Atomism originally stood for iconoclasm, impiety, and atheism, because the Greek atomists conceived a universe under the reign of chance. - Lancelot Law Whyte

During the metamorphosis from ancient to European man, self-awareness, rationalism, monotheism, and morality all developed in parallel as expressions of the influence of a new form of social tradition on the organization of the individual. […] Europe forced the new mode of life till it produced a definite dissociation, for self-awareness did not then bring with it an adequate understanding of the self; religion could not offer a complete integration; the rational intellect knew nothing of its own origins, limitations or mode of operation; and morality necessarily failed to realize its aim. (p. 114)

Goethe did not propose a return to the undifferentiated condition of Heraclitus. The development of man lead from undifferentiated unity with nature, through a differentiation achieved by separation, to a new organized unity. But this last state would be different from the first; it must contain within its recovered unity all the differentiated knowledge, all the specialized organs and faculties, of two thousands years of development. (p. 224)

The ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness represent attempts to interpret the process of development as a group of tendencies permanently directed towards certain permanent and universal ends. But human behaviour is not directed towards unchanging ends, not even towards those temporary ideals which each community sets up for itself. The formative tendency is displayed, not in any steady process of definite orientation, but in a rhythmic sequence of transformation which cannot be represented as tending towards any particular final condition. (p. 261-262)