Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/13



I have been endeavouring to sketch the general common-sense notion of the universe, which about the beginning of the sixteenth century, say in the year 1500, was in process of formation among the more progressive thinkers of the European population. It was partly an inheritance from Greek thought and from medieval thought. Partly it was based on the deliverance of direct observation, at any moment verified in the world around us. It was the presupposed support supplying the terms in which the answers to all further questions were found. Among these further questions, the most fundamental and the most obvious are those concerning the laws of ;ocomotion, the meaning of life, the meaning of mentality, and the interrelations of matter, life, and mentality. When we examine the procedures of the great men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we find them presupposing this general common-sense notion of the