Theory and practice in the latest science are still allied, otherwise
neither of them would prosper as it does; but each has taken a leap in its
own direction. The distance between them has become greater than the naked
eye can measure, and each of them in itself has become unintelligible. We
roll and fly at dizzy speeds, and hear at incredible distances; at the
same time we imagine and calculate to incredible depths. The technique of
science, like that of industry, has become a thing in itself; the one
veils its object, which is nature, as the other defeats its purpose, which
is happiness. Science often seems to be less the study of things than the
study of science. It is now more scholastic than philosophy ever was. We
are invited to conceive organisms within organisms, so minute, so free,
and so dynamic, that the heart of matter seems to explode into an endless
discharge of fireworks, or a mathematical nightmare realised in a thousand
places at once, and become the substance of the world. What is even more
remarkable--for the notion of infinite organisation has been familiar to
the learned at least since the time of Leibniz--the theatre of science is
transformed no less than the actors and the play. The upright walls of
space, the steady tread of time, begin to fail us; they bend now so
obligingly to our perspectives that we no longer seem to travel through
them, but to carry them with us, shooting them out or weaving them about
us according to some native fatality, which is left unexplained. We seem
to have reverted in some sense from Copernicus to Ptolemy: except that the
centre is now occupied, not by the solid earth, but by _any_ geometrical
point chosen for the origin of calculation. Time, too, is not measured by
the sun or stars, but by _any_ "clock"--that is, by any recurrent rhythm
taken as a standard of comparison. It would seem that the existence and
energy of each chosen centre, as well as its career and encounters, hang
on the collateral existence of other centres of force, among which it must
wend its way: yet the only witness to their presence, and the only known
property of their substance, is their "radio-activity", or the physical