Philosophers are apt to assume that impartial thinking is both possible and desirable. This article, originating in a very definite doubt of this assumption, is an attempt at an examination of the problem.

This paper has been written in the light of recent discussions on the relevance of the New Physics to Philosophy, and with particular reference to a symposium held at the Royal Institution on May 19, 1943. It seemed to me that, at the symposium, there was some misunderstanding both on the part of the scientists and on the part of the philosophers, mainly due to the fact that neither quite realized what the opposite side considered to be the function of science and philosophy. One of the few things that emerged clearly was that the scientists thought the new physics (by which was meant the developments in physics associated with the names Einstein, Planck, Rutherford, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac) had very definite relevance for philosophy, while the philosophers thought that it had no relevance at all. It would seem that such disagreement could be due only to disagreement about what the new physics attempts to do, or to disagreement about what philosophy attempts to do. I shall consider each of these in turn.

Theism is sometimes defined by reference to the contrasted doctrines of Deism and Pantheism. Deism, it is said, lays stress on God's transcendence, while Pantheism emphasizes his immanence to the exclusion of his transcendence. Theism, on the other hand, mediates between these two one-sided doctrines and affirms that God is at once both immanent and transcendent. He is in the world and yet beyond it. This definition, however, can only be accepted with qualification because some forms of Pantheism are arrived at by stressing, not the immanence, but the transcendence of God. According to Neo-Platonism, for example, the ineffable Absolute is so transcendent in existence and value that the world is reduced to the humble status of a mere illusory appearance and all veritable reality is absorbed in the Divine. This complication of the matter means that when studying the nature of Theism it is necessary to consider the opposition between Cosmism and Acosmism as well as that between transcendence and immanence The cosmistic tendency is to affirm, whereas the acosmistic tendency is to deny, the ultimate reality of the finite individual's effective autonomy. Theism is cosmistic, in the sense that it refuses to reduce the finite individual to a mere dependent mode of God. Nevertheless, the acosmistic tendency is very evident in many so-called theistic systems—so much so in some cases, indeed, that what is alleged to be Theism really amounts to Pantheism in disguise.

The experience of each one of us is individual, private and particular, and in its immediacy is incommunicable. Images of all sorts, sense factors, figments of the imagination, mental comments and judgments, all these impressions, some persistent, some fleeting, follow one another in endless passage through the consciousness.

When the weather is fair, it is the custom of the writer to take a walk across the common which abuts on to his house and garden. This morning he observed the fresh green of the spring grass, and at the same time heard from an adjacent hawthorn bush the cheerful song of the thrush. As he proceeded, the scent of burning brushwood in a clearing near by was smelt. He picked up a stick lying on the grass and used it as a staff. Within a few minutes he had enjoyed sense experience through eyes, ears, nose and hands. In the autumn he hopes to gather from the bushes a handful of blackberries, as he has done in many previous years, and enjoy their luscious taste.