“In these writings Florensky defended the importance of the idea of “discontinuity” (a theme he undoubtedly picked up from his professor Bugaev), both in mathematics and in social behavior. Like many members of the Russian Intelligentsia of this time, Florensky believed that all intellectual life is a connected entity…Florensky was convinced that intellectually the nineteenth century, just ending, had been a disaster, and he wanted to identify and discredit what he saw as the “governing principle” of its calamitous effect. He saw that principle in the concept of “continuity,” the belief that one could not make the transition from one point to another without passing through all the intermediate points. In contrast to the “false” principle of continuity Florensky proposed what he saw as its morally, even religiously, superior opposite: discontinuity. He realized of course that this was not a new topic, and that discussion of the antinomy of continuity/discontinuity were very old, dating back to the Greeks. However, Florensky believed that the problem had a particular relevance to the beginning of the twentieth century “the cementing idea of continuity brought everything together into one gigantic monolith.

Florensky faulted his own field, mathematics, for creating this unfortunate monolith. Because of the strength of differential calculus, with its many practical applications, he maintained that mathematicians and philosophers tended to ignore those problems that could not be analyzed that way–the essentially discontinuous phenomena…And this emphasis on the continuous, Florensky believed, affected many areas of thought outside mathematics, Differentiable functions were “deterministic” and emphasis on them led to what Florensky saw as an unhealthy determinism throughout political and philosophical thought in general, most clearly in Marxism.

Intellectual modes based on continuity, said Florensky, had spread to geology, in the uniformitarian ideas of Lyell, and to Darwin, in the concept of evolution through gradual small change. Both opposed “leaps” in natural development and postulated smooth, even transformations. Florensky believed that similar ideas had influenced many other fields, including psychology, sociology, and religion.”pg87-88 Naming Infinity