NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20488, 5 March 1932, Page 13

NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

——♦ SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY. The Scientific Outlook. By Bertrand Russell Allen and Unwin, 279 pp. (7s 6(1 net- '

Lord Russell is as formidable as ever. His words are like bullets, his technique military. Sometimes he searches an area provocatively and randomly, but whenever he steadies himself for his shot he rarely registers than an inner. Who else in the history of English literature lias equalled him in imparting momentum to words. It is as if the precision of Sir Isaac Newton had been added to the fighting wit and athletic vigour of Voltaire, the school-mastering flair of Wells thrown in, and the whole kept cool—on ice. Ordinary forms of commendation seem out of place, as though one were attempting to present a testimonial to a mountain or pat the Great Pyramid on the buck, is or is it remarkable that metaphysicians should be awkward and uneasy m the presence of one who can say (as he does in "Knowledge or the External World"); ' The number of terms in a given class is the class of all classes that are similar to a given class"; and mean itPari one deals with scientific knowledge, its methods and implications, part two with techniques of the various sciences, and the iinal section w,ith social application;) of science as they are and as they may be. While the first part is brilliantly sceptical and constructive at the same time, it is for the intellect. But intellect needs something beyond its own achievements. Few know as he knows that the acquisition of knowledge and power is a game, an athletic pastime of a special kind incapable of satisfying the full potentialities of life. The resting point of his book is therefore not where these brilliant things are said and done, but where all this has to be transmuted .into conduct that gives peace to the feelina side of man. Stavrogin in "The Devils" said once that if it were mathematically proved to him that truth excludes Christ hewould prefer to stick to Christ. Lord Russell does not and cannot say this, nor could Stavrogin continue to say it, since everything must be held steadily in its place, truth, beauty, and goodness, in an indivisible blend of intellect, feeling, "and action. Quotations do less justice to men of this calibre than to lesser men, yet it is possible to indicate a little, both content and method; the visual precision of a pioneer familiar with the frontiers of knowledge, his keen sense of environment, the life of hard stringy thought, and the eatpat and frolic of relaxed intervals. Here, for example, arc some passages from the chapter on "The Limitations of Scientific Method" :

The plain mail thinks that matter is solid: but the physicist thinks that it is a warn of probability undulating in nothingness. To put it - briefly, the matter in a place is dofined as the likelihood of your seeing a ghost there. . . . It is characteristic of the advance of science that Ipsa and less is found to be datß and more and more is found to be inference

Hume, nearly 200 years ago, threw doubt upon induction, an indeed, upon most oth?r things. The philosophers were indignant, and invented refutations of Hume, whjch passed muster on account of thoir extreme obscurity. Indeed, for a long time philosophers took care to be unintelligible, since otherwise everybody would have perceived that they had been unsuccessful in answering Hume. It is oasy to invent a metaphysic which will have as a consequence that induction is valid, and many men have done so; but they have not shown any reason to balieve in their metaphysic except that it was pleasant. The metaphysic of Bergson, for example, is undoubtedly pleasant: like cocktails it enables us to »eo the world as a unity without sharp distinctions, and all of it vaguely asroeable, but it has no better claim than cocktails Have to be included in the technique for the pursuit of knowledge.

Then there is the chapter that he calls "Scientific Metaphysics'":

It 5s a curious fact tliat just when the man in the street ha* begun to believe thoroughly in tciencei the man in ths laboratory has begun to lose his faith So long as we do not enquire too closely what the nclentist really meant, he seems to be presenting us with, a more and more imposing edifice of knowledge. This is especially the caso in astronomy." ...

Academic philosophers from the time of Parmenides have believed that the world is s unity. This view has been taken over from them by clergymen and journalists, and Its acceptance has been considered the touchstone of wisdom. The most of my intellectual views Is that this is rubbish. I think the universe is all spots and jumps without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of- the other properties that governesses love. Indeed, there is little but prejudice and habit to be said for tho view that there is a world at all. Physiists have recently advanced opinions which should have led Ihem to agree with the foregoing remarks; but they have been so pained by the conclusions to which logic would have led them that they have beon abandoning logic for theology in shoals. ...

Finally, we have things like these in "Science and Religion":

We have seen that Eddington and Jeans contradict each other, and that both contradict the biological theologians (Lloyd Morgan) ; but all agree that .in the last resort science should abdicate before what is called the religious consciousness. This attitude is regarded by themselves and by their admirers as more optimistic than that of the uncompromising rationalist. It is, in fact, quite the opposite: It is the outcome of discouragement and loss of faith. . . . The war and the Russian Revolution have made all timid men conservative, and professors are usually temperamentally, timid. . . . • Those who desire caprice in the physical world seem to me to have failed to realise what this would • involve. All inference in regard to the course of Nature, is causal, and if Nature is not subject to causal laws, _ all such inferences must fail. The principle of causality may be true or it may be false, but the person who finds the hypothesis of its falsity cheering, is failing to roalibe the implications of his own theory. He usually retains unchallenged all those causal laws which ho And* convenient. ... y

To prove that a given set of phenomena (the behaviour of single atoms, electrons, etc.) is not subject to law is essentially and theoretically impossible. All that can be affirmed is that the laws, if any, have not yet been discovered. ... Sir Arthur Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics. Sir James Jeans deduces it from the fact that they do. Both these arguments have been accepted with equal enthusiasm by the theologians, who hold, apparently, that, the demand for consistency belongs to cold reason, and must not interfere with our deeper religious feelings. Wc have examined Eddlngton's argument from the way that atoms jump. Let us now examine Jeans' argument from the way that stars cool. Jeans' God is platonic. He is not, we are told, a biologist or engineer, but a pure mathematician ("The Mysterious Universe," p. 134). I confess to a preference for this type of God rather than the one that is conceived after the analogy of bis business; but that, no doubt, is because I prefer thinking.to doing. This suggests a treatise dealing with the influence of muscular tone on tueology. The man whose muscles are taut believes in a God

of actifln, while the man whose muscles arc relaxed believes in a God of thought and contemplation. . . . Apart from all detail he (Sir James Jeans) has been guilty of a fundamental fallacy in confusing the realms of pure and applied mathematics. Puro mathematics at no point depends upon observation; it is concerned with symbols, and with proving that different collections ol symbols have the same meaning. . , . Physics oil the contrary, however mathematical it may become, depends throughout on observation and experiment, that is to say, ultimately, upon sense perception.

This bombardment is not meant to entertain but to affect conduct. He wants men to be less tyrannical and to have more courage in telling the truth as they see it. That is his hope, his belief, his feeling of probability. What then must wo do? Some scoff at his association of morality with determinism, but tliey do not understand, Robinson Crusoe alone on his island would not make false reports to-him-self about his cave, his crops, and his canoe. Hut let Friday come, and as many others as will make a modern community, and then both self-deceit and the deceiving of others becomes advantageous to tyrants and slaves, ft is in society there fore, that the internal balance of tho soul is deranged, fhe young child is beautiful because he is unspoiled, but the adult is the r.ugel marred. The world is saddening and a heavy burden to the lonely thinker and tho Eternal Beloved comes to him only in a moment's dream. Accordingly, in the last chapter on values. Lord Russell's utterance chancres to a most moving simplicity and tenderness. Pain is known and with an effort mastered. Yet quiet affirmations remain, for the hopeful child in man still lives though ultimate beauty is hidden from his eves.

Science in its beginning was flue to men who were in love with the world. They perceived the beauty of the stars and the sea, of the winds and the mountains. Because they loved them their thought's dwelt upon them, and they wished to -understand them more intimately than a mere outward contemplation made possible. Bu(. the lover of Nattire has been baffled, the tyrant over Nature ha* been rewarded. . . . The leaders of the modern world are drunk with power. . . . What matters it, says the practical man. whether tho outer world exists or is a dream, provided X can make it behave as I wish? Thus. science has more and more substituted power-knowledge for love-know-ledjre. and as this substitution becomes completed science tends more and more to become sad'stic

' Man has been disciplined hitherto by his subjection to Nature. Having emancipate'! himself from this subjection, he is slioViu? something of the defects of slave-turned-master. A new moral outlook is called for in which vubmissinn to the powers of Native i« replaced by respect for what is heUin n-an. Tt is where Ibis respect is larking that scientific technique is dangerous. . . . The lover, the poet, and the mystic find a fuller satisfaction than the seeker after power can ever know, since they can rest in the object of their love, whereas the seeker after nower must be perpetually engaged in some fresh manipulation if he is not to suffer from a sense of emptiness. X Ihink therefore that' (he satisfactions of the,, 'over, using that word in its broadest sense, exceed the satisfactions of the tyrant, and deserve a hiirh»r place amone the ends of life. . . . When T come to die X shall not feel X havo lived in vain. X have seen the earth turn rod at cveninr. the dpw sparkling in the morninp. and the snow shining under a frosty sun; X have smelt rain aftev drought, and "have heard the stormy Atlantic beat upon the granite shores of Cornwall. . - •

Whnfevcr lie will .*■;<y tlic.se are his last word's.

ESSAYS IX GERMAN LITERATURE. Men. Myths, and Movements in German Literature. By William Hose, Reader In German in the University cf London. Allen and TJnwiu. 286 pfl. (10s 6d net.)

This book- is a miscellany of studies in German literature, three of them devoted to Goethe, three to the modern expressionist movement, and others to such disconnected subjects as the romantii; Fichtc, the writings of the sharp-eyed seventeenth century humorißt, Grimmelshausen, the popular mediaeval Boast Epic, and Baron Munchausen. The best of these last are those on Grimmelshausen and the Beast Epic, the latter tracing the very interesting branches, of the supreme "Beynard the Fox" narrative. The best of the Goethe papers is the very careful and complete account of the development of the tragic theme, to the period when .Leasing discerned its sublimity through crude popular versions and Goethe rescued it. The others deal with the background of "Werther," and with the poet's failure to transcend a purely intellectual interest in the Jews or to rid himself of prejudices typical of his day. But the most deeply interesting studies are those of modern German literature, a general essay on Expressionism, another on th 6 German Drama between 1914 and 1927, and a third on the spirit of revolt in those days. Mr Rose is a good deal happier in generalisation than in specific criticism, but these three studies are remarkable and valuable for their judicious choice and arrangement of the evidence. Indeed one of Mr Hose's greatest, merits is his ability to serve the student or reader by clearing the ground and exhibiting the best lines of cxplqration. His care in giving several bibliographies contributes to this service.

FROM BEOWULF TO ULYSSES

A Brief Survey of English Literature from its Beginning to the Present Say. By Brnest Pickering, M.A., M.P. George G. Harrap and Co., Ltd. 264 pp. (3s 6d net.)

The author spent, four years as Professor of English in a Japanese State College. rie and his family rediscovered in this exile, happy but still an exile, the truth ''that England's greatest contribution both to lier own children and to the world was her fiiorious literature''; and this book originated in that discovery. Its merits are real, not the least of them being that the price is 'very little for so much. Its summary treatment, both of the schools and movements and inliuences which broadly characterise literary history, und of individual writers, is as clear and as well proportioned as possible, though it is of course not possible at all to pack, seal, and deliver great genius and great achievements in small, neat parcels. Book V., oonsi&te of two chapters on twentieth century novelists, another on the poets, another oli criticism and belles-lettres, - and a fifth on drama. There are also two supplementary chapters on th 6 Irish Literary Movement and on American literature. In these last Seven .chapters, though they contain a great" deal of useful information and comment, Mr Pickering is for two reasons less successful. One is that lie has been" too anxious ft* include; the second, that where judgment has had insufficient time, to crystallise summary estimates are too hazardous. Ate\ there are some disturbing eccentricities. For instance, Mr Pickering quotes from H. M. Tomlin?on's "The Sea and the .Jungle" the following passage—

"We got aboard a coryplieite. the dolphin of the sailovß. It gave iu in its death a;ony the famous display, beautiful, hut rather, painful t-ft watch, for the wonderful hues, as they changed, stayed in the eye. and sent to the mind only a message of a creature in a violent death struggle—

and blesses it as ;tn example of "apt and sensitive expression." Had Mr Tomlingon written nothinp more apt and sensitive than that, his reputation as a stylist would be hard to justifv. But renders who want a cheap and handy sruidc book to the whole fipld of TlnglMi literature, froi" "Beowulf" to Mr Joyce's ".Ulysses," especiallv those who vmnt to design systematic reading" courses lor themselves, may turn to Mr Pickerinp with as much confidence as to anyone else.

CENTRAL AFRICA. Par ergon: or Eddies in Equ&tori*. By Captain John Yardley. Foreword by Hold marshal Viscount AUenby. J. M. Scat and Sons, pp. 283. 10s 6d net. Captain Yardley is a little slow in getting t.o Equatoria, but he is 110 sooner there than he plunges at once into the most interesting narrative of Central Africa wo have had this century. Ilis territory was the inaccessible mountain and hill country on the South-West Frontier of Abyssinia which is controlled jointly by the Sudan, Kenya, and Uganda, and inhabited by a powerful tribe of naked savages known generally as the Turkana. It was also raided at intervals by the semi-civilised Abyssinians, who sometimes worked with, and sometimes against, the Turkana, but had for years before Captain Yardley arrived been carrying off men, women, and cattle, and generally defying Britain, and bringing her name into contempt. It was to correct all this that Captain Yardley led a Sudanese company of the Equatorial Rifles on what he calls a patrol of the country, but was in reality a most strenuous campaign packed with incident and punctuated every day by examples of the most extraordinary heroism and initiative. But in addition to telling a thrilling story, Captain Yardley is conducting an argument all the time and stating a case. We are or we are not, he says, the black man's keeper, but if we are, we should shoulder the responsibility and not allow ourselves to be mocked at by thieves, murderers, and slave-raiders. The patrol as a patrol was successful, but Captain Yardley has no confidence that the results will endure, and his last chapter is a kind of despairing challenge to Britain to shoulder her responsibilities to those of her subjects "who have no Parliamentary votes." The story is illustrated by twenty-seven original photographs and a military map.

MUSIC IN SHAKESPEARE.

Shakespeare and Musdc. By Edward W Naylor, Mus. D., Hon. A.8.0.M. 3. HI. Dent and Sons, Ltd. 212 pp. (6s net.)

Dr. Naylor's excellent account of imisic in Elizabethan England, illustrating (and illustrated by) Shakespeare's innumerable and very skilful references, was first published tlurty-> five j'oars ago, and is now reissued with correction and additions. Students ot the history of music will find plenty of familiar ground; readers who pore over the explanatory notes in the more tiresome editions of Shakespeare may have half-discovered what he meant, say, in "Romeo and Juliet," 111. v. 25, or in Hortensio's account of Kate's teaching him the lute, or in Falstnff's musing upon Shallow s rcmantical reminiscences of youth, or in a hundred other passages. But historians of music do not generally know much about poetry or about Shakespeare in particular, and editors of Shakespeare are not Often verv strong in music. Dr. Naylor's equipment has neither deficiency. The book is admirably thorough, though short, and its learning is gracefully carried and displayed. There are several illustrations of Elizabethan instruments, and an appendix give? the words and music of manv of the songs sung or referred to in "the plays. It may perhaps be regretted that Dr. Naylor says nothing about the modern revival of Elizabethan music and of the instruments to play it.

MAJOR-GENERAL SEELY'S ADVENTURES. Fear, and Be Rla'u. By Wajor-G«neral the Et. Hon. J. E. B. Seely. Hodder and Stougfctoa. Ltd. 306 PP. (1~» 64 net.) From W. S. Smart. Major-General Seely writes this book to show that " 'Safety First' " is a soul-destroying, a pestilential heresy, which will rob the race of man of all incentive and spell doom to the British Empire." The proof of this lie finds in the fact that, throughout hi a own adventurous career, a disregard for personal safety has not brought him any harm. The catch in this argumfent is that people whose experience leads them tn a different conclusion are seldom ablo to write books about it. The weakness of Major-General Seely's personal philosophy need not, however, spoil anyone's enjoyment of the book, because, ho wisely gets over his moralising in the preface. His adventures include several shipwrecks, winning £335 on the Cambridgeshire as ian undergraduate. flying under tho Tower Bridge, running out of water in Northern Australia, and as Series of escapades with the Duke of Westminster during the Great War. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is that which deals with Major-General Seely'b eonnoxipn with flying; for he has travelled in aeroplanes almost since there were aeroplanes, and his discussions of their commercial and military possibilities are worth careful attention.,. HANGMAN'S TRIO. (I) Ths Devil Drive*. By Virgil Markham. W. Collins, Bona and Co., Ltd. 382 pp. (II) Man Made An«ry. By Hugh Brooke. Longmans, Green and Co. 280 pp. (iii) Murder in the Squire's Pew. By J. B. Fletcher. George G. Harrap and Co., Ltd. 281 pp.

Number three in Mr Fletcher's series of the cases of Ronald Camberwell and ex-Inspector Chaney is a good, pennyplain detective story. It begins with Canon Effingham's calling them to investigate the theft of a chalice and paten and two valuable manuscripts 1 from his church, and their discovery, as early as. Chapter 111., of the ne'er-do-well Dick Skate's corpse in the Squire's pew; and a long hunt ends prosperously outside the Lord Warden Hotel at Dover.

Mr Markli&m has unusual skill in fabricating a plot out of diverse and apparently incongruous elements, and at last, after prolonged excitement and suspense, making their connexion suddenly firm and clear. George Peters, who begins as Warden of one American prison and ends in the condemned cell of another, leaves his wardenship to undertake an almost hopeleßS quest—for'the unknown writer of a bundle of letters, many years old, and delivering by internal evidence only the faintest hints of place and person. The quest draws him into the world of the New York gangsters and into the service of Raffy, a very elegant racketeer,. who sets him on a trail that crosses his own arid ' 'frames'' him for a murder; but Peters escapes, only to be caught in the trap set by chance when Raify himself is murdered. But as he waits to go to the chair he can loose and straighten every thread in the tangle. Mr Markham's thriller is in the highest class. "Man Made Angry" is a curious novel, about a young man who had been a butcher and became a poet, but a bad one, and also, because his psychology was Jack the Kipper's, a sacrificial murderer- The story is not seldofn repulsive but it is written with a more artistic purpose than to cause shudders and it does net wholly fail.

NIETZSCHE. The Madness of Nieteache. By E. T. Podsch. Translated from the German toy T. A. Volgt. Fntn&m. 257 pp. (7b 64 net.) " There is already a voluminous literature on Nietzsche's breakdown; but i>r. Podach's exevtse for adding to, ft is a remark by Nietzsche's friend Grerbeck: "It is not his end siat throws a light upon his life, as those people think who conclude from his end'that he was never anything but an idiot, in whose life they look for nothing but the prei liminary symptoms of madness; on. the contrary, his life enables us to understand his end and to look upon it as a fitting close." Dr Podach's attack on "the theory concocted by the muddleheaded mandarin Lambroso, that there is a relationship between genius and insanity," is good reading; but when Dr. Podach tells us that Nietzsche's mad* ness w&s his "destiny," he necessarily turns his back on logic Bis attack on tlie pathographers is therefore hardly fair, because he has shifted t,lie discussion to another plane. Apart front this, the book is scrupulously impartial, particularly where the medical evidence is concerned.

THE DEATH OF A JOKER. Murder on Monday .. . ? By Charles Barry. Eyre and Spottfawoode. 270 pp. When a rich bookmaker makes a will ■which names a different residual beneficiary, according to the day of the week ou which he dies—each of his live nephews and nieces, an old client,, and a Cancer Hospital—and when he reads tho will before a family gathering for the fun of the thing, it is not surprising that he should be found dead in a gravel pit soon after. But he had been lying there for some days, hidden by snow; and two connected questions arose, how he died and when he died.' The first question was Scotland Yard's: to answer the second the executors or Peter Perley's ridiculous will persuaded Lawrence Gilmartin to emerge from his retirement in Cornwall. Mr Barry's skill is shown in hia ability to put sa fantastic a plot in workaday harness nnd drive it safely to the end. He can even introduce the humorous testator's second will; an aluminium one, without breaking down; but he might have played a little fairer by giving the, year. Too dever readers may be Wftrnod against the old client.