Evening Post. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1930. MR. SHAW'S LITTLE LIST

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 148, 20 December 1930, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1930. MR. SHAW'S LITTLE LIST

London is still a great centre, according to Mr. Bernard Shaw, but he does not expect it to retain that character for long. "It will presently be transferred to the United States," he thinks, and then apparently the great will pass it by, or perhaps be deported willy-nilly to New York or Chicago. But for the moment he was speaking in a capital where the reeeption of a great man was a very common event. In truth, in London great men were six a. penny, and were a very mixed lot. When they drank their health, and made speeches about them, they had to bo guilty of scandalous suppressions and disgraceful hypocrisies. Suppose he had to rise that night to propose the toast of Napoleon. The- one thing which he should not possibly be able to say would bo, perhaps, the most important—that it would have been better for the human race if he had never been born. Such, as reported in "The Times," was the promising opening of the speech in which Mr. Shaw proposed the health of Professor Einstein at "an appeal dinner" given by Jewish organisations in London on the 28th October. It is hardly necessary to say that the guest of honour was not classed among the mixed lot of great men who may still be picked up in London at six a penny. Not at the rate of six a penny but of eight in twenty-five centuries is greatness of the Einstein type to be picked up anywhere, according to Mr. Shaw. It was but as a foil to the greatness of Einstein that Mr. Shaw had referred to the greatness of Napoleon. There is one glory of the philosopher and another glory of the murderer, and he puts the philosopher's first. That night, at least, he said, they had no need to be gnilt3r of suppressions. There wore great men who were groat men: among small men. But there were also great men who were great among great men, and that was the sort of man they were honouring that night. Napoleon and other great men of his typo were- makers of empire. But there was an order of men who got beyond that. They were makers of universes, and as makers of universes their hands were unstained by the blood of any human being. Such mea were very rare. Going back 2500 years, he could count them on the fingers of his two hands. They were Pythagoras, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein, and ho still had two fingers left vacant. These^great men had been leaders of a movement of humanity which had two sides, one called religion and the other science. . . . All those great men had been trying to solve those problems. Einstein had not challenged the facts of science but •the axioms of science, and science had surrendered to the challenge. In his reply, Professor Einstein did not attempt to make the problems of relativity clearer to an English audience by a speech in German, nor did he touch upon Mr. Shaw's list of great men. But he may be said to have turned the tables on his eulogist by an exceedingly happy appreciation of Mr. Shaw's work. Mr. G. B. Shaw had succeeded, he said, in gaining the love and joyful admiration of mankind by a path which to others had led to martyrdom. He had Jiot only preached to mankind morality, but oven dared to mock at what to others appeared unapproachable. What Mr. Shaw had done could be done only by the born artist. From his box of tricks ho had taken countless puppets, which, while resembling men, wore not of flesh and bone, but consisted entirely of spirit, wit, and grace. By holding the mirror before them Mr. Shaw had been able as no other ■contemporary to liberate them and to take from them something of the heaviness of life. The plain men to whom Einstein's calculations and speculations would be just as unintelligible in English as they are in German, and who is therefore compelled to take his greatness in trust, must be rilled with a first-hand admiration for the man who can speak with such sympathy, understanding, and critical power of the work of a foreigner in an entirely different field. Abounding in interest from widely different points of view, perhaps the most striking feature of Mr. Shaw's list of universe-makers is the dominance of ancient Greece. That tiny little nation supplied three of the names, and in the twenty centuries that have since passed the rest of the world has been able to add only five! The . first of the Greek names on the list—Pythagoras— carries us back to the 6lh century, 8.C., and if it is not also (lie greatest name on the list, it may be because Aristotle, who comes next, is entitled to precedence. The third of the names is, perhaps, the most doubtful in the whole list, but if so it is only because another Greek may be entitled to priority. The obligations of astronomy to the Ptolemaic system are not open to, challenge, but the work of Ptolemy was in•" large measure that of compilation and revision, and it is from Ptolemy himself that we learn of his indebtedness to liipparchus, who preceded himself by about three hundred years. Hipparchus discovered the procession of the -equinoxes -and the eccentricity of the sun's path, determined the length of the solar year and the distances of the sun and moon respectively from llio, earth, invented the planisphere, drew up a catalogue of 1080 stars, and fixed thr; geographical position of places on the enrth by giving their longitude and latitude. AD I his was done about 150 B.C.*

with apparatus which a modern astronomer might think good enough for the village carpenter, but the carpenter himself might not. If the name of liipparchus were added to Mr. Shaw's list there Avould be four Greek names on it, representing just half the total until Einstein came along some 1800 years after the latest of them lo turn the scale in favour of the modern world. But, as we have suggested, the probability is lhat the recognition of the just claim of liipparchus would be at the expense of Ptolemy. One would be glad, however, to see Ptolemy retaining his place in the list if only on account of his noble epigram which surely marks the highest point of astronomical achievement in literature. Walter Headlam's version is as follows: — I am but human, and must die; Yet when aloft I gaze And trace the tangled stars on high Through all their curving maze, No more then on the earth I tread, But far far hence recline With Zeus in heaven, and share the bread Of deathless Gods divine. We have referred to Pythagoras as probably the greatest of the whole team. Though his greatness is at once proved and blurred by the fables and the myths which quickly gathered round his name, certain facts are not in dispute. He was the first to adopt the title of philosopher (wis-dom-lover)—the word being apparently of his own invention—instead of sage, and the first to apply the term "cosmos" to the universe, embodying therein for all time the great conception of a world governed by physical law to the exclusion of lite chances and the caprices of current speculation. The all-roundness of Pythagoras is illustrated by Thirlwall's description of his school as at once a philosophical school, a religious brotherhood, and a political association. • ' But even here there is no reference lo his scientific achievements, especially in astronomy and mathematics. If William Maccall's rhetoric suggests the enthusiast rather than'the scholar, there is a solid foundation for a good deal of his tribute to Pythagoras in "The Newest Materialism": — Travelling from land to land to add to the stores of his knowledge, seeking the divinest alike in his own deep soul and in tho mysteries and symbols of the East, never severing the vastest, loftiest ontological survey from the valiant glance at human destiny and j duty; beholding a poetry in numbers, a philosophy in poetry, a religion in music; teaching, the harmony of tho spheres as the emblem of man's virtues; enlarging, ennobling, transfiguring all scionces, all arts, demonstrating their concatenation, promoting their mutual relations; making each seienco', each art a stop, in tho inarch of the citizens to the godlike life—Plato, Archimedes, Moses, Porieles, Pcstalozzi in one —and revealing no glory of tho sky, picturing no sublime vision of tho Deity that could not be turned to food and force for the education of our erring and suffering race. The interval between the last of the Greeks on Mr. Shaw's list and the first of those whom the Greeks themselves would have called "barbarians" is more than 1300 years. Yet their conceptions had continued to dominate European astronomy during all that time. And the revolution then effected by Copernicus was the result to a very large extent of the application of the Greek methods of free inquiry and experiment to sap the tyranny which the ignorant worship of Greek conclusions throughout the Dark Ages had succeeded in establishing. The work of all the astronomers from Copernicus to Newton and Einstein has not put Ernest Myers's stirring paean to the men of ancient Greece out of date: — There tho light of "hidden " Wisdou springs to their compelling quest; Ray by ray tho dawn from Hellas rose upon the waking "West, Every thought of all their thinking sways the world for good or ill, Every pulse of all their life-blood beats across the ages still.