I have also considered many scientific plans during my pushing you around in your pram!
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific research.
I am among those who think that science has great beauty.
How can this cosmic religious experience be communicated from man to man, if it cannot lead to a definite conception of God or to a theology? It seems to me that the most important function of art and of science is to arouse and keep alive this feeling in those who are receptive.
He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.
For scientific endeavor is a natural whole the parts of which mutually support one another in a way which, to be sure, no one can anticipate.
Finally we shall place the Sun himself at the center of the Universe.
Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.
Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.[Jede wissenschaftliche “Erfüllung” bedeutet neue “Fragen” und will “überboten” werden und veralten.]
Even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies.
As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet’s utopia.