The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology Quotes

“Interest in alchemy seems to be nowadays on the rise. Whereas the educated public at large remains no doubt skeptical and indeed disdainful of the ancient discipline, there is today a deepening awareness among the better informed that what stands behind many an “exploded superstition” may be in fact a long-forgotten wisdom. Although Carl Jung was obviously exaggerating when ! he suggested that four centuries after being expelled from our universities,- alchemy stands “knocking at the door,” a number of factors have conspired; to render the prospect of re-admission less remote, at least, than it had been ; during the heyday of materialism. In any case, no truly solid grounds for rejecting the ancient doctrine have yet been proposed. Take the case of the so-called four elements: earth, water, air and fire. One can be reasonably certain that these terms were not employed alchemically in their ordinary sense, but were used to designate elements, precisely, out of which substances, as we know them, are constituted. Somewhat like the quarks of modern physics, these elements are not found empirically in isolation, but occur in their multiple combinations, that is to say, as the perceptible substances that constitute what I term the corporeal domain. Now, as I have argued at length in The Quantum Enigma (Peru, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden, 1995), corporeal objects are not in fact mere aggregates of quantum particles; and this clearly suggests that there may indeed be elements of the aforesaid kind. It turns out that our habitual opposition to alchemy is based mainly upon scientistic prejudice: upon a reductionist dogma, namely, for which there is in reality no scientific support at all.”
― Wolfgang Smith, The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition

“Now I realize, of course, that not everyone accepts the Thomistic (or any other traditional) ontology, and that moreover a reductio to quantity constitutes in fact the definitive tendency of the modern age. One fact, however, is incontrovertible: as I have shown in The Quantum Enigma, it is possible to interpret all of physics—by virtue of its definitive modus operandi—in traditional (and thus non-Cartesian) terms, based precisely on a categorical distinction between the 'corporeal' (i.e., perceptible) and the 'physical' universe: the universe, namely, as conceived by the physicist. Everyone, of course, is free to disagree with the non-Cartesian interpretation of physics: what is NOT possible (by virtue of the above-said finding) is to do so on SCIENTIFIC ground.

("Taking Stock of a New Philosophy of Physics: The KKE Theory")”
― Wolfgang Smith, The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition

“What saves the day for physics ... is the fact that the experimentalist does not accept the Cartesian philosophy, which is to say that he treats his apparatus not as a mathematical structure, but as a perceivable object. Even as there are said to be 'no atheists in the trenches', so indeed there are no bifurcationists in the laboratory. All knowledge of the external world begins in the perceptible realm: deny the perceptible object, and nothing external remains.”
― Wolfgang Smith, The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition