It is the bare truth that one must rake the records of history to discover a more complete and abject subservience to the Demon of the Absolute than that of the philosophy, falsely called science, of the period now closing. And, as I say, any one who clings to common sense must be thankful to Mr. Whitehead for lending his authority as a scientist to the unlocking of these shackles. But then, why should so masterly an intellect, again like Luther’s drunken man, topple over on the other side into a contrary but equally impossible absolutism? Why? “The only way of mitigating mechanism,” he says, “is by the discovery that it is not mechanism.” And so, instead of admitting humbly that mechanism is mechanism while beside it there exists something of a totally different nature, and that the ultimate nexus between these two fields of experience surpasses our comprehension, he must demonstrate mechanism out of the world altogether. In his philosophy there will be no more solid obstinate material things such as go to the making of machines, but only “events.” Time and space, which used to be regarded as modes of perception, become internal components of things; value, which used to be a name for our conscious estimation of what we could do with things or for their effect on our spiritual life, now proves to be “the intrinsic reality of an event.” There is, you see, an entire reversal of the mechanistic hypothesis. Formerly it was held that the human soul obeys the same laws as a stone; now we are to believe that a stone is of the same nature as the soul. In either case we avoid the discomfort of a paradoxical dualism and reduce the world to a monism which may plausibly call itself science, though as a matter of fact Mr. Whitehead’s theory, if carried out, would simply abolish science.