142 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 193 2 



if further bis iutellect were vast enough to submit those data to analysis, would 

 include in one and the same formula the movements of the largest bodies in the 

 universe and those of the lightest atom. Nothing would be uncertain for him ; 

 the future as well as the past would be present to his eyes. The human mind 

 in the perfection it has been able to give to astronomy affords a feeble outline 

 of such an intelligence. * * * All its efforts in the search for truth tend to 

 approximate without limit to the intelligence we have just imagined. 



The second is by a philosopher (C. D. Broad) : 



" Determinism " is the name given to the following doctrine. Let S be any 

 sul)stance, ^P any characteristic, and t any moment. Suppose that 8 is in fact in 

 the state a with respect to 4' at t. Then the compound supposition that every- 

 thing else in the world should have been exactly as it in fact was, and that S 

 should have been in one of the other two alternative states with respect to f 

 is an impossible one. [The three alternative states (of which a is one) are: To 

 have the characteristic ■'p, not to have it, and to be changing.] 



The third is by a poet (Omar Khayyam) : 



With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man's knead. 

 And then of the Last Harvest sovv'd the Seed : 

 Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote 

 What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read. 



I propose to take the poet's description as my standard. Perhaps 

 you will think this is an odd choice ; but there is no doubt that his 

 words express what is in our minds when we refer to determinism. 

 The other two definitions need to be scrutinized suspiciously; we 

 are afraid there may be a catch in them. In saying that the physi- 

 cal universe as now pictured is not a universe in which " the first 

 morning of creation wrote what the last dawn of reckoning shall 

 read," we make it clear that the abandonment of determinism is no 

 technical quibble but is to be understood in the most ordinary sense 

 of the word. 



It is important to notice that all three definitions introduce the 

 time element. Determinism postulates not merely causes but pre- 

 existing causes. Determinism means predetermination. Hence, in 

 any argument about determinism, the dating of the alleged causes 

 is an important matter; we must challenge them to produce their 

 birth certificates. 



Ten years ago practically every physicist of repute was, or believed 

 himself to be, a determinist, at any rate so far as inorganic phenom- 

 ena are concerned. He believed that he had come across a scheme 

 of strictly causal law, and that it was the primary aim of science to 

 fit as much of our experience as possible into such a scheme. The 

 methods, definitions, and conceptions of physical science were so 

 much bound up with this assumption of determinism that the limits 

 (if any) of the scheme of causal law were looked upon as the ulti- 

 mate limits of physical science. 



