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262 CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCIENCE
II. Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging
people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect.
Certain it is that a conviction. akin to religious feeling. of the
rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scien·
tific work of a higher order.
Ill. This firm belief. a belief bound up with deep feeling.
in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience.
represents my conception of God. In co=on parlance this
may be described as "pantheistic" (Spinoza).
IV. Denominational traditions I can only consider historically
and psychologically; they have no other significance for
me.
JOHANNES KEPLER
On the occasion of the three hundredth anniversary of
Kepler's death. Published in the Frankfurter Zeitung
(Germany), November 9,1930.
In anxious and uncertain times like ours. when it is difficult
to find pleasure in humanity and the course of human affairs,
it is particularly consoling to think of such a supreme and quiet
man as Kepler. Kepler lived in an age in which the reign of
law in nature was as yet by no means certain. How great must
his faith in the existence of natural law have been to give him
the strength. to devote decades of hard and patient work to the
empirical investigation of planetary motion and the mathematical
laws of that motion. entirely on his own. supported by no
one and understood by very fewl 1£ we would honor his memory
fittingly. we must get as clear a picture as we can of his
problem and the stages of its solution.
Copernicus had opened the eyes of the most intelligent to
the fact that the best way to get a clear grasp of the apparent
movements of the planets in the heavens was to regard them
as movements round the sun conceived as stationary. 1£ the
planets moved uniformly in a circle round the sun, it would
have been comparatively easy to discover how these movements
must look from the earth. Since, however. the phenomena to
be dealt with were much more complicated than that. the task