ll this I find announced in newspapers and even in books as the
breakdown of scientific materialism: and yet, when was materialism more
arrant and barbarous than in these announcements? Something no doubt has
broken down: but I am afraid it is rather the habit of thinking clearly
and the power to discern the difference between material and spiritual
things.

The latest revolution in science will probably not be the last. I do not
know what internal difficulties, contradictions, or ominous obscurities
may exist in the new theories, or what logical seeds of change, perhaps of
radical change, might be discovered there by a competent critic. I base my
expectation on two circumstances somewhat more external and visible to the
lay mind. One circumstance is that the new theories seem to be affected,
and partly inspired, by a particular philosophy, itself utterly insecure.
This philosophy regards the point of view as controlling or even creating
the object seen; in other words, it identifies the object with the
experience or the knowledge of it: it is essentially a subjective,
psychological, Protestant philosophy. The study of perspectives, which a
severer critic might call illusions, is one of the most interesting and
enlightening of studies, and for my own part I should be content to dwell
almost exclusively in that poetic and moral atmosphere, in the realm of
literature and of humanism. Yet I cannot help seeing that neither in logic
nor in natural genesis can perspectives be the ultimate object of science,
since a plurality of points of view, somehow comparable, must be assumed
in the beginning, as well as common principles of projection, and ulterior
points of contact or coincidence. Such assumptions, which must persist
throughout, seem to presuppose an absolute system of nature behind all the
relative systems of science.

The other circumstance which points to further revolutions is social. The
new science is unintelligible to almost all of us; it can be tested only
by very delicate observations and very difficult reasoning. We accept it
on the authority of a few professors who themselves have accepted it with
a contagious alacrity, as if caught in a whirlwind. It has sprung up
mysteriously and mightily, like mysticism in a cloister or theology in a
council: a Soviet of learned men has proclaimed it. Moreover, it is not
merely a system among systems, but a movement among movements. A system,
even when it has serious rivals