| OLOF EDLUND Antiquarian Bookseller STOCKHOLM |  |
| OLOF EDLUND Antiquarian Bookseller STOCKHOLM | |
| $ 78 |
| First edition in French of Haldane's best-known philosophical book, The Reign of Relativity (1st. ed. 1921), translated by Henry de Varigny, "in which he sketches the mathematical context of the theories of general and special relativity in the work of C.F. Gauss, G.F. Riemann, and Hermann Minkowski, and maintaines that Einstein's theory is only an illustration of the "the principle of the relativity of knowledge" to a special subject. In the course of it Haldane discusses Moritz Schlick's view, expressed in Raum und Zeit in der gegenwärtigen Physik (1917), that physical space is "essentially dissimilar" from perpetual space although correlated with it and argues that such a view introduces "a splitting up of experience into sensations and conceptions which seems to have little warrant in the actual character of that experience" (p. 59). Noting, by reference to Arthur Eddington, that Einstein's equation for gravitation is "not so much a law as a definition," Haldane discusses the more metaphysical approach to relativity that A.N. Whitehead had taken in The Concept of Nature (1920), supporting Whitehead's rejection of "the bifurcation of nature". Haldane believed that Einstein's theory supported the idealist thesis that the distinction between knowledge and what is known is a distinction within knowledge itself. He therefore mistakenly treated Einstein's "observer" as if it were akin to Kant's "transcendental unity of apperception." The Reign of Relativity, in consequence, became a compendium of idealist metaphysics, with discussions of the work of F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, a defense of vitalism in biology continued in ThePhilosophy of Humanism and Other Subjects (1922), and even a vindication of the general will. When Einstein came to lecture at King's College, London, in 1921, he told Haldane he did not believe that his theory had metaphysical implications, and the archbishop of Canterbury that it had no religious implications. Haldane had wrongly supposed that "relative to an observer" entails "dependent on mind""(H.B. Acton). |
| * DSB, 6, p. 26. |