all was. “What”, you cry, “is the point of men being born, and loving, and dying, if the experiment of the earth is snuffed out by accident almost?” No one would answer you; just a cosmic silence. This might be the position, because frequently there is no answer to one's most anguished questions. But it surely makes more sense to believe that the earth's life was intended, or destined, or has the potential, to flower into something wonderful?
As with so many things, one can argue endlessly and reach no conclusion, and no prospect of a conclusion. What you see depends on how you look. Nor is any true reconciliation between the attitude of mind of the scientist and of the religious person possible, because even when these attitudes are in the same person, he is looking at things from two different points of view. The only reconciliation is to demonstrate that the two attitudes can co-exist in the same rational being. A reconciliation between science and religion, which takes the form of a verbal formulation, is not worth the paper it is written on, unless backed by a reconciliation lived in flesh and blood and spirit. This must be so; otherwise spirit would cease to be the reality, and verbal formulas and scientific equations would take its place.
Napoleon's judgment was that in war the moral was to the physical, as three to one; by the word “moral” he meant the spirit, the morale, the esprit de corps of his men. I have never been involved in war, but I am sure the same judgment is true of litigation. Of course you cannot do without witnesses and legal arguments; but, when these are equally balanced, success will go to the side which gives the deepest thought to the preparation, and the most lively imagination to the presentation, provided you remember there is luck in it too. Anyone who thinks that you can predict from written statements whether you will succeed, must be ignorant of how things work out in practice. The case of the man, charged with being in charge of a motor vehicle when unfit through…