y fixed the end of life, and man could do
nothing to alter it significantly in any respect. Arbitrary teleological
determinism is, in the Christian religion, the philosophic root of other
worldliness. And it was no alleviation of the state of affairs that
miracles could happen in the realm of Nature, that is, that Nature was
not determined, but was undetermined, accidental, or "free." On the
contrary, it was a decided aggravation that there existed side by side
with a perverse teleological determinism for the other world, an
instrumental indeterminism for this world. For the latter served as
effectively to put the means of man's life, as the former did to put his
end, out of his present reach and control.

Contrast the modern and contemporary Christian period with the medieval
and pre-medieval Christian period. What a vast difference there is! With
the introduction of the modern period man's energies were almost
instantaneously liberated. And why? Because of Chancellor Bacon's
discovery of the value of empirical investigation? Hardly. For this
discovery had been made long before Bacon. But it was only after Bacon
that the discovery had a great effect because an enormous intellectual
transformation had already partly taken place in the time between the
first medieval discovery of the empirical method and Bacon's
proclamation of it. The enormous change was that determinism had been
transferred from ends to means; and indeterminism from means to ends.
Mathematical physics had, as a system for explaining Nature, supplanted
theology.

With scientific determinism firmly established in the realm of Nature
and arbitrary determinism thoroughly disestablished in the realm of
ends, the two-fold fatality that crushed man with its oppressive power,
automatically disappeared. On the one hand, the world ceased to be
haunted by demonic powers; it was no longer a miraculous world subject
constantly to capricious perturbations. It was no longer a world alien
to man's nature and it therefore ceased to be sheerly brutal to him. For
the world is brutal only as long as we do not understand it. As soon as
we do, it ceases to be brutal, and becomes quite human, if not humane.
Knowledge transmutes a brute existent into a rational instrumentality.
And, on the other hand, man could now espouse any end consonant with his
nature. He was no longer bound and dwarfed by an alien, superimposed end
which is just as sheerly brutal to man's soul as an al