Rounded Picture Of Knowledge: The Physical Earth is a book of popular general knowledge about the earth. It is a self-contained book with its own index and its own internal system of cross-references to help you to build up a rounded picture of our world.
It is one volume in Rigby's intended ten-volume library of individual books we have entitled The Joy of Knowledge Library-a library which, when complete, will form a comprehensive encyclopaedia.
For a new generation brought up with television, words alone are no longer enough-and so we intend to make the Library a new sort of pictorial encyclopaedia for a visually oriented age, a new "family bible" of knowledge which will find acceptance in every home.
An encyclopaedia (the Greek word means "teaching in a circle" or, as we might say, the provision of a rounded picture of knowledge) has to perform these two distinct functions for two sorts of users, each seeking information of different sorts.
First, many readers want simple factual answers to simple factual questions, such as "What is beryl?" They may be intrigued to learn that it is a silicate mineral that forms as hexagonal crystals which may be white, blue, yellow, green or pink, and that it is already familiar to them-as aquamarine, emerald and morganite. Such facts are best supplied by a short entry and in the Library they will be found in the two A-Z Fact Index volumes.
Philosophy.-Rationalism in philosophy is primarily a theory of knowledge. As opposed to empiricism, which holds that all knowledge comes from perception, it maintains that the most important part of our knowledge comes from intellectual insight. The clearest cases of such insight are to be found in logic and mathematics-the knowledge, for example, that a thing cannot be both square and not square, or that 2 + 2 = 4. Such knowledge is certain; it is necessary, in the sense that we not only see it to be true, but see that it could not be otherwise; and it is universal, in the sense that it holds everywhere and always. Such insights provide the framework of all our knowledge.
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