September 4, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



347 



student will feel grateful to the translator and 

 the publisher who have made the work acces- 

 sible in good form to those whose reading is 

 necessarily confined to the English language. 

 The work is, in the best sense of the term, a 

 philosophical work. Accordingly, one can not 

 but wonder a little why the author did not 

 choose to call it " Philosophy of Science " in- 

 stead of " Problems of Science." Perhaps the 

 decisive consideration was similar to that 

 which led Messrs. Whitehead and Eussell to 

 entitle their great treatise "Principia Mathe- 

 matica " instead of " Principles of Mathe- 

 matics " : they feared the warmer title might 

 attract many readers incompetent to under- 

 stand the work. Doubtless Professor Enriques 

 desired his work to engage the attention of 

 men of science, and he may have reflected that 

 most of these gentlemen are rather repelled 

 than attracted by titles in which the word phi- 

 losophy occurs. Is our author himself a mem- 

 ber of this majority? His evident great care 

 not to be fooled by words or to be lost in nebu- 

 lous generalities seems to indicate that he is. 

 Confirmatory indicia are to be found in some 

 passages of the work. It is essential " to elim- 

 inate all transcendental processes of definition 

 and of reasoning," says Cesaro in the begin- 

 ning of his lectures on the infinitesimal cal- 

 culus. Enriques quotes those words of his 

 fellow-countryman and heartily approves them 

 (p. 16) as designed to warn the student " to 

 banish from his mind all metaphysical ideas " 1 

 Again, p. 31 : " Metaphysics not only puts to- 

 gether symbols without sense, but," and so on. 

 Again, p. 208 : " And precisely to ignorance of 

 this subject (modern geometry) are due those 

 strange conclusions over which some philos- 

 ophers are stUl toiling." Once more, p. 308: 

 " But even if these objections were not mani- 

 fest, of what use is it to confute a philosopher? 

 Schopenhauer said nothing could be easier or 

 more useless." Just why the testimony of 

 Schopenhauer is adduced is not quite evident 

 unless it be on the principle that it takes a 

 philosopher to catch a philosopher. One who 

 has attended meetings of philosophic associa- 

 tions and meetings of scientific associations 

 can scarcely have failed to notice this very 



significant difference: at a meeting of scien'- 

 tific men, when a paper is presented, the au- 

 thor's colleagues assume that the author has 

 probably made a contributon of some value 

 and that it is their privilege and duty to 

 understand it and sooner or later to estimate 

 it ; at a meeting of philosophers, when a paper 

 is presented, the author's colleagues usually 

 proceed at once to discuss it with the air of 

 " of course the author's contentions are erro- 

 neous and it is our privilege and pleasure to 

 show that they won't bear criticism." 



That Professor Enriques should not wish to 

 pose as a philosopher as distinguished from 

 the character of man of science is indeed en- 

 tirely understandable. Yet his work is a very 

 important contribution to the philosophy, the 

 methodology, the epistemology of science, and, 

 whether or not he would own it, he has shovm 

 himself to be a philosophic thinker of immense 

 learning and of great power both critical and 

 constructive. But what kind of philosopher is 

 he? To what school does he belong? Is he a 

 realist or an idealist or a rationalist or a prag- 

 matist or an empiricist or a positivist or some 

 other variety? The answer is that he is at 

 once all and none of these things. He is too 

 big to belong to any of the schools. His 

 thought goes crashing into and through all of 

 them, and, when he has passed along, the scho- 

 lastic architectures look much as if they had 

 been struck by a discourse of Henri Poincare. 

 One can not paste a label on Enriques and 

 then inform people of his doctrine by pointing 

 to the label. The only way to ascertain what 

 his doctrine is is to read and ponder what he 

 has said. But who can read it? Not many 

 know enough to read it all, but there are many 

 qualified to read it in part, some this part, 

 some that, some another. Even historians 

 (whose province includes the whole activity of 

 man and nature) might try it ; so might sociol- 

 ogists, lawyers and men of letters. Should 

 they fail to understand it — ^well, the conscious- 

 ness of one's limitations is not always un- 

 wholesome, and if it become unbearable, one 

 can take refuge in the soothing reflection that 

 it was Leibnitz who was " the last of the uni- 

 versals." 



