October 14, 1922] 



NA TURE 



503 



with, better systems imposed upon their tenants by 

 landlords. To-day, if English farming practice is in 

 many respects still ahead of its competitors, it has 

 become, comparatively speaking, not so alive to the 

 applications of science. Farmers themselves are not 

 quite what they were ; the great industrial develop- 

 ment of the last sixty years has been drawing away the 

 brains from the more slowly moving pursuit of agricul- 

 ture, and, speaking broadly, the present race of farmers 

 are not educated up to their needs or their oppor- 

 tunities. 



Here again the landowners have not been, but can 

 be, leaders ; they can become intelligence centres, they 

 can stimulate the education of their tenants and of 

 their tenants' sons, they can even insist on education 

 in selecting their tenants. It is the lack of apprecia- 

 tion of science among landowners that has made it a 

 plant of slow growth among their tenants. 



The address is really a powerfully worded appeal 

 from Lord Bledisloe to the landowning class to treat 

 landowning as a vocation and to educate themselves 

 for it. It is a far-sighted call for service, and coming 

 from one who has so notably put into practice what he 

 preaches, carries with it an authority which no ordinary 

 admonition to progress can possess. 



Bergson and Einstein. 



Durie et SimuUaneite : A propos de la theorie d'Ein- 

 stein. Par Henri Bergson. Pp. viii + 245. (Paris: 

 Felix Alcan, 1922.) 8 francs net. 



EINSTEIN in his theory of relativity may be said 

 to have thrown down a challenge in the scientific 

 world of the same kind as that which Bergson in his 

 theory of duration has thrown down in the philosophic 

 world. Both theories are primarily concerned with a 

 certain fundamental character in the experience of 

 time. Both recognise a difference of nature, that is, 

 a qualitative difference, between the time which enters 

 into our equations of measurement and the time which 

 is lived. At one point, however, Bergson seems to 

 come into direct conflict with the Minkowski-Einstein 

 scheme of a space-time continuum. This is in his 

 conception of creative evolution. Creation means 

 that the reality of the physical universe is of the nature 

 of life or consciousness, a conception which implies 

 the continued existence of the past in the present, -and 

 a universal moving forward into an open future. How- 

 is this consistent with the view that there is not one 

 single universal time but as many different times as 

 there are systems, and that there is no absolute simul- 

 taneity between events which take place at any two 

 points if they are separate from one another in space ? 

 NO. 2763, VOL. I 10] 



Bergson has evidently been of opinion that for his 

 own sake he must clear up his position on this crucial 

 point. To do so has been no slight undertaking, for 

 he has not been content to accept the principle of 

 relativity from the physicists or to assume that its 

 mathematics is correct. He has, therefore, deferred 

 the resumption of his own philosophical work, inter- 

 rupted by the war, and has set himself to study at 

 first hand the mathematical equations of Lorentz and 

 Einstein. It may interest readers of Nature to know 

 that Bergson specialised in mathematics in his student 

 days to the extent of hesitating between it and philo- 

 sophy when he had to choose a profession. The argu- 

 ment in his new work deals almost exclusively with the 

 restricted theory, for it is that which affects directly 

 the question of the reality of time. The re^ ance of 

 the generalised theory is only touched upon. It is 

 the subject of a " Final Remark," in which the nature 

 of its importance for philosophy is indicated, but 

 general relativity does not seem to Bergson to challenge, 

 as the restricted relativity does, his theory that time 

 as a universal flux or change is an intuited reality, 

 while successive states are a spatialised time due to 

 the intellectual mode of apprehending it. 



Descartes in the Principles (ii. 29) declares that in 

 movement there is complete reciprocity ; either of two 

 objects changing their relative position may be con- 

 sidered as having moved or as having remained at rest. 

 To this Sir Henry More replied (March 5, 1649) : " When 

 I am sitting still, and someone moving away a mile 

 from me is red with fatigue, it is he who moves and I 

 who am still." Nothing science can affirm concerning 

 the relativity of perceived movement, measured by foot- 

 rules and clocks, can disturb the inward feeling we have 

 that we ourselves can effect movements and that the 

 efforts we put forth in doing so are under our control. 

 Here we have, then, in the most striking manner, the 

 contrast between the intuitive mode and the intellectual 

 mode of apprehending reality. Is there anything in 

 the principle of relativity which conflicts with the con- 

 ception of reality as fundamentally a duration which is 

 intuited or lived ? Prima facie, yes. The denial of 

 absolute simultaneity seems completely inconsistent 

 with it. This comes out most clearly in Einstein's 

 paradox. " Suppose a traveller to be enclosed in a 

 cannon-ball and projected from the earth with a 

 velocity amounting to a twenty-thousandth of the 

 velocity -of light ; suppose him to meet a star and be 

 returned to earth ; he will find when he leaves the 

 cannon-ball that if he has been absent two years, the 

 world in his absence has aged two hundred years." 

 Any one who applies the mathematics of relativity 

 and makes the simple calculation for the two systems, 

 earth and cannon-ball, will find that the conclusion 



