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FR.IGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
advanced with giant strides, pushing aside his ingenious hypothesis which, nevertheless, will always retain the great merit of having boldly blazed the trail of progress- of inaugurating a new era of spiritual freedom. The great merit of the Cartesian hypothesis was that it constructed a physical system in which the forced assumption of an original creator appeared to be entirely superAuous, the process of the evolution of the Universe being purely mechanical, the creator having abso lutely no power to alter the minutest detail.
Both the founders of the scientific method emphatically repudiated the prejudice of a Final Cause. In view of this diecisive negative attitude regarding the cardinal principle of religion and theology, their forced and formal recognition of the existence of God loses the cogency of conviction. Descartes wrote: “We can only presume it (the first creation by god), since God did not take us into his counsel. This habit of searching for a Final Cause has no use for the knowledge of physical and natural things. In physics, the appeal to a Final Cause is idle, since every conclusion must rest on solid ground.”
The philosophical revolution heralded by Bacon and Descartes triumphantly marched ahcad during the last three hundred years. With its iconoclastic methods. science advanced steadily, showing how flagrantly the certainties of experience contradicted, and were contradicted by, the 278
