“The great masters do not take any model, or any theory, quite so seriously as the rest of us. They know that it is, after all, only a model, only a theory, and as such possibly replaceable.”

Theories - provisional and progressive

It is not in the nature of things that great thinkers should take much interest in models. They have more difficult and more controversial matters in hand. Every model, we said, is a contruct of answered questions. The expert is engaged either in raising new questions or in giving new answers to old ones. When (s)he is doing the first, the old, agreed model is of no interest to him or her; when (s)he is doing the second, (s)he is beginning an operation which will finally destroy the old model altogether.

The history of though as such deals chiefly with the influence of great experts upon great experts.

Briefly noted

One particular class of experts, the great spirtitual writers, ignore models and theories almost completely. This is partly because the spiritual books are entirely practical - like medical books. A man concerned about the state of his soul will not usually be much helped by thinking about the spheres or the structure of the atom.

In saying thus, I am not suggesting a direct ‘conflict between religion and science’ of, for instance, of the nineteenth-century typ. But there often is an incompatibility of temperament. Delighted contemplation of the predominant model of a particular age and intense religious feeling (of a specifically Christian character) are seldom fused - except perhaps in the work of Dante.