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Glossary.
101
I,
reason. Having been very nearly involved in a prosecution with his
friends, accused of Jacobinism and Republicanism, Godwin left out of
the second edition of his work on Political Justice all that he had written
in a Communist sense in the first edition.
Grove, William Robert (1811-1896), an English physicist; wrote in
1842 a most remarkable memoir, and in 1856 a book, on the unity of the
physical forces, in which he proved that sound, heat, light, electricity,
magnetism, and chemical action are not separate "substances" or
"entities," as they had been described till then, but are merely different
forms of vibrations of the molecules of which all physical bodies are made
up. All these different forms of vibrations (formerly called forces) can be
transformed into one another ; and all of them are but different modes
of mechanical movement. A mechanical mass-movement, such as the fall
of a hammer on the anvil, or the rotation of the wheels of a train when a
brake is applied, can produce all these modes of movement: sound, heat,
light, electricity, and magnetism. And vice versd, all these kinds of
molecular movement—sound, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, and
chemical action—can be transformed into one another (heat—into light,
or electricity, etc.), or into mass-movements of physical bodies, as we see
in our steam engines and electrical railways. Grove also had the courage
to ask the question whether universal gravitation is not a mere resultant
of all these molecular vibrations going on all over the universe.
Haeckel, Ernst (born 1834), German biologist and philosopher. He
was one of the first and one of the most enthusiastic followers of Darwin,
and soon after the appearance of "Origin of Species" he published (in
1866) a most remarkable work, "General Morphology," followed by the
"Natural History of Creation," in which he made the first attempt to
find out the different stages of evolution from the simplest organisms up
to man. In his later years he wrote two works, widely circulated now,
"Monism as a Link between Religion and Science" and "The Riddle
of the Universe," in which he cast aside the religious dualism which
opposes the heavens to the earth, the soul to the body, and so on ; but
instead of coming to a purely dynamic conception of the universe, as
might have been expected from his previous works, he came to the
metaphysical (Hegelian) conception of the "Spirit" being an emanation
of "Matter."
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm (1770-1831), a German philosopher, whose
ideas exercised in Germany a very deep influence on the thought of the
nineteenth century during the period of reaction after the defeat of the
Great French Revolution. His philosophical system divides itself into
three cycles of thought. The first is Logic—the science of the " Idea in
itself" (Idee an sichj. In the second part, the Philosophy of Nature,
the Idea is treated in its "being," as something that has taken the form
of its contradiction—i.e., of Nature and its beings and phenomena. And
in the third part, the Philosophy of the Mind, the process is described by
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