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Pages: 327
Publisher: J. Murray / Maudsley Press
Year: 1927/2007
ISBN: B0006DAJHU
ISBN: 1406768529
ISBN: 978-1406768527
PREFACE
THIS BOOK I DEDICATE TO MEN OF WIT AND UNDERSTANDING, HOPING THAT THE INDIVIDUAL RESPONSES MAT SWELL INTO THE GREAT VOICE OF THE PUBLIC PREFACE ALLOWING the eye to wander over the whole domain of spience, one cannot but feel admiration for man. Here is this little fellow, cast naked upon a planet inhabitable only with difficulty, sailing in space he knows not whither, can vaguely guess why physically so meagrely endowed that he must envy the elephant his strength, the wolf his digestion the frog his jumping powers and yet gifted with a superior intelligence and behoven to direct his eyes at every turn towards a certain signal - that of truth, which, when he can discern it, answers unerringly Yes or No and by this alone suffices to lead him upwards. Upwards indeed he has striven in ignorance, mental blindness by struggle, by ruthless violence at times through war and rapine, wholesale murder gradually discovering the world in half fearful, half-heroic search, led or driven in ventures clothing himself, himself in communities, providing of food tad Imple at and on high by of thought and emotion the of at his and his sympathies, and reaching out and aloft to aspira tions of greater living and to new vistas of entrancing thought. Marvelling and marvellous man 1 The stars have guided him, and the star of his reasoning mind is that which in our present state of knowledge we call science. Science is great. Discoveries in science are wonder voyages of the soul. But those who wield authority in science have not always been fair to their fellow-man they have sometimes deceived him, possibly because themselves deceived but they have also fallen to the worship of inferior divinities,-religious fanaticism or political pre judices conventional falsities hypocrisies, hum bugs even the lure of social titles and personal distinctions, and other perversions which, though not without a plausible appearance, have signal injustice and introduced grotesque inversions of values. This is the theme of the present hook, hut in writing it I not cared to in content. It is to for no has been done in the our wellnigh perfect, our centres of illumination our for the of but I for one think that we are between two phases of develop ment, and in that transition we have lost the surety of ignorance that often gave force to the doctrines of old, and we have only in a tentative way reached at the fruits of the new dispensation losing the old faiths we are deficient m moral courage, and we cover our deficiencies by pretence or simply by that never-failing arid extensible garment of our hypocrisy in the world of thought in especial we live in a mist of falsity so all-prevailing that we have come to regard it as our normal atmosphere. In this scene I see the figure of Science blurred and distorted, but I do not now affect the pose of an inspired Perseus rescuing from the claws of a monster the unsullied maiden, Wisdom 1 am con tent to take the rdle of the honest char who, with scrubbing-brush, and soap,, works at what she knows, strenuously removing the rubbish, and catching fleeting vision of the beauty that emerges from the midst of her toil for all that is dona in the service of science wins surely a meed of grace.
CONTENTS
- SCIENCE LEADING AND MISLEADING 13
- MATHEMATICS 50
- PHYSICS AND QUESTIONS OF RELATIVITY 82
- ORIGINS OF RELATIVITY 98 DOGMAS OF SCIENCE
- PHYSICS 120
- CHEMISTRY 137
- THE SACKED SCIENCE BIOLOGY 155
- PHYSIOLOGY 201 REGIONS OF FALSITY
- PSYCHOLOGY 230
- VITALISM 300
- THE SPIRITUAL IDEA 314 AFFLICATIONS
- St BciALtfittt 525
- MEDICINE 341
- . . . . . . . 361
