Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/171

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The Games of Science

these mechanics as was known a thousand years ago have come to the same conclusion regarding the nature of the universe.

There is in science a certain naïveté: the belief that facts differ in their nature; the belief that a fact which it is more difficult to unearth is therefore profounder than a fact which is obvious; the belief that a microbe, because it needs a microscope to reveal it, touches truth more deeply than the flea, which can be seen with the naked eye: yet a fact is not more valuable for being difficult of access, any more than a thought is more profound by having been made obscure.

In the end it comes to this: science, which is the accumulation of literal fact, hopes that the accumulation of facts will reveal the nature of fact. Science seems to believe (if I may use these rather clumsy locutions) that some facts are of a different order from other facts, going nearer to the sources of the nature of things. This is untrue. All facts are on the same plane. Facts are not explanatory, but expository, and what they ex-

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