When the World Became Material

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"By materialization of the external world we mean the misappre­hension that the structure of the external world as it is constituted in the system of mathematized physics is the ontologically real structure of the world.

"The tendency of mistaking the laws of mechanics for the structure of the world makes itself felt strongly even by the middle of the seventeenth century under the influence of Galileo’s discoveries and even more so under the influence of Cartesian physics...

"To a spiri­tually feeble and confused generation, this event transformed the universe into a huge machinery of dead matter, running its course by the inexorable laws of Newton’s mechanics." -- Eric Voegelin

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