In a very famous analysis and panegyric of the philosopher, Plato claimed that he is a man magnificent in mind and the spectator of all time and all existence. These are great words, and words made venerable by ancient repute and centuries of citation. Unfortunately, however, like many such utterances they can only be regarded as hyperbolic and rhetorical; and in an age that, failing in inspiration and fecundity of intuition, seeks at least to be precise, thay must suffer limitation. For the lumen siccum of reason shows that the phrase “all time” involves a contradiction, and that the human mind, by nature limited both in amplitude and in profundity,

Though I have been a member of this Institute, I think from its foundation, I have been a steadily inactive member, and have resisted with what grace I could the blandishments of our Secretary when he has suggested that I should address my fellow-members. For I am not a philosopher, either by training or, I fear, by instinct; and, now that I have allowed myself to be inveigled into this place, I feel that I am brawling in church. I am the most ill-informed of laymen, and, if you feel any interest at all in what I am about to say, it will, I fear, only be the rueful interest that the expert sometimes takes in an exhibition of ignorance.

Some years ago Max Planck published a small book with the title Where is Science Going? in vigorous protest against the idea that the doctrine of relativity in general and the new quanta physics in particular mean that “the quest of the absolute becomes eliminated from scientific progress.” That it seems to be time to raise a similar question with regard to philosophy was suggested to me at a recent conference held at Farnham Castle on the relation between science and philosophy, at which the new school of logical positivism was strongly represented by some of the ablest of the younger men.

The catchwords of our age, evolution and progress, sound very attractive so long as we do not pause to inquire into their significance. They are the delight of the sophist and the despair of the thinker. When we speak of progress we have in mind the human species. It is not easy to define what exactly the goal of human progress is. Even the leaders of the federation of progressive societies will find it difficult to give an adequate answer to the question of the end towards which we are actually progressing. They will find it more difficult to frame an ideal of human evolution which will be equally acceptable to, say, the monks of Mount Athos, Christian

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

Berkeley belonged to the days when it was possible to write philosophy without being learned, when it was sufficient to have fundamental convictions and to be able to write about them clearly. His contribution to the stock of philosophical possibilities was substantially complete when he was twenty-five, at which age no man can or should be learned. Not until he became a bishop did he pile up the burden of scholarship, and the work in which he expressed it, the Siris, has remained a stumbling-block to his expositors. In his day philosophy was not learning but culture and wisdom. He

DavidHume, a member of the well-known Border family of Home, was born on April 26, 1711. After a period of preparatory training he matriculated at Edinburgh College in 1723, although he may have entered earlier. His course during this period is obscure; according to his own statement the curriculum was mainly literary; on leaving College he records that his interests lay predominantly in this direction, and, being left to his own choice, he was able to indulge his inclinations. An attempt to train him for a legal career ended in failure; and he continued to live at his ancestral home of Ninewells, to the west of Berwick, for some years, devoting himself

In American philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century there was small interest in Empiricism and almost no interest in Realism.

Anyone who thinks, for example, of “realism,” “sur-realism,” and the like in matters of art, or of the vulgar and journalistic vagueness in the use of the adjective “realistic,” may be prepared for the discovery that in philosophy also the term “realist” is either uncomfortably fluid or else acquires technical senses that are rather easily blurred. Our lexicographers tell us that, in its most general sense, “realism” indicates fidelity to what is real, particularly in the representation of (usually sordid) matters of fact, and that in philosophy it is an antithetic term, asserting the contrary either of

The more elementary student used to be left with four main impressions of Locke. Firstly, he was an “empiricist”; secondly, he occupied an inconsistent intermediate position on the road to Berkeley and Hume; thirdly, he was pre-eminently the philosopher of common sense; fourthly, he committed the epistemological error of teaching that our only objects of knowledge were ideas in our mind which copied reality. All these dicta contain an important element of truth, but are misleading by reason of the excessive emphasis which has been placed upon them.

I Have often wished that someone would write a History of Oxford Honour Schools. But I want that work written for reasons which the title does not immediately suggest.

The great philosophers have generally held that there was some kind of interdependence between philosophy and practice. An unexamined life, they have maintained, is not worth living; and if there is to be anything to examine, life must first be lived, i.e. a practical experience is a propaedeutic to philosophy. But although Plato, for instance, thought that the task of government could be well performed only by the philosopher, he does not seem to have thought that fifteen years’ practical experience had any beneficial influence on the philosopher’s subsequent work of philosophic contemplation. Aristotle explicitly prefers the theoretical to the practical life, and the resultant divorce of theory and practice leads to quietism and so to ethical scepticism.

In his greatest work (The Republic) the greatest thinker of his era, if not of all time, Plato, writing in one of the greatest, if not even the greatest epoch in the intellectual, artistic, and literary history of mankind, held up a mirror not only to his own age but to every age, not least our own, in the glowing radiance of his unsurpassed genius. This essay is an attempt to look on the world around us with his searchlight. Addressing on this subject a select company of educated and intelligent men and women, I discovered that several of them had attempted but had failed to read through The Republic. They could not see the wood for the trees, lost their way, and gave up the guest.

Positivists have excelled at destructive criticism. This criticism has been useful for pruning away absurd and superfluous theories but it is liable to be used to prune away everything else. The latest exponents, the Logical Positivists, are no less adept at criticism than their predecessors. The doctrines of this school have been surrounded with an air of mystery and inquirers have been frightened off by alarming technical apparatus. We all know that the Logical Positivists had proved that everybody else talked nonsense, but we did not know what they themselves talked. Mr. A. J. Ayer's exposition of the doctrine, Language, Truth and Logic, is therefore welcome as it is simple,

Professor Kemp Smith in providing a new edition of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, embodying all the author’s additions and corrections, has given expression to the perennial interest and fascination which this work has possessed for many minds during the odd one hundred and fifty years since it was first published by Hume’s nephew. The editor himself has performed a great service by contributing an Introduction and a clear and concise summary of the Dialogues, in both of which he expounds his own view as to how Hume’s discussion is to be interpreted. Hume employs three characters—Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes; and

I Think there is scarcely any academic subject regarding which there exists so much general misapprehension as philosophy. If I were to introduce myself to the readers of almost any newspaper as a professor of chemistry, or of classics, or of music, most of them would have a fairly good general idea of the nature of my subject. But if I were to introduce myself as a professor of philosophy, I suspect that many of them would vaguely associate my subject with theosophy, or palmistry, or occultism. Very few would have any notion of what philosophy really is. Even in a university, even among the learned themselves, it would be true to say, I think, that

Do the most celebrated works of Rousseau—more particularly his Discourse on Inequality, émile, and Control Social—present on the whole a coherent answer to the problems of Education and Society? My impression is that Rousseau has here been very much calumniated, owing to the incredible haste and superficiality with which his writings have generally been studied. Even sympathetic inquirers, like M. Schinz in his thorough and attractive work La Pensée de J. J. Rousseau, seem to be too easily discouraged in the quest for unity.

There is a certain emotion of repugnance which I, and I hope a good many would-be philosophers, feel when asked the conventional question, “If you are a philosopher, to what school of thought do you belong? Are you an Idealist or a Realist, a Platonist or a Hobbist, a Monist or a Pluralist?”

The first part of this article deals with two questions1 raised by Professor Muirhead in his interesting review of the volume What Can Philosophy Determine?

The following considerations have been styled “simple thoughts” for two reasons.