ESSAY-REVIEWS 513 



Couple of Languages, never mastered ; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, 

 represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and analyses of plot 

 and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said 

 to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of the living of it?" (pp. 13, 14). As 

 an example of the way in which apparently widely different subjects should be 

 connected in the mind of the student, the application of the graphs, now so 

 generally used in algebra, is mentioned (p. 16) as providing very vivid "curves 

 of history" which are "more informing than the dry catalogues of names and 

 dates which comprise the greater part of that arid school study." 



Our technical work should be " transfused with intellectual and moral vision 

 and thereby turned into a joy, triumphing over its weariness and its pain. . . . 

 The immediate need of the nation is a large supply of skilled workmen, of men 

 with inventive genius, and of employers alert in the development of new ideas. 

 There is one — and only one — way to obtain these admirable results. It is by 

 producing workmen, men of science, and employers who enjoy their work " (p. 31). 

 The social and recreative sides of Life must then not be despised : " For heaven's 

 sake don't think that you must be dull in order to be great" (p. 64), and the 

 claims of beauty and therefore art must be taken into account (pp. 66, 67). In a 

 good technical education " geometry and poetry are as essential as turning 

 lathes " (p. 33), and also " the insistence in the Platonic culture on disinterested 

 intellectual appreciation is a psychological error. Action and our implication 

 in the transition of events amid the inevitable bond of cause to effect are funda- 

 mental. An education which strives to divorce intellectual or aesthetic life from 

 these fundamental facts carries with it the decadence of civilisation. . . . Dis- 

 interested scientific curiosity is a passion for an ordered intellectual vision of 

 the connection of events. But the goal of such superiority is the marriage of 

 action to thought" (p. 37; cf. pp 38,41). Thus we understand the stress that 

 Dr. Whitehead lays (pp. 10, 77) on the importance of physical applications. He 

 tends— mistakenly, I think— to disparage the "amateur" as compared with the 

 expert (pp. 25, 26), but this is probably because he defines, without saying so, an 

 "amateur" as a human being who is not an expert. 



The aim of education is to give a sense for " style," of which " organisation 

 of thought" and "economy of thought " seem to be synonyms (pp. 24, 25, 105, 106). 

 Dr. Whitehead does not point out that the history of science has shown that the 

 essence of science is this economy, but he (pp. 81-2) suggests the history of 

 mathematical thought— not a list of names and dates — as a way in which the 

 student's ideas can be generalised, and adds, " Perhaps it is the very subject 

 which may best obtain the results for which I am pleading." 



Mention should be made of the following points. Dr. Whitehead lays stress 

 on the importance of the quantitative aspect of the world (pp. 14, 15 ; cf. p. 45): 

 " Elegant intellects which despise the theory of quantity are but half developed ; " 

 he points out that the essence of mathematics is generalisation and that it gives 

 us the power of grasping general ideas (pp. 46, 93-5, 97, 101, 102) ; he urges that we 

 must eliminate reconditeness in education (pp. 73, 74) and thus lay stress on the 

 main ideas (p. 75); he discusses the place which the principles of mathematics 

 should have in education (pp. 92-104) ; and sketches an ideal course in 

 mathematics (pp. 78-90). 



There are numerous witty sayings and practical points of view in this admirable 

 book, and it is wonderful that even the passages of eloquence should be so 

 stimulating. Take this : " When one considers in its length and in its breadth 

 the importance of this question of education of a nation's young, the broken lives, 



