(1) Science and the Unseen World (2) The Meaning of Life: as shown in the Process of Evolution

Abstract

(1) PROF. EDDINGTON'S Swarthmore lecture will be read with interest by all who watch the movements of scientific thought in relation to philosophy and religion. The attitude of the author has become generally familiar through his volume on “The Nature of the Physical World”, but in the present lecture he attacks the religious problem at closer quarters. His treatment of it, as one would expect, is both original and suggestive. He puts aside the question, Does God really exist? “because it raises so many unprofitable side issues, and at the end it scarcely reaches deep enough into religious experience. Among leading scientists to-day I think about half assert that the aether exists and the other half deny its existence; but as a matter of fact both parties mean exactly the same thing and are divided only by words.” He points out that the crucial point for us is not a conviction of the existence, but a conviction of the revelation, of a supreme god. It is, if we may venture to say so, only very rarely that a man of science so well understands the true nature of the religious problem. Also, Prof. Eddington has no sympathy with any attempts “to base religion on scientific discovery” which the scientifically nebulous and the religiously fantastic have sometimes made. He knows how much to expect from science, namely, what it can tell us and what it cannot. The methods of physical science do not lead us to anything which can serve as a basis for religious experience, but only to “a shadow world of symbols. For that necessary basis we must return to our starting-point in human consciousness, the only point where we have direct and first-hand knowledge of reality.

(1) Science and the Unseen World.

By Prof. Arthur Stanley Eddington. (Swarthmore Lecture, 1929.) Pp. 56. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1929.) 2s. 6d. net; paper, 1s. 6d. net.

(2) The Meaning of Life: as shown in the Process of Evolution.

By C. E. M. Joad. (The Forum Series, No. 10.) Pp. iv + 60. (London: Watts and Co., 1928.) 1s. net.