For three years when I asked myself the question, I thought I knew the answer. A D.P. was a human being who had lost his country, and all that was needed to stop his being one was to give him another. But during those three years I decided myself, and ten years of subsequent experience have confirmed the lesson of my initial error: you cannot give a man a new country. All you can do is just make it possible for him to dream free from care of the old.

The D.P., this man uprooted from his native soil, torn from his social setting, and cowed by want and the kind of regulation ill- luck that attends all state-aid, has been thrust into an unreal world. He has been taken out of his own time and projected into this superneolithic present which we may call ‘The Age of Hutments’, and he begins to acquire a special sort of mentality. His personality disintegrates to a larger or smaller degree, according to his level of intelligence and strength of will, and becomes merged in the mentality common to all D.P.s.

A dull new world takes shape, a realm of shadows. For three years I deceived myself; I mistook the refugee for a pauper. But ‘poverty’ is not the word to describe his misfortune, the refugee is primarily someone who has been uprooted and who drifts between the East from which he has fled and the West which very often will not admit him unless he has retained his muscular strength.

During the last fifty years the majority of Western ideas have been conditioned, or rather dominated, by science. By the end of the last century scientists in Europe and America had become more or less intoxicated by the success with which mathematical reasoning had been applied to experimental observation, and this had bred a feeling of certainty that the ultimate knowledge of nature was at hand. The French mathematician Laplace, for example, believed that if the position and motion of every atom in the universe were known at a given instant, the whole future of the cosmos could be predicted. The work of Darwin was regarded as having established that every living thing was the logical consequence of a single chemical synthesis which had produced the first living cell. It thus seemed that the history of matter was predetermined and that the technological mastery of the clever and diligent Western nations over less inspired countries was ensured. This conception of an amoral, all-pervading science was gradually passed on through schools, colleges, lectures and newspapers to the public at large. Its impact upon intellectuals resulted in materialism and dialectical argument, while it produced among less-educated people a mixture of bewilderment and expectancy.

The attitude of the professional scientist of today is a much humbler one. As our knowledge of the very small and very large increased, almost all the cherished laws of classical physics have had to be modified as they cannot be applied to the atom or the cosmos.

The Eddington Memorial Lectures were founded to foster interest in the relationship of the natural sciences to religion or ethics, with the hope of finding some common basis between different methods of seeking truth. In particular, as Professor Polanyi says at the beginning of this year’s lecture, the founders were preoccupied with the tardiness of moral improvement as compared with the swift advances of science; this aspect, neglected by his predecessors, he proposes to examine. But in the first place he doubts the assumptions which lie behind the ‘problem’, for, he writes:

Never in the history of mankind has the hunger for brotherhood and righteousness exercised so much power over the minds of men as today. The past two centuries have not been an age of moral weakness; but have, on the contrary, seen an outbreak of moral fervour which has achieved numberless humanitarian reforms and improved modern society beyond the boldest thought of earlier centuries.

He is not, in fact, here saying that moral improvement does or does not lag behind the advances of science, but that the problem with which we should concern ourselves is something quite different.

With the subject to be discussed, and the first stage in Polanyi’s answer laid before us, we can already see some of the difficulties which lurk within the lecture, although others, scarcely less important, will arise as the arguments develop. Leaving aside for the moment Polanyi’s criticism of the problem, we may doubt its validity for more fundamental reasons.