Abstract
THE day has gone when a book of philosophical studies, even though its author was distinguished only as a metaphysician, is to be regarded as necessarily outside the province of a scientific journal. The frontiers between science and metaphysics are no longer so rigidly drawn as they were a generation ago. Science may shade off into metaphysics, and metaphysics may be informed with the scientific spirit. McTaggart, for example, insisted that there is only one way of getting at the truth, and that is by proving it. He would have nothing to say to the doctrine that a thing must be true because we want it to be, except that such doctrine is “false and rather cowardly”. There spoke the man of science, though not of physical or biological science. Again, he was lucid and definite in his broad demarcation between the aims of meta-physic and of science. The former is concerned with the ultimate nature of reality; the latter is also concerned with reality, but not with its ultimate nature a definition which is something to go on with, but perhaps not to be maintained to the end.
Philosophical Studies.
By the late Dr. J. McT. Ellis McTaggart. Edited, with an Introduction, by Dr. S. V. Keeling. Pp. 292. (London: Edward Arnold and Co., 1934.) 12s. 6d. net.
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[Short Notices]. Nature 135, 388 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135388b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135388b0