ARTHUR S. EDDINGTON 49 



do not cause the scientist to lose faith in his handi- 

 work, for he is aware that the completed portion is 

 growing steadily. Those who look over his shoulder 

 and use the present partially developed picture for 

 purposes outside science, do so at their own risk. 



The lack of finality of scientific theories would be a 

 very serious limitation of our argument, if we had 

 staked much on their permanence. The religious 

 reader may well be content that I have not offered 

 him a God revealed by the quantum theory, and there- 

 fore liable to be swept away in the next scientific revo- 

 lution. It is not so much the particular form that 

 scientific theories have now taken — the conclusions 

 which we believe we have proved — as the movement 

 of thought behind them that concerns the philosopher. 

 Our eyes once opened, we may pass on to a yet newer 

 outlook on the world, but we can never go back to the 

 old outlook. 



If the scheme of philosophy which we now rear on 

 the scientific advances of Einstein, Bohr, Rutherford 

 and others, is doomed to fall in the next thirty years, 

 it is not to be laid to their charge that we have gone 

 astray. Like the systems of Euclid, of Ptolemy, of 

 Newton, which have served their turn, so the systems 

 of Einstein and Heisenberg may give way to some 

 fuller realisation of the world. But in each revolu- 

 tion of scientific thought new words are set to the old 

 music, and that which has gone before is not destroyed 

 but refocussed. Amid all our faulty attempts at ex- 

 pression, the kernel of scientific truth steadily grows. 

 And of this truth it may be said — The more it changes, 

 the more it remains the same thing. 



