THE UNFATHOMED UNIVERSE 21 



basis to start from, but what is matter, and what has been 

 its history? Must there not have been a differentiation of 

 various ^ forms of matter, may there not have been a pre- 

 material state of things, do we ever get to beginnings ? This 

 necessary limitation is well stated by Dr. Arthur Shipley : — 

 '^ 'No body of scientific doctrine succeeds in describing in 

 terms of laws of succession more than some limited set of 

 stages of a natural process ; the whole process — if, indeed, 

 it can be regarded as a whole — must for ever be beyond 

 the reach of scientific grasp. The earliest stage to which 

 science has succeeded in tracing back any part of a sequence 

 of phenomena itself constitutes a new problem for science, 

 and that without end. There is always an earlier stage and to 

 an earliest we can never attain. The questions of origins 

 concern the theologian, the metaphysician, perhaps the 

 poet'' (Schuster and Shipley, 1917, p. 276). 



(i) Another limitation has to do with causal sequences. 

 In ordinary scientific discourse, as Bergson points out, three 

 different meanings of the term ' cause ' are common. A 

 cause may act by impelling (one billiard ball striking an- 

 other), or by releasing (a spark exploding the gunpowder), 

 or by unwinding (the relaxing of the spring turning the 

 cylinder of a gramophone and having the melody as effect). 

 Now " only in the first case, really, does cause explain 

 effect; in the others the effect is more or less given in ad- 

 vance, and the antecedent invoked is — in different degrees, 

 of course — its occasion rather than its cause " (Creative 

 Evolution, English Trans., p. 77). 



In the domain of mechanics, in Gravitational Astronomy, 

 we see the high-water mark of scientific description, in exact- 

 ness and approximate completeness. There, with a clear in- 

 tellectual conscience, we can proclaim, "causa a?quat effec- 



