Introduction 1 5 



and simple kinds of electrical sub-atom, is, without doubt, extra- 

 ordinarily fascinating. From the early days of scientific philo- 

 sophy or (if you prefer it) of philosophical science, thinkers have 

 been hungering after some form of all-embracing atomism. They 

 have now apparently reached it (so far as matter is concerned) by 

 the way of observation and experiment — truly a marvellous 

 performance. Yet the very lucidity of the new conceptions 

 helps to bring home to us their essential insufficiency as a theory 

 of the universe. They may be capable of explaining the con- 

 stitution and behaviour of inanimate objects. They may go 

 some (as yet unmeasured) distance towards explaining organic 

 life. But they certainly cannot explain mind. No man really 

 supposes th^t he personally is nothing more than a changing group 

 of electrical charges, so distributed that their relative motions 

 enable or compel them in their collective capacity to will, to hope, 

 to love, to think, perhaps to discuss themselves as a physical multi- 

 plicity, certainly to treat themselves as a mental unity. No creed 

 of this kind can ever be extracted by valid reasoning from the sort 

 of data which the physics either of the present or the future can 

 possibly supply. 



The truth is that the immense advances which in modern 

 times have been made by mechanical or quasi-mechanical ex- 

 planations of the material world have somewhat upset the mental 

 balance of many thoughtful persons who approach the problems 

 of reality exclusively from the physical side. It is not that they 

 formulate any excessive claims to knowledge. On the contrary, 

 they often describe themselves as agnostics. Nevertheless they 

 are apt unconsciously to assume that they already enjoy a good 

 bird's-eye view of what reality /j, combined with an unshaken 

 assurance about what it is not. They tacitly suppose that every 

 discovery, if genuine, will find its place within the framework 

 of a perfected physics, and, if it does not, may be summarily 

 dismissed as mere superstition. 



XIII 



After all, however, superstition may be negative as well as \ 

 positive, and the excesses of unbelief may be as extravagant as 

 those of belief. Doubtless the universe, as conceived by men 

 more primitive than ourselves, was the obscure abode of strange 



