630 Notices inspecting New Books. 



the nature of the confidence which inspired them, and compare it 

 with the present development of science and the quite different 

 kind of confidence which inspires our men of science to-day. 

 I am thinking of the feelings with which that generation heard 

 the British Association Addresses of Tyndall, Huxley, and 

 Clifford, to take three leading names. There was in all they 

 said a note of clear triumph, they proclaimed a victory achieved, 

 all that remained to do was to reap the fruits. Beneath this con- 

 fidence audits basis was the belief that Nature is extremely simple 

 in its framework and universal laws, magnificent in its perspective, 

 stupendous in its grandeur, but at bottom an arrangement of space 

 and time and material in a vast chemical laboratory functioning 

 automatically. 



It was too simple. The task of science has turned out very 

 differently. New and unsuspected realms of reality have been 

 disclosed, ever-growing complexities have destroyed the simplicity 

 of the first generalizations. Men of science to-day have not lost 

 confidence in science but the basis of that confidence is shifted. 

 Nature does not present itself to us as self-revealing, as a school- 

 master from whom like children we have obediently to learn. 



The first thing on which Professor Whitehead insists in this 

 Enquiry is the impossibility of any pure science of Nature which 

 begins by ignoring the problem of the relation of the mind to its 

 objects. VVe have to take into account that we perceive, and that 

 the immediate objects of the mind are its perceptions. Physical 

 science has been impatient of Berkeley's problem, and has turned 

 it over to speculative philosophy as a problem science can dispense 

 with. To-day we are realizing more and more clearly that this 

 cannot be ignored without fatal consequences to science itself. 

 The new principle of relativity is, in effect, the inclusion of the 

 problem of perception in physical science itself. 



The Enquiry is divided into four parts. In Part I. Professor 

 Whitehead criticizes the traditional concepts and shows how they 

 have failed by reason of that very aloofness from the philosophical 

 problem which has been their boast. The problem of movement 

 then leads him to describe Newton's laws of motion, Clerk Maxwell's 

 equations, and Einstein's scientific relativity. Part II. deals with 

 the data of science, and here we have the exposition of the root 

 concept which Professor Whitehead proposes for the new organi- 

 zation of science, the event. Now, because an event seems 

 analysable into factors and because these factors seem separable 

 as well as distinguishable, it has always been taken to be com- 

 posite, a synthesis of the factors into which it is analysed. Science 

 therefore has always sought to go behind the event to what have 

 seemed to be its constituent elements, for its data. But the 

 factors of an event are not isolable, and consequently there are no 

 simple elements which constitute by their conjunction the event. 

 In Part III. Professor Whitehead expounds his method. This 

 part is, as we should expect, severely mathematical. Taking events 

 a.s his data he shows how they must be coordinated to yield a 



