JOHN LANGDON-DAVIES 209 



ory persisted; and that is why a new-born baby knows 

 how to breathe, to drink milk from its mother's breast, 

 to digest it — because it remembers doing it before. 

 Clearly, then, once we have a glimmering of the truth 

 about these things, the difficulty of seeing that science 

 is autobiography vanishes. And if science is auto- 

 biography, how much more interesting it is than we 

 were led to expect in schools. 



But we must warn the reader that it is of course only 

 a really modern scientist who will admit this outlook 

 even to-day, for, scientists have for a long time been 

 terrified by the misunderstandings of the fundamen- 

 talists, mythologists, mumbo-jumbo worshippers and 

 other half-baked thinkers into denying anything which 

 might be construed by them into being useful for their 

 own low purposes. These people had created out of 

 their dogged superstitions, for all that they phrased 

 them in words of sweetness and light, such a fright- 

 ful, painful, brutal outlook on life and the universe 

 that the nineteenth century biologists, reacting in dis- 

 gust, could not admit anything into their new outlook 

 which could be made to look as if they thought life 

 anything but mechanical and materialistic in the old- 

 fashioned sense of these words. 



And even to this day fundamentalists force scien- 

 tists in self-protection to be more old fashioned and 

 "materialistic" than they desire to be at heart. 



The whole history of science has been a direct 

 search for God; deliberate and conscious, until well 

 into the eighteenth century, and since then unconscious, 

 for the most part, because so much had been discov- 

 ered about God by then that scientists began to think 



