Ideas

Usage examples of concepts.

The conviction of the applicability of mathematical concepts to the description of natural events is grounded in his discovery of the so-called Parallelogram of Forces.

So we see that the concepts Dry and Moist, as they lived in the old picturing of them, mean a good deal more than we understand by them to-day.

The only difference between the two pictures is that in the modern one the concepts of heredity and adaptation have been formed without special application to the ethical characteristics of the soul.

The acknowledgment of this necessity, however, must not prevent us from recognizing the fact that, as a result of this restriction, modern scientific research, which has penetrated far into the dynamic substrata of nature, finds itself in the peculiar situation that it is not at all guided by its own concepts, but by the very forces it tries to detect.

Hooke considered the simplest and the most fundamental to be the geometrical concepts of point and straight line.

A brief consideration of the Darwinian concepts of inheritance and adaptation will show this.

In fact, knife and needle are products of a human action which is guided by these two concepts respectively.

Reid so far in his study of language, because it is along this way that he came to form the concepts that were to serve him as a key for his all-important findings in the realm of sense-experience.

At the same time, as we have indicated, he will help us to become familiar with another side of Goethe, and to widen our knowledge of the basic scientific concepts formed by him.

Instead of the parallelogram of forces following from the parallelogram of movements, and the entire science of dynamics from that of kinematics, our very faculty of thinking in kinematic concepts is the evolutionary product of our previously acquired intuitive experience of the dynamic order of the world.

With his elementary concepts he tried to express, therefore, the four basic conditions which he thus experienced.

Polarity concepts are certainly not foreign to the scientific mind, as the physics of electricity and magnetism show.

To ignore this would be to violate one of the principles we have adopted from Goethe, which is never to derive fundamental concepts of nature from observations obtained under artificial conditions.

As a result of these endeavours, concepts were formed which in their literal meaning seemed to apply merely to outwardly perceptible substances, while in truth they stood for the spiritual functions represented by those substances, both within and outside the human organism.

As will be seen in our further studies, these concepts prove a welcome enrichment of the language in which we must try to express our readings in nature.