Whoever undertakes to explore the necessity of this connexion cannot evade the fact that the lines of the result had been marked out in the region of pure thought, as can be proved, before even the great discovery or invention was able to present it in a fully intelligible form. Even the achievement of Copernicus would follow this general rule of development: it was the last consequence of the belief in the Sun Myth which had never been forsaken by man in spite of the violent efforts of the Church and of man himself to force the geocentric view. Copernicus concentrated what had survived of the wisdom of the earliest priests--which includes also the germ of our modern ideas of energy and electricity--of the teachings of Anaxagoras and the Eleatics which had remained latent in our consciousness: his discovery was the transformation of a myth into science. Mankind, whose wandering fancy first feels presentiments, then thinks and wishes to know, is a large edition of the individual thinker. The latter sees further only because he, so to speak, stands on the shoulders of a sum-total of beings with a world-view. Let us turn our attention to an example from the most recent history of philosophy and discovery. The absolute continuity of events was one of the generally accepted canons of thought, and is even nowadays taught by serious philosophers as an incontrovertible element in our knowledge. The old quotation _Natura non facit saltus_, popularized by Linné, is one of the formulae of this apparently invincible truth. But deep down in the consciousness of man there has always been an opposition to it, and when the French philosopher Henri Bergson set out to break up this line of continuity by metaphysical means in ascribing to human knowledge an intermittent, cinematographic character, he was proclaiming in an audible and eloquent form only what had lain latent in a new but as yet incomplete philosophy. Bergson made no new "discovery," he felt his way intuitively into a new field of knowledge and recognized that the time was ripe for the real discovery. This was actually presented to us in our day by the eminent physicist Max Planck, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1919, in the form of his "Quantum Theory." This is not to be taken as meaning that a revolutionary philosophy and a triumph of scientific research now become coincident, but only that a discontinuous, intermittent sequence, an atomistic structure, was proved by means of the weapons of exact science, to be true of energies which, according to current belief, were expected to be radiated regularly and connectedly. This was probably not a case of the accidental coincidence of a new philosophical view with the results of reasoning from physical grounds, but a demand of time, exacting that the claims of a new principle of thought be recognized.