The Growth of Physical Science

110 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY the specific. Curiously enough, it is a motion away from the Christian idea and towards the secular idea. Professor Chew provides many fascinating examples of this phenomenon. It is enough to indicate here that in the main the abstract personified symbol is drawn steadily towards the political and social theme. (The work of Bunyan appears as the great exception.) The Four Daughters of God are put to defending the rival ecclesiastical and political claims of the Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan parties. In illustrating topical debates, in magnifying the Virgin Queen, in hallowing the practices of the English merchant, the medieval type of Christian symbol was gradually secularized and schooled for surprising new tasks. Soon after Milton abandoned his "Adam Unparadised" in favour of the direct, non-allegorical treatment of God and man in Paradise Lost, the "venerable personification " is seen to mince rejuvenated- but unshriven-across the Restoration stage. Clearly, then, the allegorical symbol does not enshroud the generative ideas of Christianity. It enshrouds a secular rationalism culminating in the witty abstraction of Alexander Pope-or perhaps in Mrs. Malaprop. In fairness to Professor Chew, I must make it clear that this sketch of the direction taken on the one hand by the Christian idea and on the other by the medieval type of symbol, constitutes my own deduction from the evidence which he presents. Professor Chew has been more cautious and has allowed his documents to speak for themselves. But if I have heard their talk aright, the book has the kind of relevance which I have claimed for it. To the contemporary Christian artist who nervously seeks fit flesh in the strange shops of our day, Professor Chew's study should be heartening. For here the Christian tradition appears, and so it should appear, as the charitable captor of traditions, eternally seizing and sanctifying the quick profane, bequeathing its tested garments to the beggars of time. In Mauriac's quest for the Creator in the creature, in Graham Greene's astonishing employment of his detective "thriller" techniques, in Eliot's baptism of the Golden Bough and the bifocal sense of history, in Auden's particularization of allegory and in his patristic rendering of the new psychology, in all of these, the Christian tradition, which is no tradition and all traditions, continues to exert its generative force. THE GROWTH OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE* F. S. Haec *The Growth of Physical Science. By Sir ]AMES ] BANS, O.M. Cambridge: at the University Press (Toronto: Macmillan Co. of Canada]. 1947. Pp. x, 364. ($3.50) Through the world-wide popularity attained by such books as The Universe Around Us, The Mysterious Universe, and Physics and Philosophy, the late Sir James Jeans awakened a remarkable public interest in astronomy and other physical sciences. That he was a master at presenting abstruse concepts in a very lucid and almost exciting manner is attested by the en- REVIEWS 111 joyment his books gave to a very large circle of readers. That he was himself one of the great productive scholars in the field of mathematical physics may not be as well known to his wider audience. Yet the background of a whole generation of modern physicists·was shaped to a considerable extent by such almost classical mathematical treatises as Jeans's Dynamical Theory of Gases, The Mathematica[ Theory of Electricity and Magnetism, and Astronomy and Cosmogony. With his record as a very productive scholar in several difficult fields of the mathematical sciences, and as a writer of scientific best-sellers, Sir James Jeans was uniquely fitted to write such a volume as The Growth of Physical Science. The result is a most remarkable and valuable book, whether for careful or more casual reading. Any attempt to summarize the development of mathematics, astronomy, physics, and chemistry from the most remote beginnings down to relativity, the quantum theory, and the expanding universe, must be based on a rather arbitrary and personal selection of ideas, events, and men. In the fairly large section devoted to astronomy, Jeans has struck a reasonable balance between observation and theory. The general historical development is divided into eight main eras, each of which is further sub...