In what, after all, does civilization consist? If Japanese aggression in China were successful, would it bring to the Chinese a higher civilization or subject them to a lower? Sidney and Beatrice Webb entitled their spacious survey of present-day Russia Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? with a query at the end. In a postscript to that book they give reasons why they think that query might be omitted. But Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco assert that Communism is not a civilization at all, but an embodiment of the forces of destruction, to be resisted at all costs and to the death. History has accorded the title of “the Great” only as a rule to the

The close proximity of the nineteenth century to our own age is an impediment in the way of tracing with confidence the lines of its intellectual development, and more especially of estimating the significance of its philosophical speculation. Certain characteristics of the latter are, however, already sufficiently obvious. It is clear, at any rate, that the chief attempts at philosophical construction in the nineteenth century were the outcome of German reflexion; it is clear also that the great thinker who died in 1804 set the current of speculative activity upon a course markedly distinguishable from any that had been followed in preceding centuries. As a philosophical

Nobody interested in philosophy need be deterred by Kant's reputation for difficulty from familiarizing himself with his ethics. While the Critique of Pure Reason and his other non-ethical works are very hard to follow, the first two chapters of the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals at least are clear and straightforward and presuppose little previous acquaintance with philosophy. The third chapter is not about ethics as such but about the metaphysical problem of freedom and should be omitted by anyone who is not familiar with Kant's general philosophy, but the first two

In the course of his discussion of the work of the Disarmament Commission, in his book on the League of Nations, Sir Alfred Zimmern asks why the British people were so active in sponsoring disarmament. The question arises because, as he points out, the project must evoke proposals in regard to security which they were in no mood to consider. “The explanation,” he proceeds, “no doubt is that the eventuality, however obvious it may seem in retrospect, was overlooked in the enthusiasm for what had become for a certain type of British opinion a moral crusade, rather than a realistic

In a recent article in Philosophy (April, 1936) Professor Knox makes a plea for a philosophic treatment of economic activity by way of contrast to either the specialized study of economic history or of economic science. The conclusion which was reached was embodied in the statement that “the historical and scientific methods of the study of economic activity leave incompletely satisfied the curiosity of students, and reach results which need special interpretation before they can be useful to politicians, let alone to business men” (p. 159). Each of these methods is said to involve unreal abstractions which detract from the usefulness of the study. A philosophic

In an interesting article in a recent number of Philosophy (October 1937) Mr. H. Wallis Chapman examines Colour as one of the commonest illustrations of the universal; and comes to conclusions of a nominalist kind. I desire to propose alternative solutions for the problems he deals with. If my statements seem too dogmatic, or my quotations too brief, the motive is economy of space. I trust that any reader of the present paper will read the whole of Mr. Chapman's.

Hume'sDialogues Concerning Natural Religion are still much with us. What appears to be the definitive edition was published by Professor Norman Kemp Smith in 1935 with a learned introduction which, among other things, assembled a mass of evidence pointing to the conclusion that Philo is to be identified with Hume himself, and that Hume in the Dialogues is deliberately trying to undermine the religious hypothesis. Though these conclusions have been widely accepted, Dr. B. M. Laing, in the April issue of Philosophy, strenuously attacked them in an ingenious argument based in part on his already published thesis that Hume's fundamental philosophy is not really the scepticism so long assigned him. Dr. Laing takes the opportunity in passing to indicate his sympathy with the recent position of a distinguished British poet that Voltaire, also, has been traditionally abused in the assumption that on the question of religion he wrote with his tongue in his cheek. The present examination is not designed to inquire into this new mode of making the wicked pious; nor to push the question back from the Dialogues to Hume's basic philosophy; nor to press the writer's conviction [“The Enigma of Hume,” Mind, XLV (July, 1936) pp. 334–349] that not only is Philo to be identified as Hume, but in addition, Cleanthes as Joseph Butler, and Demea as Samuel Clarke. The present purpose is solely to indicate certain unhistorical bases of Dr. Laing's attack on the more traditional view so ably championed by Professor Norman Kemp Smith.

One of the fundamental differences between English and German civilisation which leads to different philosophical problems is their attitude to the reality of history. The English “live” history as if it were nature. They found at least by the thirteenth century their own form of life, of government, constitution, and state, which have lasted ever since through all changes so that a rich system of traditions has developed. Germany did not find a lasting unity as early as that, but, being divided into many autonomous parts, religions, and tribes, it did not reach a strong social or moral tradition. Consequently the “rise of the historical consciousness“ and even the wish to awaken the nation as a whole to it is in Germany an intellectual product. But what has been a disadvantage in the sphere of politics has been an advantage to science and philosophy. The German even believes it to be one of their chief contributions to the History of Thought that they have developed a scientific history and all the sciences which analyse its field, and above that the “Historism,“ a historical Weltanschauung or the task of interpreting the whole world from the point of view of history.