A DEAD MATERIALISM

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 February 1932, Page 2

A DEAD MATERIALISM

LAST OF THE SUPERSTITIONS.

Expert evidence at the recent centenary congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science strangely confirms the famous prediction that the world will one day look back upon materialism as merely the last of the superstitions. Science to-day does not dogmatise about a spiritual world.' It is not its place so to do. But, notably, its foremost spokesmen find room —even a necessity—for such a sphere. Anyway, the old materialism is as dead as the moa. (writes R- F- K- Felstead, in the “Sydney Morning Herald”). Eddington finds matter far too mysterious to be explained entirely by known natural laws. And the more the strange ways of the electrons are probed, the more clearly do they seem to defy the old theory of material cause and effect. Sullivan insists that the electrons within an atom can jump instantaneously from one position to another—without passing over the intervening space. It is uncanny, apparently magical. No sleight of hand by a Houdini could more amazingly arrest the human imagination. And this electron wizardly is no conjuring dodge. It is a plain fact in the material routine. What wonder that Sullivan finds matter so strange —so “ghostly” is his own significant term—or that the essentially scientific Jeans conceives the visible universe as “a thought in the mind of God.”

To the theologian there is a strangely familiar ring about such utterances. But the significant fact is that these confessions are not maae by gropers after spiritual reality. They are the admissions of men whose life work is the analysing of matter, and who have found in matter some facts and forces inexplicable by any known material laws. This revolutionary change of expert thought registered its first victory when it proved that the electron is not material. Atoms are composed of these tiny particles called electrons, and very queer are such “particles-” Figuratively, they have been likened to tiny grains of sand. Actually, they are no such physical form. Electrons consist of electricity—and of nothing but electricity. And electricity is certainly not a substance. There, ’’at a thud, collapses the whole hoary old fetish of materialism. Eddington has described the electron as “something unkown doing we know not what,” and thinks the material universe is the effect of some immaterial power outside time and spaceSCIENCE A “BEST SELLER.”

Next to the marvel of this expert change of mind, is the fact that the man in the street is deeply interested in such themes. A famous publisher said the other day that “science and sex are the two best-sellers.” Sex aside, there is no doubt about the popularity of the latest scientific probings. Such a demand has been created for popular editions from the pen of Jeans that he has been waggishly but aptly dubbed the “Edgar Wallace of the Cosmos.” Not that this scientist tries to ape the tricks of the fiction “thiller.” He does not attempt to play to the gallery by piling marvel on marvel. He will not “astonish the natives” by a single sortie into the bizarre. His books are sound, sober treatises on profound themes. And as such they win the thanks of inquiring multitudes. His main field of research is astronomy. And it is significant how astronomy, in its age-long career, has managed to make and to break successive theologies. The earliest religions were closely allied with the stars. Babylon’s chief patron was a solar deity. The pyramids of Egypt were stellar observatories as well as dark fanes for weird priestly rites. England’s Stonehenge still carries relics of its original sun ceremonies. And meteorites, fused and pitted by their earthward rush through the air, have from time unreckoned been enshrined as sacred symbols of stellar deities. In Phyrgia, one of these fallen stones was adored as Cybele; and the famous Diana of the Ephesians was probably a carved meteoric fragment. The Iroquois Indians suggestively named the Milky Way the “road of souls,” and both Greeks and Romans traced doors in the night sky through which human beings were supposed to depart into paradise. Of particular intrest just now is the way astronomy has at times unsettled outward forms of faith’—without injuring the kernel. When, for example, the sixteenth century Copernicus exploded the cosy old notion that this earth was the fixed hub of the universe, he gave the placid religion of his day a jolt that seemed to shatter it to bits. And when Galileo, with his newly-invented telescope, scanned the sky and published his heretical defiance of the timid saws of antiquity, faith seemed finally vanquished. But all that these two astronomers really did was to free a living faith from the petty conception that had long cluttered it. In their roomier universe the religious world was able to reconstruct the verbal fabric of its creed. Naturally, that very roominess in turn troubled some sensitive minds. So distant are some of the lonely outpost stars of the cosmos that their light, hurrying earthwards at incredible speed, takes centuries to make that journey. Carlyle found that vastness depressing. Pascal also con-' fessed that the eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrified him- “The intolerable vastness bows him down, the awful homeless spaces scare his soul.”

MIND TRANSCENDS SPACE. But that is not the last word from science on the subject. Promptly it was shown that vastness, after all, need not be such a terrible thing- to behold. What if the cosmos was bigger than the world had previously guessed? What has mere bulk of star matter to do with spiritual belief? The human mind that discovered Neptune, by mathematically tracking its unseen orbit, is surely greater than the blind gigantic bulk of Neptune itself. And the stars, that seem immortal, are certainly not so. As the blacksmith, throwing his bits of whitehot metal on the ground to cool, watches them gradually change thiough all the shades of yellow and red into the ultimate cold black, so the myriad stars, like sparks from the anvil of God, slowly dull by contact with the intense cold of space, and pass, in the long course of cen-1 r a " the colours, from , B ter ° r Sw " s . through' the yellow of our own Suu, to tie

ruby red of Antares, at last to join the great majoriy of dead black suns, And the human mind that can comprehend this process is more magnificant than the Solar System itself. If momentarily seized with. Carlyleatn panic when looking at the hollow immensity of the heavens, it is a healthy corrective to turn to the microscope. For if the tellescope sometimes gives the stars an ominous aspect, of “innumerable pitiless, passionless eyes,” the microscope shows how creative skill is lavished generously upon the minute particles beneath our feet as upon the immense systems that glimmer overhead. To be small is not to be excluded from the careful consideration of Nature. An aeroplane’s propeller blade is a marvel of laminated woodwork. But it is not so exquisite as the laminations that nature builds inside a common oyster-shell. The electron is as marvellous in its way as the sun. Indeed, the latest scientific report is that the electron is so wonderful that it must surely be the expression of a spiritual world.