I suspect that an utter confusion of thought has arisen here from the ambiguity of a word--as has happened immemorially with metaphysicians better and worse than Mr. Whitehead. Science as an accumulation and classification and utilisation of observed facts may go on from victory to victory; but science as a name for such hypothetical theories of time and space, matter and motion and life, as those broached by the Darwinians of the nineteenth century, or the Einsteinian relativists of the twentieth, is not a progress in insight but a lapse from one naïve assumption to another in a vicious circle of self-contradicting monisms. It really is not easy to understand the state of mind of one, cognisant of the history of thought, who urges us to seek relief from the present _débâcle_--Mr. Whitehead himself places our intellectual and spiritual level lower than it has ever been since the Dark Ages--by introducing the hypothetical method of science into religion. This is his analysis of the present condition of the popular mind: “A scientific realism, based on mechanism, is conjoined with an unwavering belief in the world of men and of the higher animals as being composed of self-determining organisms. This radical inconsistency at the basis of modern thought accounts for much that is half-hearted and wavering in our civilisation.” My reading of history is different. I should assert that our vacillating half-heartedness is the inevitable outcome of the endeavour, persistent since the naturalistic invasion of the Renaissance, to flee from the paradox of life to some philosophy which will merge, no matter how, the mechanical and the human together. I should assert that the only escape from our muddle is to overthrow this idol of Unity, this Demon of the Absolute, this abortion sprung from the union of science and metaphysics, and to submit ourselves humbly to the stubborn and irreducible fact that a stone and the human soul cannot be brought under the same definition. There are two laws discrete Not reconciled,-- Law for man, and law for thing; The last builds town and fleet, But it runs wild, And doth the man unking. For legitimate science one may have the deepest respect. But to scientific absolutism masquerading as religion, one may say justly and truly what was said so unjustly and cruelly to Keats: Back to your gallipots! FOOTNOTES [18] Sections IV and V of the title essay in _The Demon of the Absolute_ (New Shelburne Essays, Vol. I), 1928; reprinted with the kind permission of the author and of the Princeton University Press. Section IV (I, as here reprinted) concerns “The Fetish of Pure Art” and section V (II) “The Fetish of Pure Science.” [19] _Nuovi Saggi di Estetica_, 1920. [20] _La Deshumanización del Arte_, Madrid, 1925.