Viscount Haldane's treatment of Einstein's theory in the address he gave to the Association of University Women Teachers at Bedford College was no less abstruse than his words on the same subject when a few days previously the Literary Society met at the City Temple. At the outset he warned his audience, University teachers though they were, that they would find the subject. "very, very difficult." Dealing with the aspect of relativity with reference to the relationship between knowledge and reality, Lord Haldane said that Einstein had taught that the character, reality, and measurement of space and time could not be estimated unless the conditions affecting hi and the situation of the observer were taken into account. The theory of relativity had bearing on departments of knowledge besides that with which Einstein was acquainted. The scientist's statement ought to extend to psychology, biology, sociology, and ethics, to jurisprudence and the governance of the State, to literature and art; the new theory meant that in investigating other branches of knowledge, reality would also be relative to the standpoint of the observer. Mind must not be regarded as something chut up in a box looking out through certain windows; a larger conception must be entertained. If the ways in which things presented themselves were dependent on general standpoints the conflict between different kinds of knowledge disappeared, and the relationships of standpoints to one another, not the relationships of causes, was the question remaining to be considered. In philosophy, literature, truth could not be determined by the measuring rod. If anyone asked whether Shakespeare or Homer were the greater poet, the answer was that each represented the very highest qualities of his own time, and each must be judged in accordance with and relatively to the standards of his own time.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.