An unbroken mood of felicity seems to have visited Mr. Bertrand Russell while he wrote The Scientific Outlook. It is an extraordinarily gay and inspiring work, full of the good sense that comes from intellectual vitality. If a boy or girl of sixteen can be found who does not like this, they should be removed from school and sent somewhere else; he or she is not getting the right sort of education...

The Scientific Outlook makes no cheap pretence that the universe is a box of tricks which any B.Sc. can turn inside out. On the contrary, it passes on to a lively description of what a hell the world would become if there were only science to shape it; and in an eloquent last chapter Mr. Russell declares that though “knowledge is good and ignorance is evil–to this principle the lover of the world can admit no exception,” the ultimate usefulness of science depends on the system of values it upholds.