244 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



creations of the engineer consist of engines. And 

 the concepts which now prove to be fundamental to 

 our understanding of nature — a space which is finite; 

 a space which is empty, so that one point differs from 

 another solely in the properties of the space itself; 

 four dimensional, and more, even seven dimensional 

 spaces; a space which forever expands; a sequence of 

 events which follows the laws of probability instead 

 of the law of causation — or, alternately, a sequence 

 of events which can only be fully and consistently de- 

 scribed by going outside space and time. All these 

 concepts seem to my mind to be structures of pure 

 thought, incapable of realisation in any sense which 

 would properly be described as material. 



To these I would add other more technical con- 

 cepts, typified by the "exclusion principle," which 

 seems to imply a sort of "action at a distance" in both 

 space and time — as though every bit of the universe 

 knew what other distant bits were doing, and acted 

 accordingly. To my mind, the laws wljich nature 

 obeys are less suggestive of those which a machine 

 obeys in its motions than of those which a musician 

 obeys in writing a fugue, or a poet in composing a 

 sonnet. The motions of electrons and atoms do not 

 resemble those of the parts of a locomotive so much 

 as those of the dancers in a cotillion. And if the "true 

 essence of substances" is for ever unknowable, It does 

 not matter whether the cotillion Is danced at a ball 

 in real life, or on a cinematograph screen, or In a story 

 of Boccaccio. If all this Is so, then the universe can 

 be best pictured, although still very Imperfectly and 

 Inadequately, as consisting of pure thought, the 



