2o8 Science Religion and Reality 



extended territory physics will be able to maintain its aloofness from 

 consciousness ; it may be that the normal laws are such that they 

 can be set aside by human free will, or it may be that physics has 

 other undetected devices besides the cycle by which it can extend 

 the domain over which it is necessarily supreme. 



The exposure of the cycle of physical definition causes a change 

 in our attitude which can perhaps best be illustrated by an example. 

 The nineteenth-century physicist felt that he knew just what he 

 was dealing with when he used terms such as matter or atoms. He 

 was ready to admit that much remained to be found out about their 

 structure, but their general nature was definite enough. The 

 atoms were just tiny billiard-balls — a crisp statement which was 

 supposed to tell you about their nature in a way which could never 

 be achieved for the transcendental entities of the world such as 

 pain, beauty, personality, or consciousness. Chemical analysis of 

 the brain showed that it was composed of atoms of the familiar 

 elements occurring in inorganic nature. The unanswerable 

 question was, by what strange means had this collection of billiard- 

 balls acquired the property of secreting thought — a transcendental 

 entity in no way akin to atoms. But we now see that physics has 

 nothing to say as to the inscrutable nature of an atom ; what it 

 studies is the linkage of atomic properties to other terms in the 

 physicist's vocabulary, each depending on the other in endless chain 

 with the same inscrutable nature running through the whole. 

 "There is nothing to prevent the assemblage of atoms forming the brain 

 from being itself a thinking-machine in virtue of that nature which 

 physics leaves undetermined and undeterminable. Because we see 

 that our precise knowledge of certain aspects of the behaviour of 

 atoms leaves their intrinsic nature just as transcendental and 

 inscrutable as the nature of mind, so the difficulty of interaction 

 of matter and mind is lessened. We create unnecessary difficulty 

 for ourselves by postulating two inscrutabilities instead of one. 



It is just here that the physicist's magnifying glass is liable to 

 mislead us. We have seen that the microscopic view of the world 

 is accepted as the ultimate truth in science because of the exigencies 

 of the methods of deduction used in science. But the whole truth 

 is not to be seen from any one point of view, and for seeing the 

 connection of mind and brain we must adopt a point of view of less 

 magnification. I do not suppose that the human mind can be 

 analysed into atoms of feeling in the way that the brain (which 



