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The idea that there is a conflict between science and art, which is at bottom the idea that there is a conflict between science and mysticism, rests, I have suggested, upon an old-fashioned conception of the status of physics. The first duty of a man who bases his conclusions on science is to make sure that his science is up-to-date. The science that leads to the depressing conclusions I have just sketched is not up-to-date. Until a few years ago the physicist thought that the material universe he dealt with was a real, objectively existing universe in the sense that, in the absence of consciousness, it would be very much the same as it appeared to be. This universe was subject to laws, and these laws might conceivably have been different. There was no a priori reason, for instance, why the force of gravitation should not vary as the inverse cube of the distance. There was no a priori reason why matter and energy should be conserved. These were laws of governance of the material universe; their discovery had required much effort and the rejection of alternatives. Man was in no sense responsible for them: he happened to live in a universe governed by them. These were the iron laws of the Victorians and are the laws, apparently, that depress modern poets. One of the great discoveries of relativity theory is that these laws need be no more depressing than the laws of Euclidean geometry. No artist has felt his aspirations baseless because he cannot draw a circle whose circumference is six times its radius. He has no more right to despair because there is an inexorable law of gravitation. This has been made clear by Professor Eddington, whose mathematical development of relativity theory is of great philosophical importance, and would, in a more adequately educated community, be given more newspaper headlines than Tutankhamen. The real universe, according to relativity theory, is a four-dimensional world of point-events. Of the nature of point-events we know nothing. All that we require to know, for the purposes of physics, is that it takes four numbers to specify a point-event uniquely, and that some kind of structure—a minimum amount of structure—may be postulated of the world of point-events. We then find, purely by mathematical processes, that certain characteristics of this world will have the quality of permanence. The mind, faced with this world of evanescent point-events, selects those characteristics that are permanent as being of special interest. This is merely because the mind happens to be that kind of thing. As a consequence of this predilection of the mind there arises space and time, matter, and the laws of nature. There arises, in fact, the “objective universe”. The real world of point-events has many other characteristics to which the mind pays no attention. A different principle of selection, exercised on the same total world of point-events, would result in an utterly different universe, a universe that is, for us, quite unimaginable. And the universe that the mind has selected and constructed from the world of point-events does not in the least depend on what the point-events are. All that is necessary is that a certain minimum amount of structure should be attributed to the world of point-events. It is from the relations between the point-events, quite independent of their substance, that the mind has created the material universe and its laws. These laws, it must be emphasized, are necessary consequences of the mind’s selective action. They are necessary in the same sense that the sum of the three interior angles of a Euclidean triangle must be two right angles. Of the underlying reality deduced by physics we can say almost nothing. It may be what Newton called the “sensorium” of God, and the point-events may be his thoughts. They do not succeed one another in time for, at this stage of analysis, space and time are “merged in one”. This perfectly gratuitous hypothesis may appeal to some mystics, for our thoughts, considered as belonging to the world of point-events, would be part of the thoughts of God. It would be indeed true that in him we lived and moved and had our being. We see, then, the limitations of physics. All that depends on the structure of reality belongs to physics, including other universes than ours. All that depends upon the substance of reality for ever lies outside physics. As to the actual universe we live in, why we should regard it as actual is a problem for psychology. The difference between the actual and the non-actual is a distinction conferred by our minds. It is very probable that the whole movement of the universe in time is also contributed by our minds. It seems to be true that events do not take place—we come across them. Why we do not know the future is again a question of psychology. Ignorance of the future, like the existence of the material universe, is a clue to the constitution of our minds. This has a bearing on the question of “purpose” in the universe. The conception of purpose seems to suppose a process in time, and therefore may be a totally irrelevant idea when applied to reality.

The philosophical implications of relativity theory will doubtless take a long time to work out. The four-dimensional universe of point-events is something that can be argued about but it is, to use an old-fashioned phrase, “inconceivable”. Mankind, excepting professional logicians, never remains content with the inconceivable. A purely logical conclusion is not enough; it has to be grasped imaginatively, by which I do not necessarily mean that it has to be pictured. To become familiar with a theory does not merely mean that one is able, as a form of mental wire-walking, to slip nimbly back and forth over the logical connections of the structure. It means taking it into oneself in some indefinable manner—becoming “intimate” with it. Only when a theory is “realized”, as we say, do we feel that we truly understand it. Ideas, points of view, that we were able to see only in flashes, become part of our normal intellectual equipment. The process may well be called a growth of consciousness. There are ideas which our consciousness, when it first approaches them is, as it were, too flabby to grasp. We first have to exercise our mental muscles. Every student of a line of thought such as mathematics, which is rather outside our normal preoccupations, becomes aware of an actual change in his mental powers. Notions so abstract that at first they seemed almost meaningless gradually become perfectly clear and permanent additions to one’s mental resources. Students of musical composition find that their capacity for mentally hearing a number of parts rapidly increases. In some cases it is almost as if a new faculty of the mind were born and developed.

The physics of recent years has made heavy demands upon our capacity for realization. The electron theory, with its analysis of matter into “disembodied charges of electricity” required, for its understanding, the breaking up of old habits of thought. To young students the idea was, at first, extremely baffling—almost nonsense. To realize it one had to make more abstract one’s idea of matter until the notion of “substance” was replaced by the notion of “behaviour”. Anything that behaved in the way characteristic of matter was matter. The central idea of the restricted principle of relativity, the idea of different time-systems, was still more difficult to grasp. In this case we had to become convinced that our ordinary idea of simultaneity, an idea which seemed perfectly clear, was really a bogus idea. The attacks on the theory of relativity show, for the most part, merely that their authors are unable to abandon old habits of thought. With the complete theory of relativity, as we have it now, the task of adjustment has become enormous. There cannot be, even now, more than very few scientific men who naturally approach a problem from the point of view of relativity theory. In most cases a conscious effort of mental preparation is required, such as occurs when a novelist, sitting down to continue his work, deliberately thinks himself into the appropriate frame of mind. Yet doubtless the next generation or so will think in terms of relativity theory as naturally as we thought in terms of the Newtonian system. I would not hold it as impossible that the human mind may come to realize, imaginatively as well as logically, the four-dimensional space-time continuum. But it seems that the mind of the physicist, at any rate, will have to do more than become familiar with relativity theory. It will have to accommodate itself somehow to the quantum theory for, although we can write down the laws which govern sub-atomic phenomena and make deductions from them, these laws are, at present, unintelligible. An electron behaves as if it had foreknowledge of what it was about to do and could make the mathematical calculations necessary to achieve its end. We cannot admit this to be possible, and we can only suppose that the difficulty arises from the way we think about things. We must learn to think in a different way, and what the consequences of that new way of thinking will be no one can say. We know very little of the possibilities of the development of the human consciousness.

The proper attitude to-day in which the problem of man’s place in nature should be approached is one of bewilderment and humility. Both the material universe and the mind of man are very mysterious things. At the present time it is only an inadequate mind which is confident that it knows what is impossible. There was never a time when hearty dogmatism and loud confidence were more out of place. We must think as best we can, of course. The next step upward in the development of the human consciousness will not be achieved by either slovenly credulity or slovenly scepticism, but only by a terrifying mental travail. I see a human mind as some multiple plant, here in full flower, there still in the bud. Different minds have flowered in different ways. Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit points to the complete development in him of something which those of us who understand him have only in embryo. In those who do not understand him it is non-existent. And the great mystics ought at least to make us doubt whether it is we who are not deficient rather than they who are mad. It is rash to dismiss our exceptional moods, our strange flashes of what seems like insight, as mere whimsies without significance. They may be faint stirrings of the next thing that is destined to become fully alive. All that we can say is that the mind lives in a universe largely of its own creation, and that the universe, together with the mind, will change in ways we cannot foresee.