434 Living in a World of Change 



edge as we may have today by good fortune, not by any 

 merit of our own. With the same background we should 

 probably be no whit less absurd. What would we ourselves 

 do if we had been brought up in a world operated by one 

 or a few agencies having the ordinary characteristics of or- 

 dinary human beings, plus the divine attributes of omnis- 

 cience and omnipotence? What is implied for most people 

 today by the identification of personality in the deity with 

 susceptibility to ordinary human motives? What is implied, 

 for most people, by the identification of omnipotence with 

 liberty, and of liberty with irresponsibility? 



If we thought of the invisible ** forces " as more or less 

 independent personalities, we should naturally attempt to 

 enter into negotiations with them for favors, or at least for 

 the avoidance of disfavors. We should implore or propitiate, 

 we should bargain or threaten. We should attenipt to play 

 one off against the other. Is not this the picture we get of 

 certain "heathen" procedures? The heroes of Homer and 

 the ordinary folks that made up his mobs behaved in re- 

 lation to their gods precisely on such assumptions. Roughly 

 speaking, this was the common state of mind in Europe 

 until the Elizabethan period, the age not only of Shakespeare 

 and Jonson but of Bacon and Gilbert. 



Many things happened to change the appearance of the 

 world from this period onward. More and more the growth 

 and diffusion of science have forced a change in prevailing 

 attitudes, although for most people the world has not yet 

 come to look like one of law and order. Most people no 

 longer think of a special demon in the volcano and another 

 one in the storm. They are confident that the outcome of 

 pushing familiar buttons, of pulling familiar levers, of turn- 

 ing familiar knobs, will be uniform and for the most part 

 predictable. When things go wrong, they know how to 

 blame a leaky pipe or a crossed wire, instead of the personal 

 aggrievement of some deity. 



A world of' ghosts is different from a world of im- 

 personal forces. The ghosts may be restless spirits, but they 



