Abstraction Quotes (4)

The assumptions of population thinking are diametrically opposed to those of the typologist. The populationist stresses the uniqueness of everything in the organic world. What is true for the human species,–that no two individuals are alike, is equally true for all other species of animals and plants ... All organisms and organic phenomena are composed of unique features and can be described collectively only in statistical terms. Individuals, or any kind of organic entities, form populations of which we can determine the arithmetic mean and the statistics of variation. Averages are merely statistical abstractions, only the individuals of which the populations are composed have reality. The ultimate conclusions of the population thinker and of the typologist are precisely the opposite. For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation. an illusion, while for the populationist the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking at nature could be more different.
Darwin and the Evolutionary Theory in Biology (1959), 2.
See also:  |  Animal (57)  |  Assumption (3)  |  Characteristic (12)  |  Description (8)  |  Difference (25)  |  Illusion (6)  |  Individual (10)  |  Nature (243)  |  Opposition (7)  |  Organism (25)  |  Plant (38)  |  Population (18)  |  Reality (20)  |  Species (49)  |  Thinking (56)  |  Type (2)  |  Unique (2)  |  Variation (14)

The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect.
In Paolo Mancosu, Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Practice in the Seventeenth Century (1999), 138-139.
See also:  |  Construction (5)  |  Geometer (2)  |  Intellect (47)

The instinct to command others, in its primitive essence, is a carnivorous, altogether bestial and savage instinct. Under the influence of the mental development of man, it takes on a somewhat more ideal form and becomes somewhat ennobled, presenting itself as the instrument of reason and the devoted servant of that abstraction, or political fiction, which is called the public good. But in its essence it remains just as baneful, and it becomes even more so when, with the application of science, it extends its scope and intensifies the power of its action. If there is a devil in history, it is this power principle.
In Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov, Max Nettlau, The political philosophy of Bakunin (1953), 248.
See also:  |  Action (16)  |  Application (11)  |  Bestial (2)  |  Carnivorous (2)  |  Development (20)  |  Devil (4)  |  Essence (5)  |  Extend (2)  |  Fiction (3)  |  History (61)  |  Ideal (8)  |  Influence (9)  |  Instinct (13)  |  Instinct (13)  |  Instrument (8)  |  Mental (2)  |  Power (19)  |  Primitive (3)  |  Reason (69)  |  Savage (5)  |  Science (444)  |  Scope (2)  |  Servant (3)

To us investigators, the concept 'soul' is irrelevant and a matter for laughter. But matter is an abstraction of exactly the same kind, just as good and just as bad as it is. We know as much about the soul as we do of matter.
'Die Geschichte und die Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit' (1872). Trans. Philip E. Jourdain, History and Root of the Principle of the Conservation of Energy (1911), 48.
See also:  |  Irrelevant (2)  |  Laughter (5)  |  Matter (61)  |  Soul (16)

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