If science misled us before, when
it was full of clearness and confidence, how shall we trust it now that it
is all mystery and paradox? If classical physics needed this fundamental
revision, near to experience and fruitful as it was, what revision will
not romantic physics require? Nor is the future alone insecure: even now
the prophets hardly understand one another, or perhaps themselves; and
some of them interlard their science with the most dubious metaphysics.
Naturally the enemies of science have not been slow to seize this
opportunity: the soft-hearted, the muddle-headed, the superstitious are
all raising their voices, no longer in desperate resistance to science,
but hopefully, and in its name. Science, they tell us, is no longer
hostile to religion, or to divination of any sort. Indeed, divination is a
science too. Physics is no longer materialistic since space is now curved,
and filled with an ether through which light travels at 300,000 kilometres
per second--an immaterial rate: because if anything material ventured to
move at that forbidden speed, it would be so flattened that it would cease
to exist. Indeed, matter is now hardly needed at all; its place has been
taken by radio-activity, and by electrons which dart and whirl with such
miraculous swiftness, that occasionally, for no known reason, they can
skip from orbit to orbit without traversing the intervening positions--an
evident proof of free-will in them. Or if solids should still seem to be
material, there are astral bodies as well which are immaterial although
physical; and as to ether and electricity, they are the very substance of
spirit.
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