October 20, 192 1] 



;JATURE 



247 



its transformations, its application to existing 

 needs, and its response to new demands. Vet the 

 majority of our people are denied the elements of 

 chemistry in their training, and thus grow to man- 

 hood without the shghtest real understanding of 

 their bodily processes and composition, of the 

 wizardry by which living things contribute to their 

 nourishment and to their aesthetic enjoyment of life. 

 It should not be impossible to bring into the 

 general scheme of secondary education a suffici- 

 ency of chemical, physical, mechanical, and bio- 

 logical principles to render even, boy and girl of 

 sixteen possessing average intelligence at least 

 accessible by an explanation of modern dis- 

 coveries. One fallacy of the present system is to 

 assume that relative proficiency in the inorganic 

 branch must be attained before approaching 

 organic chemistry. From the point of view of 

 correlating scholastic knowledge with the common 

 experiences and contacts of daily life this is quite 

 illogical; from baby's milk to grandpapa's Glaxo 

 the most important things are organic, excepting 

 water. Food (meat, carbohydrate, fat), clothes 

 (cotton, silk, linen, wool), and shelter (wood) are 

 organic, and. the symbols for carbon, hydrogen, 

 oxygen, and nitrogen can be made the basis of 

 skeleton representations of many fundamental 

 things which happen to us in our daily lives with- 

 out first explaining their position in the periodic 

 table of all the elements. The curse of mankind 



is not labour, but waste; misdirection of time, of 

 material, of opportunity, of humanity. 



Realisation of such an ideal would people the 

 ordered communities with a public alive to the 

 verities, as distinct from irrelevancies of life, and 

 apprehensive of the ultimate danger with which 

 civilisation is threatened. It would inoculate that 

 public with a germ of the Nature-motive, pro- 

 ducing a condition which would reflect itself ulti- 

 mately upon those entrusted with government. It 

 would provide the mental and sympathetic back- 

 ground upon which the future truth-seeker must 

 work, long before he is implored by a terrified 

 and despairing people to provide them with food 

 and energy. Finally, it would give an unsus- 

 pected meaning and an unimagined grace to a 

 hundred commonplace experiences. The quiver- 

 ing glint of massed bluebells in broken sunshine, 

 the joyous radiance of young beech-leaves against 

 the stately cedar, the perfume of hawthorn in 

 the twilight, the florid majesty of rhododendron, 

 the fragrant simplicity of lilac, periodically 

 gladden the most careless heart and the least 

 reverent spirit ; but to the chemist they breathe 

 an added message, the assurance that a new 

 season of refreshment has dawned upon the world, 

 and that those delicate syntheses, into the mystery 

 of which it is his happy privilege to penetrate, 

 once again are working their inimitable miracles 

 in the laboratory- of the living organism. 



Metaphysics and Materialism- 

 By Prof. H. Wildox Carr. 



'' I F the illusion of the scholastic method is that 

 ■*■ from mere forms we can deduce essences, 

 then the world-view which we call materialism 

 is only a scholastic pastime." This is the con- 

 cluding sentence of Hermann Weyl's '* Raum, 

 Zeit, Materie." Whatever may be the case with 

 the physicists, the mathematicians are under no 

 illusion with regard to the completeness of the 

 scientific revolution. The principle of relativity 

 has not merely complicated the concept of physical 

 reality ; it has re-formed it. Mathematics is, and 

 has always been recognised as being, a construc- 

 tive process of the human mind exercised on 

 physical existence. The old mathematics took its 

 matter from physics; the new mathematics gives 

 matter to physics. The effect is that the world- 

 view which had become for physical science in the 

 nineteenth century practically unchallengeable, and 

 the acceptance of which had come to be regarded 

 as the indispensable condition and onlv passport 

 for those who would enter the ranks of scientific 

 investigators, has become suddenly incredible. It 

 is true, indeed, that it still has its' defenders, and 

 that it is held as firmly as ever by manv who 

 continue to be in their special departments authori- 

 tative teachers ; but this does not alter the fact that 

 for us to-day the world-view is changed, and it 

 is not even strange that many leaders in scientific 

 research still cling fast to the old view when we 

 NO. 2712. VOL. 108] 



remember that the great originator of the modern 

 inductive method in the seventeenth century, 

 Francis Bacon, to the end rejected the Copernican 

 theory. 



Materialism does not stand for any particular 

 theory of the nature of matter, but for the general 

 world-view that matter, something de facto 

 objective the ultimate constitution of which we 

 may not know, and even may not be able to know, 

 but which is entirely independent of our reason and 

 of any thoughts we may have about it, exists and 

 constitutes the reality of the universe, including 

 reason and will, which as qualities or proper- 

 ties of some of its forms give rise to knowledge 

 of it. This materialism reached the zenith of its 

 expression in the Darwinian theon*' of natural 

 selection, not in that theory itself, the truth of 

 which there is no intention in this connection to 

 call in question, but in the implications which 

 were generally accepted as contained in it, and 

 especially in the application which was made 

 of it to rationalise a world-view. It seemed to 

 point a way by which it was possible to conceive, 

 and to some extent to follow in its histon.-, an 

 evolution which had produced mind from an 

 original matter. 



It may not be obvious at once that the mere 

 rejection of the Newtonian concept of absolute 

 space and time and the substitution of Einstein's 



