[515]. In the famous conclusion of his “Optics” (1706) which made a powerful impression and became the starting-point of quite new enunciations of theological problems, Newton limits the domain of mechanical causes as against the Divine First Cause, whose perception-organ is necessarily infinite space itself.
[516]. As has been shown already, the dynamic structure of our thought was manifested first of all when Western languages changed “feci” to “ego habeo factum,” and thereafter we have increasingly emphasized the dynamic in the phrases with which we fix our phenomena. We say, for instance, that industry “finds outlets for itself” and that Rationalism “has come into power.” No Classical language allows of such expressions. No Greek would have spoken of Stoicism, but only of the Stoics. There is an essential difference, too, between the imagery of Classical and that of Western poetry in this respect.
[517]. The law of the equivalence of heat and work.—Tr.
[519]. Original: “Keine dem abendländischen Geist natürliche Art der Deutung mechanischer Tatsachen, welche die Begriffe Gestalt und Substanz (allenfalls Raum und Masse) statt Raum, Zeit, Masse, und Kraft zugrunde liegt.”
[520]. See foot-note, p. 314.—Tr.
[522]. See Vol. II, p. 618.
[523]. See M. Planck, Entstehung und bisherige Entwicklung der Quantentheorie (1920), pp. 17-25.
[524]. Which in many cases have led to the supposition that the “actual existence” of atoms has now at last been proved—a singular throw-back to the materialism of the preceding generation.