The papers which make up this volume have been selected because,
although they deal with different aspects of various scientific ideas,
yet they do illustrate, more or less, one point of view. That point
of view may be described, perhaps as æsthetic, but rather better as
humanistic. Scientific ideas have a history; they arose to satisfy
certain human needs; to see them in their context is to see them as
part of the general intellectual and emotional life of man. What they
exist to do they do better than does anything else, and the needs they
satisfy are not peculiar to scientific specialists. These papers try
to show one or two of the many reasons why, for people who are not
specialists as well as for those who are, science may be interesting.