Rightly or, wrongly I am going to take it that the doctrine of simple qualities says three things. First, that yellow, for example, is a simple unanalyzable quality. I don’t really believe this to be true, except in what it denies, but I have no immediate quarrel with it. Second, a simple quality, such as yellow, is what it is quite independently of its pattern of exemplification. Third, yellow is somehow ineffable, the sheer dazzling yellowishness of yellow things cannot be conveyed in words. In the third case, I do not mean the commonplace that words are different from things, that the word ‘yellow’ is not itself yellow. I mean the view that there is something about color qualities as immediately apprehended by us that eludes description. Now all these views are somewhat old-fashioned. The third is hardly mentioned nowadays. Yet I am not so sure that we are not still very much in their grip. In any case, philosophical hemlil)eS oscillate almost as frequently as do those of high fashion so it should not surprise anyone if these views were to come back into vogue, especially if phenomenology becomes important in this country. Now it may be more a matter of convenience than of historical accuracy that I am lumping these three doctrines together as “the doctrine of simple qualities”. Perhaps “doctrine of atomistic qualities” would be better. I am reasonably certain that the second and third doctrines mutually entail each other, although it has to be conceded that the situation is fairly complicated. I shall have something to say about the third doctrine–the doctrine of ineffability, but I shall be mostly concerned to refute the second doctrine–the doctrine that the identity of a quality is independent of its extension–and to put something else in its place. I shall be concerned incidentally to examine certain puzzling statements like ‘Red is a color’, ‘Red is between orange and purple’ and ‘Whatever is green is extended’, which seem to be necessary but don’t seem to be analytic.

Spinoza’s Ethics must contain some of philosophy’s most baffling statements. All things are animate; the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things: what would I be committed to in agreeing (or disagreeing) with these doctrines? His austere mode of exposition, sparing of illustrations and discursive explanations, ensures that any answer must be highly speculative.

His weakness for dark sayings seems to have communicated itself to some of his best-known commentators. Of course where a philosopher’s thought is itself opaque one would be unreasonable to expect lucidity in a commentator’s exposition of it. However he has been described as holding puzzling, to my mind unintelligible opinions on subjects concerning which, as far as I can see, his own statements more naturally suggest a much clearer and more comprehensible interpretation. There are problems enough in understanding his thought without adding needlessly to the list. I think there has been such an addition in discussion of his doctrines about the causal relationship between God and finite creatures, and this paper is devoted to suggesting another account of his thought on that topic which combines, I think, the advantages of being more intelligible and a more natural construction to place on his own statements, than the set of opinions generally laid at his door.

The interesting and suggestive interpretation offered by A. J, Watt in this journal (pp. 171-89 above) of Spinoza’s account of God’s causality to some extent anticipates the discussion of the topic which I am undertaking in a forthcoming book on Spinoza’s philosophy. To a greater extent it is, of course, anticipated by Stuart Hampshire in his study of Spinoza. I agree with Mr. Watt’s objections to some of the traditional interpretations of Spinoza’s doctrine and I think it is in fact immune from the strictures of some critics who attempt to explain the succession of finite modes in Substance as a product of imaginal thinking, a view which must lead to a paralogism in Spinoza’s thought so gross that he could not have been unaware of it and could not have committed unless he had been. I shall not enter into this part of the discussion, as I have no wish to contest what Mr. Watt has written with respect to it, but shall confine my attention to his own (and incidentally Hampshire’s) interpretation.

There are a number of grounds for criticizing what the state requires of one, and for thinking that one no longer has an obligation to obey it. I will begin by attempting to locate liberalism amongst such grounds. It is useful for this purpose to contrast two headings under which these grounds may fall. Firstly, there are criticisms concerning the content of the requirements of the state. In this case exception is taken to what it is that the law requires quite apart from the process by which it was arrived at. If Jews are legally prevented from practising certain professions, and objection is taken because no state should make laws debarring persons from certain professions on religious grounds, the objection is one of content. Secondly, there are grounds concerning the procedure by which a decision was reached. If it is thought that the British Government ought not to have signed the Treaty of Rome because no referendum was taken on whether the electorate wanted Britain to join, exception is taken to the procedure by which this decision was made. The objection could be made by one who thought that British entry was the best policy. liberalism lays down principles concerning the permissible content of what is required by the state.

The philosophy of primary and secondary qualities is in a state of some confusion. There is no agreement as to the basis upon which the two classes of quality may be distinguished—a host of features, as diverse as perceptible by more than one sense and belonging to the definition of matter, are offered as the mark of the primary. There is not even agreement on which qualities belong to which group. Shape, size and solidity are generally held to be primary, while colours, smells, and the like (I) are favoured secondary candidates. But for large numbers of qualities, for example being acidic, malleable, rust-proof—or, among perceptible qualities, glistening and vibrating—we are offered no effective guidance.

Inevitably, in such a situation, we are without clear answers to the questions; Why should any distinction be made between primaries and secondaries? Must all qualities be the one or the other? To the solution of which problems does the distinction serve as a preliminary step? What special relationship is there between primary qualities and scientific theory, or between secondary qualities and peculiarities in perception?

In Knowledge and Belief Jaakko Hintikka presents a fairly detailed system of epistemic logic and tries to show its philosophical importance by bringing it to bear upon such problems as what goes wrong in saying “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it.” In setting up the system, Hintikka presents a way of symbolizing certain locutions containing expressions like ‘knows that’, ‘know who’, and ‘believes that’; he introduces certain notions which are analogous to the standard logical concepts consistency, validity, entailment (or logical implication), and logical equivalence; and he sets up (in effect) certain criteria which determine when these analogues of consistency, validity, etc. apply to epistemic and doxastic sentences and schemata-i.e., to sentences and schemata which contain, in their symbolic renditions, one or more of the so-called epistemic operators: ‘K’, ‘B’, ‘P’, and ‘C’. (⌈Ka⌉ is “the formal counterpart” of the words ⌈a knows that⌉; ⌈Ba⌉ is the counterpart of ⌈a believes that⌉; ⌈Pa⌉ is the counterpart of ⌈it is possible, for all that a knows, that⌉; and ⌈Ca⌉ is the counterpart of ⌈it is compatible with everything a believes that⌉ [p. 10].) The analogue of logical consistency which Hintikka introduces is called “defensibility.” Intuitively, a sentence is defensible provided that it is true in at least one of the “most knowledgeable of possible worlds” (p. 36)-i.e., provided it is true in at least one of the possible worlds which have the feature that each inhabitant which is capable of knowing and/or believing things (a) knows all the logical consequences of every proposition it knows and (b) believes all the logical consequences of every proposition it believes. The remaining notions are defined by reference to defensibility in just the way validity, entailment, and logical equivalence are often defined by reference to consistency. Thus self-sustenance, the epistemic analogue of validity, is defined thus:

The theory I want to refute is sometime called Impersonal Ethical Egoism (IEE): the view that everyone ought (morally) to do what will benefit him the most in any given situation. It might be thought that this view can be distinguished from Personal Ethical Egoism (PEE): the view that I ought (morally) to do what will benefit me the most in any given situation. But to whom does “I” refer in PEE? To any person who states the view? And is the view supposed to be true no matter who states it? If the answers to the last two questions are Yes, then PEE and IEE come to the same thing. To distinguish the views, we might take “I” to refer to a specific person, say, the person who just stated the view. Put unambiguously, without the personal pronoun, PEE then becomes: RC ought (morally) to do what will benefit RC the most in any given situation. IEE would then logically imply PEE, but not conversely. But the reason why PEE would not imply IEE is not that it would be a conflicting, or even an alternative and competing, form of ethical egoism; it is simply that PEE would be formulated much less generally than IEE. In fact, since PEE would concern only what one particular person ought to do, it would not be obvious that the view itself should be called a form of egoism. For if anyone else subscribed to the view, that would hardly make him an egoist; so there would seem to be nothing inherently egoistic about the view. But, in any case, what I aim to refute is a general theory about what anyone ought to do in a given situation, not a theory limited in scope to the actions of only one individual.

There is a certain view of religion, deriving from Wittgenstein’s thought, that might be called the language-game view of religion. It has many parts, but in essence it holds–in its own terms–that religion is a language-game (or cluster of languagegames) in fact engaged in by men; or, what seems to be an alternative way of saying the same thing, or very nearly the same. thing, religion is a form of life participated in by men. As such it is in order. Although one needs to enter into the torm ot lite and engage in the language-game to learn its grammar or logic and to see the order that it has. For its order has internal criteria: what count as, e.g., rational and meaningful within religion are determined not by criteria appropriate to physics or chess playing but by criteria appropriate to religion as it is lived by the religious.

In his Arthur Holly Compton Memorial Lecture Sir Karl Popper tackles a problem raised by Compton himself in an earlier lecture. The problem is to understand how such abstract things as aims, purposes, rules, or agreements can influence or control the movements of men, and perhaps also of animals (p. 15). To illustrate the problem Compton had remarked on the amazing faith and confidence shown by his audience and the lecture's organizer that he should arrive on the agreed date to give the lecture, considering ‘the great physical improbability that their confidence was justified’. For