84 The Bible of Nature 



is not required, or if any room be left for his action, 

 it must be at some point in the "dark background 

 and abysm of time" when the orderly system 

 of the universe is supposed to have been set 

 agoing. 



Now, what is the misunderstanding in the minds 

 of those who think that there is some opposition or 

 antithesis between saying that the Earth grew out 

 of a nebula and saying that God created the world 

 by the word of His power ? The basal misunder- 

 standing is a failure to see that the word ultimate 

 does not occur in the scientific dictionary. For 

 particular purposes of formulating and thereby 

 perhaps working with natural processes science 

 pursues certain methods and reaches certain re- 

 sults. Its outlook is in no way inconsistent with 

 the emotional outlook, but it seems fairly obvious 

 that one must not try to make one sentence of the 

 two statements, "O wunderschon ist Gottes Erde, 

 und schon auf ihr ein Mensch zu sein," and 

 " Bodies attract one another with a force propor- 

 tional directly to the product of their masses and 

 inversely as the square of their mutual distance." 

 There is no reason to surrender the philosophical 

 outlook, with its conviction that " In our life alone 

 does Nature live"; but we must not mix this up 

 in any way with an inquiry into radio-activity. 



Again, the aim of science is not to explain but 

 to redescribe in simpler terms, to find a common 



