Modern
science, and the
infinitely distant and the infinitely small,
Frithjof
Schuon
...let us return for
a moment to the modern scientific outlook, since it plays so decisive
a part in the modern mentality. There seems to be absolutely no reason
for going into raptures about space-flights; the saints in their ecstasies
climb infinitely higher, and these words are used in no allegorical sense,
but in a perfectly concrete sense that could be called "scientific"
or "exact". In vain does modern science explore the infinitely
distant and the infinitely small; it can reach in its own way the world
of galaxies and that of molecules, but it is unaware -- since it believes
neither in Revelation nor in pure intellection -- of all the immaterial
and supra-sensorial worlds that as it were envelop our sensorial dimensions,
and in relation to which these dimensions are no more than a sort of fragile
coagulation, destined to disappear when its time comes before the blinding
power of the Divine Reality. To postulate a science without metaphysic
is a flagrant contradiction, for without metaphysic there can be no standards
and no criteria, no intelligence able to penetrate, contemplate
and coordinate. Both a relativistic psychologism which ignores the absolute,
and also evolutionism which is absurd because contradictory (since the
greater cannot come from the less) can be explained only by this exclusion
of what is essential and total in intelligence. [Light on the Ancient
Worlds, p. 130].
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