Article January 25, 1908 Issue

Science stands to-day upon the brink of the abyss of...

Arthur Bennington

Chicago American

Science stands to-day upon the brink of the abyss of infinity, trying with a net to catch the immaterial. It has explored the earth; its telescopes have swept the stupendous vaults of the heavens; its microscopes have searched out the innermost recesses of the minute, and in both directions it has been halted by the same thing—infinity.

Science, after a century and a half of scoffing at the immaterial, is now trying eagerly to grasp it. Baffled by phenomena that it has striven vainly to explain on material hypotheses, it is forced at last to the unwelcome conclusion that there is something more than matter—something which all its telescopes and all its microscopes are powerless to discover. Science has not yet seen the immaterial, but it has at last—and how reluctantly—confessed its existence. Now the advance skirmishers of science, groping blindly in the darkness of the unknown, are setting traps for the immaterial, hoping with beating hearts to solve the riddle of life and death, to prove the immaterial, to demonstrate its properties and to codify its laws. ...

All this is but a striving to attain to something which the believer has always possessed; and when the immaterial shall have been caught in the butterfly nets of science, when the limitless fields of infinity shall have been triangulated—then all men will recognize these newest discoveries of science as an old, old thing which the world in its childlike simplicity has long recognized.

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