The Domain of Physical Science 2 1 7 



not cause the scientist to lose faith in his handiwork, for he is aware 

 that the completed portion is growing all the time. But those 

 who use these guesses for purposes outside science are on more 

 perilous ground, and it is with great reluctance and misgiving 

 that the writer has strayed on to it. Let the scientist stick to his 

 pointer-readings, is a good rule ; and if, like many before us who 

 have broken it, we have lost our way in the outer fog, we may 

 perhaps plead that it was necessary to show that students of the 

 nineteenth and the twentieth centuries ha\e at least different ways 

 of losing themselves, and the unqualified materialism of the last 

 century is not to-day the most inviting bypath. 



Our thesis has been that the recent tendencies of scientific 

 thought lead to the belief that mind is a greater instrument than 

 was formerly recognised in prescribing the nature and laws of the 

 external world as studied in physical science ; that in exploring 

 his own territory the physicist comes up against the influence of 

 that wider reality which he cannot altogether shut out ; and that 

 by its selection of values the mind may indeed be said to have 

 created its physical environment. We have spelt mind with a 

 small "m," for our values are human values ; yet we trust there is 

 even in us something that has value for the eternal. Perhaps the 

 actuality of the world is not only in these little sparks from the 

 divine mind which flicker for a few years and are gone, but 

 in the Mind, the Logos. " The same was in the beginning 

 with God. , , . And without Him was not any thing made 

 that was made." 



It will not be expected that science should indicate how this 

 colourless pantheism is to be made into a vital religion. Science 

 does not indicate whether the world-spirit is good or evil ; but it 

 does perhaps justify us in applying the adjective " creative." It is 

 for other considerations to examine the daring hypothesis that the 

 spirit in whom we have our being — our actuality — is approachable 

 to us ; that He is to us the beneficent Father, without which, it 

 seems to me, the question of the theoretical existence of a God has 

 little significance. This image of the divine nature is not a con- 

 venient fiction for use in workaday life, to be discarded in favour 

 of a system of equations when scientific accuracy is required. If 

 the hypothesis is correct, it signifies a direct relation of spirit to 

 spirit which can scarcely be made clearer by an irrelevant excursion 

 into the cycle of physical definition where the differential equations 



