Had science in its vehement career from discovery to discovery not
forgotten its own beginnings so completely, it would not have needed
its latest researches to bring out a principle which it had in fact
been following from the outset - a principle which philosophy had
already recognized, if not in quite the same formulation, in the
eighteenth century. Indeterminacy, as we have just seen it explained by
Schrödinger, is nothing but the exact continuation of Humean scepticism.

1 In his book, Science and the Human Temperament (Dublin, 1935).


CHAPTER IV

The Country that is Not Ours

The last two chapters have served to show the impasse into which human
perception and thinking have come - in so far as they have been used
for scientific purposes - by virtue of the relationship to the world in
which man's consciousness found itself when it awoke to itself at the
beginning of modern times. Now although the onlooker in man, especially
in the earliest stage of our period, gave itself up to the conviction
that a self-contained picture of the universe could be formed out of
the kind of materials available to it, it nevertheless had a dim
inkling that this picture, because it lacked all dynamic content, had
no bearing on the real nature of the universe. Unable to find this
reality within himself, the world-onlooker set about searching in his
own way for what was missing, and turned to the perceptible world
outside man. Here he came, all unexpectedly, upon ... electricity.
Scarcely was electricity discovered than it drew human scientific