字體：小 中 大 |
|
|
|
| 2012/12/10 04:13:01瀏覽136｜回應0｜推薦0 | |
| R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 47: The metaphysical doctrine of substance in Greco-Roman philosophy was challenged by the Christian doctrine of creation. According to this doctrine nothing is eternal except God, and all else has been created by God. The human soul is no longer regarded as a past existence ab aeterno, and its immortality in that sense is denied; each soul is believed to be a fresh creation. Similarly, people and nations considered collectively are not eternal substances but have been created by God. And what God has created He can modify by a reorientation of its nature towards fresh ends: thus by the operation of His grace He can bring about development in the character of a person or a people already created. Even the substances, so called, which were still tolerated by early Christian thought were not really substances as substances had been conceived by the thinkers of antiquity. The human soul is still called a substance, but it is now conceived as a substance created by God at a certain time and depending on God for its continued existence. The natural world is still called a substance, but with the same qualification. God Himself is still called a substance, but His character as substance is now regarded as unknowable: not only undiscoverable by unaided human reason, but not even capable of being revealed. All we can know about God is His activities. By degrees, as the leaven of Christianity worked, even these quasi-substances disappeared. It was in the thirteenth century that St. Thomas Aquinas threw overboard the conception of divine substance and defined God in terms of activity, as actus purus. In the eighteenth, Berkeley jettisoned the conception of material substance, and Hume the conception of spiritual substance. The stage was then set for the third crisis in the history of European historiography and for the long-delayed entrance of history as, at last, a science. |
|
| ( 知識學習｜隨堂筆記 ) |
