each other; unless perhaps two people who dwelt in each other could transcend all boundaries.
So what I have done, I am sure will be repeated by others, and expressed in more felicitous language, because in a sense all I have done is to try to describe the truth about man in a limited context. Yet it is not only an attempt to describe man, and his position in creation, in a particular way; it is also an attempt to reconcile the religious and the secular, the spiritual and the eternal. To do that means at least describing how the same mind can embrace such contradictory ideas at the same time. It means constructing the very beginnings of a theory of thought; and it seemed to me that the simplest method was to extend the theory of attitudes of Kant, Hegel, and Collingwood, in order to show how the varied experience of mankind induces into the mind an equal variety of belief. Jung in Psychological Types said that a theory of thought was a seven sealed book; well, I have turned over the first pages. Teilhard de Chardin in the Phenomenon of Man said that the gulf between the world of the mind and the world of action was still unbridged; well, I have bridged it. It is always easier to do something the second time, and no doubt others in due time will do it better than I. It has been done for the first time, that is what matters.
The chasm is there just the same in natural science. When I was a student, we were taught that science described, but did not explain; that Newton said that bodies behaved as if they attracted each other with a force that decreased as the square of the distance between them. He did not say that bodies attracted each other; how could they, unless joined by a piece of elastic? Science is on safe ground when it claims only to describe; then an hypothesis is just the simplest way of correlating the known sense perceptions, and therefore is the best description. This way, one avoids the difficulty of having to prove that the simplest explanation is necessarily the true one, when in the ordinary affairs of life it frequently is not. And in truth, Newton's view was…