This process of adaptation displays itself in its most characteristic shape when it assumes that epochal form known as “inversion of point of view.” An example of such an epochal form of adaptation to new factual material is to be found in the inversion that took place in the astronomical idea of the world when Copernicus displaced Ptolemy. A similar inversion, but in the epistemological domain, was effected by Kant, in terms of which the conformity to law observed in phenomena was lifted out of the occurrences and placed in the mind observing them. Another such inversion, but in the realm of biology, is the transition from the old teleological view which said, “The eye leads _to_ seeing,” to the modern mechanistic view which says, “The eye results _from_ seeing.” It is one of the most striking proofs of how little science is acquainted with her own nature that she extols these inversions as the greatest of her achievements. Far from that, they are nothing but the clearest possible expression of the fact that the human mind can do nothing but limp along in the wake of events; and as it does so, the incongruity, the lack of consonance, ofttimes becomes so very pronounced that nothing short of a complete revolution--some such inversion to wit--is needed every little while to relieve the situation? Even the most successful of these inversions ever remains but an effort at adjustment. The Copernican inversion also is nothing but a useful “reading” of the facts of the astronomical world. When a sufficiency of new factual material has accumulated, then just as men perforce were swept away out of the Ptolemaic system, so in turn will they be swept away perforce out of the Copernican. That whereby science finds herself constrained to make ever fresh adjustments, is experiment. With reference to this latter she resembles the neophyte in magic of Goethe’s poem, with his broom. One is in danger of drowning in the superabundance of material, and knows not the magic word wherewith to bring the irresistible inflow of results to a stand-still. Were the fresh facts which science is continually bringing forward real stages on the way to knowledge, then in the hour of death we could not help but feel like the expiring caravan animal in the desert, as with dying eyes it gazes after the caravan that wends its way there before it towards the longed-for goal now to itself for ever lost. Death to the thinker would be a most terrible occurrence, the hugest of all catastrophes. But science does not wend its way towards any goal at all. That question which science from her own resources can never answer, as to whether her endless series, converging, tend towards any goal, finds answer thus in the Buddha-thought: We can do naught save react, inexhaustibly react to the external world, and so doing we alike remain eternally near and eternally far from knowledge.