Principles and aims of the New Atlantis Foundation

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attribute or not have it — there is no intermediate possibility. Hence this kind of logic can conveniently be described: as the logic of ‘either — or’. The law of identity, which is the key, is really saying that the same word must always have the same meaning, for if it does not, then all reasoning is impossible. Plato in his dialogues showed that every word must represent a definite concept, even though the many instances in actual life of what the word stood for might differ in detail. He brought together the philosophies of Parmenides and Heracleitus, calling the world of ideas, or concepts, ‘being’ and the world of change and movement ‘becoming’.

But this philosophical reconciliation did not solve the logical contradiction. Zeno, who was a follower of Parmenides, had proved by many paradoxical devices, of which the riddle of Achilles and the Tortoise is perhaps the most famous, that according to the strict laws of thought motion is impossible. His simplest paradox is that of the arrow in flight, of which he claimed that at each successive moment it is where it is, so how could it ever get from one position to the next? It was not until the calculus of Leibniz and Newton that the problem was for practical purposes solved. But this was done only by using the idea of an interval so infinitesimally small that, like a Euclidean point, it is both something and nothing at the same time. And even the modern method of solving the paradox by the use of so-called ‘real’ numbers has not yet been — if it ever can be — established on a basis of non-contradiction.

It may seem that this is all mere intellectual speculation. It was not so to those who were working at the problem, but it would be now, ifa serious attempt were not made to apply these and all philosophical ideas to practical life purposes as wisdom. Mere speculation, which goes beyond possible human experience, was shown by Immanuel Kant to be meaningless and unfounded. Truth must mean the truth for mankind. There is no other truth for mankind but that which we can all work out together. Any other truth there might be in the Universe, ifit were beyond our possible comprehension, would be irrelevant to our life and therefore not true for us. It is on human experience that philosophy for the future has to be founded, and towards life wisdom that it must be directed. Therefore the New Atlantis starts from Man as the centre, and from the human organism as the key to the knowledge and understanding of life and the world. For it is in our nature to conceive the world as a universe, that is as a whole in which all its parts are mutually related, and the only pattern of a living whole that we know is the organism.

Starting from this position we find in our own experience of daily life that we