MONISM 



We must remember, moreover, that mathematics deals 

 only with quantitative relations in time and space, and 

 not with the qualitative features of bodies. In fact, 

 Kant himself showed that mathematics only answers 

 for the absolute formal correctness of conclusions it draws 

 from given premises, and has no influence on the prem- 

 ises themselves. Hence, when we examine the ab- 

 stract thinking-power of the phronema in its mathe- 

 matical operations physiologically and phylogenetically, 

 we find that even this "exact fundamental science" is 

 only accessible to pure monism and excludes all dual- 

 ism. The great regard which mathematics enjoys as an 

 exact science in all branches of knowledge is chiefly due 

 to its formal accuracy, and to the possibility of express- 

 ing infallibly spatial and time quantities in number and 

 mass. 



Astronomy is one of the older sciences that took 

 definite shape thousands of years ago, and received a 

 solid mathematical foundation. Observations of the 

 movements of the planets and eclipses of the sun were 

 conducted by the Chinese, Chaldeans, and Egyptians 

 several thousand years before Christ. Christ himself had 

 no more suspicion of these great cosmological discoveries 

 than of the systems which the Greek natural philosophers 

 had built up three hundred to six hundred years before 

 his birth. After Copernicus had destroyed the geocentric 

 system in 1543, and Newton had provided a mathe- 

 matical basis for the new heliocentric system by his 

 theory of gravitation in 1686, cosmogony was -firmly 

 established in a monistic sense by the General Natural 

 History of the Heavens of Kant, and the Mecanique 

 Celeste of Laplace. Since that time there has been no 

 question of the conscious action of a Creator in any 

 part of astronomy. Astrophysics has enlarged our 

 knowledge of the physical features, and astrochemistry 

 (by means of spectrum analysis) of the chemical nature 



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