172 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLVII. No. 1207 



thai! the reading demands of him, though this 

 demand is not slight. 



For whom is the book designed? Those 

 whose acquaintance with Professor Whitehead 

 is confined to his authorship of the " Univer- 

 sal Algebra " and to his joint authorship (with 

 Mr. Bertrand Eussell) of the " Principia 

 Mathematica " will be disposed to assume that 

 the present book is designed solely for stu- 

 dents of modern logic and the foundations of 

 mathematics. But that assumption would be 

 false. The questions dealt with are large ques- 

 tions of education and of science, and the au- 

 thor is deep enough and circumspect enough to 

 know that no really lai^e question can be 

 merely logical or mathematical or physical or 

 narrowly scientific or philosophical. Accord- 

 ingly the discussions, while they are of great 

 interest to logicians and mathematicians, are 

 or ought to be of equal interest to psycholo- 

 gists, educators and almost every other type 

 of student and thinker. 



The fact just mentioned is strikingly illus- 

 trated and confirmed in the fijial chapter where 

 in dealing with the nature and meaning of 

 time, space and relativity, a first deliberate at- 

 tempt is made to recognize all the possible 

 ways of approach and to bring into relation 

 with one another the method of the experi- 

 mental physicist, the method of the mathe- 

 matical physicist, the method of the experi- 

 mental psychologist, the method of the 

 metaphysician and the postulational method 

 of the mathematician. 



A like commendable catholicity pervades the 

 very suggestive chapter dealing with the 

 anatomy of scientific ideas. This chapter 

 ought to be read in connection with Russell's 

 " Scientific Method in Philosophy." The aim 

 of the two is the same. It is to show a method 

 of constructing the fundamental conceptual 

 things— -points, atoms, electrons, molecules, 

 etc. — of mathematics and physics (indeed of 

 science in general) out of sense-given data so 

 that we shall not have to be content with in- 

 ferring the existence of such conceptual things 

 but shall Tcnow their existence as deliberate 

 constructs of our own. Space is lacking to 

 indicate the method here and I must content 

 myseK with saying that philosophers, psychol- 



ogists, logicians and students of natural sci- 

 ence, if they do not read the discussion, will 

 miss a great treat. 



The title-giving essay, which treats of the 

 organization of thought, is concerned with the 

 relation of logic to science. A thoughtful 

 reading of it will amply repay any one for the 

 trouble, though its full significance can not be 

 appreciated by such as are not acquainted 

 with modern developments in logical theory 

 and especially with its culmination in the 

 above-mentioned " Principia Mathematica." 

 Any reader of Science who happens to know 

 that the author's knowledge of logic has prob- 

 ably never been surpassed will think twice be- 

 fore turning from the following profound and 

 briUiant words closing the chapter in ques- 

 tion : " N"either logic vnthout observation, nor 

 observation without logic, can move one step 

 in the formation of science. We may conceive 

 humanity as engaged in an internecine con- 

 flict between youth and age. Youth is not de- 

 fined by years, but by the creative impulse to 

 make something. The aged are those who, 

 before all things, desire not to make a mis- 

 take. Logic is the olive branch from the old 

 to the young, the wand which in the hands of 

 youth has the magic property of creating sci- 

 ence." 



The other essays are concerned primarily 

 with education, secondarily with science. The 

 point of view is fairly well disclosed by a few 

 brief deliverances. " There is only one sub- 

 ject-matter for education, and that is life in 

 all its manifestations." Again : " The devil 

 in the scholastic world has assumed the form 

 of a general education consisting of scraps of 

 a large number of disconnected subjects." 

 Wbat is the cultural value of such scraps? 

 Answer : " A merely well-informed man is the 

 most useless bore on God's earth." What is 

 the right attitude of education towards past, 

 present and future ? " No more deadly harm 

 can be done to young minds than by deprecia- 

 tion of the present. The present contains all 

 that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the 

 past and it is the future." Why teach chil- 

 dren to solve quadratic equations ? " Quad- 

 ratic equations are part of algebra, and alge- 



