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Modern science is marked by an enormously rapid and ever-accelerating progress. It is a movement from multiplicity to unity, from the purely mechanistic understanding of the Newtonian universe to an ideal composite space
of four dimensions and the essentially virtual ideas of geometrical form in which light moves along a geodesic. Indeed, it is useless to try to understand the meaning of the universe except in terms of measurements which, once made and recorded, become facts, and which, looked upon as facts, reproduce as nearly as possible an objective empirical reality.
“I think this may be because of the innately oppositional, either/or, dialectical processes innate to our reason.” (Jonathan)
Nor is it possible to adapt the laws of physics to the needs of
conceptual logic without having recourse to what dialecticians call antiperistasis, or the development of an idea by its opposite. And accordingly, one might illustrate the empirical nature of objective reality by a simple, specific example:
It is known for instance that the density of gold is 19:32, a statement
which does not profess to deal with anything but arbitrary magnitudes. In fact,
for as long as no corresponding assertion has been made about, say, the density
of a liquid such as water, it is impossible to quantify the degree of
compactness of any piece of gold which is usually determined by the ratio of its
weight to that of a volume of water of equal size: 19:32. Each thus serves to
explain the other and questions of arbitrary magnitudes determine nothing about
the specific weight to be set, until we add to the idea of quantity that of
ratio. In the same way, electromagnetic energy consists only of relations. One
could not, for instance, imagine an electron unless one had first been apprised
of the electrical properties of the proton. An electron consists solely of
negative electricity, which tells us nothing about the essential nature of
negativity until we are confronted with its opposite. With no other distinction
to be drawn, one is almost exactly the equal of the other while neither can be
understood on its own.
To go on from this simple and verifiable statement of fact, it will
easily be evident that this great chain of mutual contingency connects and
involves all known empirical phenomena. No force remains undetectable unless it
is too faint to engage with its opposite. Which means that no force without an
opposite is, even in principle, detectable. It is a relationship of mutual
adversity. Electrically, protons and electrons are the exact opposite of one
another and since, moreover, the one determines and explains the other, the
fundamental distinction seems to be analogous to the difference between
opposites rather than cause and effect, to the tension they engender rather than
the energy they release.
One might qualify this and say that
reality is the product of its literal antithesis; that it functions by
reflecting on itself. If consciousness is choice, conception is, in fact,
effected by contrast. It is the act whereby potential reality become actual
reality. Reality, therefore, is informed by a sense of what it is not. Nothing
can be explained by itself. It must always be compared with its opposite, or
with what its opposite necessarily foregoes. Its meaning, therefore, depends on
its relation to what it is not. The good cannot be explained without the bad. No
object can be hot and cold at the same time - or high and low! Indeed, it is
impossible to emphasize the one without dwelling on the other, and therefore to
discriminate the two aspects, positive and negative, of what has originally been
one single indefinable concept, is to accept the perennial synthesis of
inherently opposite forces. Proof enough, if proof were needed, that the human
intellect cannot comprehend anything that has no polarity, no beginning and no
end. But its survival is assured by the rules of reciprocity which determine and
sustain it at the perennial point where matter and meaning converge, creating
one another.
Dreamy
