Chapter 34 - Eddington, Science and the Unseen World

Abstract

This chapter discusses Eddington's work: science and the unseen world. Many see their own consciousness as a strange, insignificant spark of spirit in a huge material universe. Eddington totally rejected this idea. For him, mind is the first and most direct thing; all else is remote inference. In Science and the Unseen World, Eddington imagined how a passage in an obituary notice, which mentioned that the deceased had loved to watch the sunsets from his country home, led to a long series of letters on the teaching of Copernicus. Scientific knowledge is only preliminary knowledge of a very restricted kind.” Eddington emphasized that the sphere of personal experience is primary and that the experiences of beauty or melancholy are important. Eddington's philosophy is very much a search for an all-encompassing view of the world. Eddington's solution to the problem of the dualism between mind and matter consists of the idea of the primacy of mind, the principle of selection and the notion of mind-stuff. Because the principle of selection concerns a particular activity of the mind as well, the solution in fact boils down to a reduction of everything to “mind.”