That Mr. Bolton did not take the prize through default of serious competition should be plain to any reader who examines the text from competing essays which is to be found in this volume. The reference list of these competitors, too, supplemented by the names that appear at the heads of complete essays, shows a notable array of distinguished personalities, and I could mention perhaps a dozen more very well known men of science whose excellent essays have seemed a trifle too advanced for our immediate use, but to whom I am under a good deal of obligation for some of the ideas which I have attempted to clothe in my own language.
Before leaving the subject, we wish to say here a word of appreciation for the manner in which the Judges have discharged their duties. The reader will have difficulty in realizing what it means to read such a number of essays on such a subject. We were fortunate beyond all expectation in finding Judges who combined a thorough scientific grasp of the mathematical and physical and philosophical aspects of the matter with an extremely human viewpoint which precluded any possibility of an award to an essay that was not properly a popular discussion, and with a willingness to go to meet each other’s opinions that is rare, even among those with less ground for confidence in their own views than is possessed by Drs. Page and Adams.
II.
THE WORLD—AND US
An Introductory Discussion of the Philosophy of Relativity, and of the Mechanism of Our Contact with Time and Space
BY VARIOUS CONTRIBUTORS AND THE EDITOR
From a time beyond the dawn of history, mankind has been seeking to explain the universe. At first the effort did not concern itself further probably than to make a supposition as to what were the causes of the various phenomena presented to the senses. As knowledge increased, first by observation and later by experiment also, the ideas as to these causes passed progressively through three stages—the theological (the causes were thought to be spirits or gods); the metaphysical (the causes were thought in this secondary or intermediate stage to be some inherent, animating, energizing principles); and the scientific (the causes were finally thought of as simply mechanical, chemical, and magneto-electrical attractions and repulsions, qualities or characteristics of matter itself, or of the thing of which matter is itself composed.)
With increase of knowledge, and along with the inquiry as to the nature of causes, there arose an inquiry also as to what reality was. What was the essential nature of the stuff of which the universe was made, what was matter, what were things in themselves, what were the noumena (the realities), lying back of the phenomena (the appearances)? Gradually ideas explaining motion, force, and energy were developed. At the same time inquiry was made as to the nature of man, the working of his mind, the nature of thought, the relation of his concepts (ideas) to his perceptions (knowledge gained through the sense) and the relations of both to the noumena (realities).][283]
[The general direction taken by this inquiry has been that of a conflict between two schools of thought which we may characterize as those of absolutism and of relativism.]* [The ancient Greek philosophers believed that they could tap a source of knowledge pure and absolute by sitting down in a chair and reasoning about the nature of time and space, and the mechanism of the physical world.][221] [They maintained that the mind holds in its own right certain concepts than which nothing is more fundamental. They considered it proper to conceive of time and space and matter and the other things presented to their senses by the world as having a real existence in the mind, regardless of whether any external reality could be identified with the concept as ultimately put forth. They could even dispute with significance the qualities which were to be ascribed to this abstract conceptual time and space and matter. All this was done without reference to the external reality, often in defiance of that reality. The mind could picture the world as it ought to be; if the recalcitrant facts refused to fit into the picture, so much the worse for them. We all have heard the tale of how generation after generation of Greek philosophers disputed learnedly why and how it was that a live fish could be added to a brimming pail of water without raising the level of the fluid or increasing the weight; until one day some common person conceived the troublesome idea of trying it out experimentally to learn whether it were so—and found that it was not. True or false, the anecdote admirably illustrates the subordinate place which the externals held in the absolutist system of Greek thought.]*