[Letters to Editor]

Abstract

CANON McCLURE'S misconception is so fundamental that I ask leave to correct it. If he had done me the honour to read other of my writings, he would scarcely have suspected me of a desire to banish imagination from science. It is just because I maintain that the imaginative element gives to science its highest value that I think it important to distinguish carefully between what is fact and what is imagination. I do not “rule out, as scientifically invalid, Prof. Eddington's being travelling with the velocity of light”; but I say that the perceptions of that being are not facts, ascertainable by experiment; and I protest against any exposition of relativity, or of any other scientific doctrine, which confuses laws, based mainly on facts, with theories, based mainly upon imagination.