WOODS AND TREES—KRECKER 309 
there was born a new thing, “science,” which as Burnet* so aptly 
definies in his survey of Greek philosophy is “thinking about the 
world in the Greek way.” 
To return to my colleague and, I fear, to many others like him, 
what a woeful void there must have been in what he reaped from 
science, perhaps also in the guidance offered him by his mentors. 
One is moved to paraphrase the biblical interrogation, what doth it 
profit a man to gather the facts of science and lose its soul ? 
One group of scientific facts, its bare, gaunt trees stripped of their 
pleasing foliage, tells us that every particle of matter is attracted 
by every other particle in proportion to the product of the masses and 
inversely as the square of the intervening distances. These few 
words represent a vast number of subsidiary facts and a prodigious 
amount of painstaking effort in their formulation. It is known to all 
who mull them over that they explain the floating of a mote of dust 
to the ground and in the same breath the grand movement of the 
planets through space. 1 am wondering, however, how many of those 
who have burnt the midnight oil in mastering these facts, how many 
of our students, indeed perhaps, how many of their instructors and 
how many of our friends in the humanities like my colleague of the 
religious discussion have been taken to a mountain top from which 
they have been able to see that these same facts have served also as a 
guidepost in our quest of the ultimate, in molding man’s interpretation 
of his universe, in orienting himself in time and space; that they have 
been one of the things which has helped to satisfy man’s wonder, the 
awesome wonder that comes over one as he gazes into the depths of a 
star-studded winter sky where wonder leads to wonder and one is 
moved to breathe the thought, “What is man that thou art mindful 
of him?” 
As Sir James Jeans * points out, “The law of gravity was important 
not so much because it told us why an apple fell to the ground or why 
the earth and planets moved around the sun as because it suggested 
the whole of Nature was governed by hard and fast laws—in the light 
of Newton’s work—Man began to see that he was free to work out 
his own destiny without fear of disturbuance from interfering gods, 
spirits, or demons.” Or again to partly paraphrase Dampier,’ New- 
ton’s reduction of the phenomenon of gravity to mathematical terms, 
coupled with the work of Copernicus and Galileo, in one grand sweep 
validated terrestrial mechanics in celestial spaces and eliminated with 
_ finality the Aristotelian and medieval doctrine that “the heavenly 
bodies are divine, incorruptible and different in kind from our im- 
? Karly Greek philosophy, 4th ed., 1930. 
4 Scientific progress. 
5 Sir William Dampier, A history of science, 1938. 
