Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/14

 universe, and endeavouring to answer all questions in the terms it supplies.

I suggest that there can be no doubt but that this general notion expresses large, all-pervading truths about the world around us. The only question is as to how fundamental these truths may be. In others words, we have to ask what large features of the universe cannot be expressed in these terms. We have also to ask whether we cannot find some other set of notions which will explain the importance of this common-sense notion, and will also explain its relations to those other features ignored by the common-sense notion.

When we survey the subsequent course of scientific thought throughout the seventeenth century up to the present day, two curious facts emerge. In the first place, the development of natural science has gradually discarded every single feature of the original common-sense notion, Nothing