Religion and Science
5. Religion and Science
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Leaving out all aesthetic, ethical, or spiritual
aspects of our environment, we are faced with
qualities such as massiveness, substantiality,
extension, duration, which are supposed to
belong to the domain of physics. In a sense
they do belong; but physics is not in a position
to handle them directly. The essence of their
nature is inscrutable; we may use mental
pictures to aid calculations, but no image in
the mind can be a replica of that which is not
in the mind. And so in its actual procedure
physics studies not these inscrutable qualities,
but pointer-readings which we can observe.
The readings, it is true, reflect the fluctuations
of the world-qualities; but our exact
knowledge is of the readings, not of the quali-
ties. The former have as much resemblance to
the latter as a telephone number has to a
subscriber.
The fact that science is confined to a
knowledge of structure is obviously of great
“humanistic” importance. For it means that
the problem of the nature of reality is not
prejudged. We are no longer required to
