The mechanism of the human mind resembles that of a great clock. To the casual reader of history its hands appear to be moving the whole time, but the clock-maker and the historian are aware that they alternately remain stationary and leap suddenly forward. The difference is that in the one instance the stationary periods may be measured in seconds, and in the other by centuries. The Dark Ages, for instance, represent roughly the stationary periods between the fall of Rome and the dawn of medievalism. The medieval mind succeeds to the intellectual supremacy of the pagan mind. To Roger Bacon and Thomas Aquinas, to Chaucer and Langland, fell the mantle of Aristotle and Plato, of Virgil and Lucretius. But when the curiosity of scholasticism died away in the jargon of chop logic, and the autocracy of Rome stamped out the fire of speculative and literary Oxford, the hands of the clock hung immovable until they suddenly sprang forward, and the hour of the Renaissance and the Reformation struck. The impetus of the Reformation was not renewed until the sowing of Voltaire and Rousseau was reaped in the French Revolution. Then, with the retirement of Napoleon to Elba, reaction again jammed on its brakes until they were suddenly ripped off in the great war.
It is from the hour of the great war that Lord Haldane dates the tremendous changes he sees developing, which he has outlined in the remarkable book he has named "The Reign of Relativity." The world, he sees, is casting about for a basis on which to build up its faith anew. In search of this he himself goes back to the pages of the New Testament, and quotes the familiar words, "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine." What, it may not unnaturally be asked, has all this got to do with relativity? The answer is, when you come to understand it everything. The Einstein theory, if it is made good, upsets the whole materialistic fabric of an objective reality so carefully built up, and carries the metaphysical and scientific argument of the schools back in the direction of Berkeley and Leibnitz. "The value of a man as a rational being turns," Lord Haldane writes, "not on external causation, not on his impulses, as a living organism, but on his capacity to rise above these impulses in controlling himself, and to become a citizen in a realm of higher ends." Now listen to what Mrs. Eddy wrote, almost fifty years ago, in a passage to be found on page 339 of Science and Health: "As the mythology of pagan Rome has yielded to a more spiritual idea of Deity, so will our material theories yield to spiritual ideas, until the finite gives place to the infinite, sickness to health, sin to holiness, and God's kingdom comes 'in earth, as it is in heaven.' The basis of all health, sinlessness, and immortality is the great fact that God is the only Mind; and this Mind must be not merely believed, but it must be understood." Natural science and scholastic metaphysics are, as Mr. Whistler might have said, creeping up to Christian Science. Relativity, as it is developed through the Einstein theory, is making this plain.
The difficulty of grasping all that this means lies in the fact that, as Dr. Wildon Carr so truly insists, when the human mind is required not merely to revise its conclusions but to amend its premises, a condition of mental giddiness is apt to follow, as though the firm ground of intellectual security were being swept from under its feet. This is precisely what Mrs. Eddy experienced in the labor of establishing Christian Science. The unthinking world joined with the thinking world, in accents of anger, of terror, or of contempt, and reechoed the cry of the demoniacs amidst the tombs, "Art thou come hither to torment us before the time?" Yet here is the same world, strewing palm leaves under the feet of Henri Bergson and Einstein for "creeping up" toward a position reached by her half a century ago. What is the explanation? The explanation, surely, is simple enough. It is, first, that half a century of debate, criticism, and demonstration has familiarized the world, all unconsciously, with pure metaphysics, so that it no longer feels quite so giddy when they are mentioned; and second, that although these philosophers have carried on the centuries-old battle over time and space, they have never pressed their conclusions remorselessly home as did Christ Jesus when he said, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." There is a dilemma compared to which Zeno's contention of the immobility of the flying arrow lapses from a paradox to a truism. Not a mere emendation of premises, which declares space and time to be concepts of the human mind instead of absolute realities, but a revolution which dismissed the human mind itself as a negation, as the parent of the flesh in which the truth does not abide.
