The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
That is something like a vision of the vital change in the whole
trend of natural philosophy in the last twenty or thirty years.
It matters little whether we regard it as the deepening
or the destruction of the scientific universe.
It matters little whether we say that grander abysses have
opened in it, or merely that the bottom has fallen out of it.
It is quite self-evident that scientific men are at war with wilder
and more unfathomable fancies than the facts of the age of Huxley.
I attempt no controversy about any of the particular cases:
it is the cumulative effect of all of them that makes the impression
one of common sense. It is really true that the perspective and
dimensions of the man's bedroom have altered; the disciples of Einstein
will tell him that straight lines are curved and perhaps measure
more one way than the other; if that is not a nightmare, what is?
It is really true that the clock has altered, for time has turned
into the fourth dimension or something entirely different;
and the telephone may fairly be said to have faded from view in favour
of the invisible telepath. It is true that the pattern of the paper
has changed, for the very pattern of the world has changed;
we are told that it is not made of atoms like the dots but of
electrons like the spirals. Scientific men of the first rank
have seen a table move by itself, and walk upstairs by itself.
It does not matter here whether it was done by the spirits; it is enough
that few still pretend that is entirely done by the spiritualists.
I am not dealing with doctrines but with doubts; with the mere fact
that all these things have grown deeper and more bewildering.
Some people really are throwing their medicine bottles out
of the window; and some of them at least are working purely
psychological cures of a sort that would once have been called
miraculous healing. I do not say we know how far this could go;
it is my whole point that we do not know, that we are in contact
with numbers of new things of which we know uncommonly little.
But the vital point is, not that science deals with what we do not know,
but that science is destroying what we thought we did know.
Nearly all the latest discoveries have been destructive, not of the old
dogmas of religion, but rather of the recent dogmas of science.
The conservation of energy could not itself be entirely conserved.
The atom was smashed to atoms. And dancing to the tune
of Professor Einstein, even the law of gravity is behaving
with lamentable levity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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