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XCI. On the Postulates and Conclusions of the Theory of 

 Relativity. By Louis T. More, Ph.D., Professor of 

 Physics, University of Cincinnati*. 



IN spite of the wide-spread interest which has been 

 excited by the theory of relativity, there has been a 

 surprising lack o£ attention paid to the credibility of its 

 postulates and to the effect its conclusions, i£ accepted, would 

 have on our ideas of the objective world. In this theory we 

 are not dealing with an abstract, or mathematical analysis, 

 but with a definite conception of what we regard as a real 

 world whose phenomena are apparent to our sense perceptions. 

 Its conclusions must square with our experience of space and 

 time and not with a world of the imagination. No matter what 

 logical excellence a scientific hypothesis may have, we may 

 judge from past experience that it will be discarded unless it 

 satisfies the persistent and imperative need of the mind for a 

 somewhat naive belief in the reality of the objective world, 

 and unless it tends to establish stability and regularity in our 

 environment. 



The earliest attack on Newtonian mechanics was made by 

 Bishop Berkeley almost contemporaneously with the appear- 

 ance of the Principia. Newton based his mechanics on the 

 conservation and objective reality of matter as expressed in 

 his law of inertia and, equally important, by his principle of 

 action and reaction he reduced the fluctuating and incom- 

 parable kinetic phenomena to a problem of statics capable 

 of direct measurement. For these principles Berkeley sub- 

 stituted his famous doctrine of subjective idealism. One 

 by one he discussed the properties by which we say we 

 recognize matter, and showed that they are but the sense 

 perceptions of the mind. His criticism is keen and his 

 argument, as a logical process, is excellent. Although 

 Berkeley intended his philosophy to be a proof, not merely 

 of the real existence of the external world, but primarily of 

 the real existence of God, yet his idealism has had the effect 

 of encouraging atheism and has gone down under such 

 illogical attacks as that of Dr. Johnson, who merely kicked 

 a large stone as an evidence that the real existence of matter 

 did not rest in his mind. The vortical theory of matter 

 proposed by Lord Kelvin, which mathematically satisfied 

 very many of the properties of matter, succumbed to the 



* Communicated by the Author, 

 Phil. Mag. S, 6. Vol. 42. No. 251. JYov. 1921. 3 K 



