 108. Metaphysics |
Latin, Metaphysica
From Greek, meta or behind and physica or nature.
That science which seeks to trace the branches of human knowledge to their first principles in the constitution of our nature, or to find what is the nature of the human mind and its relations to the external world; the science that seeks to know the ultimate grounds of being or what it is that really exists, embracing both psychology and ontology.
From the Greek, Met-a-fiz'iks (ta) Greek, Metaphusika. META = to be behind of or in back of, i.e., the foundation or PRIOR structure which gives rise and supports material reality. Physic from physica = the material universe, nature and the material realm.
Metaphysics is the research and science of the nature of the prior reality of form which causes and supports the material realm. The science and research of reality as the form of eternal Self awareness. The research and study of the most prior reality as CONSCIOUSNESS without form. The research and science of the LIVING REALITY that Generates, Organizes and Desolves all things in nature and animates human, animal and plant life.
Metaphysics is the science and concern with the nature and structure of reality.
"Metaphysics is not yet officially a science, recognized as such. But it is going to be . . . at Endinburg, I was able to affirm before 100 physiologists that our five senses are not the only means of knowledge, and that a fragment of reality sometimes reaches the intelligence in other ways...because a fact is rare is no reason that it does not exist. Those who have railed at metaphysics as an occult science will be as ashamed of themselves as those who railed at chemistry on the ground that pursuit of the philosophers' stone was illusionary. . . in the manner of principles there are only those of Lavoisier, Claude Bernard and Pasteur – the "experimental" everywhere and always. Greetings, then, to the new science which is going to change the orientation of human thought!"
-Charles Robert Richet
Origin of the term
Etymologically the term metaphysics is unenlightening. It means "what comes after physics;" it was the phrase used by early students of Aristotle to refer to the contents of Aristotle's treatise on what he himself called "first philosophy," and was used as the title of this treatise by Andronicus of Rhodes, one of the first of Aristotle's editors. Aristotle had distinguished two tasks for the philosopher: first, to investigate the nature and properties of what exists in the natural, or sensible, world, and second, to explore the characteristics of "Being as such" and to inquire into the character of "the substance that is free from movement," or the most real of all things, the intelligible reality on which everything in the world of nature was thought to be causally dependent. The first constituted "second philosophy" and was carried out primarily in the Aristotelian treatise now known as the Physica; the second, which Aristotle had also referred to as "theology" (because God was the unmoved mover in his system), is roughly the subject matter of Metaphyscia.
"There is another realm that is non-continguous (not connected) with the material reality, a realm of form (state) which actually accounted for the form in which material reality manifested (materialized)."
