BY
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Professor of Philosophy in HarvardUniversity, and sometime Professor of Applied Mathematics in theImperial College of Science and Technology
"PHILONOUS. I am not for imposing any sense on your words: you are atliberty to explain them as you please. Only, I beseech you, make meunderstand something by them."
BERKELEY,
The First Dialogue between
Hylas and Philonous.
CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1925
TO
ERIC ALFRED WHITEHEAD
ROYAL FLYING CORPS
November 27, 1898 to March 13, 1918
Killed in action over the Forêt de Gobain giving himself that the cityof his vision may not perish.
The music of his life was without discord, perfect in its beauty.
First Edition 1919
Second Edition 1925
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
THERE are three main streams of thought which are relevant to the themeof this enquiry; they may, with sufficient accuracy, be termed thescientific, the mathematical, and the philosophical movements.
Modern speculative physics with its revolutionary theories concerningthe natures of matter and of electricity has made urgent the question,What are the ultimate data of science? It is in accordance with thenature of things that mankind should find itself acting and should thenproceed to discuss the rationale of its activities. Thus the creation ofscience precedes the analysis of its data and can even be accompanied bythe acceptance of faulty analyses, though such errors end by warpingscientific imagination.
The contributions of mathematics to natural science consist in theelaboration of the general art of deductive reasoning, the theory ofquantitative measurement by the use of number, the theory of serialorder, of geometry, of the exact measurement of time, and of rates ofchange. The critical studies of the nineteenth century and after havethrown light on the nature of mathematics and in particular on thefoundations of geometry. We now know many alternative sets of axiomsfrom which geometry can be deduced by the strictest deductive reasoning.But these investigations concern geometry as an abstract science deducedfrom hypothetical premisses. In this enquiry we are concerned withgeometry as a physical science. How is space rooted in experience?
The modern theory of relativity has opened the possibility of a newanswer to this question. The successive labours of Larmor, Lorentz,Einstein, and Minkovski have opened a new world of thought as to therelations of space and time to the ultimate data of perceptualknowledge. The present work is largely concerned with providing aphysical basis for the more modern views which have thus emerged. Thewhole investigation is based on the principle that the scientificconcepts of space and time are the first outcome of the simplestgeneralisations from exper