative process theory is wholly unacceptable. Apart from its general vagueness, it is grounded on the teleological error, with its 'explanations' that are no more than empty rephrasings of the problems - nowhere more in evidence than in its conception of matter as potential form. The perfect One upon whose existence the world theory of Plotinus (205 - 270 A.D.) is centred, is really an all-embracing Being, or God. Despite His being One, the world emerges from Him in the form of a succession of derogations from His perfection: a kind of ultimate undressing in which it is not garments, but body parts, that are flung off - the hateful matter as far away as possible. Whatever satisfactions Plotinus' theory may offer to other dimensions of the psyche, it certainly offers nothing to the intellect.

Oriental
3.8.2.
Whereas the dominant conception of arrangement in the West was one of geometrical shape, permanence being provided by these unchanging shapes, and change by their relative movements in space, the East saw change primarily as intrinsic process, with permanence viewed as cyclic or repetitive changes therein. On this basic level Eastern thought was more rational than Western. But very little progress on this basic insight was made. What principally undermined orthodox Indian thought - that grounded on the Veda - was its concentration on Brahman and Atman and their union (yoga) through the cultivation of inner body states. Seeing the external world primarily as Maya or illusion degraded it to the level of a pernicious sideshow, distracting man from his proper destiny. Hardly an attitude conducive to studying it seriously.
3.8.3.
Buddhist cosmology is true in so far as it conceives the world as a process whose ultimate constituents are instant events, with nothing persisting unchanged through time. But it gives no intelligible account either of the natures of these instant events or what gives rise to them. Also, altogether irrationally, it claims that the process had no beginning, but just is from everlasting to everlasting.
3.8.4.
Both atomic and element theory appear from time to time in the luxuriant spread of Indian cosmology, but nowhere, to my knowledge, does the advantage that its more process oriented thinking gave it, produce any conception of this nature superior to those of Greece. But where process rather than geometrical thinking did give them an insight necessarily denied to the West, was in the all-important question of the ontological status of the past. Clearly, if the passage of time is defined by the movements of unchanging entities in space, each successive moment necessarily requires the demise of the moment immediately preceding. But if the passage of time is defined by the creation of a new simple, this does not demand the demise of the immediately anterior simple - indeed, as we shall see, it necessarily requires its persistence. The twelfth century thinker, Vãchaspatimisra, advanced a substance theory, which although not clearly worked out, was certainly oriented in this direction. We end this chapter on pre-scientific cosmology with two vitally important observations.

3.9.1.
The first concerns the subjectivist error (3.4.1.). Throughout this long epoch, one is conscious that the noumenal/phenomenal distinction had not been clearly made. Such a clear distinction was one of the unquestionable ontological/epistemological advances made by modern philosophy. Lacking this, older philosophy was never able to free itself from an element of endemic confusion in its treatment of all the key cosmological questions.

3.10.1.The second relates to the mind/matter problem. A rational, and hence true theory, of the universe must be monistic, in the sense of exhibiting it as a single substance/process. The more one succeeds in bringing the two halves of a dualistic theory into rational relation, the more, necessarily, one is exhibiting them as two parts of a single coherent process. Now, commonsense man sees the bodies of the outer world as falling into two distinct types: those possessing an inner mental life, and behaving in ways expressive of this; and those seemingly devoid of such attributes. To theories, such as an unchanging-atoms-in-space cosmology, which espouse a commutative conception of the relation between permanence and change, and hence the obliteration of the past, mental life must always remain as something utterly distinct from physical. But process cosmologies, with a very different conception of the relations between permanence and change have never been confronted with this stark dichotomy. Thus, all the cosmological theories of India, with the single minor exception of the Cãrvãka system, have been of an essentially psycho-physical nature.

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Theory of the Universe