Letter

Abstract

I cannot accept Dr. Douglas's view that because one could, but does not, measure the objects with which biology is concerned, one can therefore claim that the domain of biology is metrical. On those lines one could claim music and painting and poetry as sciences. However, our views do not matter, because Eddington himself has settled the question. He claimed to derive the ultimate laws of Nature from the nature of measurement, not from the character of the objects to which measurement was applied, and in his article on the cosmical number, reprinted in his posthumous work “Fundamental Theory”, he proceeded to deduce them from the details of the act of measurement—the necessity for four entities such as the two ends of the measuring scale and those of the rod to be measured, etc. He sought to meet the difficulty of biology not by forcing it into the metrical scheme but by denying that it was science and classifying it with theology.