248 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



the category of hallucinations or dreams; it is clearly- 

 less substantial than that which Johnson kicked. Crea- 

 tions of an individual mind may reasonably be called 

 less substantial than creations of a universal mind. 

 The uniformity of nature proclaims the self-consistency 

 of a universal mind. The uniformity of nature pro- 

 claims the self-consistency of this mind. 



This concept of the universe as a world of pure 

 thought throws a new light on many of the situations 

 we have encountered in our survey of modern physics. 

 We can now see how the ether, in which all the events 

 of the universe take place, could reduce to a mathe- 

 matical abstraction, and become as abstract and as 

 mathematical as parallels of latitude and meridians of 

 longitude. We can also see why energy, the funda- 

 mental entity of the universe, had again to be treated 

 as a mathematical abstraction — the constant of in- 

 tegration of a differential equation. 



If the universe is a universe of thought, then Its 

 creation must have been an act of thought. Indeed, 

 the finiteness of time and space almost compel us, of 

 themselves, to paint the creation as an act of thought; 

 the determination of the constants such as the radius 

 of the universe and the number of electrons it con- 

 tained imply thought, whose richness is measured by 

 the immensity of these quantities. Time and space, 

 which form the setting for the thought, must have 

 come into being as part of this act. Primitive cos- 

 mologies pictured a creator working In space and time, 

 forging sun, moon and stars out of already existent 

 raw material. Modern scientific theory compels us 

 to think of the creator as working outside time and 



