Yet such independence, however glorious inwardly, cannot help diminishing the prestige of the arts in the world.  If science misled us before, when it was full of clearness and confidence, how shall we trust it now that it is all mystery and paradox?  If classical physics needed this fundamental revision, near to experience and fruitful as it was, what revision will not romantic physics require?  Nor is the future alone insecure:  even now the prophets hardly understand one another, or perhaps themselves; and some of them interlard their science with the most dubious metaphysics.  Naturally the enemies of science have not been slow to seize this opportunity:  the soft-hearted, the muddle-headed, the superstitious are all raising their voices, no longer in desperate resistance to science, but hopefully, and in its name.  Science, they tell us, is no longer hostile to religion, or to divination of any sort.  Indeed, divination is a science too.  Physics is no longer materialistic since space is now curved, and filled with an ether through which light travels at 300,000 kilometres per second—­an immaterial rate:  because if anything material ventured to move at that forbidden speed, it would be so flattened that it would cease to exist.  Indeed, matter is now hardly needed at all; its place has been taken by radio-activity, and by electrons which dart and whirl with such miraculous swiftness, that occasionally, for no known reason, they can skip from orbit to orbit without traversing the intervening positions—­an evident proof of free-will in them.  Or if solids should still seem to be material, there are astral bodies as well which are immaterial although physical; and as to ether and electricity, they are the very substance of spirit.  All this I find announced in newspapers and even in books as the breakdown of scientific materialism:  and yet, when was materialism more arrant and barbarous than in these announcements?  Something no doubt has broken down:  but I am afraid it is rather the habit of thinking clearly and the power to discern the difference between material and spiritual things.

The latest revolution in science will probably not be the last.  I do not know what internal difficulties, contradictions, or ominous obscurities may exist in the new theories, or what logical seeds of change, perhaps of radical change, might be discovered there by a competent critic.  I base my expectation on two circumstances somewhat more external and visible to the lay mind.  One circumstance is that the new theories seem to be affected, and partly inspired, by a particular philosophy, itself utterly insecure.  This philosophy regards the point of view as controlling or even creating the object seen; in other words, it identifies the object with the experience or the knowledge of it:  it is essentially a subjective, psychological, Protestant philosophy.  The study of perspectives, which a severer critic might call illusions, is one of the most interesting and enlightening