670 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



It is interesting to see on p. 27 of the second volume a form of the assumption 

 made use of by Zermelo in 1904 that a continuum (for example) can be well- 

 ordered. 



Philip E. B. Jourdain. 



The Philosophy of Mr. B*rtr*nd R*ss*ll, with an Appendix of Leading 

 Passages from Certain other Works. Edited by Philip E. B. Jourdain. 

 [Pp. 96.] (London : George Allen & Unwin, 1918. Price y. bd. net.) 



The motto of this clever and amusing volume is the dictum of the Red Queen 

 that "Even a joke should have some meaning." Mr. Jourdain's little joke 

 has a great deal of meaning, packed into a very small compass. Mr. B*rtr*nd 

 R*ss*ll, whose papers are here collected, was killed by anti- suffragists in 191 1 ; 

 but the manuscript on which this volume is based was fortunately saved from the 

 flames kindled by the eager champions of the Sacredness of Property who burned 

 down his house. The editing has been done by one who believes that such work 

 may be a fine art ; and the result fully justifies that belief. References and 

 appendices are constructed with that eye for economically ordered effort and 

 balanced form which 6ne associates with a poet or a sculptor. The relations 

 between Mr. R*ss*ll and other thinkers can therefore be easily and rapidly 

 traced. Thus Mr. Jourdain's notes to the first sentence open up a vast field : 

 "The view that the fundamental principles of logic consist solely of the law of 

 identity was held by Leibniz, Drobisch, Uberweg, and Tweedledee" (p. 11). If 

 any reader should be surprised at the appearance of Tweedledee in this august 

 company let him note the distinction between sign and signification made by the 

 White Knight (p. 22) ; the nominalism of the Hatter (p. 24) ; and the likeness of 

 the March Hare and the Gryphon (who changed the subject when Alice asked 

 awkward questions) to those mathematicians whose method of solving the 

 paradoxes, arising out of commonly held logical views, is simply not to notice 

 them (p. 77). In other words this volume has, for the first time, placed the works 

 of Lewis Carroll in their proper place as profound contributions to logic. 



The influence of Mr. R*ss*ll's work upon his great contemporary Mr. Bertrand 

 Russell is very apparent. For example, his mode of proving that Humpty- 

 Dumpty was a Hegelian is closely allied to what has sometimes been called, 

 slightingly, the a priori method of writing history — a method utilised in 

 Mr. Russell's construction of what Leibniz's views would have been had they 

 formed a consistent whole. 



The book is not only full of delightful jokes but propounds an arrangement of 

 them in a hierarchy. This forms a striking application of the theory of types ; 

 though it would appear from a footnote that Mr. Russell himself is surprisingly 

 addicted to jokes of the first order (p. 81). The application of logic to everyday 

 commonplaces is in itself humorous, because incongruous ; as when Mr. R*ss*ll 

 notes that " people who refer to the Oxford Movement imply that Oxford only » 

 moved once " (p. 54). But a more incisive satire is shown when he is exposing the 

 follies of the self-styled anti-metaphysical scientist who imagines that he has no 

 metaphysical basis because what he has is so crudely uncritical. Thus it is 

 observed that " scholastic " is an academic epithet applied by such folk to any 

 order of thought which is more exact than that to which they are accustomed 

 (p. 23 ; cf. p. 74). As for the " pure experimentalist," let him ponder deeply 

 Mr. R*ss*ll's application of his method (p. 88). "I should make," he says, "a 

 statistical inquiry among school children, before their pristine wisdom has been 



