"The other, stemming from Plotinus, describes it, without any reference to parts, as the translucence of the eternal splendor of the one through the material phenomenon.
...
But if such a unitary principle of all things exists, then -- and this was the next step along this line of thought -- one is straightaway brought up against the question how it can serve to account for the fact of change. The difficulty is particularly apparent in the celebrated paradox of Parmenides. One being is; non-being is not. But if only being is, there cannot be anything outside this being that articulates it or can bring about changes. Hence being will have to be conceived as eternal, uniform, and unlimited in space and time. The changes we experience can thus be only an illusion...In addition to being, non-being can still exist as a possibility, namely as the possibility for movement and form, or, in other words, as empty space. Being is repeatable, and thus we arrive at the picture of atoms in the void -- the picture that has since become infinitely fruitful as the foundation for natural science."
"The next step along this road was taken by Plato with the formulation of his theory of Ideas. Plato contrasts the imperfect shapes of the corporeal world of the senses with the perfect forms of mathematics; the imperfectly circular orbits of the stars, say, with the perfection of the mathematically defined circle. Material things are the copies, the shadow images, of ideal shapes in reality; moreover, as we should be tempted to continue nowadays, these ideal shapes are actual because and insofar as they become "act"-ive in material events. Plato thus distinguishes here with complete clarity a corporeal being accessible to the senses and a purely ideal being apprehensible not by the senses but only through acts of mind. Nor is this ideal being in any way in need of man's thought in order to be brought forth by him. On the contrary, it is the true being, of which the corporeal world and human thinking are mere reproductions. As their name already indicates, the apprehension of ideals by the human mind is more an artistic intuiting, a half-conscious imitation, than a knowledge conveyed by the understanding. It is a reminiscence of forms that were already implanted in this soul before its existence on earth. The central Idea is that of the Beautiful and the Good, in which the divine becomes visible and at sight of which the wings of the soul begin to grow. A passage in the Phaedrus expresses the following thought: the soul is awe-stricken and shudders at the sight of the beautiful, for it feels that something is evoked in it that was not imparted to it from without by the senses, but has always been already laid down there in a deeply unconscious region."
- Werner Heisenberg, "Science and the Beautiful"
BE STILL MY HEART!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
