Myopic Phenomenalism

The New Background of Science. By Sir James Jeans. (Cam- bridge University Press. 7s. 6d.) Tin.; difficulty in dealing with Relativity lies in this—that whereas the problem is a philosophical problem, people all imagine it to be a mathematical affair to be handled and

decided only by mathematicians, who are credited by the vulgar with supreme, even awe-inspiring, intelligence. It is a

delusion. The error of Relativity arises from erroneous philosophy, or more strictly, epistemology, and mathematics have nothing whatever to do with it. It concerns the origin and foundation of science, prior to mathematics or any other science whatever. Relativity, to employ a colloquial expres- sion, " gets away with it," quite illegitimately, simply by reason of this misunderstanding. It is merely an absurdity,

in the strict sense of that term, rooted in the bad analysis of the philosophy miscalled Idealism, whose proper name should be Phenomenalism, since in all its forms, it consists in the endeavour to make the Universe depend upon the mind that

knows it. Relativity is one of these endeavours ; remarkable, among all its characteristics, especially for the extraordinary lack of humour in its professors.

We are all fools (especially Carlyle) in one way or another. Let us never forget it, lest one should charge us with failing to see our own face in the -glass. Yet every genus has its species, and as the witty Earl of Pembroke puts it, there is

the fool who knows he is a fool, and the fool who does not. Were we compelled, on pain of death, to indicate the greatest

of the last species, we should, with alacrity, point to that long row of philosophers that began with Berkeley, passing from sage to sage to end in Einstein. And by way of preface to our own considerations, let the reader note the observation of Dr. Paul Heyl, in the most luminous little volume yet written on Relativity matters, the New Frontiers of Physics (p. 84) : " One needs to be scarce fifty years old to remember when such ideas as space curvature and four dimensions were permitted to be presented perhaps as theories, but never as facts, under penalty of being sent to academic Coventry, or oven of suspicion of lunacy. But today, Jeans, Eddington, or Einstein, not to mention a host of others, may speak freely that which C. H. Hinton thought but dared not say,.except in a strictly limited circle."

And this " freedom " Dr. Hey! appears to consider a happy evidence of advance in Science. We are not so sure. It does not seem to occur to Dr. Heyl, that it may on the contrary be a mark of the reverse : that a change whereby what was scien- tific lunacy riow passes for scientific sanity might be, what in fact it is, a psychological disease, originating in the philosophy of Berkeley, by whom all subsequent philosophers have allowed themselves to be argued out of their own senses ; a disease to which mathematicians are particularly prone.

Berkeley was one himself. Nor can the pathologist study it anywhere so well as in W. K. Clifford, another mathematician. With Berkeley," says Clifford, " we get rid of the thing per- ceived."

Ali ! do you indeed ? Marvellous verily is the sequacity of the dupes, et quasi cursores Erroris lonipada tradunt. Here is a long processionary string of amiable gentlemen, each bowing low to the one -before him : all, like everybody else, seeing, all their life long, things as they are, at a distance ; all persuaded, .notwithstanding, that they neither do, nor can all hugging to their bosoms, as a pearl beyond price, the sophistical argumentation that robs them of'their own senses : all constantly disproving, by their own exercise of it, the

theory that persuades them that they are not able to see. And all the while, staring them in the face, is the conclusive argument, to which Berkeley was blind, knowing as he did nothing of organic Nature, but which Aristotle could have taught them, who knew a great deal ; Aristotle, whose philo- sophy Hume declared to have deservedly decayed.

" With Berkeley, we get rid of the thing perceived." Ali ! Clifford, that is really very funny. Is it not as clear as the sun at noon, that we do actually see the things themselves, at a distance, because we must ? Did it ever strike you that

we are not the only things that see ? Is it not gross, open, palpable, that no animal, fish, bird, beast or man, could pre- serve its life, unless it could see its prey or its enemy, while yet there was time, from afar ? Is it not obvious, that if sight were what these egregious philosophers reduce it to, the whole of Nature, the whole organic world of animals would be impossible, and disappear ? Yet what did Berkeley know of this organic necessity ? Nothing at all. He cared nothing for it. He was not thinking about Nature : he devised his

paradox simply in order to prop up his theological creed, as a weapon against his bugbears. the atheists and freethinkers.

His blindness is comprehensible ; so, in another way, is that of

Hume and Kant. But what are we to say of those, who go on echoing, like parrots, their absurdity, in a biological, zoo- logical, evolutionary age ? Who sail cannot see, that the perception of objects, at a distance, as they are, is the neces- sary condition of all organic life. All take it for granted that Berkeley's absurd thesis has been proved. It has not, nor ever can be, for a very simple and unanswerable reason ; neither Berkeley, nor Hume, nor anybody else has ever brought, nor can ever bring, an argument against the power of sight, which' does not assume it in attempting to disprove it. But you cannot employ sight to refute itself. Yet this is exactly what these philosophers do : as we have abundantly shown elsewhere. Just as in the case of gravitation, so with sight : they deny the fact, because they cannot understand it ; the irreducible fact, that, after all, we do, and they do, and everybody does, and every living being does, see, objects at a distance, as they are. Because, if they don't, out they all go. Out goes Nature, and out goes Science.

Exit Berkeley, and his row of processionary caterpillars : overboard goes Relativity and its band of devotees. And in their place stands the real thinker, Aristotle, who might, all the time they were romancing, have taught them many things. First, that esse is not pereipi, but posse, of which pereipi is but an accident, and which goes on almost wholly without it in the dark. Secondly, that your explanation of a fact must not issue in explaining it away, and that explana- tion of the obseurum by the obscurius is scientifically illegitimate. Thirdly, that science is impossible, if you eviscerate sense, the root and germ of all science, of its content. Fourthly, that mathematical science begins not with lines, points and surfaces, but with the perception of the solid, the only reality, of which points, lines and surfaces are only unreal abstractions. Fifthly, that ultimate matter is incognizable : as, e.g., when two colourless gases combine, with a loud explosion, to reappear as a purple liquid ; or when the grub .of a parasitic fly sucks dry the grub of a bee, thereby changing bee stuff into fly stuff—what is it that persists.through these changes ? And lastly, that absurdity begets absurdity : a deadly truth exemplified by the evolu- tion of modern philosophy from Berkeley to this year of grace, 1933.

Yes, Aristotle will still be what he always was, the Master of the Wise when Relativity is dead, buried and forgotten. And we may write upon its tomb that terrible old dictum of Publius Syrus : Judex danmatur, cum nocens absolvitur : which being interpreted is : the philosopher who endorses critical absurdities, refutes himself. F. W. BAIN.