2 1 2 Science Religion and Reality 



certain of these relations as being and others as becoming, certain 

 relations as passive, others as dynamic. That dynamic quality 

 by which nature is not merely something which exists, but is 

 something which becomes, is not in the physical scheme, and 

 must be introduced like actuality by filling the skeleton scheme 

 of physics with things which over and above their physical defini- 

 tion have a value for consciousness, i.e., a spiritual value. As we 

 have said, the non-appearance of " becoming " in pure physical 

 theory may merely be a defect of the present theory which time 

 may remove ; and it should not be so much stressed as the absence 

 of actuality which is evidently inherent in the whole method of 

 cyclic definition. But it is, at any rate, a tempting hypothesis 

 that " becoming " and actuality are spiritual values outside the 

 scope of theoretical physics ; or we may put it in the form that the 

 actuality that must be brought in from outside is not only an 

 actuality of being but an actuality of becoming. 



There is another way in which the mind must be held respon- 

 sible for the processes of the material world — ^an intervention which 

 can scarcely be ignored even if our interests are confined to 

 the development of physical science. This intervention may be 

 expressed crudely by saying that " values " are created by the mind. 

 It is generally agreed that aesthetic and ethical values — the beauty 

 of a landscape, the nobility of a deed — belong to a mental sphere ; 

 but it appears also that the value to be attached to physical entities, 

 such as mass and force, is (at least in most cases) ultimately a value 

 for consciousness. We have said that mass, momentum, and stress 

 are certain analytical expressions containing combinations of the 

 ten potentials. Theoretical physics takes the form which it does 

 take, and discovers laws of nature of a characteristic type, largely 

 because it chooses to talk about these combinations of the potentials 

 to which it has given the above names ; there are other combina- 

 tions which it might talk about, but it regards them as uninteresting 

 and leaves them nameless. This choice of subject-matter made 

 at the outset determines the nature of the superstructure. Any- 

 one attempting to construct a theory of the material world ab initio 

 — to see how out of a basal relation-structure may be built up a 

 world operating according to the laws of nature recognised by 

 observation — is confronted with the difficulty of justifying and 

 explaining this choice. He can find entities — that is to say, com- 

 binations of his symbols — which obey the well-known laws of 



