The Sleepwalkers (257 page)

Religion
will
not
regain
its
old
power
until
it
can
face
change
in
the
same
spirit
as
does
science.
Its
principles
may
be
eternal,
but
the
expression
of
those
principles
requires
continual
development...

The
religious
controversies
of
the
sixteenth
and
seventeenth
centuries
put
theologians
into
a
most
unfortunate
state
of
mind.
They
were
always
attacking
and
defending.
They
pictured
themselves
as
the
garrison
of
a
fort
surrounded
by
hostile
forces.
All
such
pictures
express
half-truths.
That
is
why
they
are
so
popular.
But
they
are
dangerous.
This
particular
picture
fostered
a
pugnacious
party
spirit
which
really
expresses
an
ultimate
lack
of
faith.
They
dared
not
modify,
because
they
shirked
the
task
of
disengaging
their
spiritual
message
from
the
associations
of
a
particular
imagery...

...
We
have
to
know
what
we
mean
by
religion.
The
churches,
in
their
presentation
of
their
answers
to
this
query,
have
put
forward
aspects
of
religion
which
are
expressed
in
terms
either
suited
to
the
emotional
reactions
of
bygone
times
or
directed
to
excite
modern
emotional
interests
of
nonreligious
character...

Religion
is
the
vision
of
something
which
stands
beyond,
behind,
and
within,
the
passing
flux
of
immediate
things;
something
which
is
real,
and
yet
waiting
to
be
realised;
something
which
is
a
remote
possibility,
and
yet
the
greatest
of
present
facts;
something
that
gives
meaning
to
all
that
passes,
and
yet
eludes
apprehension;
something
whose
possession
is
the
final
good,
and
yet
is
beyond
all
reach;
something
which
is
the
ultimate
ideal,
and
the
hopeless
quest."
¹⁴

6.
The Vanishing Act

To
the
other
divorced
party,
science,
the
parting
of
the
ways
seemed
at
the
beginning
to
be
an
unmitigated
boon.
Freed
from
mystical
ballast,
science
could
sail
ahead
at
breathtaking
speed
to
its
conquest
of
new
lands
beyond
every
dream.
Within
two
centuries
it
transformed
the
mental
outlook
of
homo
sapiens
and
transformed
the
face
of
his
planet.
But
the
price
paid
was
proportionate:
it
carried
the
species
to
the
brink
of
physical
selfdestruction,
and
into
an
equally
unprecedented
spiritual
impasse.
Sailing
without
ballast,
reality
gradually
dissolved
between
the
physicist's
hands;
matter
itself
evaporated
from
the
materialist's
universe.

This
uncanny
vanishing
act
began,
as
we
saw,
with
Galileo
and
Descartes.
In
that
famous
passage
in
The
Assayer
(see
p.
469),
Galileo
banished
the
qualities
which
are
the
very
essence
of
the
sensual
world
–
colour
and
sound,
heat,
odour,
and
taste
–
from
the
realm
of
physics
to
that
of
subjective
illusion.
Descartes
carried
the
process
one
step
further
by
paring
down
the
reality
of
the
external
world
to
particles
whose
only
quality
was
extension
in
space
and
motion
in
space
and
time.
At
first
this
revolutionary
approach
to
nature
looked
so
promising
that
Descartes
believed
he
would
be
able
to
complete
the
whole
edifice
of
the
new
physics
by
himself.
His
less
sanguine
contemporaries
thought
that
it
might
take
as
much
as
two
generations
to
wrest
its
last
secret
from
nature.
"The
particular
phenomena
of
the
arts
and
sciences
are
in
reality
but
a
handful,"
said
Francis
Bacon.
"The
invention
of
all
causes
and
sciences
would
be
the
labour
of
but
a
few
years."
¹⁵

But
in
the
two
centuries
that
followed,
the
vanishing
act
continued.
Each
of
the
"ultimate"
and
"irreducible"
primary
qualities
of
the
world
of
physics
proved
in
its
turn
to
be
an
illusion.
The
hard
atoms
of
matter
went
up
in
fireworks;
the
concepts
of
substance,
force,
of
effects
determined
by
causes,
and
ultimately
the
very
framework
of
space
and
time
turned
out
to
be
as
illusory
as
the
"tastes,
odours
and
colours"
which
Galileo
had
treated
so
contemptuously.
Each
advance
in
physical
theory,
with
its
rich
technological
harvest,
was
bought
by
a
loss
in
intelligibility.
These
losses
on
the
intellectual
balance
sheet,
however,
were
much
less
in
evidence
than
the
spectacular
gains;
they
were
light-heartedly
accepted
as
passing
clouds
which
the
next
advance
would
dissolve.
The
seriousness
of
the
impasse
became
only
apparent
in
the
second
quarter
of
our
century,
and
then
only
to
the
more
philosophically-minded
among
scientists,
who
had
retained
a
certain
immunity
against
what
one
might
call
the
new
scholasticism
of
theoretical
physics.