Continuity: The Presidential Address to the British Association for 1913

Front Cover
G. P. Putnam's sons, 1914 - Continuity - 131 pages
 

Selected pages

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 86 - Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape And ivyberry, choose ; and still depart From death to death thro' life and life, and find Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite, But this main miracle, that thou art thou, With power on thine own act and on the world.
Page 19 - Long ago it was said: If Tycho had had instruments ten times as precise, we would never have had a Kepler, or a Newton, or Astronomy. It is a misfortune for a science to be born too late, when the means of observation have become too perfect. That is what is happening at this moment with respect to physical chemistry; the founders are hampered in their general grasp by third and fourth decimal places; happily they are men of robust faith.
Page 9 - And then characteristically he adds : — " If there could be a unit of happiness, Politics might begin to be scientific." Emotion and Intuition and Instinct are immensely older than science, and in a comprehensive survey of existence they cannot be ignored. Scientific men may rightly neglect them, in order to do their proper work, but philosophers cannot. So Philosophers have begun to question some of the larger generalizations of science, and to ask whether in the effort to be universal and comprehensive...
Page 66 - The ether is not a fantastic creation of the speculative philosopher; it is as essential to us as the air we breathe.
Page 68 - ... of a cubic centimetre of air would only occupy at atmospheric pressure a volume of half a millionth of a cubic centimetre. When stated in this form the quantity seems exceedingly small, but in this small volume there are about ten million million molecules. Now the population of the earth is estimated at about fifteen hundred millions, so that the smallest number of molecules of neon we can identify is about 7,000 times the population of the earth.
Page 93 - No ; but it is my function to remind you and myself that our studies do not exhaust the Universe, and that if we dogmatize in a negative direction, and say that we can reduce everything to physics and chemistry, we gibbet ourselves as ludicrously narrow pedants, and are falling far short of the richness and fullness of our human birthright.
Page 10 - It would seem as if the second law of Thermodynamics must be somewhere disobeyed — at least if the age of the Universe is both ways infinite — else the final consummation would have already arrived.

Bibliographic information