Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-12T21:31:08.328Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Order and Surprise

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Extract

“We are in the position of a little child,” said Einstein in a press interview twenty years ago, “entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. … The child does not understand the languages in which they are written. He notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order which he does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1950

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity, 1925.

2 Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, 1948, p. 285.

3 Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book III, 18. A similar paragraph occurs in the same author's, Against the Physicists, Book 1, 203. Both references are to the Loeb Classical Library edition.

4 Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity, 1925.

5 Gilbert Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday, 1908.

6 Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, 1948, p. XII.

7 Bertrand Russell, Philosophy, 1927.

8 Gilbert Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1927.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest, 1917.

12 Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, 1948, p. 507.

13 William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902.

14 Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, 1948, p. 245.

15 George Santayana, Ultimate Religion, an address reprinted in Obiter Scripta, 1936.