98 COSMOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY 



time and place of their origin." And, as regards scientists generally, 

 surely an affirmative answer must be given to Weizsacker's query: 



Should we not say that the historical situation of human consciousness 

 belongs to the a priori of physics? 



To us ancient atomism appears to have offered an extremely promis- 

 ing alternative to the animistic conceptions widely accepted in antiq- 

 uity. But atomism never "caught on"; it was, as Sambursky observes, 

 fatally incompatible with the whole cosmology of the age. 



Today we aim at projecting the mathematical and physical laws of 

 the physical universe into man, with the object of explaining the phe- 

 nomena of life by physics and mathematics; whereas the Greeks 

 sought to extrapolate man into the expanse of the cosmos and re- 

 garded the cosmos as a living organism. Their biological metaphors, 

 such as the breathing of the cosmos, are not simply allegorical: they 

 really mean that the cosmos has its own rhythm of life, that its laws 

 are basically organic and that therefore it is conscious of the musical 

 harmony of the spheres. The conception of the world as a living body 

 was present in all periods of Greek science. Any deviating tendency, 

 such as the atomic theory, did not take firm root in the science of the 

 Ancient World. 



The linguistic factor. Almost a century ago, long before Sapir and 

 Whorf reached their more extreme conclusions, Stallo already fovmd 

 it obvious 



. . . that the thoughts of men at any particular period are limited 

 and controlled by the forms of their expression, viz., by language 

 (using this term in its most comprehensive sense); that the language 

 spoken and "thought in" by a given generation is to a certain extent 

 a record of the intellectual activity of preceding generations, and thus 

 embodies and serves to perpetuate its errors as well as its truths; that 

 this is the fact hinted at, if not accurately expressed, in the old ob- 

 servation according to which every distinct form or system of speech 

 involves a distinct metaphysical theory; . . . 



From that metaphysics we do not fully escape even as we acquire 

 scientific and mathematical languages. Always in thought, if not 

 also in statement, we supplement those languages with parts of every- 

 day speech. Into science then stretches the aura of the covert cosmol- 

 ogy enshrined in common-sense language: the existence of "things"; 



