Diogenes is the pseudonym for a regular contributor to the British weekly, Time & Tide, this article being from the issue of October 6, 1956. 

There are two kinds of truth.  There is the truth about the world which is external to us, the world which we perceive through our senses, or our senses aided and extended by instruments; but there is another kind of truth, the truth about the world which is internal to us and which cannot be seen by the eye, heard by the ear, nor measured by instruments.

I see a man. With my physical senses I take him in, a solid, three-dimensional object. I note if he is small or large, tall or short; I note whether he is young or old; I note the color of his eyes and his hair; I note whether he is bearded, moustached, or clean-shaven. With my ears I hear his voice and assess its pitch and timber—and so on. But, when I have used my physical senses to the full, how much do I know of the man? I know nothing except some physical facts about his body; but of the real man be­hind that body—the compound of emotion, thought, experience, memory, and the rest—I know nothing.

And now suppose that (without killing the poor fellow, of course) I were able so to operate upon him that I could see his brain, his heart, his internal organs. From seeing them, I might learn some­thing of how the machine works. I might see the heart pumping blood through the veins, or watch the operations of the digestive organs and the organs of elimination—but again I should know nothing of the man himself.

Suppose, further, that I could take segments of his flesh and of his organs and his brain and sub­mit them to microscopic and chemi­cal analysis. I might learn a good deal about the materials which go to make up the human body, but I should be as far away as ever from knowing anything about the "the invisible man," of whom the body is only one—and that a tem­porary—manifestation.

Yet, knowing this truth about a human being, we do not apply it to the world without, to the physical universe. We assume that if we could push the boundaries of knowledge of that universe suffi­ciently far back, we should find the answer to what Maeterlinck called "The Great Secret." We think that we should find the why and where­fore of things, that we should un­derstand the meaning of life.

The Spirit of Things

The thought of earlier ages did not entertain this delusion; it knew that man was more than his physical apparatus. It thought of him as a spirit of which the body was but the instrument. It saw the universe not as God, but as the garment of God. Man was the microcosm, of which the universe was the macrocosm, but they came from the same Hand and it was reasonable to suppose that they were constructed on similar prin­ciples. If there was "an invisible man" behind the visible man, it was reasonable to suppose that be­hind the visible world there was an invisible one.

But since the time of Galileo, modern man has thought less and less in these terms. The whole em­phasis of scientific injury has been on probing the material uni­verse. Man has developed instru­ments of ever-greater precision, telescopes of ever-greater power of penetrating the skies, microscopes which probe ever-deeper into the infinitely little.

True it is that he has added im­mensely to his knowledge of the material universe. He has pushed far back into time and space the boundaries of the skies, opened up the sub-molecular world, measured, weighed, analyzed the different forms of matter. He has broken down the "particle" of my boyhood into the atom; he has even broken down the atom to its constituent neutrons and electrons.

Nor is it to be denied that much of the knowledge which science has discovered has been of great prac­tical use. The constant probing of the physical body has revolution­ized the art of surgery. The con­stant analyzing of various forms of matter has made available a vast range of medicines.

We can do all sorts of things with matter of which our fathers could not have dreamed. The impact of the inventions made possible by scientific discovery has changed during my own lifetime the face of civilization—and the pace of change becomes ever swifter.

On the other hand, it must be admitted that increased knowledge of the material world has led to awful things and to still more dreadful possibilities. Gunpowder, high explosives, the cultivation of deadly germs for war purposes, the atom and the hydrogen bomb—these must be set against the many benefits that in a material sense science has brought to the world. If science has made possible more abundant material life, it has also made possible its universal destruc­tion.

But the essential point is that, with all the answers to all the ques­tions which science has rendered available, it has riot answered the only questions which really matter, for its only concern has been with the external, material world. In my car I can travel fifteen times as fast as Plato could. In a plane I can travel perhaps a hundred and fifty times as fast as Aristotle ever did. But the same questions are there at the end of the journey.

In earlier ages men could hear the human voice only within a dis­tance of a few score feet; now I can hear the voices of men from every part of the earth, but they tell me much less of what is to the point than the utterances of the wise of old. I may extend the dura­tion of my life for perhaps a score of years longer than my forefathers could have hoped for—but will it equal theirs in quality? Sci­ence may plan better cities and houses, but does it help one iota with the mansions of the soul?

When an individual man denies that he is more than flesh and blood, when he thinks of himself as being merely a highly developed form of animal life, when he denies the invisible man within, he sets strict bounds to the possibility of his own psychological and spiritual development. The materialist creates his own blind alley. So does a materialistic science. It is reach­ing the end of that blind alley to­day. As one bewildered scientist expressed it not long since, "We don’t know where we are."

EDITOR’S NOTE: Diogenes well em­phasizes the dead end of material­istic science—the sad fate of the individual who perceives only the ex­ternal, material world. But that is hardly the end of the trouble, for the attitudes and actions of the material­ist also affect others.

Anyone unconscious of the Invis­ible—oblivious to that creativity which is infinitely beyond self—is logically inclined to believe in his own omniscience. Thus self-enthroned, he may dream of a world perfected by casting others in his "omnipotent" little image—even to the point of compelling them to act and believe as he does. From such inability or unwillingness to contemplate the In­visible and to admit of reality beyond one’s own sensory perceptions, may well stem the growth of authoritar­ianism. For if a person is aware of the mysteries enshrouding even him­self, how could he possibly seek to control or forcibly direct the creative actions of others about whom he knows less?