72 The Poetry of Physics and The Physics of Poetry
answer philosophical questions including those concerning the working
of the human mind through the observation and analysis of empirical
information in direct analogy to the methods of physics. This attitude is
perhaps best expressed by the following remark of Hume: “As the
science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so the
only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on
experience and observations.”
The British Empiricists by adopting the methods of science converted
the study of humankind from philosophy to psychology, a field of study
that perhaps first commences with their work. Although they were a trifle
naive by present day standards, employing rather crude mechanical
models for the way in which the human mind worked, they established
the empirical foundations of the study of psychology.
The British Empiricists like the Pre-Socrates believed that knowledge
is arrived at only through the observations made by the body’s senses of
sight, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting. They attached different
values to the various senses, however, and categorized the properties of
an object apprehended by the senses, into primary quantities of an object
consisted of extension, position, motion, mass and density, whereas the
secondary quantities consisted of color, sound, taste and odor.
The primary quantities are just the properties of a body that are
necessary to describe it within the framework of Newtonian Physics. The
secondary quantities, on the other hand, are not needed for a mechanistic
description of a body. Furthermore, the primary quantities are explained
i.e., related to each other within the framework of Newtonian mechanics
whereas at the time these philosophers were writing, the secondary
quantities such as color, sound, odor and taste were not understood
scientifically as were the primary quantities.
As a consequence, primary and secondary quantities were regarded
differently by these philosophers. The primary quantities were held to be
susceptible to rational analysis and to have an objective reality whereas
the secondary quantities were held to be purely subjective, not even a
property of the body but rather of the observer. In other words what can
be understood is real and what cannot be understood is not real and
hence unimportant.
This attitude of the empiricist is similar to that of certain Greek
thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, who divided the world into two
domains; one domain, which they understood and called real and rational
and another domain they did not understand and labeled unreal and