34 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



discovered; who are hypnotized by anything which is 

 new because it is new; and who are not interested in 

 first finding what has been found to be true. There 

 are presumably fundamental laws in art as well as in 

 physics, in accordance with which all real progress 

 must be made. One of the foremost painters in the 

 United States recently told me that he considered a 

 very large fraction of what is called modern art to be 

 in the precise category of perpetual motion machines 

 and Abrams electronic reactions — a violation of the 

 fundamental laws of real art, and hence doomed to 

 disappear like all other untrue things. And how many 

 cubists we have in economics, in education, in govern- 

 ment, in religion, everybody knows, — persons who are 

 unwilling to take the time and to make the effort re- 

 quired to find what the known facts are, before they 

 become champions of unsupported opinions — people 

 who take sides first and look up facts afterward when 

 the tendency to distort the facts to conform to the 

 opinions has become well-nigh irresistible. 



The assumption that our feeble, finite minds un- 

 derstand completely the basis of the physical uni- 

 verse is the sort of blunder that has been made over 

 and over and over again throughout all periods of 

 the world's history, and in all domains of thought. It 

 is the essence of dogmatism — assertiveness without 

 knowledge. This is supposed to have been the espe- 

 cial prerogative of religion; and there have been 

 many religious dogmatists; but not a few of them, 

 alas, among scientists. Every one will recognize Mr. 

 Bryan, for example, as a pure dogmatist; but not 



