You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The chapters of this book constitute the Gifford lectures delivered in the University of Aberdeen in 1921 and 1922 by the author, who is the professor of pure mathematics at the University of Cambridge. They are an attempt, as their title indicates, to outline the domain of natural science and to plumb its depths. This effort is made by a man who is primarily a mathematician and therefore we are prepared to find that his discussions rather tend in a mathematical direction and where they undertake the elucidation of problems of physics and mathematics they are especially well done, whereas in his discussions of the living organism he seems to be upon much less sure ground.
The book is an exceedingly interesting and profound presentation of the subject. Aside from discussing Scientific Laws and Theories in general, and the Relation of Natural Science to Philosophy, he discusses specifically such questions as Causation and Deterministic Systems- Number and Its Developments-Time and Space-Corpuscular Theories of Matter-Dynamics-The Conservation of Matter and Energy- Mechanical Theories and Thermodynamics-Electricity, Magnetism and Light-The Constitution of Matter-Cosmical Theories-Einstein's Theory of Relativity-Biological Science-The Living Organism- Heredity-The Evolution of Species-Natural Science and General Thought-and Natural Science and Theism. The scope of the work, as will be seen from these subject headings, is very large.
The impressions, in general, which one gets from reading this learned treatise are, in the first place, that absolute knowledge about anything is forever destined to elude us.
“Natural Science explains nothing; it only describes conceptually “(p. 87), or in other words,”Natural Science describes, so far as it can, how, or in accordance with what rules, phenomena happen, but it is wholly incompetent to answer the question why they happen” (p. 82). “The conclusion of the whole matter seems to be that the conception that the whole world of physica