Alexander, Samuel
Alexander, Samuel
a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was born Feb. 16, 1836. He professed religion in 1853; moved to Missouri from Tennessee in 1857; and was licensed to preach and received into the Missouri Conference in 1860. In 1872 he removed to Marion, Va., to recover his health, and in the following fall was transferred to the Holston Conference, and remained in its active ranks until he died, Feb. 15, 1874. As a preacher, Mr. Alexander was industrious and eloquent; as a Christian, pious, cheerful, dignified; as a father, devoted and kind. See Minutes of Annual Conferences of the M. E. Church, South, 1874, p. 15.
Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature
Alexander, Samuel
(1859-1938) English thinker who developed a non-psychic, neo-realistic metaphysics and synthesis. He makes the process of emergence a metaphysical principle. Although his inquiry is essentially a priori, his method is empirical. Realism at his hands becomes a quasi-materialism, an alternative to absolute idealism and ordinary materialism. It alms to combine the absoluteness of law in physics with the absolute unpredictability of emergent qualities. Whereas to the ancients and in the modern classical conception of physical science, the original stuff was matter and motion, after Minkowski, Einstein, Lorenz and others, it became indivisible space-time, instead of space and time.
Thus nature begins as a four-dimensional matrix in which it is the moving principle. Materiality, secondary qualities, life, mentality are all emergent modifications of proto-space-time. Mind is the nervous system blossoming out into the capacity of awareness. Contemplative knowledge, where the object is set over against the mind, and the actual being, or experiencing, or enjoying of reality, where there is no inner duplicity of subject and object, constitute the two forms of knowledge. Alexander conceives the deity as the next highest level to be emerged out of any given level. Thus for beings on the level of life mind is deity, but for beings possessing minds there is a nisus or urge toward a still higher quality. To such beings that dimly felt quality is deity. The quality next above any given level is deity to the beings on that level. For men deity has not yet emerged, but there is a nisus towards its emergence. S. Alexander, Space, Time and Deity (1920). — H.H.