Woe Unto The Defeated, Whom History Treads

Scientists Are Peeping Toms At The Keyhole Of Eternity.

If Time Is Treated In Modern Physics As A Dimension On A Par With The Dimensions Of Space, Why Should We A Priori Exclude The Possibility That We Are Pulled As Well As Pushed Along Its Axis? The Future Has, After All, As Much Or As Little Reality As The Past, And There Is Nothing Logically Inconceivable In Introducing, As A Working Hypothesis, An Element Of Finality, Supplementary To The Element Of Causality, Into Our Equations. It Betrays A Great Lack Of Imagination To Believe That The Concept Of "purpose" Must Necessarily Be Associated With Some Anthropomorphic Deity.

We Find In The History Of Ideas Mutations Which Do Not Seem To Correspond To Any Obvious Need, And At First Sight Appear As Mere Playful Whimsies Such As Apollonius' Work On Conic Sections, Or The Non-euclidean Geometries, Whose Practical Value Became Apparent Only Later.

All "if" Statements About The Past Are As Dubious As Prophecies Of The Future Are. It Seems Fairly Plausible That If Alexander Or Ghengis Khan Had Never Been Born, Some Other Individual Would Have Filled His Place And Executed The Design Of The Hellenic Or Mongolic Expansion; But The Alexanders Of Philosophy And Religion, Of Science And Art, Seem Less Expendable; Their Impact Seems Less Determined By Economic Challenges And Social Pressures; And They Seem To Have A Much Wider Range Of Possibilities To Influence The Direction, Shape And Texture Of Civilizations.

Of All Forms Of Mental Activity, The Most Difficult To Induce Even In The Minds Of The Young, Who May Be Presumed Not To Have Lost Their Flexibility, Is The Art Of Handling The Same Bundle Of Data As Before, But Placing Them In A New System Of Relations With One Another By Giving Them A Different Framework, All Of Which Virtually Means Putting On A Different Kind Of Thinking-cap For The Moment. It Is Easy To Teach Anybody A New Fact...but It Needs Light From Heaven Above To Enable A Teacher To Break The Old Framework In Which The Student Is Accustomed To Seeing.