First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life

thinking men in the perpetual difficulty that arises from the fact that the universe can be seen in many different fashions and expressed by many different systems

ferent levels and in different planes, and that we accomplish a large amount of error a

oot of 2 with a rook rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife. One's conception of an atom is reached through a process of hypothesis and analysis, and in the world of atoms there are no knives and no men to cut. If you have thought with a strong consistent mental movement, then when you have thought of your atom under the knife blade, your knife blade has itself become a cloud of swinging grouped atoms, and your microscope lens a little universe of oscillatory and vibratory molecu

freely moving system of interlacing centres of force, what we call colour and sound is there no more than this length of vibration of that. We have reached to a conception of that universe of m

that there may be finer and subtler differences of level between one term and another, and that

in which one moves by analysis or synthesis, if you go down for example from matter to atoms and centres of force and up to men and states and countries - if you will imagine the ideas lying in that manner - you will get the beginnings of my intention. But our instrument, our process of thinking, like a drawing before the discovery of perspective, appears to have difficulties with the third dimension, appears capable only of dealing with or r

experience and there is no more indisputable fact than man's freedom of will, unless it is his complete moral responsibility. But make only the least penetrating of scientific analy

ater the reasonableness and convenience of regarding the common-sense