SCIENCE, YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW — SWANN 247 



have no sense of sudden change; and even as one who travels from 

 tropical regions to the poles can accommodate himself to his satisfac- 

 tion at each stage of the journey, so the philosopher, in traveling over 

 this wider domain which I envisage, will find himself content wher- 

 ever he may be. 



In developing the foregohig thoughts I have called attention to the 

 rapid advance which took place in physics itself once one was willing 

 to accept a new particle, the neutron, and furnish it wdth the where- 

 withal to operate. Now I do not expect it to be necessary to find a new 

 particle which will cement the old materialistic realm with the realm 

 of life and all that goes with it, but I may expect to find the formal 

 recognition of some kind of a new entity differing from those which 

 we have encountered in physics. I do not necessarily expect that this 

 entity will be something which can be described in terms of space and 

 time, although I shall expect it to be accompanied by well-defined laws 

 of operation which provide, not only for the activities peculiar to its 

 own purposes, but for the possibility of cementing it logically with 

 the knowledge of the past. We must not be too astonished at the invo- 

 cation of an entity which does not call for expression in terms of space 

 and time. After all, I may speak of such things as good and evil 

 without accompanying them with coordinates a?, y, ^, t, to express 

 where they are and when they were there. For the sophisticated 

 physicist, I may recall that even the coordinates which represent 

 Fourier amplitudes in the analysis of radiation in an ideal box are not 

 coordinates of a material point in ordinary space, but, as coordinates 

 in an abstract, multidimensional space, they perform a useful service 

 m physics. In the last analysis much that is spoken of in the quantum 

 theory of physics involves concepts having little to do with the old 

 conventional notion associated with the expression of all relevant 

 concepts in terms of some thing or things having positions at certain 

 times. I shall not be surprised to find the new entity playing a part 

 in the survival of pattern, so dominant in living things. I hesitate 

 to limit its potentialities by giving it a name already appropriated 

 and endowed with properties of vagueness too foggy to be permitted 

 in a scientific discussion, and so I will not call it by the name "soul." If 

 it is to be of service, it must not shrink away from its duties and take 

 refuge as part of high-sounding sentences. Its functions and modes 

 of operation must be well defined and it is only natural that in con- 

 ventional science it will have to go through the process of skeptic 

 criticism which has fallen to the lot of all its predecessors in the 

 materialistic realm. I should expect to find it play a role in those 

 phenomena which for long have lain in the borderland between what 

 is accepted by all and what is accepted only by few, even though rep- 

 resentatives of the few may be found in all periods of man's history. 



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