Eddington and our access to the “unseen world.”

Images: Wikipedia. Among his many great contributions, Sir Arthur Eddington is said to be “the man who made Albert Einstein famous. “ The photo of Einstein is from 1904, the year before his “miracle year” which included his paper on Special Relativity. Eddington was one of the first to understand that this new understanding of nature constituted one of the most consequential changes in the history of human thought.

The second post on Sir Arthur Eddington and how he integrated his deeply held faith as a Quaker with his remarkable insight into science at a time of great discovery and paradigm-shifting understanding.

For those interested in how science and spirituality can be integrated, Sir Arthur Eddington’s thoughts are most worthy of study. Today the focus may be on writers like Fritjof Capra, the Dalai Lama or even Deepak Chopra. But nearly 100 years ago the famous British philosopher and science educator perhaps brought us closer to a true integration of science and spirituality than anyone before or since.

That integration led him to conclude that the external world is real and mind is real. That implies dualism but Eddington was not a dualist. Both mind and matter (which we can only approach indirectly through our minds) are manifestations of a single “background.” He sometimes refers to this as the “sub-aether.” That background is spirit. We can know the existence of spirit in the same way we know the existence of the external world, but not through the same methods.

Eddington’s realism

In the previous post we reviewed first his unique approach to understanding science from the perspective of his faith as a member of the Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers. Using…