On Legend

Earlier on these pages I mentioned that "myth" was the favorite word of a famous actor; what I failed to add was the audience's reaction to such a pretense: the cooing and hollering so typical of the easily impressed. Kingsley's religious beliefs I cannot hope to know, and such a point bears no relevance on a discussion of the difference between his favorite word – sadly abused for over a century – and another, related term, that of "legend." As children, pupils, listeners, we come to associate terms that a more mature mind would cleave asunder; instead of learning at an early age the fine differences between vocabulary, we tend and are in fact pedagogically encouraged to list alleged synonyms as if they were eggs in a carton, all white, unbroken, and indistinguishable. Countless times as a schoolboy I found myself perplexed by this methodology. What good can it do us to know similarity if our world is founded on difference? What passion can be elicited from the average pupil by the average schoolmarm if we cannot take pleasure in separating our reality into its natural categories? Let us be clear: a myth is falsehood taken by the right gullible soul as historically true so that it then becomes a banner for our own mores; a legend is an exaggerated truth or plain fiction with a moral aspect, a glorification of what has already been accepted by the listener as worthwhile. This distinction and several others inform an essay in this collection.   

Legend, according to Belloc, serves the only need that we should ever consider, that of the spiritual (which may explain its earliest English meaning). Are we amazed by mystery and incomplete knowledge of the world and thus prone to flights of fancy? No, we are simply spirituals who must rekindle the imaginings that allow us to glimpse something beyond what our five dull senses might perceive:

It is in the essence of Legend that its historical value is not in question. It has not to be believed as witness to an event but as example; or even as no more than a picture which does us good by its beauty alone. We are not, in using legend, affirming a belief in a particular occurrence, but listening with profit to a story; and if the moral of the story is sound – if its effect is towards truth, goodness, beauty – that is all we ask of it.

There then follows a nice example of legend deprived: an "inhuman child" does not absorb this children's tale and dream of courage, but rather requests that the Giant's Castle be located "on the ordnance map." Why would a child ever think of committing such folly, given that he is supposed to know what he hears may not and indeed probably could never be true? Because that child is no tyro, but an incredulous adult who from arrogance's throne has decided that anything that his senses cannot pick up is a sham. Now when I heard the tale of Saint George and the Dragon as a child, I immediately sensed that I was listening to fiction; not because, as it were, dragons could not or did not exist; but because the tale itself was too clean, too buttressed by stylistic accretions to resemble the news reports I watched every night on television (my parents, at one point at least, used to love television news). I then learned that dragons, if that's really the right term for them and if they weren't simply this beast, died with all the fantastic creatures in a child's universe because of snow, lots of snow. There still lurks somewhere in the snowy plains of my imagination a slow-falling and gigantic lizard crumbling beneath its incapacity to survive in cold climates. Whence comes that image, or whether it isn't a montage of many memories, is what is meant by legend.

Belloc also touches upon this hallowed site, believes its fame to be perfectly plausible, and then adjoins one final phrase: "I am sure I appear absurd when I say that I believe this legend to contain historical truth." Historical truth is, mind you, not what can be proven through empirical testing – ultimately, almost nothing, since not having been there can stand as proof alone of its impossibility – but what gilds logic according to our sensibilities, not just our senses. Surely it is sensible to think that creatures like us came from other, less evolved creatures, but where we all emerged from is a black hole of knowledge that has been explained away, at least for now, with some preposterous theory of combustion and explosion that is more mythic and nonsensical than any miracle or divine interference. A basic law of physics is that you cannot get something for nothing – but we were, apparently, uncreated and therefore at one time nothing. To remind us of these past lives we have forged the annals to delude the stupid into believing in grace and providence, all the while concealing the truth: that those dragons are nothing more than an amalgamation of birds and snakes, our two tree-bound enemies, and that we are monkeys who have become something more than monkeys. Again, evolution has its merits and it is perfectly logical according to our senses, our actions, and our physical instincts of survival. But to say it completely explains our provenance is a little like saying sharks explain the pelagic food chain or kangaroos explain Australia. In other words, we have a species but not a world, existence without origin, and effect without cause – the last of which will not make the modern scientific mind particularly happy.

We have come a long way from myths and legends. Now we know nearly everything there is to know about our world and have invested an indefinite amount of money into exploring others. Millions of years ago, chants a chorus of men of science, beasts walked the earth whose bones we still have and whose shapes we can reconstruct owing to our utter brilliance in reconstructing the past, predicting the future, and discarding the present in favor of both. These men of science, as learned as they might claim to be despite the fact that they are inevitably destined to be contradicted and exposed by the following generation, will then talk of ice ages, asteroids, and other events that are quite probable but completely and utterly unprovable. They will sneer at any talk of supernatural events, although any fifteenth-century person claiming dinosaurs once roamed the earth would forcibly attribute such an occurrence to powers beyond that of mankind. But something is bothersome about all their formulas, fossils, and filibusters: there is no accountability. The myth itself, if that is the right word, has come and not quite gone until another, better myth has been substituted:

But if there enter into the controversy side issues which have logically nothing to do with it, if the controversy arouses passions on matters which the reason should see to be quite distinct from the original statement, then at once the breeding soil for Myth, the atmosphere favorable for its growth, has appeared. So that the next stage is the prodigious advance in strength and wide dispersion of the false statement; it is, so to speak, mobilized and armed, and goes out to battle on a large scale. 

You may have heard of these battles; they are still being waged by those who believe in nothing except stars they can barely discern and animals whose lifetimes cannot be quantified. They believe that we owe each other nothing because we are but links on an endless chain of death, an assembly line to build a perfect beast that will ultimately develop the capacity to obliterate itself.  Once upon a time we were amoebae – that is their legend, myth, and holy scripture. But an alternative prevails upon the spirit during hard times – even occasionally, I suspect, on theirs – and indicates another path, a golden road which may look like the plainest soil but which ascends gradually to a higher level of what we believe and what we have taught ourselves to think. And there we may find the greatest legend of them all to be something more than that.

The Great Heresies

Were you to bother researching this extremely learned and extremely opinionated man, you would often find him accused of being a bit too, well, orthodox. Unlike his genial contemporary, Belloc was not someone who made much room in heaven, or, for that matter, on earth, for people who did not share his views on life, God, right, wrong, and a few other important things. He has been charged with antagonizing non–Catholics with his effusive and bull-like prose, as well as relegating non-Christians (a term I use ironically since he insists there is no such thing as a “Christian”; there are “Catholics” and everyone else) to levels of salvation, etcetera, quite below what he expects of himself and others who properly impale heresies right through the sternum. Since I don’t doubt that he would have considered my beliefs to err too greatly on the side of ecumenicalism, it is with a chastened but unscarified eye that I read and enjoyed this book for what it is worth and what it can bring us in terms of historical perspective. That it is one-sided, consistent, and unforgiving, you may rest assured; that it sparkles with radiant insight into many a human topos, you may find more than a little fascinating.

The scope, indeed the sweep of a small work like The Great Heresies cannot possibly detail these alleged crimes with sufficient accuracy, which, I suspect, is one of Belloc’s methods of downplaying their historical vigor. He has other works – especially on his unending nightmare, the Reformation, which he blames for everything and anything – that treat the topics with more academic precision. Apart from a definition of heresy, the current book has a list of the five main offenders: the Arian heresy, Islam, the Albigensians, the Reformation, and what he terms “the Modern Phase,” which is nothing more than the post-Darwinian reliance on empiricism and so-called hard science. But we should begin in any case with that all-important definition. According to Belloc, a heresy is “the proposal of novelties in religion by picking out from what has been the accepted religion some point or other, denying the same or replacing it by another doctrine hitherto unfamiliar" (these days we might say “customization”). If you find something faulty in his reasoning, some gaping hole in his logic, you will be surprised to learn how assailable Belloc’s arguments are throughout his text. He abides by that most commendable of principles that only people who believe in something fully and completely cannot defend themselves with any margin of success. Should you disagree with Belloc’s initial premises, you will shake your head at every single observation that follows; but if you like what you hear, you will be enthralled by the cold logic of his math and smooth pavings of his causeways. Since Islam and Protestantism are attacked unfairly and far too succinctly to justify a rebuttal by me or anyone else, and the Modern Phase has devolved into such flummery that I will let Belloc alone crush it into gunpowder, a brief look at the two lesser known heresies, the Arian heresy and the Albigensians, will give us an idea of Belloc’s style and substance.

The Albigensians, now in retrospect the minimus on heresy’s fist, were a mass movement in the mid–twelfth century, the likes of which the Church had not seen in quite a while. There is ample information available on their objections to the Church, as well as the vicious campaign that dammed their rebellious flood. Belloc draws attention, however, to the events at Muret on September 13, 1213:

Muret is a name that should always be remembered as one of the decisive battles of the world. Had it failed, the campaign would have failed. Bouvines would probably never have been fought and the chances are that the French monarchy itself would have collapsed, splitting up into feudal classes, independent of any central lord ... With it our culture of the West would have sunk, hamstrung to the ground.

This assessment, made about seventy years ago, seems overblown even at the time of its publication. But it is indicative of Belloc’s coercive spirit that wants us to know the hardships his faith has sustained to reach through the centuries down at long last to him, its herald. He supports, for example, the First Inquisition, which “arose from the necessity of extirpating the remnants of the disease” of the Albigensian heresy, but acknowledges “the sporadic cruelty of earlier Christian times.” When discussing the Manichean dualism of the fourth century Arian revolt, which appears almost as distant now as Christ’s time itself, he attributes to this movement

The factor which is called today in European politics “Particularism,” that is, the tendency of a part of the state to separate itself from the rest and to live its own life. When this feeling becomes so strong that men are willing to suffer and die for it, it takes the form of a Nationalist revolution.

Catholic, he points out like any good etymologist, is from the Greek word for “general” or “universal,” and it should know no boundaries, be they national or economic. There should be one general and universal culture, as there should be one religion from which “cultures spring,” because “the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude towards the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it.” And the vital force which maintains Catholic culture? A “certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness,” which is a nice way of co-opting the Ancient Greeks into our ways and means.

About decay, as about many other things in this book, Belloc is right; he is perhaps wrong in his refusal to broaden his etymology to include other cultures who may not immediately identify with the straits through which his faith has sailed. Belloc is now seen as prescient for his warnings about the modern re-emergence of Islam, to which he claims Catholics have fallen inferior in their faith. Despite that nothing would ever bring him to reconsider the manifestoes of that faith, should one plod on with no corollaries and theorems that might aid in making sense of modernity as reflected through the prism of thousand-year-old truths?  Absorption by acceptance not subjugation; confederacy by trust not loyalty; compassion for differences, not similarities. But I do not want to rewrite Belloc’s book, just encourage its deliberation.

The Faith and Industrial Capitalism

Everything about Industrial Capitalism – its ineptitude, its vulgarity, its crying injustice, its dirt, its proclaimed indifference to morals (making the end of man an accumulation of wealth, and of labor itself an inhuman repetition without interest and without savor) is at war with the Catholic spirit.

                                                                                                                         Hilaire Belloc

From the title of the above essay in this collection and the opening citation, it may be concluded that we mean the doctrine of the Catholic Church against that of another entity, namely the belief in the power of enriching oneself without limit or conscience – but the true issue lies elsewhere.  The true issue has as little to do with the Catholic Church, or any Church, as it does with the motors and levers of factory growth and maintenance, or even with the gold bullion that factory owners tend to hoard.  We cannot deny a person his ambition to make his life better; indeed, the vast majority of emigration is fueled by precisely that desire.  Nor can we correctly persuade him to forsake almost every penny he has earned for the benefit of a society that did little in his promotion.  He will bellow and bay at our demands for his contribution to the nation that did not want him or his forefathers to cross its border, and will be equally vicious at any charges of chauvinism or selfish interest.  He was poor; he departed a life whose fate was already determined; and he arrived in a land of opportunity, which for a person of proper attitude and energy can be practically any land.  In this land he built a fire.  On that fire he did not roast the morsels that mendicant activity might have secured, or even the stale bread that a laborer gains at the end of another black day.  Instead, he forged an iron scythe and with that scythe he revolutionized the harvest.  And soon enough his invention became the most profitable means to reap what he or any of the enterprising and ruthless persons who copied his scythe certainly did not sow.

Now property in and of itself has long been a principle espoused by the Catholic Church.  After all, it was the Church itself that owned a large amount of Europe before the Reformation, and what was once servitude developed in time into something positive and even dignified – there are, admittedly, few things less dignified than servitude.  Belloc phrases it thus:

The antique world was a servile state; the civilized man of the Graeco-Roman civilization based his society upon slavery .... The Church did not denounce slavery, it accepted that institution.  Slaves were told to obey their masters.  It was one of their social duties, as it was the duty of the master to observe Christian charity towards his slave.  It was part of good work (but of a rather heroic kind) to give freedom in bulk to one's slaves.  But it was not an obligation.  Slavery only disappeared after a process of centuries, and it only disappeared through the gradual working of the Catholic doctrine upon the European mind and through the incompatibility of that doctrine with such treatment of one's fellow men as was necessary if the discipline of servitude were to remain efficient.

Whatever one may think of the Ancient world – and many prefer it still to our current reality – the claims that Belloc makes are undeniable and decidedly pervasive.  Yet to debate whether the Church was primarily responsible for the liberation of the average man from the yoke of decadent overlords is again missing the point by a significant margin.  Christianity does not need a church to implement its ideals; and as its detractors never tire of emphasizing, it often implements policies by which no true Christian could ever abide.  What the Church facilitated, in a form intelligible to the persons who existed at the time as well as to subsequent historians, was a code that could be specifically called Christian and more accurately called moral.  Much of recent philosophy has been devoted to showing that we need no Church or even an Anointed to be moral, which is at once true and untrue.  We can indeed be moral if we understand what pity and love really mean; when we see the history of man, however, we might see something even Greater.  But what we cannot reconcile is the urge to enslave others to make us millionaires with our duty to treat all like equals, equals in dignity, equals in respect, and equals under the law of free will to decide our own fate.  

The antidote to Capitalism was the most radical political movement of the twentieth century, and despite its alleged novelty, there is nothing new to Socialism or Communism or Marxism-Leninism or whatever you wish to call it.  Socialism is the realization that very rich people do not really pay more taxes than an aggregate of citizens making the same amount of money, nor do very rich people really serve any purpose at all apart from enriching themselves further. Socialism is also the realization that trickle-down economics, one of the biggest travesties that economists have ever created, is absolute hogwash.  What trickles down is what the very rich don't need – and you'd be surprised at what they decide they do need – leaving those tasks well below their perceived level or class; you know the kind, the menial errands of the disenfranchised and servile.  But neither is Socialism the answer for a person of moral principles:

What is vaguely called 'Socialism' of which the only logical and complete form worthy of notice in practice is Communism, directly contradicts Catholic morals and is at definable and particular issue with them in a more immediate way than is capitalism.  Communism involves a direct and denial of free will; and that it has immediate fruits violently in opposition to the fruits of Catholicism there can be no doubt .... To promote conflict between citizens, to engage in a class war with the destruction of capitalism as the main end is also directly in contradiction with Catholic morals .... We may say: 'You have a right to fight to prevent the conditions of your life becoming inhuman,' but we may not say, 'You have a right to fight merely because you desire to have more and your opponent to have less.'  

Some rather petty minds may conceive of free will as the right to take what is theirs and leave what they do not need, but that axiom will quickly remind you of another theory.  We may also remember the paradigm case of this English dramatist about two thieves, one of whom was offered Paradise and was saved.  And that other one?  No need to make any presumptions.    

Science as the Enemy of Truth

Readers of the pages will understand that I have few qualms about the development of modern technology: there are so many wonderful aspects to our existence, devices that ease our every movement and task that I would be rather grim to rail against the riches that science has brought to man's thatched hut.  Yet what science is and is not remains a pervasive misconception.  Among many of my fellow earthlings the misconception can be summarized very pithily in the axiom: what science promises, faith removes.  Faith, as the persons who promote such an axiom will tell you, is nothing more than a panoply of superstitions to while away our ignorance, children's tales to explain to unripe minds what will become readily evident at a later age.  From this reasoning, anyone who subscribes to the tenets of faith believes in fairy tales because his mind cannot or will not accept the logical precision and explanation of the world in which he exists.   It might have been profitable at one time, indeed almost necessary, to flood the masses' consciousness with dreams of an afterlife and a grandfatherly caretaker who will reward the good and consign the bad to some fiery demise, and this charade was sufficient to lend hope to the farmer's russet brow and keep them in thralldom to the moneyed.  But since the middle of the nineteenth century we have lifted the veil of our foolishness and begun the steady march towards total and complete knowledge.  Gone are the mysteries of the Trinity, the whimsical writings we call the Scriptures, the agonistic effort to do good amidst the scoriae of a fallen world.  Every last corollary of Christian teaching, every last rose window within every last nave in every last chapel in the universe is a two millennia-old lie.  We have all been duped by our own fears, and should now break free and celebrate the liberty that science has bestowed upon us in the form of atheism, selfishness, greed, and living for the here and now at the expense of the there and then.  If all this sounds a bit too easy and congratulatory, that's because it is.  And what science is, is not, should and should not be are all addressed in this essay from this superb collection.

Belloc will be the first to admit that the essay's title is in fact a contradiction in terms.  Science, in its former identity, used to mean exactly what any Latinist will tell you it means: knowledge and the glorious and relentless pursuit thereof.  There is no shame in saying that knowledge has overcome many of our quainter understandings of the world; yet it has also reinforced the impression held by those of faith that although we cannot hope to comprehend even a fraction of the awesome realm that we call reality, something inside of us suggests that we may be privy to much more than we suspect.  And so, while the pundits of evolutionary clarity continue stumbling through their caverns and fossilized fictions, we are left with science as a form of petty oneupmanship that really defeats its inherent purpose:

Many men of today would by implication at least show their agreement with that phrase, "Science is the enemy of Truth"; and the number of those who feel this more or less consciously is increasing.  On seeing a passage beginning, "Science has proved ..." or "There is no scientific evidence for ..."  or "Examined in a strictly scientific spirit ...." and so forth, men are becoming more and more predisposed to quarrel with what follows.  They are filled with an "I know all about that!" feeling.  On hearing of some method that it is "scientific" they are at once prepared to find it leading to ridiculous conclusions.  They do not feel instructed; they feel warned.  Habits of eating, clothing and everything else suggested in the name of "Science" they constantly discover to be inhuman, degrading or simply silly.  The term "Scientific" applied to some recommended habit is beginning to have something grotesque about it, as likely to be in opposition to the general conclusions of mankind and our human common sense.  As for the name "Scientist," it has fallen on the worst fate of all.  It is becoming something of an Aunt Sally, and to call a man a Scientist is perilously near making a laughing-stock of him; unless you add the word "distinguished," which turns him into a statue.

No clearer proof of such a morass of competitive minds who seek victory instead of truth can be found than the continuous (and almost daily) "scientific studies" that contradict other scientific studies and, eventually, themselves.  They will tell you that drinking alcohol is both good and bad, depending on the quantity, quality, and whether you eat, sleep and exercise regularly – as if this needed millions of research funds to determine.  They will tell you that love doesn't exist in its Romantic form and is nothing more than a series of chemical reactions, and then later backtrack and espouse love as a psychosomatic healer of physical pain – which again evinces nothing new under all the suns of the universe.  

Yet the main fault with all the science-seekers that continue to do some good work in terms of technological advancement and some very atrocious work in terms of philosophy is the smugness that accompanies these additions.  As much as people may complain of proselytizing on the part of certain church advocates, there is no louder howl to be heard than from the militant atheists who have concluded before ever reading Augustine or Swedenborg, or even more recent thinkers such as Tillich, the younger Niebuhr or Belloc himself, that nothing can happen that they could not know about or understand.  They will attempt to defend themselves by stating that we know very little about the universe – a wholly true statement – and yet they know quite enough to aver that God cannot possibly exist.  Is not the question of God the most important and elusive piece of knowledge that mankind could ever have?  When confronted with this ridiculous contradiction, they swat away any doubters by employing the very same tactics of which they accuse the clergy.  Namely, that only the enlightened can possibly understand the shape and shifts of the universe, and that any suffering they might incur owing to their work (both terms used rather loosely) earns them the moniker of "martyr":

There is ... no more absurd example of "Scientific" mumbo-jumbo than this ... A "martyr to science" should properly mean one who bears witness to scientific truth by submitting to suffering rather than recant his conviction.  In this sense men are indeed martyrs to scientific truth who sufficiently anger the Scientists by pointing out their mistakes .... But our new priesthood does not use the word "martyr" in this sense at all.  They apply it to a man who is blown up in the course of a chemical experiment, or who dies of a disease caught in a medical one.  And as for "the gulf between the clergy and the laity," which was made such a grievance of against real priests, it is nothing to the gulf between the ignorant herd and Scientific Persons.  They show a corporate and almost universal contempt for the man who has not had the leisure to go through all their studies, but who can bring valid criticism to bear on their own laughable conclusions; they do not meet his criticism in its own field, they appeal to Status, to their own necessary and unapproachable superiority.

Now one would not hesitate to trust a chemist rather than a coffeehouse barista as to an evaluation of rat poison or a metallic alloy.  But I would rather have the barista make my cappuccino for the simple reason that he will know more about the chemical processes and foibles involved therewith than any chemist.  And herein lies the problem with materialistic science: there will always be someone who knows better.  The problem is not unlike the quandary of the rich man who wakes up one day and realizes that he will never become the richest man in the world: the only way he can ever be considered rich is to hobnob with those who have less than him and thus, quite logically, he spends a disproportionate amount of his time making sure that everyone knows quite how wealthy he is.  The same pockmark identifies the man of science who will devote all too many hours to highlighting the ignorance of others on, ironically, either petty things that do not matter one way or another (the chemical composition of an obscure plant, for example) or things he hasn't the foggiest notion about (the nature of God, the number of stars in a galaxy invisible to the human eye, what was taking place on earth five billion years ago).  Purely empirical knowledge like money can only be relative, because regardless of what noble intentions may have existed at the onset the quest for purely empirical knowledge will always devolve into a competition.  And apart from a few "elections" in some recent totalitarian states, no one to date has yet to win a competition in which there were no other participants.

Science in itself is a marvel, but science in itself is not the subject of Belloc's title.  What he refers to and states explicitly is the modern scientific spirit of snobbery, oneupmanship, ego maintenance and glory.  Not one of those characteristics should distinguish a true scholar.  And while Belloc exaggerates mildly when he claims that "anyone can, with patience, do scientific work," he is at the same time generally correct: we all do scientific work to form conclusions about what is hot and cold, safe or dangerous, painful or pleasant.  The person who sees a gang of toughs in an evening alleyway does not need to stroll in their direction to understand he is risking his well-being; nor does a child who has only beheld from afar a fireplace's crack and spittle need to immerse his hand in flame to see what might come of it.  Our method of reasoning perception, what science often claims belongs to it and it alone, is how we deal with the majority of our reality's moments, but this is coupled with a large amount of faith.  We believe that certain things will and will not occur that have nothing to do with empirical observation.  We believe that our spouses, who are apparently only attracted to us by chemicals, will not find the chemicals of others more attractive even during long periods of separation from our chemicals.  We believe that our government will do everything in its power to avoid a nuclear war, or war in general, although we have little material evidence that would persuade us of its unswerving commitment to that end.  But with the scientists who have come to outyell all other voices of reason, we encounter a particularly virulent form of egoism that has spelled the downfall of many of their predecessors:

[The] Scientist has acquired a habit of achievement in knowledge: in knowledge not possessed by the mass of other men.  This breeds in him a natural pride, and from that root, I think, spreads that extraordinary presupposition I have noted, unconscious, but very much alive, that the scientist is possessed of universal knowledge .... [and so] a cause of the Modern Scientific Spirit's disease would seem to be the exclusion from consciousness of all that is not measurable by known and divisible units, because the scientific method can only deal with results recorded in known and divisible units.  Thus, the physical scientist tends through habit to a state of mind in which qualities not so measurable seem negligible or imaginary; hence the loss of the sense of beauty -- the loss of all that is qualitative; the loss of distinction and of hierarchy in sensation.

This is where science ends: at the doorstep of a lab of no color, shape or distinction.  Science travels a long path and completes tasks to make our lives easier, safer and healthier, but it must know its limits.  It cannot explain the sensations we feel when we look upon the starry sky, the curdling ambition that restrains us in our speech and manners for fear of offending some greater party, our sympathy for those who will never love or even know us, those whose predicaments we will never personally confront,  those who exist as blurry forms on the periphery of our privileged paths.  There can be no scientific explanation for the feelings that rise in our throats when we see what we have and what they do not, when we contemplate the suffering that has ravaged the world in every century to the detriment of the majority but not of us.  There is no logical explanation for us, nor can science ever hope to develop one.  Except, of course, if what we understand as science is extended back to its original sense to what we might learn from the realms of the unseen and unprovable.  And we see and what we can prove are often two wholly different things.