102 SOCIAL SCIENTIST as tools for the conceptional organisation of our sensory experience. Bohr holds that "We construct theories of the micro-structure of the physical world in order better to comprehend the world in which we move and have our own being — the macroscopic world." The book by Bernard D'Espagnat, a theoretical physicist himself, also subscribes to views very close to Bohr's. Espagnat's philosophical standpoint is that of a total rejection of positivist and phenomenalist philosophies of science. As he sums up his own position "It was once thought the notion of Being must be repudiated. Now that it has finally become apparent that to do so is to court incoherence, it is dismaying to find that in the interim it has become peculiarly difficult, if the facts are to be respected, to rehabilitate that notion." D'Espagnat draws a distinction between reality in itself or as such-reality independent of human minds - and the ensemble of phenomena or empirical reality. The former he terms as veiled reality which is knowable while the latter is what science deals with in its day to day activity. Although it may not be known which aspects of veiled reality are know-able, to reject the notion of such a reality according to the author is "to risk falling headlong into the abyss to solipsism". Espagnat very strongly rejects the 'linguistic standpoint' as the philosophy of science developed by the Vienna Circle and their followers. Displaying close affinity to Kantianism in maintaining that causality in the narrow and technical sense of the term is a structural feature of human understanding, Espagnat nonetheless categorically rejects the Kantian idea of the thing in itself as being in principle, unknowable. In the face of the developments in 20th century physics the classical ideas of continuity, strict determinism in the Laplacian sense and clarity have required to be modified, enriched and deepened. Espagnat pleads for a rather modest approach in questions relating to epistemology. He says ".... it is necessary that partisans of mathematical realism refrain from elevating to an absolute dogma the principle that the real is totally intelligible. And it is also necessary, by the same token, that those physicists, who assign to science the more modest objective of simply describing phenomena (synthetically and mathematically, of course) refrain from systemically condemning (by implicit reference to the word 'metaphysics' applied in the spirit of Vienna Circle, namely as a synonym for a nullity, something absurd and worthless) the idea that there can be any point in concerning oneself with independent reality." The discussion on the question of philosophy by physicists confirm what Leopold Infeld had observed in 1942, "No scientist thinks in formulae. A Scientist in the moment of creation must have acted as the realist does, accepting emotionally the reality of the outside world". What is, however, underlined by the discussion is the fact of the inexhaustible nature of cognition and the need for its conscious realisation. Rajendra Prasad Editorial Staff, People's Democracy, New Delhi