. Another is that some supposedly nonmaterial absolutes may turn out to be material after all. That is what happened to the traditional concept of light when Einstein proved that light was particular (=made up of atomic particles).6 To the degree matter = reality, then reality, too, is unstable, or in a constant state of change and flux.
This is a way of organizing the physical universe that would seem to depart from,the philosophies of both matter and spirit that are familiar to Western culture. It also appears to have troubled even those of the scientific community such as Eddington who in the 1940s were involved in the transformation of theory to explain how the universe was organized. This is explained by Yutang:
"We have chased the solid substance from the continuous liquid to the atom, from the atom to the electron, and there we have lost it." What the electron is doing inside the atom is summarized in the following line: "Something unknown is doing we don't know what." Somewhere in the quantum of light, the corpuscular and the non-corpuscular meet and confuse and exasperate the investigator of truth.7
To the degree the scientific person cannot explain a perpetually changing reality, the universe seems impossible to really explain. Thus the philosophical temptation is to depart entirely from science and fall into mysticism. But this answer, too, is inadequate because of the contradiction between mystical and scientific temperaments. The response of Yutang, writing in 1947, is to appeal to what he implies is the systematic mysticism of Taoism and Laotse, based on the fact that mathematics and science have encountered an impossible situation:
Mathematics, the tool of science, works with equations and has yielded us nothing but equations, plus the new knowledge of the essential emptiness of matter. When Laotse and Chuangtse spoke in mystic phraseology of the "elusiveness" of Tao, it must be remembered that th...