Most men experience from time to time a wish to know something about the character of the larger reality in which they live, move, and have their being; something much more fundamental than any department of research classed as “scientific” can provide. And the most incurably practical of us has good reason for cherishing this wish. Metaphysics, i.e. inquiry into the general nature of reality, makes appeal first to the contemplative student interested in knowledge for its own sake, but it has a very noteworthy practical side as well. Few, like Earl Russell, can build the soul”s habitation on a “foundation of unyielding despair”; very many will not take life seriously unless its value, which must be lasting, is high. The problems stated by pessimism have to be solved; our burdens must be shown to be worth taking up strenuously. Religious consolations, once potent, are losing their force, and the danger of social decay has therefore to be countered. Let man suspect seriously that he is a day-fly, flitting about futilely a short while ere it perishes, and, whatever a few wild optimists may counsel, his big battalions are lost to progress. The East is right.

The recent speculation which I have in view is that which finds its inspiration in the great development of scientific discovery and scientific thought in our day. It would be impossible to range over the whole field. Moreover, the efforts which have been made to frame a comprehensive scheme of thought on the foundation supplied by science are those which are truly characteristic of our time. In recent years, science has been passing beyond the experimental stage, and also beyond the limits which, in former times, made it departmental. The great conception of Evolution, and the intimate linking up of astronomy with chemistry and physics, and of chemistry and physics with physiology and biology, have quite altered our outlook on the universe. The mind of to-day passes from space-time to the electron, and from the electron to the structure of the cell, and from the cell to the living organism, with hardly a jolt. Not that the problems which mark the passage from stage to stage in this series have been solved, far from it; but that the different tages have so much the appearance of closing up into one continuous process that we seem to be approaching a view which will regard the whole as one unbroken development. No wonder that philosophic minds, among students and dreamers speculating on the mystery of the Universe, begin to think that some account of it, based on assured results of science, is becoming possible.

In Plutarch’s Quæstiones Conviviales there is a discussion on the topic—π (“What did Plato mean when he used to say that God always geometrizes?”).

Philosophy is keenly interested in the new cosmological theories. For, whatever view we take of the nature of ultimate reality, the world in space and time is an appearance of that reality, and must bear some relation to it. That the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin have deeply influenced both philosophy and religion is universally admitted. Many think that Einstein and his colleagues may produce a revolution not less momentous.

Indeterminism is opposed to the philosophic theory of determinism, of which Sir Arthur Eddington, in a recent pronouncement on this subject, 1 quotes three definitions. On the ground that it expresses unequivocally what we all feel to be the gist of the theory, he gives preference to the third, from Omar Khayyám:—

In the January number of the quarterly journal published by The British Institute of Philosophy, called Philosophy, Sir James Jeans with extraordinary ability has represented the view of the universe which may be held now in the twentieth century by a mathematician, and concludes that this representation contributes to and upholds an idealistic philosophy. Now with the contention that an idealistic philosophy is superior to any other, that is to say nearer the truth, we may be allowed to sympathize. Several physicists, even in the nineteenth century, were inclined to sustain the essence of Berkeley's view, or to consider that metaphysical truth must lie somewhere in that direction. G. F. FitzGerald, for instance, was notably of that opinion. But he was not prepared on that account to abandon the physical view of existence, and to take refuge in mere mathematical abstractions.

I think it will be generally admitted that if Oxford philosophers have any claim to have added in recent years to the store of our philosophical ideas, it lies in their published works on the theory of conduct. I don’t think it can be claimed that, even in this sphere, they have given us many new and illuminating positive truths. After reading Mr. Ross, Professor Prichard, and Mr. Joseph, we are left, I think, with the impression that the whole subject is much more intricate and puzzling than we should have thought possible. I intend in this paper to try and discover what is true in the theories of these three moralists on one of the most difficult and puzzling of ethical problems, viz., “What Renders a Right Act Right?” Professor Prichard and Mr. Ross, in the main, stand together; it is regrettable that Professor Prichard's published work is so very meagre. And if in quoting from his article in Mind, 1912, on “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake,” I am doing him an injustice in attributing to him any views which he no longer holds, I am sorry; but modesty in publishing has its penalties, and anyhow, the article is too guilty an offender to get off free, for its annoying subtleties started the whole trouble, and led indirectly to Some Problems in Ethics and the Right and the Good.

I Shall begin by a distinction which will limit my subject. I propose to speak only of beautiful poetry and beautiful prose, or if the phrase be preferred, artistic poetry and prose. The distinction I wish to draw is between art and craft, between making a competent and useful thing which exactly fits its purpose and making it beautifully, between technical skill and artistry, between good workmanship and design and that touch of rareness which makes not merely good but fine and lovely. The boundaries are difficult to draw. For much craft is also beautiful, and the craftsman is always in doing his best, striving to be an artist and often succeeding. But they are not the same things. Mere technical skill will not make a work beautiful but only correct, and on the other hand art may possess beauty, even if not of the highest order; though it fails in skill, the conception in some degree makes up for the defect of skill, as for instance much primitive Italian painting or Greek sculpture, which is defective in drawing or modelling and yet beautiful. Now a large part, perhaps the greater part, of what is called art is not art at all, but craft, good correct painting or drawing or sculpture; pleasing, but not pleasing with the pleasure or even rapture which beauty gives. It is so with prose and poetry. Many poems are not poetry, though written in impeccable verse, and long poems are always apt to drop in places into what is only not called prose because it is metrical. By far the greatest part of prose is merely good workmanlike writing, and in no sense art. I am not intending to depreciate craft, and still less the value and difficulty of attaining it.

So far I have taken prose and poetry where admittedly they exist, in literature, and attempted to discover the difference between them by taking pieces of prose or poetry which have the same or much the same subjects and comparing them with one another. In all these pairs of passages I thought I could detect this difference: that in the poem the subject as rendered in words (for the poem is words and nothing else) acquires a life of its own, is a living thing, as it were, living its own life like an animal or plant, is organic, and, in a word, concrete. While the prose, for all its constructive unity, is not self-subsistent, but is descriptive of a given subject, even though that subject is itself created by the writer, as in a novel, and, in a word, is analytic. It is not the greater passion or vividness of the poem, for prose may be vivid, as in Carlyle, and passionate, as in Burke. It is that the poet places himself and places his hearer within the subject itself, and works from within outwards, while the prosaist describes relatively from without. Both of them describe, the poet as well as the prosaist. But the prosaist builds up his subject so as to bring it before your mind. The poet starts with his subject in its integrity, places the hearer's mind within it, and his exposition is the unfolding life of the subject itself.

If there is one question which stands forth pre-eminently from among the many problems with which physical science bristles, it is that of the ontological status of the world which physics is exploring. What is reality in the eyes of science, and what are we to understand the physicist to mean when he refers to the “real world”? Can we agree with him when he assures us that physical science represents a progress towards pure truth? There seems to be a certain reluctance on the part of twentieth-century physicists to face the ontological question which I think their colleagues of the nineteenth century did not share to the same extent.

The study of Plato has become involved in so many entanglements of higher criticism that it is difficult even to approach the interpretation of any particular dialogue without bias or preconceptions. A swarm of problems starts up for settlement as a preliminary consideration to the correct understanding of Plato’s aims in writing the dialogue, and there is a danger lest its precise issue and philosophical value may be obscured by discussions about its place in the chronological order of the dialogues, as to whether it expresses the views of Socrates or of Plato, or represents a particular stage in the development of Plato's own thought, and so on. That this danger is real is forcibly suggested by a remark of Professor Taylor: “To understand a great thinker is, of course, impossible, unless we know something of the relative order of his works and of the actual period of his life to which they belong....We cannot, then, even make a beginning with the study of Plato until we have found some trustworthy indication of the order in which his works, or at least the most significant of them, were written.”

The conception of entropy came from the theoretical study of the steam-engine, and, neglecting refinements of mathematical treatment, can easily be illustrated. The motive power of the engine comes from the transformation of the heat generated by the combustion of the fuel. The mechanism transforms the kinetic energy of the molecules of heated steam into the kinetic energy of the parts of the engine. Consider a steamship under way: for a brief period of time this can be regarded as an automatic physical system. Some of the heat conveyed by the steam transforms directly into mechanical energy and some passes out into the ocean in the condenser water. We take the latter fraction: in the boiler there is a certain quantity, Q1, at a temperature of, say, 200°C, that is, 473° absolute, and its entropy is simply Q1/473° ab. The same quantity passes out into the ocean where its temperature falls to, say, 10°C, or 283° ab., and its entropy is now Q1/283° ab. Plainly the former quantity of entropy is less than the latter, so that in the transformation of heat into mechanical energy entropy has increased. The conception has been generalized so as to include all forms of energy and all physical transformations, and it can be shown that in all physical events that occur of themselves entropy increases. The conception includes these notions: (1) Available and unavailable energy; (2) greater or lesser improbability of the elements of the systems contemplated; and (3) the physical meanings of before and after.

Since the appearance, nearly twenty years ago, of the first volume of Husserl”s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, philosophers have been watching the development of a movement in Germany that has claimed attention through its opposition on the one side to the still powerful Kantian tradition, on the other to the trend of thought arising under the influence of biological science, aptly named by Meinong Psychologismus. The subtlety and originality of this new line of speculation and the exactness of its method have attracted to it some of the most powerful intellects of the country, whose contributions would repay a more detailed study than they have yet received from English or American scholars.

In Charles Renouvier we have one of the lone, stern, and indefatigable workers in philosophy in the nineteenth century. His powerful mind, moral earnestness, and intellectual vigour command respect and attention and place him high in the ranks of the philosophical thinkers of his century. He differed profoundly from his English contemporary Spencer and his German contemporary Lotze, both of whom have received more attention than Renouvier. His long and immensely active life fell into periods which coincide with, and partly reflect, the political and intellectual fortunes of his country from the Battle of Waterloo, through the Revolution of 1830, the Second Republic of 1848, the Second Empire, the War and the Commune of 1871, into the Third Republic, with its Dreyfus struggles and its Educational and Disestablishment problems in the early years of the present century.

First Criticism of the Theory (161C–162C).—This is of the nature of an argumentum ad hominem. In the first place, (1) It is surprising that so clever a man as Protagoras did not see that he proved more than he intended, for according to his theory not only are all men, the wise and the foolish, reduced to the same level, but on the plane of sentient experience it is just as true to say that a pig or a tadpole is the measure of all things.

The proofs offered by St. Thomas of the existence of God suggest a problem. The day is past when the scholasticism of the Middle Ages was scornfully—often ignorantly—dismissed. The intellectual strength of a thinker such as St. Thomas is amply recognized.

It is difficult within the space of an article such as this to do more than indicate the principal features of Renouvier's philosophy, and it is, of course, impossible to give in detail a discussion of the immense wealth of thought and argument contained in his writings. Of his thought before 1854, the most important piece of work was the article on “Philosophie” written for the Encyclopédic Nouvelle. This in some respects shows his own thought developing in the direction

Recent developments both in science and philosophy are tending to converge upon an outlook on things that constitutes or at least foreshadows a great new synthesis. The advances made more especially in astronomical and physical knowledge—the one concerning the indefinitely vast and the other the indefinitely minute—and the similarities disclosed in the two spheres, recalling Pascal’s insistent relating of the two infinites (the infinitely great and the infinitely small), and also Bacon’s contention that such similarities are not mere analogies but “the same footsteps of nature treading or printing upon several subjects or matters,” 1 have both widened and unified our conceptions of reality. Along with this has gone the influence alike on philosophy and on the sciences generally of the development of mathematical and biological ideas. Under the combined influence, especially, of Bergson and Einstein a restatement of fundamental principles is proceeding apace.

Almost exactly a quarter of a century ago—in the year 1906— the George Combe Department of Psychology was established in this University, thanks to the farsightedness of Professor Pringle-Pattinson, who has, to our regret, now gone from among us, and Professor Sir Edward Sharpey Schafer, who is happily with us still, and to the generosity of the George Combe Trustees. In his inaugural lecture, delivered in the old Natural History classroom, my predecessor, Dr. W. G. Smith, discussed the scope and relations of modern psychology. He emphasized the fact that modern psychology had extended its boundaries far beyond the psychology taught in the past in this and other universities, that it now included child psychology, animal psychology, abnormal psychology, physiological psychology, and experimental psychology, all developed studies, and that its growth in importance had been commensurate with its expansion.

In actual practice the relation between history and sociology is very close. The sociologist of necessity derives his material from the data furnished by anthropology and history. On his side the historian, however eager he may be to confine himself to detailed and close narration of actual fact, cannot avoid reference to problems of causation or assumptions regarding human nature or the general course of human evolution, and so is a sociologist malgré lui. Again, though there are still not wanting some historians, such as v. Below, who deny sociology any status, most writers on the theory and methodology of history have come to regard the two disciplines as Hilfwissenschaften to each other. Closer examination, however, reveals considerable uncertainty and hesitation. This is due, firstly to widely prevalent doubts as to the scope of sociology, with regard to which it is said, not without some exaggeration, the sociologists themselves are not in agreement. It is due, secondly, to the fact that the issues raised involve reference to difficult problems in the theory of knowledge generally, in regard to which, in the present position of epistemology, agreement is hardly to be expected. In this paper I shall attempt firstly to define briefly the scope of sociology and discuss the bearing of my definition upon some recent representative views of the nature of historical investigation. Secondly, in the light of this discussion, I will endeavour to restate the fundamental points of our problem in the hope of bringing out more clearly the main issues involved.