February 21st will mark the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the death of Spinoza, which occurred on February 21st, 1677. The visitor to the Hague may still see, in the Paviljoensgragt, the small two-storied house in the top rooms of which Spinoza spent the last six years of his short life. A tablet placed under the top windows commemorates the fact. It was in these rooms that Spinoza completed his Ethica, which may perhaps be regarded as the greatest masterpiece in the history of Metaphysics. The house is in danger of being pulled down, and the Spinoza Society is endeavouring to secure it as a memorial to Spinoza, and a centre of philosophic studies. It is not so long since the house-breakers I had their way with the home of Erasmus in Rotterdam. It would be sad indeed if the abode of another of the greatest Humanists were to meet with a like fate. It is to be hoped that the revived I interest in Spinoza which we are witnessing now may take the I practical form of saving this precious relic, which may well serve to promote the peace and goodwill among men which Spinoza had so much at heart.

I Suppose that most believers in God, if asked what is the relation of God to the world, would reply that he is its Creator and its Lord. But, like all the language in which we express our religious convictions, the language of this reply is plainly metaphorical. It calls up the picture of a human artificer or artist, the image of a human ruler or proprietor. And yet it needs but little reflection to perceive that there must be essential differences between a human artificer or artist, who has a material to work in ready to his hand, and One who makes all things, as it is said, “ out of nothing “; between a human ruler or proprietor.

§ 1. “To the mind of the philosopher”, according to Plato,1 “there belongs a vision of all time and all being"; and certainly many of the great thinkers have made it their business to speculate about the omnitudo realitatis or the ens realissimum—about the universe as a whole and in its wholeness, or about that which is supremely real—in short (to use the most convenient term) about ‘ the Absolute ‘. It may be (as the history of philosophical speculation suggests) that this interest in the Whole lies at the heart of all genuine philosophy, giving to it its distinctive inspiration and character. It may be, on the other hand, that it is a misdirected solicitude—an anxiety to solve the inherently insoluble. The Absolute, we shall perhaps be told, is a vox nihili—a name for that which, being nothing, has no attributes ; or we, at least, can never hope to characterize it. All our available predicates, being drawn of necessity from a limited field, must ‘ come short‘must prove inadequate for so immense and so august a subject.

According to Plato, it is the aim of Philosophy to furnish us with a certain vision of all time and all existence. This must always have seemed a large and difficult undertaking; but the opening years of the present century have already introduced considerable changes in our estimation of magnitudes. We are learning to think of modes of existence that are much more minute and of others that are much larger than any that had previously been conceived with any definiteness. Analysis now leads us to entities and processes that are almost inconceivably small; and synthesis points to a totality that is almost inconceivably great, and that may be even greater than we know. Our interests naturally begin with our human lives on earth ; and we are rapidly discovering that even these have to be thought of in ways that were hardly possible for any previous generation. In a sense, it may be said that our human world has been becoming much smaller. Distances within it are beginning to seem, in many respects, almost negligible ; and great hopes may be based upon this contraction.

The question of substance in the philosophy of physics has three branches: logical, physical, and epistemological. The first is a problem in pure philosophy: is the notion of “ substance ” in any sense a “ category,” i.e. forced upon us by the general nature either of facts or of knowledge? The second is a question of the interpretation of mathematical physics: is it (a) necessary, or (b) convenient to interpret our formulae in terms of permanent entities with changing states and relations? The third concerns the relation of perception to the physical world.

In the first part of this article an attempt was made to clear the ground for a functional theory of knowledge, and the discussion of structure and function with which it concluded enables us to approach the problem of cognition. If the view already set forth is sound, it seems clear that the relation of the mind to its object is a function and not a structure of the mental processes involved. The mere existence of a mental content, however complex it may be, however decorated with fringes or set off by a background, does not constitute an act of knowledge or give the content a meaning. In order to see a mental act as cognitive we must consider its function, its origin, its results, and in general the circumstances in which it stands.

It is, I think, one of the outstanding characteristics of our age that during a short spell of thirty or forty years fundamental advances have been made in a large number of different sciences. These developments have altered almost every aspect of material life—they have certainly had great influence upon modern education, and upon modern ideas of politics, as well as upon a host of less important things. But chief of all we notice the effect of this Golden Age of Science in the birth of new ideas. The revolution in ideas has only just started. Where it will end no one can see.

Ben Jonson, writing before 1641 in Discoveries, observed that nature intends us no courtesies. The rivers carry our boats, the winds favour our sails, and the sunlight warms our bodies, by necessary motions that contain no kindliness. This represented, or expressed, though perhaps unwittingly and certainly without scientific precision, the mechanical version of physical nature that steadily prevailed during the seventeenth century.

The man in the street to-day is aware that recent developments in the physical sciences have necessitated a fundamental revision of the concepts of physics; he finds that Einstein is no less upsetting to his ideas than was Copernicus to those of his own time or than Darwin was to Bishop Wilberforce. The plain man who has “ philosophical leanings ” is aware that questions previously regarded as metaphysical—and about which philosophers have written much that is unintelligible—are now recognized as falling within the scope of physics. Every reader of this Journal is aware that the criticism to which the main concepts of physics—space, time, matter—have been subjected is so fundamental that it is no longer possible tosay that there are material bodies in space, which have events happening to them at a given time. We must substitute the conception of a fourfold continuum within which space, time and matter are inextricably involved. Finally, we are told that this new way of regarding the classical trinity suggests the consequence that we know nothing about the “ inner nature ” of the terms with which we deal, we can make no assertions as to the ultimate nature of that to which they may refer. In this respect the prevailing temper of the present-day scientist is to be contrasted with the cocksureness of most nineteenth-century physicists l who, even if they did not go so far as to say “ we know what matter is,” at least suggested that only the metaphysician had, or could have, any doubts as to its nature and reality^

The problem of knowledge is generally regarded as an essential part of philosophy, and since the time of Descartes at least, every philosopher has found it necessary to show that his own view can afford a solution to the problem. In this paper, however, the method of approach is psychological rather than philosophical, and an attempt is made to deal with the question from a point of view differing in several respects from those more commonly accepted.

To treat of the relation between life and matter, after the problem has been discussed from so many points of view and in the light of the teachings of philosophers of all ages, must seem perhaps ambitious and certainly presumptuous; but I presume that philosophers do not consider that they have completely solved the age-long problem, and some may be willing to hear what a physicist has to suggest in the light of our present knowledge of nature. I have no wish to challenge controversy, but controversial topics cannot be wholly avoided.

There is an old and persistent tendency in the human mind to conceive of the causal relation as rationally explanatory, and therefore to assimilate it, vaguely or explicitly, to the logical relations of inclusion, implication, or equivalence. That ‘ there cannot be more in the effect than there is in the cause’ is one of the propositions that men have been readiest to accept as axiomatic; a cause, it has been supposed, does not ‘ account for ‘ its effect, unless the effect is a thing which the eye of reason could somehow discern in the cause, upon a sufficiently thorough analysis. This antipathy to the notion of an absolute epigenesis has left its effect, unless the effect is a thing which the eye of reason could somehow discern in the cause, upon a sufficiently thorough analysis. This antipathy to the notion of an absolute epigenesis has left its mark deep and wide upon the history of thought; it appears, indeed, at the very outset of Western speculation in the struggles of the physiologers with the supposed difficulty of admitting qualitative change. Two of the later phases of what may be named the preformationist assumption about causality may pertinently be remembered here.

Every student of the early history of mankind, and their numbers have greatly increased of recent years, must be well acquainted with the recent conflict between the advocates of diffusion in interpreting the origins and world-wide manifestations of civilization and those of independent development, or, in more exact terms, of the spontaneous generation of cultures. To an unbiassed observer of the evidence, it must also be a matter of astonishment that the ethnologists of the latter school have for so long refused to admit a distribution of ideas, beliefs and customs which are not only of proved historical but daily and common occurrence. It is impossible to enter a library or a club, or to walk down Regent Street and look into the shop windows, without realizing that world-diffusion is the very stuff of civilized existence. It is impossible to travel the remoter regions of the globe to-day without being constantly reminded of London, Leeds and Manchester. Nobody, again, would dream of controverting the known phenomena of the spread of great religions, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, from a single original centre. The school of independent development of cultures not merely ignores or twists to its own purposes a gigantic mass of evidence bearing upon the subject in dispute and capable of being interpreted in only one way; it displays a singular disregardof common sense and human nature. The innate conservatism of humanity, its readiness to live on the.

At the beginning of this article I propose to use the word “ evolution “ as it is used in biology, to mean the formation of a number of vegetable or animal species out of a few comparatively simple types, and to exclude from its connotation any idea of perfection, purpose, value, and so on.

The concept of evolution is of fundamental importance to any general scheme of thought: and one of the ways in which its importance is greatest is in defining the place of mind within any such scheme. If bodies and their contained brains have evolved, why not the accompanying minds? Indeed, to-day the question can only be properly put the other way round: how can the minds not have evolved? Mental evolution can only have failed to occur if we deny to mind the principle of continuity, which is one of our axioms on the physical side: only, that is to say, if the world ceases to be rational.

When Adam Smith, at the age of forty, resigned his professorship in Glasgow and devoted himself, after three years of travel, to the composition of his Wealth of Nations, he set himself to elaborate the sociological portion of his course on Moral Philosophy. Indeed, at the conclusion of his Moral Sentiments, written during the tenure of his professorship, he had promised “ another discourse ” on the “ general principles of law and government,” including a historical treatment and an account of “ police, revenue and arms.” To be sure, when the work appeared, it was not, in essentials, a continuation of the researches of Montesquieu, and had no authentic connection with Smith’s earlier treatise on morals, Instead, the bulk of it was a strict, and as we should say, a scientific (not a philosophical), inquiry into theorigin and conditions of opulence in human communities. Nevertheless, it expounds and is even dominated by a certain social philosophy which is not too convincing when nakedly put. Smith's abiding fame, accordingly, rests more upon the strict scientific analysis of his book than upon its implicit philosophy. Still, the philosophy was there. It had, and it still has, influence. A short discussion of it, therefore, is likely to have something more than historical interest.

This paper is intended to be an interpretation of what I shall venture to call—the deliberate philosophy of Santayana, as outlined in his recent and most penetrating book: Scepticism and Animal Faith. I refrain from employing the battered term metaphysics, because this candid “ lover of wisdom ” has reminded us that his system is not metaphysical, “ except in the mocking literary sense of the word.” What the vulgar (among which I count myself), however, understand by the term, he is guilty of offering in this mature work. It is my desire to try and see his philosophy under the searchlight of contemporary discussion;and I shall introduce some remarks of my own on what I consider significant Realistic issues of the day. My philosophy, however, on nearly all conditions, has been formed by, and is in concord with, the system here expounded.

The problem to which the present paper is addressed is one aspect of that of the relationship between Religion and Morality. That God is good is a proposition which presents itself to many with axiomatic force, and by its help the path is traced which leads directly either from Religion to Morality or from Morality to Religion. Yet the reflective mind may well ask: By what evidence, or in what way, do we know that God is good? If the proposition rests on evidence in the ordinary sense, what is it and wherein lies its convincing character? Or if it rests, as is often asserted, on another sort of knowledge altogether, what is this non-experiential cognition and what are its guarantees ? Or again, we may ask whether the proposition is analytic, i.e.

The Symposium on the “ Colour-problem,” recently organized by our Institute and published in this Journal, deserved to be welcomed, not only for the intrinsic importance of its topic, but also as an indication that it is the policy of the Institute not to restrict philosophy to purely theoretical questions. This is a return to the Platonic tradition which lays upon the philosopher the obligation to descend from the sunlit world of pure theory into the dark cave of practice. It is a much needed reminder to our “ practical ” age (which has some respect for science, but little, if any, for philosophy), that where practice touches on fundamental human values, it will fail of wisdom and, therefore, of the highest success without that illumination of experience which philosophy alone can give.

The so-called materialist conception of history is not only very popular in certain quarters, it is also embodied in much of the practice of historians. Yet, in spite of the current interest in philosophies of history, it is not often that one finds it seriously and critically discussed by philosophers, or indeed by anybody. One reason for this is, no doubt, that though claiming to be scientific it is closely connected with a militant political and economic creed. But there are further and more honourable reasons, in the apparent comprehensiveness of the theory itself and in the lack of any comprehensive statement of it from its chief author. To some of its supporters it appears to be not merely a complete explanation of all history, past, present, and future, but also a psychology, a philosophy, and even a religion ; and yet Marx—who, if he did not originate it, is anyhow mainly responsible for its wide popularity—nowhere expounds it at any length, and for an adequate and authoritative discussion of it we must consult the correspondence of Engels, which is not gathered together in any one place. Thus, while opponents of materialism and determinism tend to reject or ignore a theory which is supposed to imply them both, opponents of Marxism are naturally unwilling to read through that author's very voluminous works for the purpose of reconstructing from his fragmentary remarks a theory that he nowhere fully states.