NOTES 



The Principle of Relativity 



At the Annual General Meeting of the Aristotelian Society, 

 held on July 13, the Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour was elected President 

 for the ensuing session. After the election of the officers and 

 committee and the transaction of other business, Dr. H. Wildon 

 Carr opened a discussion on the " Principle of Relativity and 

 its importance for Philosophy." 



Dr. Carr gave a short account of the scientific aspect of the 

 subject, asserting that " the Principle of Relativity " affirms that 

 neither space, time, matter, nor ether (if there is ether) is absolute, 

 no one of these is one and the same identical reality for every 

 observer, but that each is particular to the observer." He con- 

 tended that this assertion was of value to philosophy in many 

 ways. It showed that continuity was not in anything that was 

 observed but in the observer. Continuity was a psychical 

 principle. " Science can not only no longer find, but can no 

 longer believe that it is possible there can be, a basis of absolute 

 reference in any fact observed, whether it be formal or material, 

 and is driven by exclusion to find the continuity necessary to 

 its existence in the psychological principle of an observer in a 

 system of reference. The problem of philosophy is thereby 

 raised to a new and higher level." 



Dr. T. P. Nunn contended that the importance of the Principle 

 of Relativity was greatly overestimated. There was nothing 

 particularly strange or startling for those who were acquainted 

 with the works of Mach and Ostwald. Poincare, notwithstand- 

 ing his scientific and mathematical eminence, was hardly sound 

 on the philosophical side, and was prone to make sensational 

 statements, without adequate foundation. Anyone who had got 

 rid of the concept of mass as a quantity of stuff would find no 

 philosophical difficulty in non-Newtonian mechanics. 



Mr. Shelton agreed that the philosophical importance of the 

 principle was overestimated, but for a different reason. He 

 contended that the metaphysics began much sooner than the 



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