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“prefers .. : • “

• Natural assumptions and convictions about morality, about aesthetics, about politics have profoundly declil1ed. . Generally ‘Speaking, certainties are hard to come by in an age of rapid change, scepticism and uncertail)ty in the realm of ideas. Because of the ~odem communications, the mental horizon of most people has vastly expanded. We know about more and more. We are certain about less and less.21 Has secularization and modernization made religion obsolete so that man no longer feels the need

for it?

There is no domain in which change and transformation reign with the same supremacy and totality as in that which con·· cerns nature and man’s relationship to it as well as his knowledge of it. Modem science, which has acted as a catalyst

~ during the past Few centuries for change in. so many other fields, is Itself based upon change and impermanence. Were it to become stationary and Immutable, it would ceue to exist in its present form. Today one often hears the claim that all is reJative. But the same people who make such a claiin often bestow an absolute character on th~ domain of the relative itself.

Metaphysics which de a1s with permanence cannot become “out of-date” because it is not concerned with any date as such. The permanent elements in the relation between man and the Universe remain as valid now as ever. Only they: must , become known once again after the long period during ~hich the West did not search for permanent elements in change and even soQght to reduce permanence itaelf to chaap and

the historical evolutioJl8,ry process. Today man seeks to chanse

all his social, political and . even religious institutions with the excuse that nature itself is always changing and therefore must change likewise.

In fact, just the reverse holds¹