58 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



Newton, that keen reasoner and careful investi- 

 gator, whom most of us still regard as the most pow- 

 erful intellect which has yet appeared on this earth, 

 seems never to have been moved by the plebeian faults 

 of pride or vain-glory in his scientific work, even 

 though occasionally human in his religious controver- 

 sies. Yet we can almost imagine that this Titan felt 

 a touch of human pride and self-appreciation as he 

 penned the words, — "Hypotheses non jingo," — "As 

 for hypotheses, I don't make them." And later, in his 

 Opticks: "The main business of Natural Philosophy 

 is to argue from Phasnomena without feigning Hy- 

 potheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects, till we 

 come to the very first Cause, which certainly is not 

 mechanical." Basically, and with due regard for the 

 results from more modern theories of knowledge, it 

 seems certain that Newton told less than the truth in 

 his complacent rejection of hypothesis. He thought 

 that he was not making them, while as a matter of 

 fact his deductions, his mathematical equations, his 

 very laws of thought, go back to hypotheses of one 

 sort or another, either just beneath the surface, or 

 deeply hidden in the sub-structure of mind. He 

 founded a wonderful mechanism on a few assumed 

 axioms, but an axiom is merely an hypothesis which 

 ought to be true. Quite a proportion of present-day 

 scientists are now seriously considering a radically 

 different hypothesis of the structure of the universe 

 from that of Newton, — the theory of relativity. It 

 is perhaps too soon to try to make a prophecy as to 

 whether Newton's gravitational universe, or a rela- 

 tivity universe with time and space united In a single 

 unit and with gravitation thrown out entirely as a dis- 



