The following reflections center round a current of thought and a way of action which an increasing number of our contemporaries recognise as the great conformity of our age, namely the cult of economic growth. Even thirty years ago this was a partial truth; today it seems to be the favorite anxiety of those political forces endeavoring to be modern regardless of the philosophies to which they refer. Focussed as it is on the acceleration of material progress, is this “productivist” anxiety not the unifying idea of a world in a state of fusion? A world that is becoming more and more indifferent because of its traditional divergences? And the pragmatism of this idea, when translated into equations, suits all those for whom man is equal to his technical strength and for whom progress corresponds to a quantum of accountable acquisitions…

Our predecessors Pott, Miklosich, Woolner, Grierson, Jules Bloch, Barannikov, Ralph Turner and others, have established from diachronic facts (comparison of the Romany with the old Indian) the Indian origin of the Tsiganes, or Gypsies. Their divergencies originate from the exact place of the primitive homeland of the Gypsies, the majority inclining to the north-west of India.

It may be a temptation to build the science of letters upon the concept of individuality. In this case the researcher tries to isolate the qualities which distinguish one work from other works by the same author, and these works from those of his contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. This approach evokes objections of a logical and of an empirical kind.

Contemporary scientific research has reached such fundamental layers of laws to be discovered that questions of scientific methodology, of means and procedures of analysis, of creating (or of perfecting) a method of research can no longer be answered “along the line” in the course of a strictly scientific progression. It is necessary to consider them as a particular branch of research, to separate them as independent stages, although absolutely indispensable within the structure of contemporary science.

There is only one bondage: that forbidding a person from seizing his creatives opportunities. On the contrary, when the person does put them to work he can recognise a primitive part and a destiny in the energies being used. Once in possession of his opportunities to create, he can master any servitude more surely than by an enfranchisement from his relevant social class. Furthermore, the classless society of the future will require possibly more compulsive and certainly more insidious conditions than those that have issued from capitalism, and these must be anticipated. And we are in any case committed to develop the infinite resources in the possession of the human being. Should this evidence not be apparent, it is enough to envisage the provocations of planetary civilisation to summon up a formation that is open to all possibilities: the contemporary world is calling for continuous creation; in a minor form this can be seen in the innovations under way, and in the daily adaptations that these entail.

It is easy to guess from the title of this article that its content will deal with the current changes in the foundations of physical sciences—the changes which are far-reaching enough to be called revolutionary. But the full significance of this intellectual upheaval will become clear only if we compare it to another scientific revolution which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The significance of this first scientific revolution is fully recognized by the historians of science and historians in general; if I shall recall its main features, it will be only to provide us with a contrasting backdrop against which the salient features of the contemporary transformation of physics will stand out more vividly and more suggestively. The comparison between what is going on now and what went on three centuries ago will clearly show that the distance along which physical science moved in the last fifty years is not only greater than that covered in the last three centuries, but also—and this is far more significant— greater than the distance separating the science of Newton from that of Aristotle. In other words, the twentieth century revolution is far more profound than what was rather inappropriately called “the Copernican revolution;” the intellectual distance between Aristotle and Newton is far smaller than the distance separating the world of Newton and Laplace from that of Einstein, Planck, de Broglie, and Heisenberg.

The trouble about discussing religion is that most of us are against it. Since Bruno was burned at the stake and Galileo bullied into saying that the world was flat, rational and scientific thought about man and the world has known its enemy: God and the priests and all their works, the whole black cloud of canting obscurantists who have clogged understanding and persecuted knowledge for the sake of kings, popes, proprietors or other baleful fatherfigures clinging to their privilege and comfort at other mens'expense. If the liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century did not go as far as Marx and Engels in affirming that “law, morality, religion are to (the proletarian) so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk just so many bourgeois interests,” they said much the same in their own context. They saw Christianity as a deplorable mystification, at best a mere vestige of primitive awe in face of the unknown, at worst an ingenious racket. Wrestling with it, they called for aid to “primitive religion.” There they found “a weapon which could, they thought, be used with deadly effect against Christianity,” since “if primitive religion could be explained away as an intellectual aberration, as a mirage induced by emotional stress, or by its social function,” so too could “higher religion” and the path thereby cleared to that extent of historical lumber.