There can be little doubt, I think, that the quality and texture of recent scientific and philosophical thought mark a greater break with the past than any innovations such as were introduced by a Gallileo or a Newton, a Descartes or a Kant. The switch over from the logicality and essential rationality of these men to the irrationalisms, the anti-intellectualisms, and the new logics of the moderns, is not at all on the same footing as that deepening of our concepts of knowledge and reality which we associate with the masters of thought, more particularly with the critical philosophy of Kant. Strong and significant as these earlier changes were, they marked but the onward strides of an art of thinking which remained in its essence the same in spite of them. But the thinkers in the public eye to-day are exploring in unknown regions, and it may turn out that they have got beyond their depth. Whatever their fate, it seems undeniable that the experiments that they have made and are making constitute, at points at least, and for the time being, a veritable revolution.

The psychologist finds himself in disagreement with a method of treating religious dogma current amongst many philosophers and theologians who regard it as a purely intellectual matter with an entirely intellectual history. This tradition belongs not only to philosophers and theologians; students of comparative religions have, in the past, erred in the same way. Tylor, for example, lays it down as the first condition for research into primitive religions that “the religious doctrines and practices examined … are treated as belonging to theological systems devised by human reason, without supernatural aid or revelation.” Elsewhere he says that the student will “search for the reasonable thought which once gave life to observances now become in seeming or reality the most abject and superstitious folly.”

I do not propose in this paper to discuss what is the nature of the Good. Although the content of morality and the sanction for morality are closely connected, and it may be argued with much force that it is not practicable to deal with them separately, limits must be set to any one discussion. I would propose, therefore, not to embark upon the general question—what conduct is right and what is wrong; but, assuming that there is right and wrong, to consider why we should pursue the one and avoid the other.

Vedānta endeavours to base itself essentially on the facts of experience—in the fullest sense of the term. It recognizes the occurrence of everyday experience and the so-called fact of evil, but it refuses to view them as real. The real, it says, like Hegel, does not exist, and that which exists is not real. Evil is only an “existent"—as all this Samsara is—but not the ultimate Real. But it will be at once objected that if evil is an appearance, a Maya, why should this appearance appear at all? If it has no foundation in reality, how and why does it occur at all? Further, how can anything be known as real unless it should appear (to us)? Reality must appear.

We have been led by our preliminary survey to acknowledge the autonomy of the moral life. The Tightness of an action is something that is sui generis and ultimate. It is vain to seek a reason for the rightness other than the Tightness itself. To the question, “Why ought I to do what I ought?” the only answer is, “Because I ought to do it.” 1 It is with rightness as with truth: Vera idea est norma sui et falsi. In any moral situation, we intuitively judge what it is right to do, and in judging recognize that the obligation to do it is unconditional. That we possess this capacity is what is meant by saying that we are moral beings.

“The object of the moral faculty,” wrote Butler in a classic passage of the Dissertation on Virtue, “is actions, comprehending under that name active or practical principles: those principles from which men would act if occasions or circumstances gave them power, and which, when fixed and habitual in any person, we call his character. It does not appear that brutes have the least reflex” (i.e. reflective) “sense of actions, as distinguished from events; or that will and design, which constitute the very nature of action as such, are at all an object to their perception. But to ours they are: and they are the object, and the only one, of the approving and disapproving faculty.

Popular interest in the progress of physical science has increased very rapidly in the last few years. Perhaps the spectacular ‘mysteries’ of wireless and the intriguing paradoxes of the theory of relativity are the chief causes. For every home now has its Magic Box—a piece of pure physics; there is not a familiar thing in it, not even that sine qua non of all things that ‘work’—a wheel, only mysterious parts called condensers, grid-leaks, inductances, and thermionic valves. And surely, when a Sunday newspaper produces a facsimile page of Einstein’s recent paper in German containing abstruse tensor equations, reverence for the mathematical physicist is nearing its zenith.

By an “organism” I mean a living thing, in the most ordinary sense. There is an “organic theory of nature” in which the term “organism” is extended so as to include atoms, molecules, crystals, colloidal micelles, etc.; such constellations of parts have been called “inorganic organisms” by Driesch. I shall regard them as the “results of organization.” As we know them they are “models” (variant with the progress of physics), and they exist in the minds of physicists just as differential equations are in the minds of mathematicians. They express arrangements just as a trade union (an organization) is an arrangement, and just as artifacts, such as the nest of a chaffinch or the sleeping-bag of an Arctic explorer, are expressions of arrangements.

In previous articles I have been concerned with various aspects of science; and I have now to endeavour to look at scientific activity as a whole, and to view it in its relation to other activities of man. I have been trying to avoid those pleasant sweeping generalizations which strike the imagination and which are so easy to write and to read about: such as that science is our only avenue to truth; or that science is abstract and tells us nothing about the concrete nature of things; or that knowledge of particular facts is the object of science, generalizations being merely a means thereto; or that generalizations are the object of science, investigation of particular facts being merely a means thereto; all of which can be defended by a rich array of arguments, none of which can finally stand confrontation with the actual nature of scientific activity as a whole. The situation seems to be much more complicated than any such generalizations would suggest.

We were led, at the close of the last paper, to the conclusion that the moral judgment lays claim to a knowledge of what is unknowable. It is not merely that our volition is imperfect, that the act of necessity falls short of what we know to be right. This seems bad enough; but the plight in which we actually find ourselves is even worse. The paradox is that we never know, and never can know, in any particular situation, what it is really right to do. We know indeed that it is always right, really and absolutely right, to do what we believe to be right. For a man to act “against his conscience,” after all possible thought has been taken for its enlightenment, we know to be morally wrong. But this knowledge is purely formal and gives no clue to the matter of moral obligation. It tells us what is common alike to any and every case of moral duty; it does not tell us what we ought to do. For the right that we will cannot be merely the rightness of willing it. What I ought to do cannot be merely that I ought to do it. Now our beliefs and judgments as to material rightness, i.e. as to what it is right to do in a concrete situation, are notoriously liable to error. So we seek for a criterion by which to test our variable and fallible judgments, a criterion of what is really right. But the search is doomed to failure; we can only test beliefs by beliefs, our former beliefs by our later, the beliefs of one man or society or age by those of others.

The source and inspiration of French “eclecticism” in the first half of last century was historical; its immediate purpose, the reconstitution of philosophical doctrines of the past; its riper though remoter effects, the formation of a tradition which insisted on reinterpretation as an indispensable preliminary to further construction. And it is largely a result of this that we to-day find commonplace the declaration: “A peculiarity of systems that are epoch-making is that their influence should extend beyond their own generation, and that they should prepare, as it were in secret, the thought that is to come.” So far as fuller and comparative scholarship have been applied to the elucidation of Cartesian philosophy and science, the results appear to fall into three groups. First, largely a result of the impetus of Cousin's teaching at the École Normale, there is the ample story of the development and modifications of Cartesianism in Bouillier's Histoire, and the Cartésianisme of Bordas-Demoulin. Later in the century, after the reaction against Cousin, come the invaluable study of Liard, insisting on the greater importance of Descartes' methodology and physics and the priority of the latter over his metaphysics, and the elegant monograph of Fouillee stressing the “voluntarist” tendencies in Descartes.

It is not only in science that abstraction is found as a method of dealing with the world, and we may profitably begin by showing its wide use in ordinary practical life.

Shaftesbury is one of those philosophers who are usually placed more or less in the margin of the history of thought because an insufficient idea of system and a certain looseness of conception make it difficult to grasp their ideas and to classify them. Yet when you are able to break down or to dismiss the mental figures in which you have been accustomed to consider the historical succession of doctrines and are prepared to revive their words with an open mind, not only do they give you in their originality more than you had hoped, but also they help to render your representation of intellectual life as a whole more complex and more harmonious in its development. Bandini,1 an Italian scholar, in making a zealous study of Shaftesbury, has succeeded in drawing out his rich personality, and at the same time in explaining the importance of his contribution to the perennis philosophia. We could hardly succeed in understanding the modern English mind in its genesis if we concentrated our attention exclusively on those empiristic currents which, although they preponderate in Anglo-Saxon speculation, do not contain all its originality. There is a deep fount of romance in the spirit of this people which wells up from time to time, and the drier and harder the surface earth the more strongly it gushes forth. Shaftesbury is just such a fount, isolated and inexplicable to all outward appearances, but far otherwise for anyone who knows how to penetrate below the surface. In his essay Bandini, while emphasizing the contrast between the philosophy of moral enthusiasm and feeling and the contemporaneous doctrines of Hobbes and Locke, examines with equal penetration the way in which the former becomes reattached to English speculative tradition and by what means it contributes in its turn to furnishing new trends in philosophy.

This survey deals with (i) Contemporary [German] Philosophy, vol. vii, by several contributors; (ii) The Machine-Theory of Life, by Julius Schultz; (iii) Bernard Bolzano, by Heinrich Fels; (iv) The Theory of Classes, by Adolf Fraenkel; (v) An Abstract of Logistic, by Rudolf Carnap.

This survey first deals with German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century and Forms of Thought, both by Hans Leisegang. It then summarizes Theodor Ziehen's Foundations of the Philosophy of Religion. Next it refers to a revised edition of Hermann Cohen's Religion of Reason, and to two small books by Louis Anderson. Finally some shorter announcements of other new books, including Hans Reichenbach's Philosophy of the Space-Time Theory, which Einstein has praised, Nicolai Hartmann's Hegel, and a new edition of Bolzano's Theory of Science.

In America most of us are so proud of our own achievements and—as a corollary of this—so provincial and narrow-minded in our general worldoutlook, that it has probably never occurred to us that until very recently we have cut absolutely no figure in the world's philosophy. In fact, it may still be said that even in 1930 the influence of American philosophy upon the philosophical world is almost a negligible factor. But even such nearly negligible influence is vastly more than American philosophers could boast of thirty or forty years ago. The fact is that even as late as at the outbreak of the world-war most of Europe hardly knew that there was any such thing as American philosophy. And up to a very few years prior to the beginning of this devastating conflict such judgment concerning the non-existence of American philosophy was probably quite in agreement with the facts of the case. For an understanding of America's present cultural position it is essential, therefore, that one should know something of the recent advances in American philosophy. In fact, such philosophical progress in contemporary America constitutes one of the most remarkable and distinct proofs of America's ability to make significant and appreciated contributions to the highest intellectual and cultural life of the world. It would be foolish were one—even yet—to claim that America has arrived, philosophically. But the signs which indicate that American philosophy is definitely on its way are numerous, and are constantly multiplying. If American philosophers cannot yet say: “Plato, Hume, and Kant, we are here!”