Q. Why not?
A. It's too late. The Unity should have started ignoring them right at the beginning—we are already changed. And if they are absorbed, we shall be still more changed.
Q. They will be changed. The Unity is eternal and—
A. You ought to talk to a man called Heisenberg. He called it the inexactitude principle, but it's the same thing. For example, men are always going around asking each other questions; they call it taking a poll, only when you try to find out that way what people are thinking, you change them. Or anthropology—when you study a tribe, you alter its way of life. Furthermore, it alters yours.
Q. It would appear that you have lost your sense of objectivity.
A. That's the way my last husband talks. There is no such thing. It's a strange fact, but it seems that the mathematicians are the only ones who have a glimmering of the truth—they and the physicists. I was beginning to think that mankind as a whole was progressing quite nicely.
Q. I thought you said they were. It seems you're never satisfied.
A. Well, some things improve, but their point of view keeps changing with regard to what should and what should not improve. It's hard to say whether the Greeks really believed in progress: they thought there had been a golden age and that the world had degenerated from it. Some of them may have wanted to return to it, but I always suspected their motives—by their own showing, they were decadent. During the Middle Ages, it was felt that art was on the way up—part of an evolutionary process—whereas science was not. Aristotle and the Thomists had science all cut and dried. Nowadays it's fashionable to say the art was as "good" in primitive times as it is now, while science on the other hand is evolving to a higher state of truth. The latter happens to be true, but they still have war.
Q. Perhaps it's inevitable.
A. If it is, we are wasting our time.