The problem of the relation between mechanism and purpose is of profound theoretical interest. It is the most fundamental of the great perennially disputed problems. And, unlike some other of the great unsolved problems, it is also of far-reaching and profound practical importance. The kind of answer we give to the question affects in a multitude of ways the conduct of our lives, the form and working of all our institutions, our science, our law, our politics, our economics, our morals, our religion.

The distinction tentatively drawn by Mr. Porteous at the last meeting of the Society between logical and causal necessity depends on the more general distinction between what is known or capable of being known as self-evident and what is known only as matter of fact. That there are three cows in a field is a matter of fact. That 1 + 2 = 3 is self-evident and necessarily true (if it is true at all). So soon as the question is raised it is seen that there can be no alternative to its being true—otherwise it is not self-evident. But there is no necessity that a field should have cows in it, or that if it has they should be just three in number. Similarly, it does not seem self-evident that an unsupported stone must fall to the ground.

The Epistemology of dictatorship! This expression couples terms which seem to be utter strangers to each other. How could a political régime which is an eminently practical, often violent, hard-striking thing be concerned with a science which is an essentially unpractical, introspective business of secluded and subtle contemplation?

The term tradition is frequently used in the narrow sense of oral transmission from one generation to another; occasionally in the wider sense of transmission of any kind, written or oral or forms of behaviour, derived from a preceding generation. Sometimes it includes custom; sometimes it does not. At times it refers to the process of transmitting; at other times to the result transmitted.

When I agreed to lecture to-night I stipulated that I might be allowed to interpret the subject announced so as to let my treatment relate less to the subject in general than to some particular aspects which happen to have been interesting me lately. Professor Whitehead, Sir Arthur Eddington, and Sir James Jeans have given to the world brilliant accounts of the present position of physics in relation to mathematics and philosophy. What I have to say bears to their writings, the humble relation of an example to a piece of book-work, or of an application of a theorem to the theorem itself.

The positions that I would support in regard to the question whether philosophy has any relation to practice are as follows. In the first place, there are certain problems of modern civilization, and those amongst the most crucial, with which philosophy alone can deal. In the second place, in spite of appearances to the contrary, the present age will not be deaf to the voice of philosophy, if it can speak with sufficient clearness and power to secure a hearing. The problems to which I refer do not belong to the sphere of science, in the strict modern sense. Science is triumphant in its own sphere, but it is not concerned primarily with the values of human existence, or the activity of the mind by which they are discovered, pursued, enjoyed.

Sir arthur edington's brilliantly phrased article, “Physics and Philosophy,” which appeared in the January 1933 issue of Philosophy, seems to me to contain a number of things which are calculated to be provocative to the mere philosopher. And I propose in this article to discuss what appears to be one of the most important of these provocative things, namely, Sir Arthur's view of the status of the physical world.

It is really impossible to say anything worth saying about Plato in general within the limits of a single article. Indeed, the more one studies Plato the more impossible does it become—if the concept of degrees of impossibility may be used in a philosophical journal. The reasons for this are manifold. The first lies in the supreme greatness of Plato as a thinker. Hardly anyone who has made a serious effort to study Plato has escaped receiving the impression of him as probably the greatest thinker of all ages. The difficulty is intensified by the particular form in which his greatness is conveyed to us. One may make a distinction, a relative distinction at least, between different philosophers in this respect. With some, their message is conveyed to us with comparative rapidity, even perhaps on the first careful reading, and subsequent study adds little except in the way of detail. Among these it would perhaps not be unfair to place Hume. Others, on first reading, will appear obscure and difficult, sometimes even repellent. It is only after a much more careful study that their real greatness emerges, and they may go on increasing in stature at every subsequent reading. Such, I believe, to be the experience of the majority of readers with Kant. Plato is almost unique in that he makes his impression in both ways. Almost everyone is captivated by him at first reading, but it is only to those who take the trouble of reading him again and again with the intellectual effort that he himself would have demanded

Nobody should want to rid his mind of science, but why should science want to rid us of our minds? In the name of science, however, clever men have given their minds to that very enterprise, although no doubt with the explanation that they were only ridding us of what we had falsely thought to be our minds. Thus in the eighteenth century La Mettrie presented the thesis that man was a machine. In the nineteenth, Huxley tried to show that we were conscious automata. In the twentieth, Mr. Hogben,1 among others, professes to deduce from Pavlov's2 experimental results that consciousness is a superstition, being only a misdescription of conditioned reflexes. I propose, then, to examine the modish form of this persistent doctrine.

The subject which has been chosen for me is sufficiently comprehensive. Several years ago I wrote the last of a series of essays in a book called Science, Religion, and Reality, in which, as requested, I tried to sum up the contributions of the other writers, with reflections of my own. I have also given a short statement of my opinions in the first volume of that interesting book, Contemporary British Philosophy. Lastly, I have tried, in a book published in the autumn of 1933, to consider the religious and philosophical implications of recent scientific theories and discoveries, and particularly of the conviction held by our leading astronomers and mathematicians that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is unassailable, so that the ultimate extinction of the universe as we know it is certain. I showed that the acceptance of this verdict raises important questions for the philosopher and theologian.

The dominant feature of eighteenth-century aesthetic is the inquiry and discussion concerning the theory of “taste.” There is material or bibliographical evidence of this in the rapid sequence of treatises, essays, inquiries, observations, and controversies on this subject, extending from the close of the seventeenth to the last years of the eighteenth century, and bearing the names, in France, of Dacier, Bellegarde, Bouhours, Rollin, Seran de la Tour, Trublet, Formey, Bitaubé, Marmontel, and, still more eminent, of Montesquieu, Voltaire, d’Alembert; in England, of Addison, Hume, Gerard, Home, Burke, Priestley, Blair, Beattie, Percival, Reid, Alison; in Italy, of Muratori, Calepio, Pagano, Corniani; in Germany, of Thomasius, J. U. König, Bodmer, A. von Schlegel, Wegelin, Heyne, Herz, Eberhard, J. C. König, and, by German influence in Hungary, Szardahely; and, greatest of all, Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgment consists in the main of a critique of the aesthetic judgment of taste.

1. Those having a detailed and first-hand knowledge of Descartes’s work seem agreed that it was highly original, genuinely critical and of permanent importance in the history of thought. And though they would differ in opinion on what are the reasons best advanced in support of their estimate, a majority would seem to regard the “Cartesian revolution” as summing up what is most meritorious in Descartes’s philosophy and most lasting in his influence. They would find Professor E. Gilson speaking their mind when he declares, “Sur ce qu’il y a de nouveau et de strictement original dans sa pensée, aucun doute ne saurait subsister. Descartes est la revendication personnifiée du mathématisme universel.

§ 1. Of all the subjects which for well over two thousand years have remained the more or less constant topics of philosophical discussion, I can think of none which has not at some time by some philosopher been dismissed as a nonentity or an illusion. The history of philosophy seems to show that we cannot begin fairly to estimate the nature of any element in the universe until we have steadily contemplated a universe from which that element has been hypothetically eliminated.

In the history of human thought the name of ARISTOTLE must be written in capital letters. Of few of the Great Thinkers of history is it so true that he was one of what William James called “the folio editions of mankind.” In speaking of him, whether in praise or dispraise, it has been found almost impossible to avoid superlatives. The later ancients ranked the disciple level with his master Plato as occupying the twin summits of philosophical attainment. Since then they have divided the allegiance of the thinkers of the Western World. No doubt it is a rather wild judgment of Coleridge's that every man is born either a natural Platonist or a natural Aristotelian, but it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that no man has attained any width of knowledge or depth of reflection who is not driven to recognize, and often to express, a preference for the one over the other.