ESSAY-REVIEWS 51 r 



unnecessary existences. By hiding, with perfectly incredible stupidity, the 

 interest— technical or intellectual— which prompted people to make discoveries 

 and often to see, even at the time at which they made them, much of the 

 importance which we now know they have, teachers have, as far as 1 can see, 

 attained only one good result : the pleasure which every thoughtful man and 

 woman must feel on reading Dr. Whitehead's sound and vigorous protest against 

 their misdeeds. His book points the way to a real reform : it is not concerned 

 with improving the means for reaching those ideals of education which have been 

 fixed by convention— such as becoming a Wrangler or passing high into the 

 Civil Service ; it opens fundamental questions as to the why and how of education. 

 It has the stimulus of a fresh spring morning, and Dr. Whitehead's wise and 

 enthusiastic sympathy with the young student will rouse in him an ardent wish to 

 understand here and now some at least of the meaning of what he learns. 



The book consists of eight chapters of addresses and papers published from 

 1912 to 1917. The only exception is the seventh chapter, and this is now 

 published for the first time. The first five chapters deal with education— and 

 more particularly mathematical education — and the remaining three with certain 

 points arising in the philosophy of science. "But a common line of reflection 

 extends through the whole and the two sections influence each other. . . . The 

 various parts of the book were in fact composed with express reference to each 

 other, so as to form one whole" (p. v). However, since many of the recent 

 advances made by Dr. Whitehead in the philosophy of science have been already 

 referred to from time to time in the accounts of "Recent Advances in Science" 

 given in Science Progress, we will, in this review, concentrate our attention on 

 the educational reforms outlined and advocated by Dr. Whitehead. 



"It is," says the author (p. 1), "useless to discuss abstract questions in the 

 midst of dominant practical preoccupation. We cannot disregard the present 

 crisis in European civilisation " ; and yet we must not imagine that the appli- 

 cations of education to warlike purposes, whether of arms or of trade, fill this 

 book to the exclusion of considerations of culture and abstract logic. This is not 

 the case : while technological applications are given due prominence, as they 

 should be given, it is an outstanding merit of the book that the importance of a 

 combination of both culture and expert practical or theoretical knowledge is 

 emphasised. " Culture is activity of thought and receptiveness to beauty and 

 humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely 

 well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. What we should 

 aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some 

 special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start 

 from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as 

 art" (pp. 3, 4). What has been called the "divine curiosity" of the ancient 

 Greeks and Descartes, for example, is given a high place by the author, but 

 technology is not neglected or despised as it was by Plato. This "divine 

 curiosity " is the pure desire for knowledge, which is sometimes as strong as, and 

 always more lasting than, any other of those human desires for food and com- 

 panionship, and so on, which are sometimes disparaged in words by the affected, 

 and more rarely disparaged in deeds by martyrs and men of genius. 



The connection of facts, whether of life or logic, is the object of knowledge, 

 and, as for the means it uses, the essential part of " scientific method " seems to 

 consist, firstly, in the abstinence from the shelving of problems through satis- 

 faction with what may seem at first sight their irreducibility to logically simpler 

 facts ; and, secondly, the unprejudiced attack of these problems. The unscientific 



