Jeans went even further:
"The concepts which now prove to be fundamental to our understanding of nature – a space which is finite; a space which is empty, so that one point [which appears to us occupied by a material body] differs from another solely in the properties of the space itself; four-dimensional, seven and more dimensional spaces; a space which for ever expands; a sequence of events which follows the laws of probability instead of the laws of causation – or, alternatively, a sequence of events which can only be fully and consistently described by going outside space and time, all these concepts seem to my mind to be structures of pure thought, incapable of realisation in any sense which would properly be described as material." 19
And again:
"Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter..." 20
Thus the medieval walled-in universe with its hierarchy of matter, mind and spirit, has been superseded by an expanding universe of curved, multi-dimensional empty space, where the stars, planets and their populations are absorbed into the space-crinkles of the abstract continuum – a bubble blown out of "empty space welded onto empty time". 21
How did this situation come about? Already in 1925, before the new quantum mechanics came into being, Whitehead wrote that "the physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus." 22 The common feature between pre-Keplerian astronomy and modern physics is that both have developed in relative isolation as "closed systems", manipulating a set of symbols according to certain rules of the game. Both systems "worked"; modern physics yielded nuclear energy, and Ptolemaic astronomy yielded predictions whose precision bowled over Tycho. The medieval astronomers manipulated their epicyclic symbols as modern physics manipulates Schroedinger's wave equations or Dirac's matrices, and it worked – though they knew nothing of gravity and elliptic orbits, believed in the dogma of circular motion, and had not the faintest idea why it worked. We are reminded of Urban VIII's famous argument which Galileo treated with scorn: that a hypothesis which works must not necessarily have anything to do with reality for there may be alternative explanations of how the Lord Almighty produces the phenomena in question. If there is a lesson in our story it is that the manipulation, according to strictly self-consistent rules, of a set of symbols representing one single aspect of the phenomena may produce correct, verifiable predictions, and yet completely ignore all other aspects whose ensemble constitutes reality:
"... Science deals with but a partial aspect of reality, and ... there is no faintest reason for supposing that everything science ignores is less real than what it accepts... Why is it that science forms a closed system? Why is it that the elements of reality it ignores never come in to disturb it? The reason is that all the terms of physics are defined in terms of one another. The abstractions with which physics begins are all it ever has to do with..." 23
Modern physics is not really concerned with "things" but with the mathematical relations between certain abstractions which are the residue of the vanished things. In the Aristotelian universe, quantity was merely one attribute of things, and one of the least important. Galileo's "the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics" was regarded by his contemporaries as a paradox; today it has become unquestioned dogma. For a long time the reduction of quality to quantity – of colour, sound, radiation to vibrational frequencies – was so eminently successful that it seemed to answer all questions. But when physics approached the ultimate constituents of matter, quality took its revenge: the method of reduction to quantity still worked, but we no longer know just what it is that is being thus reduced. All we do in fact know is that we read our instruments – the number of clicks in the Geiger counter, or the position of a pointer on a dial – and interpret the signs according to the rules of the game:
"And so in its actual procedure physics studies not these inscrutable qualities [of the material world], but pointer readings which we can observe. The readings, it is true, reflect the fluctuations of the world-qualities; but our exact knowledge is of the readings, not of the qualities. The former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." 24
Bertrand Russell expressed this state of affairs even more succinctly:
"Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover." 25
7. The Conservatism of Modern Science
There are two ways of interpreting this situation.
Either the structure of the universe is indeed of such a nature that it cannot be comprehended in terms of human space and time, human reason and human imagination. In this case Exact Science has ceased to be the Philosophy of Nature, and no longer has much inspiration to offer to the questing human mind. In this case it would be legitimate for the scientist to withdraw into his closed system, to manipulate his purely formal symbols, and to evade questions concerning the "real meaning" of these symbols as "meaningless", as it has become the fashion. But if this be the case, he must accept his role as a mere technician whose task is to produce, on the one hand, better bombs and plastic fibres, and on the other, more elegant systems of epicycles to save the phenomena.
The second possibility is to regard the present crisis in physics as a temporary phenomenon, the result of a one-sided, overspecialized development like the giraffe's neck – one of those culs-de-sac of mental evolution which we have so often observed in the past. But if that is the case, where, on the three-centuries' journey from "natural philosophy" to "exact science", did the estrangement from reality begin; at what point was the new version of Plato's curse uttered: "Thou shalt think in circles"? If we knew the answer, we would, of course, also know the remedy; and once the answer is known, it will again appear as heartbreakingly obvious as the sun's central position in the solar system. "We are indeed a blind race," wrote a contemporary scientist, "and the next generation, blind to its own blindness, will be amazed at ours." 26
I shall quote two examples which seem to me to illustrate this blindness. The materialist philosophy in which the average modern scientist was reared has retained its dogmatic power over his mind, though matter itself has evaporated; and he reacts to phenomena which do not fit into it much in the same manner as his scholastic forebears reacted to the suggestion that new stars might appear in the immutable eighth sphere. Thus for the last thirty years, an impressive body of evidence has been assembled under strict laboratory conditions which suggests that the mind might perceive stimuli emanating from persons or objects without the intermediary of the sensory organs; and that in controlled experiments, these phenomena occur with a statistical frequency which invites scientific investigation. Yet academic science reacts to the phenomena of "extra-sensory perception" much as the Pigeon League reacted to the Medicean Stars; and, it seems to me, for no better reason. If we have to accept that an electron can jump from one orbit into the other without traversing the space between them, why are we bound to reject out of hand the possibility that a signal of a nature no more puzzling than Schroedinger's electron-waves should be emitted and received without sensory intervention? If modern cosmology has a single comprehensive lesson it is that the basic events in the physical world cannot be represented in three-dimensional space and time. Yet the modern version of scholasticism denies additional dimensions to the mind, or brain, which it readily accords to the particles of a piece of lead. I am not playing on the word "dimension" as a mechanical analogy – after the manner of the "fourth dimension" of occult quacks. I am merely saying that since the space-time framework,
the concepts of matter and causality as understood both by classical physics and by commonsense experience, have been abandoned by modern physics, there seems to be no justification in refusing to investigate empirical phenomena because they do not fit into that already abandoned philosophy.
A second example of the hubris of contemporary science is the rigorous banishment of the word "purpose" from its vocabulary. This is probably an aftermath of the reaction against the animism of Aristotelian physics, where stones accelerated their fall because of their impatience to get home, and against a teleological world-view in which the purpose of the stars was to serve as chronometers for man's profit. From Galileo onward, "final causes" (or "finality" for short) were relegated into the realm of superstition, and mechanical causality reigned supreme. In the mechanical universe of indivisible hard little atoms, causality worked by impact, as on a billiard table; events were caused by the mechanical push of the past, not by any "pull" of the future. That is the reason why gravity and other forms of action-at-a-distance did not fit into the picture and were regarded with suspicion; why ethers and vortices had to be invented to replace that occult pull by a mechanical push. The mechanistic universe gradually disintegrated, but the mechanistic notion of causality survived until Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle proved its untenability. Today we know that on the sub-atomic level the fate of an electron or a whole atom is not determined by its past. But this discovery has not led to any basically new departure in the philosophy of nature, only to a state of bewildered embarrassment, a further retreat of physics into a language of even more abstract symbolism. Yet if causality has broken down and events are not rigidly governed by the pushes and pressures of the past, may they not be influenced in some manner by the "pull" of the future – which is a manner of saying that "purpose" may be a concrete physical factor in the evolution of the universe, both on the organic and unorganic levels. In the relativistic cosmos, gravitation is a result of the curvatures and creases in space which continually tend to straighten themselves out – which, as Whittaker remarked, 27 "is a statement so completely teleological that it would certainly have delighted the hearts of the schoolmen." If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension almost on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity.
These are matters of speculation and possibly quite beside the point; but we have learnt from the past that impasses in evolution can only be overcome by some new departure in an unexpected direction. Whenever a branch of knowledge became isolated from the mainstream, its frozen surface had to crack up and thaw before it could be reunited with living reality.
8. From Hierarchy to Continuum
As a result of their divorce, neither faith nor science is able to satisfy man's intellectual cravings. In the divided house, both inhabitants lead a thwarted existence.
Post-Galilean science claimed to be a substitute for, or the legitimate successor of, religion; thus its failure to provide the basic answers produced not only intellectual frustration but spiritual starvation. A summary recapitulation of European men's view of the world before and after the scientific revolution may help to put the situation into sharper relief. Taking the year 1600 as our dividing line or watershed, we find indeed virtually all rivers of thought and currents of feeling flow into opposite directions. The "pre-scientific" European lived in a closed universe with firm boundaries in space and time a few million miles in diameter and a few thousand years of duration. Space as such did not exist as an abstract concept, merely as an attribute of material bodies – their length, width and depth; hence empty space was unthinkable, a contradiction in terms, and infinite space even more so. Time, similarly, was simply the duration of an event. Nobody in his senses would have said that things move through or in space or time – how can a thing move in or through an attribute of itself, how can the concrete move through the abstract?
In this safely bounded world of comfortable dimensions, a well-ordered drama was taking its pre-ordained course. The stage remained static from beginning to end: there was no change in the species of animals and plants, no change in the nature, social order and mentality of man. There was neither progress nor decline within the natural and spiritual hierarchy. The total body of possible knowledge was as limited as the universe itself; everything that could be known about the Creator and his creation had been revealed in Holy Scripture and the writings of the ancient sages. There existed no sharp boundaries between the natural and the supernatural: matter was imbued with animal spirits, natural law was interpenetrated with divine purpose; there was no event without a final cause. Transcendental justice and moral values were inseparable from the natural order; no single event or fact was ethically neutral; no plant or metal, no insect or angel exempt from moral judgement; no phenomenon was outside the hierarchy of values. Every suffering had its reward, every disaster its meaning; the plot of the drama had a simple outline, a clear beginning and end.
This briefly, was our forebear's view of the world less than fifteen generations ago. Then, roughly within the five generations from Canon Koppernigk to Isaac Newton, homo sapiens underwent the most decisive change in his history:
"The gloriously romantic universe of Dante and Milton, that set no bounds to the imagination of man as it played over space and time, had now been swept away. Space was identified with the realm of geometry, time with the continuity of number. The world that people had thought themselves living in – a world rich with colour and sound, redolent with fragrance, filled with gladness, love and beauty, speaking everywhere of purposive harmony and creative ideals – was crowded now into minute corners in the brains of scattered organic beings. The really important world outside was a world hard, cold, colourless, silent, and dead; a world of quantity, a world of mathematically computable motions in mechanical regularity. The world of qualities as immediately perceived by man became just a curious and quite minor effect of that infinite machine beyond." 28
The uomo universale of the Renaissance, who was artist and craftsman, philosopher and inventor, humanist and scientist, astronomer and monk, all in one, split up into his component parts. Art lost its mythical, science its mystical inspiration; man became again deaf to the harmony of the spheres. The Philosophy of Nature became ethically neutral, and "blind" became the favourite adjective for the working of natural law. The space-spirit hierarchy was replaced by the space-time continuum.
As a result, man's destiny was no longer determined from "above" by a super-human wisdom and will, but from "below" by the sub-human agencies of glands, genes, atoms, or waves of probability. This shift of the locus of destiny was decisive. So long as destiny had operated from a level of the hierarchy higher than man's own, it had not only shaped his fate, but also guided his conscience and imbued his world with meaning and value. The new masters of destiny were placed lower in the scale than the being they controlled; they could determine his fate, but could provide him with no moral guidance, no values and meaning. A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque.
Before the shift, the various religions had provided man with explanations of a kind which gave to everything that happened to him meaning in the wider sense of transcendental causality and transcendental justice. But the explanations of the new philosophy were devoid of meaning in this wider sense. The answers of the past had been varied, contradictory, primitive, superstitious or whatever one likes to call them, but they had been firm, definite, imperative. They satisfied, at least for a given time and culture, man's need for reassurance and protection in an unfathomably cruel world, f
or some guidance in his perplexities. The new answers, to quote William James, 'made it impossible to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, leaving no result.' In a word, the old explanations, with all their arbitrariness and patchiness, answered the question after 'the meaning of life' whereas the new explanations, with all their precision, made the question of meaning itself meaningless. As man's science grew more abstract, his art became more esoteric, and his pleasures more chemical. In the end he was left with nothing but 'an abstract heaven over a naked rock'.
Man entered upon a spiritual ice age; the established Churches could no longer provide more than Eskimo huts where their shivering flock huddled together, while the campfires of rival ideologies drew the masses in wild stampedes across the ice." 29
9. The Ultimate Decision
Coincident with this progressive spiritual dessication, the post-Renaissance centuries brought an unprecedented rise in both constructive and destructive power. The operative word here is "unprecedented". All comparisons with past epochs break down before the fact that our species has acquired the means to annihilate itself, and make the earth uninhabitable; and that in the foreseeable future, it will be within its power to turn this planet into a nova, a rival sun in the solar system. Every age had its Cassandras, and one tends to draw comfort from the fact that mankind has, after all, managed to survive regardless of their pessimistic prophecies. But such analogies are no longer valid, for no past age, however convulsed, had the actual means of committing racial suicide and interfering with the order of the solar system.