Quotes About Monism

Monism: The metaphysical position that ultimately the cosmos and everything in it is One Thing with a single unified set of natural laws that guide it. Saying that the entire universe is composed of only atoms that are managed by the universal laws of physics is a monistic statement. Materialism is a form of Monism.

Taoist philosophy is essentially monistic. Matter and energy, Yang and Yin, heaven and earth, are conceived of as essentially one or as two coexistent poles of one indivisible whole.

if you know whether a man is a decided monist or a decided pluralist, you perhaps know more about the rest of his opinions than if you give him any other name ending in IST. To believe in the one or in the many, that is the classification with the maximum number of consequences.

Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.

The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece. If it's not, you've got two. The only disagreements among the monists concern the attributes of the One, not the One itself. Since the One is the source of all things and includes all things in it, it cannot be defined in terms of those things, since no matter what thing you use to define it, the thing will always describe something less than the One itself.

A spirituality that can contribute to the renewal of the church will be solidly trinitarian, as opposed to a mystical monism in which diversity in God is sacrificed to simplicity. It will also be historically oriented-rooted in concrete human history and directed to the transformation of history into eternity.

The principal barrier to a general acceptance of the monist position is that it is counterintuitive.

The picture of a universe of infinitely many wholly unrelated substances is at least as hard to understand as the monism of Spinoza, and far less easy to reconcile with appearances.

By virtue of being an -ism, pluralism is a monism.

Totalitarian regimes justify their existence by means of philosophy and political monism, according to which the state is god on Earth, unification under the heel of a divine state is salvation, and all means to such unification, however intrinsically wicked, are right and may be used without scruple.

Por lo tanto, la Teoría Sintérgica se inscribe dentro de una tradición monista-idealista, la cual solamente acepta una realidad, la de la conciencia en todos sus posibles niveles.

Most of the makers of the twentieth-century mind, figures such as Freud, Heisenberg, Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot, have in common an about-face on the subject-object question and the mindmatter question; they all reject the dualism that arbitrarily and irreversibly splits the world into pieces. This rejection of dualism and the corresponding reach for monism are of the essence in understanding the revolutionary nature of twentieth-century science and art.

The logical forms are anumerical. Therefore there are in logic no pre-eminent numbers, and therefore there is no philosophical monism or dualism, etc.

As a Sufi Muslim you cultivated within yourself the thought of oneness, or monism, and made progress in experiencing each seemingly separate thing as an illusory veil over the eternal truth. You recognized the reality of God and the unimportance of matter, and one of the verses of the Koran that was the most dear to you was, "All things in creation suffer extinction and there remaineth the face of thy Lord in its majesty and bounty.

Do Eastern religions meditate because it helps them to perceive reality as they consider it really is; that is, in monistic mode? Or do they see reality in monistic mode because they meditate? Similarly, do western religions emphasize such acts as prayer and worship because they help the believer to see the reality of the theistic mode? Or do they tend to see reality in a theistic way because of the activities of prayer and ritual worship?

Spiritualism is no less a one-sided world view than materialism. Monism, be it spiritual or material, does not so much disclose the alleged oneness of the world as it betrays the one-sidedness of its own view.

For the record, Parmenides' metaphysics-which is even wilder than the D.B.P's, and in retrospect seems more like Eastern religion than Western philosophy-is describable as a kind of static monism, and Zeno's paradoxes (of which there are really more than four) are accordingly directed against the reality of (1) plurality and (2) continuity. For present purposes we are concerned with (2), which for Zeno takes the form, as Russell mentions, of regular physical motion.

primitive man has never existed; he is nothing but a poetical creation of monistic imagination

panmechanistic world view is committed to a methodological monism; it acknowledges only mechanistic causality because it attributes to it alone any cognitive value or at least a higher cognitive value than to teleology.

We might say that Western thinking is uniformly dualistic in its nature, whereas Eastern thinking is founded upon monism, whose overarching conception of reality is based on a single unifying principle rather than paired opposites.