Abstract
It is likely that our distant ancestors believed all nature to be animate; rivers, mountains and natural objects along with animals and plants would have been credited with thoughts, feelings and desires analogous to those of human beings. Such a general belief would probably not have been explicitly formulated and certainly not explicitly justified, but it would have been the basis of explanations of many natural events, such as changes in the weather, the success or failure of crops and the outbreak of diseases.
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1 PRIMITIVE BELIEFS, CLASSICAL THEORIES, EARLY PRACTICES
Stephen F. Mason, A History of the Sciences, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1953, p. 16.
Plato, Phaedo, from The Complete Texts of Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W.H.D. Rouse, Plume Books, New York and London, 1961, p. 557.
Gilbert Ryle, ‘Plato’, Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Vol. 6, ed. Paul Edwards, Macmillan, London, The Free Press, New York, 1967, p. 323.
Aristotle, Historia Animalium, 588b4ff, trans. G.E.R. Lloyd, Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of his Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968, p. 88.
G.E.R. Lloyd, Science, Folklore and Ideology, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 18. See also Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, p. 139.
A.G. Morton, History of Botanical Science, Academic Press, London, 1981,
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1976, p. 52. Glacken says that Lovejoy traced the origin of the Principle to Plato’s Timaeus: Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1967, p. 5.p. 23
Jennifer Trusted, Physics and Metaphysics: Theories of Space and Time, Routledge, London and New York, 1991, p. 34.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book III, lines 176–80, trans. R.C. Trevelyan, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1937, p. 93.
S. Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1959, p. 37. Glacken refers to the Stoic Panaetius, born c. 185 BC, who developed the old Stoic belief that ‘the beauty and purposefulness of the world is to be ascribed to a creative primeval force’, Glacken, op. cit., p. 51.
Galen, On the Natural Faculties, Book I, trans. A.J. Brock, William Heinemann, London, 1928, p. 3.
William C. Dampier, A History of Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1946, p. 62.
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© 2003 Jennifer Trusted
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Trusted, J. (2003). Primitive Beliefs, Classical Theories, Early Practices. In: Beliefs and Biology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375246_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375246_1
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