The quest of the absolute leads into the four-dimensional world. - Arthur Eddington

The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind … To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by "mind" I do not exactly mean mind and by "stuff" I do not at all mean stuff. Still that is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to feelings in our consciousness … Having granted this, the mental activity of the part of world constituting ourselves occasions no great surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be — or rather, it knows itself to be.

I think it is not irreligion but a tidiness of mind, which rebels against the idea of permeating scientific research with a religious implication.

Materialism in its literal sense is long since dead. … It is … belief in the universal dominance of scientific law which is nowadays generally meant by materialism.