SCIENCE AND MATERIALISM

Manawatu Herald, Volume LI, Issue 4451, 13 May 1930, Page 1

SCIENCE AND MATERIALISM

As “Che best possible euro Cor materialism” contemplation ot the progress in physics is recommended by Dr. lv. A. 'Millikan, the renowned A merican scientist, in an article, in Scribner's Magazine. He says llmt a hundred years ago physics consisted ot six distinct, sharply separated departments: mechanics, molecular physics, heat, sound, light, electricity. Beginning with the discovery about 18;>0 that heat was not a substance, but simply molecular motion, all the partitions have been 'broken down and it has been established that there is no distinction between other and matter, and that there is an in ter-rela-tedness, a unity, a oneness about the whole 'of nature. “Is it at all likely in the light of that his lory that we can long maintain airtight. compartments separating ether or matter, from life and mind?” he asks. Dr. Millikan rel'ers to the astonishing extension of hitman vision, which now perceives the constituent parts of the atom mid observes the “amazing orderliness" in the many parts of its nucleus. Again, man has turned his microscope upon the living cell and found it even more complex than the atom, with many parts each performing its function necessary to the life of the whole, and again he has turned his great telescopes upon the spiral nebulae a million light years away and there also found system and order. “After all that, is there anyone who still talks about the materialism of science?” he asks. “Rather does the scientist join with the psalmist of thousands of years ago in reverently (proclaiming- ‘the Heavens declare the glory of God and the Firmament, shewelh Mis handiwork. The God of Science is the spirit of rational order and of orderly development, the integrating factor in the world of atoms and of ether and of ideas and of duties and of intelligence. Materialism is surely not a sin of modern science.