05/25/2020
🔮[The Occult]🔮
Occult Qualities - PART I 🕯
“The new philosophies associated with the “scientific revolution” of the 17th century have often been portrayed as rejecting occult qualities; it is more accurate, however, to say that they accepted their reality but sought to account for them in mechanical terms (Hutchison 1982). Whereas the scholastic approach implied that occult qualities fell beyond the scope of science, philosophers and scientists in the wake of Descartes claimed that occult and so-called manifest qualities could both be explained scientifically in terms of an insensible mechanism. In fact, since our sense perceptions never give us a direct picture of reality, all qualities were “occult”; but this did not imply, as for the scholastics, that they were unknowable. The ambition of the new science was, precisely, not to restrict itself to the domain of what could be perceived by the senses, but to go deeper and explore the invisible workings of nature. In this respect there is a continuity between the magia naturalis of Renaissance philosophers and the new science of the 17th century: although the former remained dependent on scholastic categories while the latter went beyond them, both refused to leave occult qualities in the domain of inscrutable and irrational mysteries and instead approached them as a domain of reality that could be scrutinized by the human mind and put to practical use...”
- Roelof van den Broek
🎨: “ Microcosmus Hypochondriacus” by Malachias Geiger. Colored by Adam McLean
(From .matt)
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