advocating, replied, "I sometimes think that bold assertion is the best kind of argument"' (II, 608).

;

No doubt the reiteration of terminological inexactitudes' has its nemesis in the end. 'You may,' as Abraham Lincoln observed, 'fool all the people for some of the time, and some of the people for all of the time but you cannot fool all the people for all the time.' But during the space for which the majority has been 'fooled' there may have been one of those political landslides by which states have been wrecked; a party pledged to a ruinous policy may have been placed in power, or legislation with disastrous consequences put in operation. We cannot get over the fact that a democracy is more liable to be hoodwinked by suppression of the truth, or deafened by loud and blatant selfadvertisement than other ruling bodies-more especially because, as Lord Bryce owns, on page 584 of vol. II, democracies do not enlist in the service of the state nearly so many of their most capable or of their most honourable citizens as could be desired. The sordid side of politics frightens away the self-respecting man, who fears to find himself caught in the toils of a party machine. He has no wish to be perpetually rubbing elbows in the lobby with Cleon and Alcibiades, or serving on a financial commission with Eschines and Theramenes.

'Lastly, Democracy has not induced that satisfaction and contentment with itself which was expected. One of the strongest arguments used to recommend Universal Suffrage was that as it gave supreme power to the numerical majority, every section of the people would bow to that majority . . . a resort to violence would be treason against the people and their sovereignty. Nevertheless in some countries governed under democratic constitutions revolutionary methods are now being applied or threatened, just as they were in the old days of tyrannical kings or oligarchies' (II, 584).

'Direct action' by large organised minorities, like the recent Triple Alliance of miners, railwaymen, and transport workers in Great Britain-still more the violent abolition of Universal Suffrage in Russia by the armed minority which calls itself the Proletariate, were things that

were never foreseen by 19th-century

prophets when they hazarded a guess at the practical working of a democratic constitution.

The list of defects is formidable-and we have not got to the end of it; administrative extravagance might, for example, ask for more notice than space allows here. But yet-here comes Lord Bryce's final judgment—mankind must be governed somehow, unless black anarchy is to supervene. And the examination of autocracy, oligarchy, bureaucracy, leads to the conclusion that all are infinitely worse than democracy as practical expedients.

'It has achieved less than idealists of the 18th or 19th centuries expected; but, after all, the experiment has not failed-the world is now a better place than it was under other governments, and the faith that it may be better still survives. Hope, often disappointed but often renewed, is the anchor by which the ship that carries democracy and its fortunes will have to ride out the latest storm, as it has ridden out so many storms before. There is an Eastern story of a king with an uncertain temper, who desired his astrologer to discover from the stars when his death would come. The astrologer, having cast the horoscope, replied that he could not find the date, but had ascertained only this-that the king's death would follow immediately on his own. So may it be said that Democracy will never perish till after Hope has expired.'

C. OMAN.

Art. 9.-LORD HALDANE AND RELATIVITY.

The Reign of Relativity. By Viscount Haldane. Murray, 1921.

IT is unfortunate that some reviews of this work have assumed it to be a treatise on the physical theory of relativity, and have concentrated in their criticisms on those chapters which deal specifically with Einstein's work. The scope of the book is, however, far wider than this. It is in fact that of Knowledge itself. As the author states in the preface, the topics of this book are Knowledge itself and the relativity of reality to the character of Knowledge.'

The subjects dealt with range from science, religion, and art to the history of philosophy, political science, and law, in so far as all these fall within the content of Knowledge. The result has been the production of a somewhat bulky volume of over 400 pages. In a recent review a writer has criticised such voluminous works as the production (as Pascal said) of those who have not got time to write less. It is certainly true that but one idea runs through the whole volume, and that this idea could have been expressed abstractly in a fraction of the volume of the actual book; but, where an idea is new and essentially difficult to grasp, it cannot be adequately transmitted by abstract phraseology. The process of transmission which must be adopted is that of suggestion by setting forward the idea as it appears in many different forms, till at last the reader, by a process of generalisation, grasps the concept which the author wishes to transmit. This is the method Lord Haldane has adopted, and he has excellent precedent in the works of Schopenhauer, who has stated that, by his bulky treatise on 'The World as Will and Idea,' he intends to impart a single thought, and can find no shorter way of doing so.

What Lord Haldane's book loses in the way of pure logical form, it far more than makes up for by covering, in one comprehensive survey, a range of subjects, many of which lie outside the knowledge of more academic philosophers. The fundamental thesis is that Knowledge is ultimate. We cannot resolve Knowledge into other

terms. We cannot ask the explanation of the 'why' of Knowledge; we can only describe the 'what' of Knowledge; and, in answering this question, we find that the distinctions which arise in everyday life are distinctions which fall alike within the content of Knowledge. The distinction between the mind as a thing and the external world confronting this mind is a distinction which exists only for Knowledge. Subjective idealism has failed in so far as the conception of 'thing' was applied indiscriminately to the mind and its object. No wonder the Realists rebelled against the view that the object world of experience exists only for such a mind; and yet the Realists never succeed in drawing a satisfactory line between mind and the external world. The two are inseparably bound together, and, treated as 'things,' neither can be given precedence to the other. The problem can be solved satisfactorily only by passing beyond the conception of 'things,' and viewing mind and externality, or subject and object, as distinctions produced by the activity of the ultimate fact of knowledge. Knowledge, in the sense in which Lord Haldane uses the word, is not a special form of individual activity, but the ultimate fact which must be presupposed in any inquiry into the nature of existence. To quote Lord Haldane:

'How the great fundamental fact of knowledge is to be accounted for, is a question which is constantly being raised. But it is inherently an irrational question, for the fact of knowledge is presupposed as ultimate in whatever shape the question is put. When we raise points about how knowledge is put together, we are raising points about a foundation which our own questions presuppose for their possibility.'

The doctrine of the Relativity of Reality to Knowledge is developed from this view of Knowledge. Every aspect of reality disclosed in Knowledge is relative to Knowledge itself. Our world is not made up of disconnected fragments and relations but as a whole, the parts of which exist as relative to the whole, that is, to Knowledge. This basic fact manifests itself, as Lord Haldane shows, in every branch of Knowledge. Each branch abstracts from the whole only those features

which are relevant to the purpose of the particular inquiry, ignoring those other features which lie outside its scope. So Physics ignores beauty and emotion in its effort to describe the relations of natural entities in mechanical terms. This is a legitimate and very necessary process, but it inevitably necessitates that the Truth of Science is relative only. The price which Science pays for its precision and exactness is the relativity of the truth at which it arrives.

The chapters in the book which deal with the development of Mathematics and Science, and in particular with the physical theory of relativity, are there simply as showing how the general theory of relativity is illustrated in this particular case. Dr Whitehead's books, 'An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge' and 'The Concept of Nature,' have clearly influenced Lord Haldane very much in his treatment of this subject; and he pays a warm tribute to the value and originality of Dr Whitehead's investigations. Dr Whitehead has protested against what he calls the bifurcation of nature into nature apprehended in awareness and nature which is the cause of awareness, or into nature as the play of molecules and radiant energy and nature as presented with psychic addition such as colour and smell to mind. To drag in mind in this way is, as he points out, shirking the problem of Science, which is to describe the relations inter se of things known abstracted from the bare fact that they are known. The bifurcation theory is acceptable for the simplicity it introduces, but, if accepted, it is a confession of failure on the part of Science. Lord Haldane points out that, if Dr Whitehead pushes his theory a little further, the logical result it that the distinction between mind and nature vanishes, and nature for Dr Whitehead becomes Knowledge in the wide sense in which our author uses the term. Meaning, interpretation, significance-all these things fall within Dr Whitehead's world of Nature. As Lord Haldane says:

"The portal of Nature was to be bolted and barred against mind, but mind has apparently gone round the corner, got in by a back-door and taken possession of the building. "Events," "recognition," "objects"! Here we have Knowledge with all its implications, and Knowledge in which the