194 Science Religion and Reality 



those phenomena of experience which had hitherto been attributed 

 to an entirely mysterious agency called gravitation. Not only so, 

 but the test of observation has shown that the prediction is more 

 accurate than the predictions from the old Newtonian law of 

 gravitation in the three cases in which the difference is sufficiently 

 great to be observed. 



Change of position of the observer gives him another point of 

 view j but man is so used to changing his position that he very 

 early acquired the habit of synthesis for this kind of change. He 

 would be badly handicapped in the struggle for existence if he were 

 unable to conceive an external world which remained unchanged 

 whatever position he himself happened to occupy. But he is not 

 in the habit of taking trips on other stars or of falling over precipices, 

 so that the corresponding syntheses have been left to scientific 

 research, and the conceptions of the external world which result 

 from them are outside anything which he has hitherto imagined. 



I hope the reader will not attempt to judge the great theory 

 of relativity by the brief reference to it above. These remarks may 

 possibly put a right idea in his head, but they will almost certainly 

 also put in some wrong ideas unless he refers to a fuller account of 

 the subject. Its relevance here is that it shows us modern physics 

 in the act of synthesizing the conception of observers with different 

 points of view and declaring (rightly or wrongly) the result of the 

 synthesis to be the real external world. Most of this essay will be 

 dominated by the modern conceptions of the external world of 

 physics which have arisen from Einstein's theory of relativity. 

 We think that the reader may take it that the theory has come to 

 stay, and that it marks a firmly established stage in the development 

 of science. No doubt it may in the future have to give place to a 

 fuller conception embodying a still larger measure of truth ; but 

 that anticipation does not affect our conviction that in the present 

 relativity theory we have the truth in a purer form than in the 

 Newtonian theory that preceded it, even as the Newtonian theory 

 was a great advance on the conceptions that preceded it. Some 

 of the scientific assertions that will be made here refer to rather 

 advanced deductions from the theory which may not have secured 

 the same wide acceptance among scientific men as the better-known 

 portions of the theory ; and naturally we must not claim the great 

 authority of the scientific theory for the philosophical speculation 

 which we propose to base on it. But granting that the reader may 



