A note of uncertainty is beginning to show itself, however, for thoughtful physicists are seeing the _impasse_ into which their unbridled hypotheses have led them. Abstruse mathematical analysis is again proving to us, what Pascal, Newton, Lagrange, and philosophy had demonstrated in a simpler way, that the mechanistic method can, at best, only picture an objective world as it seems to us, and not as it is. As a recent physicist confesses: “The physicist thus finds himself in a world from which the bottom has dropped clean out; as he penetrates deeper and deeper it eludes him and fades away by the highly unsportsmanlike device of just becoming meaningless. No refinement of measurement will avail to carry him beyond the portals of this shadowy domain which he cannot even mention without logical inconsistency. A _bound_ is thus forever set to the curiosity of the physicist. What is more, the mere existence of this bound means that he must give up his most cherished convictions and faith. The world is not a world of reason, understandable by the intellect of man, but as we penetrate ever deeper, the very law of cause and effect, which we had thought to be a formula to which we could force God himself to subscribe, ceases to have meaning.”[1] The answer to this naïve confession is simple enough: there never was a _bottom_ to his hypothetical world, as he could have foreseen if he had acquainted himself with the warning of the more profound men of science, philosophers, and humanists. The writer adds that this failure, now proved, “must forever keep the physicist humble.” But there is no cause for him to think lowly of himself for what he has accomplished and for what he may achieve. He should, rather, be modest and restrict himself to what can be done legitimately by the scientific method. I fear, however, that in spite of such occasional confessions, the physicists are neither humble nor modest, but are merely bewildered. The false pretensions of science must be wholly abandoned, and the problems of our destiny be examined by a wise judgment drawn from human experience, before we can hope for a sane and humanistic philosophy. FOOTNOTES [1] “The New Vision of Science,” by Professor P. W. Bridgman, _Harper’s Magazine_, 1929. _Humanism: An Essay at Definition_ IRVING BABBITT I