Bright Star

THE SCIENTIFIC OUTLOOK--Bertrand Russell--Norton ($3).

Bertrand Russell is still at his priestlike task. Not only bright but steadfast, he surveys civilization with a calm and rationalistic eye, preaches to an increasing congregation the virtues of Reason. Russell's lucidity has rarely faltered, but of late years his published sermons have seemed at times a little thin. Now he admits his recent books were "mainly pot-boilers"; but says of The Scientific Outlook: "For my part, though I says it as shouldn't, I think it is a very good book." Its purpose: "To show up all the scientists who talk about religion, all those who make superstition a substitute for science." Russell obviously enjoyed writing it; it makes good reading.

Russell thinks scientific faith, which tended to replace religion in the 18th and 19th Centuries and has now been undermined by "the new physics," is tottering into superstition. "The new philosophy of physics is humble and stammering, where the old philosophy was proud and dictatorial." To Popularizing Physicists Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (The Nature of the Physical World) and Sir James Hopwood Jeans (The Universe Around Us) Russell lays the blame in large part, in no uncertain terms. An almost angry skeptic on the subject of reasoning by deduction, Russell asserts: "Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics. Jeans deduces it from the fact that they do. ... Jeans's God. like Plato's, is one who has a passion for doing sums, but being a pure mathematician, is quite indifferent as to what the sums are about. . . . Eddington and Jeans contradict each other, and . . . both contradict the biological theologians, but all agree that in the last resort science should abdicate before what is called the religious consciousness. This attitude is regarded by themselves and by their admirers as more optimistic than that of the uncompromising rationalist. It is, in fact, quite the opposite: it is the outcome of discouragement and loss of faith."

The new physics, says Russell, cannot yet be translated into plain English. "Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say. . . . The men of science have not said nearly as much as they are thought to have said, and in the second place what they have said in the way of support for traditional religious beliefs has been said by them not in their cautious, scientific capacity, but rather in their capacity of good citizens, anxious to defend virtue and property."

Russell has never been backward about saying what he himself thinks. "I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love." But he is no fatalistic pessimist. "It may be that God made the world, but that is no reason why we should not make it over." He pays his irreverent respects by the way to many an established notion, sums up psychoanalysis in a neat paragraph. "I do not think that psychoanalysts have reflected very deeply upon the distinction between phantasy and reality. I suppose that for practical purposes 'phantasy' is what the patient believes, and 'reality' is what the analyst believes."

The Author, A thin, wiry little man who looks something like Henry Ford but more like the Mad Hatter, Bertrand Arthur William Russell last March became, by the death of an elder brother, third Earl Russell. He plans to take his seat in the House of Lords, where his peers will probably give him a chilly reception. Well-known is he as author of many a book not calculated to give aid & comfort to orthodoxy: Roads to Freedom, Philosophy, Sceptical Essays, Marriage and Morals, The Conquest of Happiness.

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