the existence is, as it were, latent unless someone gives a significance to the walk by following it; and in the same way the existence of any one of these qualities of the world only acquires significance above its fellows, if a mind singles it out for recognition. Mind filters out matter from the meaningless jumble of qualities, as the prism filters out the colours of the rainbow from the chaotic pulsations of white light. Mind exalts the permanent and ignores the transitory; and it appears from the mathematical study of relations that the only way in which mind can achieve her object is by picking out one particular quality as the permanent substance of the perceptual world, partitioning a perceptual time and space for it to be permanent in, and, as a necessary consequence of this Hobson's choice, the laws of gravitation and mechanics and geometry have to be obeyed. Is it too much to say that mind's search for permanence has created the world of physics? So that the world we perceive around us could scarcely have been other than it is[1]?
The last sentence possibly goes too far, but it illustrates the direction in which these views are tending. With Weyl's more general theory of interval-relations, the laws of electrodynamics appear in like manner to depend merely on the identification of another permanent thing—electric charge. In this case the identification is due, not to the rudimentary instinct of the savage or the animal, but the more developed reasoning-power of the scientist. But the conclusion is that the whole of those laws of nature which have been woven into a unified—scheme mechanics, gravitation, electrodynamics and optics—have their origin, not in any special mechanism of nature, but in the workings of the mind.
"Give me matter and motion," said Descartes, "and I will construct the universe." The mind reverses this. "Give me a world—a world in which there are relations—and I will construct matter and motion."
Are there then no genuine laws in the external world? Laws inherent in the substratum of events, which break through into
- ↑ This summary is intended to indicate the direction in which the views suggested by the relativity theory appear to me to be tending, rather than to be a precise statement of what has been established. I am aware that there are at present many gaps in the argument. Indeed the whole of this part of the discussion should be regarded as suggestive rather than dogmatic.
