Concrete and Abstract Motion
We must pay attention to facts regarding things and their nature, not to words or to someone's authority. The mind should be concerned with particular and concrete things themselves, not with abstract terms. The effects that are felt on our senses should be noticed. The causes of these effects are rationally inferred and are occult qualities.
Gravity and force are examples of occult qualities. But they can be useful terms. Gravity can designate concrete bodies in motion and force can designate the concrete effort of resisting. However, they should not be used abstractly, separate from concrete, individual things. If no change occurs and there is no effect, then there is no force. Force, gravity, and attraction are mathematical, hypothetical abstractions and they are not found in nature as physical qualities. The parallelogram of composite forces is not a physical quality. It is mathematical. Attempts to explain the cause and origin of motion are abstract and obscure. They are not particular and determinate assertions. Such attempts try to explain the unknown by something that is even more unknown.
Read more about this topic: De Motu (Berkeley's Essay)
Famous quotes containing the words concrete, abstract and/or motion:
“Experience and imagination must enter into the very constitution of our thoughts involving concrete individuals.”
—Zeno Vendler (b. 1921)
“The reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the language he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader’s eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.”
—J. David Bolter (b. 1951)
“Too many Broadway actors in motion pictures lost their grip on success—had a feeling that none of it had ever happened on that sun-drenched coast, that the coast itself did not exist, there was no California. It had dropped away like a hasty dream and nothing could ever have been like the things they thought they remembered.”
—Mae West (1892–1980)