Locke is the first English philosopher to be considered in this series, and that fact of itself is worthy of attention. Philosophy, of course, like science, knows no frontiers and no national boundaries. Yet it is true to say that Locke’s contribution to philosophy is typically and peculiarly English. His moderation, his emphasis upon experience, his tolerant spirit of compromise, his dislike of mystical extravagance and of metaphysical speculation, even that elusive quality of his which people call his “common sense”, are English traits. His very defects, illogicality leading to inconsistency and an awkward disorderliness of thought so abhorrent to the

I would like to develop a few critical observations on some substantive moral ideas propounded in Professor R. M. Hare's Freedom and Reason a work where formal and substantive moral arguments are blended in an attractive and plausible, though at times somewhat exasperating, mixture. Hare's formal doctrines, the celebrated theses of prescriptivity and universalizability, will not as such interest me here, though I shall have to take notice of at least one of them, viz. universalizability, in so far as it has a bearing on what I take to be Hare's substantive position. The arguments in Freedom and Reason are compounded of Kantian and utilitarian elements, and culminate in Hare's conceptualization of two antithetical types of person, whom he calls respectively the ‘liberal’ and the ‘fanatic’. This distinction itself is based on a rigid and uncompromising dichotomy of ‘interest’ and ‘ideal’, and it is on this dichotomy that Hare's substantive moral doctrine hinges. Hare's argument is that the morally good person is one who subordinates his ideal to a moral principle that takes interests into account, in contradistinction to the fanatic who allows interests to be overridden by his ideal. There is much to recommend in this doctrine, and distinctions of this nature can and ought to be drawn. But the way in which it is done in Hare's work opens up fresh doubts and fails to solve some fundamental problems. As I do not think that his distinction between ‘interest’ and ‘ideal’ is tenable, I cannot agree wholly to the predominantly formal manner in which Hare deals with the important question of distinguishing between liberalism and fanaticism. The upshot of my arguments is that this distinction can only be made intelligible in substantive terms. Although I cannot here offer a positive alternative to Hare beyond some oblique hints at the end, my critical remarks on Hare's doctrine ought at least to go some way in establishing the need for such an alternative.

‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ It is with this seminal sentence that Leszek Kolakowski begins his great work on The Main Currents of Marxism: its Rise, Growth and Dissolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). Both the two terms in the predicate expression are crucial. It is most illuminating to think of Marx as originally a philosopher, even though nothing in his vastly voluminous works makes any significant contribution to philosophy in any academic understanding of that term. It is also essential to recognize that for both Marx and Engels philosophy was always primarily, indeed almost exclusively, what they and their successors called classical German philosophy. This was a tradition seen as achieving its climactic fulfilment in the work of Hegel, and one which they themselves identified as a main stimulus to their own thinking. Thus Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, claimed that ‘The German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy’.

1. The scientific study of sleep has recently been stimulated by comparisons between people and advanced computers, whose normal activities need to be suspended periodically for reprogramming. I quote from a popular account by Dr Christopher Evans, which appeared in the Sunday Times during 1969:

Sleep is of course the state in which the brain-computer is ‘off-line’, during which time the vast mass of existing programmes are sorted, outdated ones revised in the light of recent experiences and useless ones or the remnants of modified ones cleared and eliminated. These processes take place for a substantial part of the night, but because the brain is ‘off-line’ and consciousness suppressed, we are mostly not aware of them. However, if for some reason our sleep is disturbed or when we wake in the morning, as the conscious mind ‘comes to’ it catches the programme operations at work, and for a moment has no way of knowing whether the events are internal or external in origin. It sets to work therefore to try to make sense of the programme or fragments thereof that are being run through, and the result is what we call a dream— though we should presumably call it an interrupted dream.

Richard Price argued for democratic institutions on the ground that each individual has a moral responsibility for the good government of his community. This assumption that political responsibilities are moral responsibilities was in turn derived from the belief that each individual has a continuous duty to create in his own personality and in his relations with his fellow men the conditions of the virtuous life. Popular political responsibility was thus defended by the extension of a rigorous moral athleticism into the sphere of social arrangements. The dominating feature of this demand for comprehensive reform and reconstruction is the attempt to construe the moral life as a process in which the individual struggles to recreate himself in the light of his most mature conceptions. These conceptions, Price maintained, are determined rationally, and that they are so is presented in two different ways. Either as in the case of the principles of moral judgment they are held to be the objects of a rational intuition; or as in the defence of democratic institutions they are derived from an abstract construction of the demands of moral personality.

In an essay on ‘The Notion of Cause’ reprinted in Mysticism and Logic (and which constituted the presidential address to the Aristotelian Society in the year 1912) Russell argued ‘that the word ‘cause” is so inextricably bound up with misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary desirable’.1 His argument here to the effect that ‘cause’ is not a central concept in science, as philosophers have thought it, is reminiscent of Norman Campbell's statement in Physics: The Elements (1920) and in What is Science? (1921).