BELIEFS
craving for explanation, which is a craving for identity
behind diversity, is actually satisfied by the real world; for
the real world reveals itself as being in effect a unity in
diversity. The craving for explanation was felt by men
thousands of years before the instruments, by means of
which that craving could be scientifically satisfied, had been
invented. The old philosophers of nature assuaged that
craving by postulating the existence of some single sub-
stance, material or mental, underlying the apparent diversity
of independent existents, or by proclaiming that all matter
must be built of identically similar atoms, variously arranged.
Within the last half-century investigation by means of
instruments of precision has actually demonstrated that
these cosmological theories which, up till then, could only
be described as pieces of wishful thinking designed to satisfy
the inborn craving for explanation, were in fact remarkably
consonant with die facts of the empirical world. The
craving for righteousness seems to be a human character-
istic just as fundamental as the craving for explanation.
The moral argument in favour of theism is certainly a
piece of wishful thinking; but it is no more wishful than
the arguments in favour of the atomic theory propounded
by Democritus and Epicurus, or even by Boyle and Newton.
The theory by means of which these natural philosophers
tried to satisfy their craving for explanation was found to
be in tolerably close accord with the facts discovered by
the later investigators, equipped with more effective instru-
ments for exploring physical reality. Whether it will ever
be possible to verify the theories of the moral philosphers
by direct observation and experiment seems doubtful. But
that is no reason for denying the truth of such theories.
Nor, as we have seen, is the fact that they originate in
wishes. * Tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne me possidaisj
wrote Pascal. 'Ne fingu&te done pas.9 The theories
devised to satisfy the craving for explanation have proved
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