ROBERT A. MILLIKAN 29 



Yes, dnd much more than this, for it is not merely 

 the material side of life that this idea has changed. 

 It has also revolutionized the whole mode of thought 

 of the race. It has changed the philosophic and reli- 

 gious conceptions of mankind. It has laid the foun- 

 dations of a new and a stupendous advance in man's 

 conception of God, for a sublimer view of the world 

 and of man's place and destiny in it. The anthropo- 

 morphic God of the ancient world, the God of human 

 passions, frailties, caprices, and whims is gone, and 

 obviously with it the old duty, namely, merely or 

 chiefly the duty to propitiate him, so that he may be 

 induced to treat you, either in this world or the next, 

 or in both, better than he treats your neighbor. 



Can any one question the advance that has been 

 made in the diminishing prevalence of these mediaeval, 

 essentially childish, and essentially selfish ideas? The 

 new God is the God of law and order; the new duty, 

 to know that order and to get into harmony with it; 

 to learn how to make the world a better place to live 

 in, not merely how to save your individual soul. How- 

 ever, once destroy our confidence in the principle of 

 uniformity, our belief in the rule of law, and our effec- 

 tiveness immediately disappears, our method ceases to 

 be dependable, and our laboratories become deserted. 



Matter is no longer a mere game of marbles played 

 by blind men. An atom is now an amazingly compli- 

 cated organism, possessing many interrelated parts, 

 and exhibiting many functions and properties — energy 

 properties, radiating properties, wave properties, and 

 other properties quite as mysterious as any that used 

 to masquerade under the name of "mind," so that the 

 phrases, "all is matter," and "all is mind," have now 



