24 AUGUST 1945, Page 16

Shorter Notices

THIS most important book is one of the first serious attempts to discuss the most recent thinking on Time by the physicists and relate it to the ideas of Time held by philosophers and poets. On the scientific side Dr. Johnson expounds the post-Einsteinian ideas of Professor Milne, and much of this book will be thoroughly intelligible only to mathematical physicists—in spite of the fact that he devotes a special appendix of supplementary notes for readers unacquainted with atomic and astronomical physics. But the educated non- scientific reader will find much of value here, especially in Part Three where the author discusses what Time means to the physicist, the metaphysician and the artist. His valuable dictum that science exists " by its right to abstract an external world independent of any one observer's subjective peculiarities " may be compared with the artists' intuition that it must be possible to abstract aesthetic value independent of any one person's subjective judgement. It is one of the outstanding virtues of Dr. Johnson that he writes with full understanding that epistemology must deal with the whole of human experience and not only that part of it which can be measured quantitatively.