G. H. Mead by Mead G. H.; Carreira da Silva Filipe;

Author:Mead, G. H.; Carreira da Silva, Filipe;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Notes

* As originally published in “Studies in the Nature of Truth”, University of California Publications in Philosophy, 11 (1929), 65–88.

1 Laboratory animals.

2 Journal of Philosophy, XIX, 157–163.

III. Science applied

17

SCIENCE IN SOCIAL PRACTICE (n.d.)*

There is no more striking difference between the ancient and the modern worlds than that revealed in their fashions of dress, of armor, and of building. Study the garb of men and women of Greece and Rome, of Persia, and of Egypt during the thousand years and more that are covered by the remains of their monuments, and then place beside these fashions, unchanged in their essentials during the whole period, the bewildering variety of dress which confronts one who turns to the repositories of medieval history, culture and custom. From the early centuries in which the modern world commenced to emerge from the old, uneasy change has characterized the fashion in, which men and women have clothed themselves at home, at court, and in the field.

The same stability of equipment marks the method in which armies were fitted for fighting by the nations and civilizations of the ancient world. The masses of ancient troops which conquered the world for Persia, the phalanxes which disputed the hegemony of Greece, the legions of Rome which presented the ultimate arm of ancient warfare, remained in their essentials unchanged throughout the histories of the empires which phalanx trampled down and scattered the masses of Persian troops and stood in their places until the short swords and flexible maniples of the Roman legions disintegrated them in turn and superseded them as the final victorious formation.

The same uniformity characterized the arms of offence and defence. They were perfected and fashioned of superior materials. They were superseded by the arms of other nations and other civilizations, but in their form and nature, while they were in fighting hands, they remained unmodified by theory or practice.

Turn to the treasures of our museums and follow the series of vases and vessels and mirrors, the pins and brooches, and see how persistent the types of articles were, how the great forms of ancient art and manufacture dominate the usage of centuries and more than centuries. See the ideas of Greek society embodied in the series of representations of Greek divinities. Study the growth in perfection, the increasing intellectual content in the same form, and still the steady reforming and restating of the same figure and the same meaning in a Zeus or a Pallas Athena.

Turn to the house and note the same form in the structure of the home of the citizen and in the house of the god. The temple is wonderful in the perfection of its lines and the balance of its proportions, but it is the perfected home of the city’s greatest citizen. The palace of the Roman emperor but multiplies the house. The unit is the same and the form of the unit unchanged as were the ideas in Plato’s World beyond the Heavens.

The forms of thing remained. The Aristotelian essences which are

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