Readers of the Journal may know little of Melchior Palágyi. Even on the Continent his work has been very inadequately recognized. It is not that he has written little: he published some books and many articles during his lifetime, in German as well as in Magyar, and since his death, Barth of Leipzig has issued an edition of his selected works, including his most important contribution, Naturphilosophische Vorlesungen, also the Wahrnehmungslehre and Zur Weltmechanik. He has many enthusiastic admirers, and those (...) who care to look up the Preussische Jahrbücher, March 1926, will find there a most informative and highly appreciative article on his general philosophy by Werner Deubel, who in the same journal, some two years previously, discussed the work of a kindred spirit, Ludwig Klages. It was Deubel's article that first roused my interest in Palágyi and led me to study his more important writings. (shrink)

The guiding idea of Palágyi's Monism is what he has called the Principle of Polarity. This is made clear in Palágyi's own preface to the second edition of his main work, the Naturphilosophische Vorlesungen. The lectures were originally given in 1908. The Second Edition and the Preface date from 1924. In this preface we learn that the quest for the creative on the one hand, and for unity through polarity on the other, were ever the two leading motives of his (...) thought. Both are pervasive and permanent, and they support each other; but in so far as the intellectual urge towards unity prevails over the more artistic impulse to creative freedom, it is the principle of polarity that receives the main stress and exercises the greater influence. For Palágyi, as for Hegel, it is the main principle of mental evolution. “ Polarity,” so Palágyi tells us, does not simply mean “ opposition,” the. (shrink)