Microcosmus : An essay concerning man and his relation to the world / Herman Lotze ; translated from the German by Elizabeth Hamilton and E. E. Constance Jones.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lotze, Hermann, 1817-1881, author.

Contributor:

Jones, Emily Elizabeth Constance, 1848-1922, translator.

Hamilton, Elizabeth, 1840-1882, translator. .

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mechanism (Philosophy).

Microcosm and macrocosm.

Philosophy, German--19th century.

Philosophy, German.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

Fourth edition.

Other Title:

Microcosmus

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh, Scotland : T & T Clark, [1885]

Summary:

Between spiritual needs and the results of human science there is an unsettled dispute of long standing. In every age the first necessary step towards truth has been the renunciation of those soaring dreams of the human heart which strive to picture the cosmic frame as other and fairer than it appears to the eye of the impartial observer. And no doubt that which men are so ready to set in opposition to common knowledge as being a higher view of things, is but a kind of prophetic yearning, which, though well aware of the limits that it seeks to transcend, knows but little of the goal that it would reach. Such views, indeed, though they have their source in the best part of our nature, receive their distinctive character and colouring from very various influences. Fed by many doubts and reflections concerning the destinies of life and drawn from a range of experience that at the best is limited, they neither escape the influences of transmitted culture and temporary tendencies, nor are they even independent of those natural changes of mental mood which take place in men, and are different in youth from what they are after the accumulation of manifold experiences. It cannot be seriously hoped that such an obscure and unquiet movement of men's spirits should furnish a juster delineation of the connection of things than the careful investigations of science, in which that power of thought which all share in is brought into action. Though we cannot command the heart to suppress its questionings and longings, we yet hold that it can expect a response to them only as an incidental result of knowledge which starts from a less emotional and therefore a clearer point of view. But as the growing farsightedness of astronomy dissipated the idea that the great theatre of human life was in direct connection with divinity, so the further advance of mechanical science begins to threaten with similar disintegration the smaller world, the Microcosm of man. In saying this, I do not intend to allude more than incidentally to the increasing diffusion of materialistic views which strive to trace back all mental life to the blind working of material mechanism. Broad and confident as the current of these views flows on, yet it by no means has its source in inevitable assumptions, bound up inseparably with the spirit of a mechanical investigation of Nature".

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Volume 1 -- Volume 2.