Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/164

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You Gentiles

or eight hundred and eighty: the atom may be a kind of solar system, or it may be a figure of speech: life may be the function of a complicated molecular structure or it may be an illusion: whichever should turn out to be "true," we should remain the same: our only concern is with the exploitation of these things for physical advantages, and as far as that is concerned it does not matter whether we have the truth or have hit on a method by conventional hypothesis. The Ptolemaic system of astronomy could permit the calculation of eclipses as accurately as the Copernican. "Cycle in epicycle, orb in orb" works as effectively, if the figures are closely enough watched, as ellipses with the sun at one of the foci.

For science is a game, a particular systematization, which might well be any other systematization. Indeed, despite the prodigious number of facts which science has unveiled, no new type of spiritual outlook has been evolved. Is the general consciousness or self-consciousness of the modern material-

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