The Two-Handed Engine

472 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY ciple," according to which an electron cannot simultaneously have both position and velocity. Since uncertainty pr~vails, the theory has been held to disprove the philosophical principle of determinism and thus to give a scientific basis (or the doctrine of the freedom of the will. Dr Watson dissents from this conclusion and shows, what is generally overlooked, that the new physics has merely substituted the causality of quantum mechanics for that of classical mechanics, each of which is valid in its own field. The resolution of the difficulties attendant upon determinism and free.:will cannot therefore be found in modern physics. Dr Watson discusses or alludes to over two hundred physical principles, facts or philosophical ideas, some of which are very abstruse, so that his book, even though brief, possesses a wealth of material. It is not always easy reading, and it seldom evades a difficulty. Able and often brilliant it measurably accomplishes its purpose, which is the understanding of physics, and that is the nature of the physical world. THE TWO-HANDED ENGINE" A. E. BARKER "This," remarked Sir Edward Dering in the Commons in 1641, "hath been a very accusative age." The student of the first half of the seventeenth century in England is apt to agree, especially if he has striven, with Professors Allen and Haller, to cut his way through the thickets of pamphlet controversy to some foothold on the vantage-ground of enduring principles. The prospect is likely to be at once as inspiring and as disheartening as the vision presented to the wondering gaze of the Miltonic Adam. Professor Haller perceives that the throes and pangs which accompanied the rise (and the decay) of Puritanism marked the birth of a new social order in England as well as in America; Professor Allen observes that passionate accusation and muddled assertion led to a futile civil war which ended in 1660 with a settlement seen to be inevitable·Engli.sh Po/ili(lJ/ Though/, /603-1660; volume 1,1603-1614, by J. W. AUen, Methuen, 1938, $7.50. Tlu Riu oj Purilanism; or, the Way 10 Ihe New Jerusalem as Sf! Forth in Pulpil and Press Jrom Thomas Cartwright 10 John Lilburne and John Millon, 1570_161J~ by William Haller, Columbia University Press, 1938, $4.50. REVIEWS 473 by cooler heads in 1642. One scholar is impressed by the enthusiasm of the Puritans, and especially of Milton} for the establishment of the New by the fanatical incompetence begot anarchy. analysis of English political Allen deals with the ng stage of the Civil War. a new and, . illuminating interpretation and parliamen 1 discussion of the ecclesiastical so far as, in his opinion, it was related to the political problem; a lucid, though not altogether decisive, attempt to give more definite meaning to the term Puritanism; and a review of the factors making for toleration. The historian of political thought in the sixteenth century brings to the task an equipment which gives authority to his judgments and a colouring to his interpretation. He perceives that however admirable enthusiasm (or a cause may be, it is no substitute for thought. His sense of the prejudice, misconception, and confusion sides, leads him to . a circumspectly the documents through disputants opinion, and to define with clarity the involved in the conflict obscurely antagonists. Professor of the political problem analysis of excellent. He is concerned to lay the threatening spectre of divine right raised by the liberal historians of the last century. Through the evidence afforded by specific cases and judgments as well as political pamphlets, he shows that (like Popish machinations) the bogey assumed much larger proportions in the imaginations of the parliamentarians than in the theory of the royalists, even of those bishops mistakenly supposed to have considered the king's right more divine than their own. It seems to Professor Allen that the royalist claim was based Tudor precedent and upon government ample support in law and His tracing the somewhat inconsisten of James to chief royalist pamphleteers 1640's affords corrective to the simple view which· adopted. though cri tical analysis opinion is balanced by an equally 474 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY...