Journal of Scottish

Volume 6

John Laird: A Scots Professor General Editor: Cairns Craig

This edition edited by Cairns Craig. ‘Introduction © Cairns Craig

The Journal of Scottish Thought is a peer reviewed, open access journal published annually by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of . Correspondence should be addressed to The Journal of Scottish Thought, 19 College Bounds, , AB24 3UG.

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Published by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies University of Aberdeen 2018 ISSN 1755 9928 Introduction

John Laird was Regius Professor of Moral at the University of Aberdeen from 1922 till 1946, during which time he published fourteen individual books ranging across almost all aspects of philosophy, as can be gathered from some of their titles: The of the Soul (1924), The Idea of Value (1929), Morals and Western (1931), An Enquiry into Moral Notions (1935), and Deity (1941). He also addressed the of philosophy in books such as Hume’s Philosophy of Human (1932) and Theism and (1940), as well as issues of contemporary debate in Modern Problems in Philosophy (1928). Even if he was never thought of as one of the leading philosophers of his generation, his career charts many of the key developments of , from the ‘new realism’ that he took up from G. E. Moore and in the aftermath of World War I – his A Study in Realism appeared in 1920 – to the consequences of contemporary particle physics for our understanding of and , as he explored in his posthumously published On Human Freedom which appeared in 1947. Laird’s career was equally symptomatic of the discipline of philosophy in in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. A fi rst degree from University led him to Cambridge from where he graduated in 1920. He was then appointed as an assistant at St Andrews University before taking up a lectureship at Dalhousie University in Canada. Many Scots philosophers of the late nineteenth century had emigrated to posts in Canada or Australasia and one of them, John Watson, whom Laird met while Watson was giving his Gifford Lectures at the University of in the early 1910s, was probably responsible for Laird’s appointment at Dalhousie. Unlike Watson, who made his career in Canada and helped shape that nation’s emerging culture, Laird only taught for one year in Canada before returning to take up a professorship at Queen’s in Belfast – another common route for Scottish academics keen to fi nd a way back to Scotland. George Elder Davie, for instance, spent a decade and a half at Queen’s after the Second World War before returning to Edinburgh and among Laird’s colleagues was G. Gregory Smith whose Scottish Literature: Character and Infl uence (1919) was fi rst delivered as lectures in Belfast. Laird’s return to Scotland allowed him to become what he described as ‘A iv Autobiography of a Scots Professor

Scots Professor’ and it was the title that he gave to an autobiography penned in the 1940s, the manuscript of which is with others of his papers in Aberdeen University Library. This issue of The Journal of Scottish Thought publishes Laird’s autobiography for the fi rst time. With it, however, we also re-publish Laird’s Recent Philosophy, a book fi rst written for the ‘Home University Library’ and published in 1936. In it, Laird does not simply give an account of recent but an account of recent philosophy in France, Germany and as well as the United States. It has sometimes been suggested that Aberdeen University in the 1930s was intellectually soporifi c, content to service communities from the North of Scotland and disengaged from the intellectual mainstream of British, let alone European thought. Laird himself may seem to confi rm that view when he notes that one of the advantages of Aberdeen was that in some years he had no Honours students (i.e. those in the third and fourth years of their degrees) and was therefore free to focus on his writing – writing which he treats as never of very great signifi cance. But Recent Philosophy reveals an Aberdeen philosopher who has not only mastered a vast range of European , but has identifi ed those that will go on, after the Second World War, to be central to the development of the discipline – the phenomenology of Husserl, the ‘existence’ philosophy of Heidegger and the ‘new mediævalism’ of a revived . None of these accorded with the kind of ‘realism’ that Laird had himself espoused in his own early books, a fact which makes his enthusiastic response to them all the more remarkable. Recent Philosophy was a small book for an audience of the self-educating, but Laird treated his audience to a broad perspective on what was involved in ‘recent philosophy’, one that must have come as a revelation to most of them. What it testifies to, however, is the on-going engagement of Scottish thinkers with the European heritage that had been central to the philosophical promoted by Scottish philosophers before the First World War and which was to be continued by the likes of John McQuarrie, translator of Heidegger’s Being and Time, or Thomas Torrance, who did so much to promote the theology of Karl Barth. Laird’s work may be only an introduction, but it would be hard to think of anyone else who could have done justice to such a wide range of recent philosophies, giving a very different significance to the term ‘A Scots Professor’ from what one might have anticipated. Cairns Craig University of Aberdeen John Laird The Autobiography of a Scots Professor

(from the manuscript in the Aberdeen University archive)

I Childhood and Schooling

I shall offer no excuse for this attempt at an autobiography. If it is ever published, it will be published posthumously, and I shall not burden my executors with any directions about it. I am fond of writing, and I am interested in myself and in my recollections. I was born on the 17th of May, 1887 at or about 5 o’clock in the afternoon. So it is stated on my birth certifi cate, and my father was very meticulous about such entries. In this instance he was a fi rst father. I’m sure I ’t know what in me is due to heredity and what to environment so I shall say something about both together. My environment and the family traditions were nearly-scholarly. I was a son of the manse – of a largish Free Church manse adjacent to a tiny Free Church in the parish of Durris near the banks of the Dee. My father was a scholar manqué. He had been in business in early life and had gone to Edinburgh University too late to win high academic distinction. Or so it was thought. He had been very diligent in his divinity course at the New College in Edinburgh, and there he was fi rst in his year; but he had little self-confi dence and was rather desultory in application. His dreams, however, were of scholarship, and in that my mother agreed with him. She had a very lively mind with amazingly acute, although not very balanced, human perceptions. Her were neither well-munitioned nor well-disciplined, and I don’t suppose that her literary judgment was impeccable. She had romantic tastes in literature combined with a genuine love for old-time commentaries on the Scriptures, such as Matthew Henry’s. I had a long clerical ancestry. My paternal grandfather was a Moderator of the Free Church and was what was called a “Disruption Worthy”. (Lots of people, when they were introduced to me said they had known my grandfather. did, for instance, and there was a pause before he treated the remark as a joke. So I suppose my grandfather had some reputation). He was a committee-man, I am told, with an admirable capacity for speaking effectively on every subject and on every occasion. His father at the age of eighty-three had also been a Disruption Worthy – I suspect a very unwilling one. He had 2 Childhood and Schooling masterful sons. I have always been entertained by what I have heard of him. He contrived to make quite a lot of money partly from the farmers’ opulence in the Napoleonic Wars, partly by teaching the neighbouring . In the end he bought an estate near the famous Drovers’ Road in the Lothians. Having married a girl of fi fteen – an English girl, I believe, who was a governess – he had a family of fi fteen or thereabouts, half of whom grew up. He provided for all the survivors quite handsomely. I thought this very creditable, especially as Portmoak, his Fifeshire parish seemed to be largely composed of rabbit warrens. What interested me most about him, however, was his indomitable courage. He nursed three of his children in a typhus epidemic, and three in a cholera epidemic, segregating himself and them from the rest of the household. He wasn’t successful as a nurse; for all the six died. But at least he was brave. I have also been told that, being in a catalepsy, he was twice laid out for burial before he fi nally died. I have some of his sermons. (He wrote them out and then learned them by heart). Judging from them I should say that his Doctorate of Divinity, from Marischal College in Aberdeen, an institution with which he had no direct connection, was probably obtained by infl uence. But what of that? My maternal grandfather had also studied divinity but with less professional and fi nancial success. He was, in fact, a “stickit” minister who had turned schoolmaster. I fear that he wasn’t a very effi cient schoolmaster for once when I went to Edderton in Ross-shire where he taught I was shown the school register. The best the inspector could say was that the “school continued to be amiably conducted”. I think his interests were paternal, and human and agricultural. I knew and liked both my grandfathers. Each of them impressed upon me the splendour, and also the possibility, of being a fi ne scholar “like my father”. Since they were both men of the world (although of different worlds) I must conclude that the for their unanimity was that I was supposed to have a bookish turn. I don’t remember much else that the former Moderator, Dr John Laird of Cupar, told me (I was nine when he died) expect that, like most old gentlemen at the time, he had an insatiable curiosity about the family history of his neighbours, and used to tell me about the births, marriages and deaths in every house that we passed as we walked about Cupar. He was very kind to me, much kinder, I believe, towards his grandchildren, than ever he had been towards his children. He taught me to hop, and competed with me in that exercise when he was over eighty. I possess a letter that he wrote to my father when he knew that he was about to die. It was a dignifi ed letter. “My Autobiography of a Scots Professor 3 malady is just old age and is, of course, incurable”. It wasn’t just old age, but it was incurable. My maternal grandfather, Mr John Stewart, had a charming way with children, telling them stories about pigs and markets (embroidering on the rhyme) that they dearly loved. But he judged it proper, when he remembered, to treat me as one who in due course would belong to the very highly educated classes. Looking back, I suspect that my mother’s mother had more toughness and sense in her than any other of my forebears. She came from a little farm at the back o’beyont, the Cabrach in Aberdeenshire. What money there was came chiefl y from what was called a “distillery” – I suspect, a pot-still. She lived to be over ninety, but, towards the end of her life thought rather too much, and spoke rather too much, about pills. There was more curiosity about ancestors on my mother’s side than on my father’s, but the tales I have heard are rather vague, mostly about sudden death nearly always on the evening of some market day. One of my ancestors was still more foolish. He broke his leg when over eighty by attempting injudiciously to jump over a wall. I don’t know how long it took me to learn to speak, but my father began to teach me my letters systematically and daily when I was eighteen months of age. I gather (of course I don’t remember) that he found the process more tedious than he expected. My mother had a story that when I was two I came to her one day with a heart full of gratitude, saying how good it was of papa to give me a holiday that morning. Her own explanation (carefully concealed from me) was rather different. I believe I found the recognition of the individual letters easy enough but took what my father thought an interminable time to tumble to the trick of combining them into syllables. Still, I was reading a great deal of large print by the time I was three. As the family increased (I was the eldest of fi ve) we became a self-educating community. My father gave up. We could all write pretty early too. I do not mean to suggest that any of us were precocious, or that my father wanted us to be precocious. On the contrary, one of his fi xed ideas was that the university was the place for taking one’s coat off, and that in school and before it, the best thing was to be rather slack. I think he regarded reading and writing as preliminaries to education, things that couldn’t be begun too soon, and, when acquired, should be indulged as one listed. For the rest he was interested in his children, at any rate when they were little and when there were not too many of them to disturb the privacy that he deeply prized. I was just the fi rst to stimulate his pride in paternity, and to beguile him into seeing 4 Childhood and Schooling how a very youthful mind began to work. All the same, I think it is true that the atmosphere in the Free Church manse at Durris favoured the sort of bookish life I was later to lead. We had plenty of play in adorable woods; we had plenty of fresh air; best of all we were left to our own devices for most of the daylight in every twenty-four hours. We enjoyed stream, and fl ower, and wild animals and stars without being taught too much about them – for our parents knew very little about them. Despite all that, I don’t think that the fact that most of my early recollections are in some sort literary is due to some peculiarity on my own part. The public events that were stressed in our presence were the deaths, say, of Tennyson or of Browning. The of greatest interest when our parents visited Aberdeen was the books they brought back from a reading-club. I suppose I can’t really remember, as I seem to remember, very many of Stevenson’s books coming hot from the press; but we all felt that our writers were really doing something, and that their stories were the news of the day. The period before Christmas was peculiarly stimulating. My parents made presents of books – a good many presents. But fi rst of all they bought the books and read them themselves. They also thought of us when we were small. We had our proper ration of the Brer Rabbit stories and the like, and also of Hans Andersen, Reynard the Fox and their kind. Later, improving books, such as Man and his Markets were added. More generally we (or rather I) read voraciously, and for the most part unintelligently, anything that had an established reputation. My father collected that sort of book, preferably in a cheap edition and let me read what I liked. (He kept a locked cupboard too but I didn’t know about that). By the time I was ten or so I was widely read in Shakespeare, Scott, Milton, Thackeray etc. etc. My motives, I daresay, were more showy than ambitious, and I was little the richer for what I read. I have never had good taste in literature. But I did have a very wide vocabulary which I was fond of using. I had a genuine affection for words and phrases, mostly borrowed from good writers. I was sprinkled, not soaked, with a literary mist, and although I am incapable of deliberately imitating any other writer or speaker, I naturally tend to assume the protective colouring of any mode of speech with which I have made contacts at any time. That is a defect when it is exaggerated, as it is in my case, but if the company be good the defect has compensating qualities. My company was almost too good, the company of dead men all highly praised. In all the above, I have spoken as if schooling didn’t matter very much, and I don’t think it did. But of course it had some effect which, such as it was, I shall try to set down. Autobiography of a Scots Professor 5

I went to the nearest parish school, Crossroads, when I was fi ve. The school was a mile and a quarter away. One had to carry a box of books, a slate, a bottle of milk and a “piece” i.e. a chunk of bread and jam, to reach the school by foot at nine (or was it half-past?), and return after three in the afternoon. The schooling therefore made demands upon one’s physique. In the severe winter of 1895 – 1896, for example, I had often to leave the road because of the depth of the snow-drifts and take to the fi elds which were barer. The schoolmaster (or head-master, since he had a female pupil teacher of dubious attainments to help him) was a certain Alexander Macdonald, an elder in our church. He was much more of a man than most country schoolmasters are (or were) and the fact was adequately recognised in the press and in the Times Educational Supplement when he retired and, much later, when he died. If he chanced to be interested in anything that he happened to be teaching he imparted a dramatic quality into it. I remember for instance, that he staged a duel between himself, as the royal Saxon, and Roderick Dhu. He made pungent comments about the great. For example he called the then of Wales “old drunken Neddy”. I have no doubt that I gained something permanent from the freedom, zest and originality, that radiated from him at his best moments. As I have said, I was imitative and susceptible to atmosphere. I think of him with great affection and with much respect. He did more for me than a better teacher would have done. But he was not a good teacher. For one thing, he was rather lazy. He was listless when he was bored (which was common) and diligent only when he had a spasm of interest. Indeed, he would frequently retire to the schoolhouse and munch oatcake, leaving the school to its own devices plus the pupil-teacher. I don’t suppose these absences were very prolonged; for he had a conscience even about the school. Speaking generally, we picked up, or could have picked up, much that was interesting and much that was even exciting in the by-ways of our teaching, but straggled, and stumbled and dragged our feet along its highroads. Macdonald was something of an antiquary, of a botanist, of a political theorist, and of a journalist. He preferred to talk about what he liked, and didn’t much care whether the pupils attended or not. I suppose I was quicker-witted than most of the others, and he had various good for trying to make something of me. So by the time I reached my teens he gave me special tuition with a view to scholarships and the like. Understandably enough, such tuition was irregular and defective. Macdonald had taken his degree in Latin. So had my father; but neither of them had any practice in teaching it. They were aghast at my blunders, but they discouraged 6 Childhood and Schooling rather than helped me. The same holds, a fortiori, for what they taught me of Greek. As for French, both were self-taught in the main, Macdonald altogether so. My father had travelled and could make himself understood in French, although his accent was vile. Macdonald had once spent a week end in Paris, and said that a Frenchman’s lips were as mobile as a horse’s. There was nothing Gallic about his lips. Consequently when, rising thirteen, I went in for a local county scholarship and for Leaving Certifi cates I came hopelessly to grief except in English. I was not the bright country lad (on paper) of Macdonald’s hopes. That didn’t matter. What did matter to me, though it need not have affected a better man, was that I had had a bad start in linguistic studies. I never repaired the defect adequately; and I wish I had. A momentous event in our family’s history occurred in 1900 when my father received and/or wangled an invitation to “offi ciate” at the Scotch Presbyterian Church in Pau during the winter that was to come. Our journey disturbed us in various ways. We entrained on an October afternoon and were loaded with grapes and with sweet drinks by sundry parishioners. There were similar scenes at Aberdeen station where our band of fi ve children and two parents fi lled a third class compartment for ’s Cross. My sister Mary (then aged seven) was habitually train sick. She succumbed before we reached Aberdeen. We were all sick, except the elders, before we got as far as Montrose, and continued in the same plight all the way to London. There a disappointment awaited us. We were gong to sail to Bordeaux, and the boat was delayed for a day. We put up at a cheap hotel near King’s Cross and had no night clothes. We saw the Tower and the Zoo during the day. I have never seen the Tower since. Next morning, of a Sunday, we joined the boat. I can’t precisely remember the devious means my father chose to meet it. He was always an ingenious traveller. But whatever the staff- work was, it involved a walk en famille on our part through about two miles of London streets. There is a general impression that Londoners show less curiosity about odd-looking visitors than any other townsfolk in the world. They are surfeited I suppose; but I didn’t think we went altogether unnoticed. My father, though untidy, never looked conspicuous anywhere; but my mother was not a good walker, was clumsy with hand-luggage, wore a dress rather injudiciously mauve, and was hampered by having to jerk my youngest brother Hugh along by hand (he was four, but also carried his piece of luggage). The rest of us were all pretty heavily laden, all complaining and disconsolate, all fl ustered and all straggling. I took a dislike to my overcoat which was very long Autobiography of a Scots Professor 7

(for I was growing), pink rather than brown, and generally of an order that I chose to consider unmetropolitan. Two of the party were in tears long before the walking part of the journey was over. My father was haranguing us about the wisdom of his arrangements, my mother vainly and crossly attempting to restrain him. I think our winter and spring in the Basses Pyrénées was a great spiritual success. It rejuvenated both my parents, and immensely stimulated all their children. From our fl at in the Rue Porte Neuve we admired nearly all we saw, the ox-carts, the goats milked at the doors, the palms, the stir of town life. It was easy, too, to see and admire the mountains. I went to the Lycée de Pau, my brothers and sisters to a small and peculiar École Protestante. I have to confess that the expedition puffed me up in various unlovely ways. I returned giving myself airs as a travelled person and renowned French scholar – “a French tart” as a rude and unkind schoolfellow said. That was the foolish side of the affair. But six months in a French Lycée was very good for me as well as genuinely educative. I even began to have some understanding of Greek and Latin and advanced some little distance from the bottom of the class where I very properly began, not simply because I had at fi rst some diffi culty in using the medium of French. I was fi rst in English, which was not a remarkable feat, and fi rst in drawing which was. Indeed I shall always remember that incident. Our test was a charcoal free-hand drawing of a plaster-cast, and at that time I acquired the trick, never afterwards recovered, of drawing circles and other such fi gures, almost perfectly, with one sweep of the arm. So I produced my drawing in about two minutes, an hour being allowed, and then threw bread pellets (we used bread for erasing) at the other competitors who replied, but less spiritedly than I, being otherwise occupied. The drawing-master set out to annihilate me, but he looked at my drawing fi rst, and then walked quietly away with a puzzled frown. He knew, and I knew, that I couldn’t draw; but he knew and I knew that my drawing was bound to be the best. All he did was stop the pellet barrage. When we returned, and after I had had a summer in which to become a little less uppish about my travels, I was sent to the Aberdeen Grammar School. The teaching there was very good. I was nearly, although not quite, at the top of my class, I made some very good friends, and I might have acquired a solid grounding in the classics and even in mathematics (except, I suspect, in geometry) had I not left the school after two years on account of another family migration. My father resigned his charge at Durris and we went to live in Edinburgh. 8 Childhood and Schooling

My father had long contemplated such a move. The congregation at Durris was dwindling, and was likely to become even smaller. The fi nancial minimum required to keep it from a mere preaching-station served by some short-time man had to come principally from my father’s own pocket. In short, my father considered himself a failure and wanted to get away from the obvious signs of failure. To this end my parents had been rather frugal for many years. At one time we were the worst dressed children in the entire parish, unless on very special occasions. We were suffi ciently but unappetizingly fed. Indeed there was one Christmas when the younger children had barley and milk for their Christmas dinner, my father, mother and myself being in Edinburgh at an aunt’s wedding, where I was a sort of page but without a page’s splendour. Such frugality helped to conserve the family’s capital which was augmented by sundry intermittent legacies. At the time I am speaking about, my father had some £800 a year, enough to live upon in Edinburgh in those days and also enough to educate his family there. So to Edinburgh we went. As it happened my father was appointed sub-librarian of the New College at £50 a year. At long last he achieved a minor academic status, and may even have been glad that he had been rejected in the solitary application of a Canadian professorship he had ever made. In any case he could live in a bookish atmosphere, not too strenuously and gossip with the varied collection of people who, in some cases came to glance at the library and, in other cases, frequented it. At Edinburgh I went to George Watson’s College. I was put in the top class, and skipped a year, owing to my prowess in Aberdeen, but, to keep me in my place, I was assigned, pretty much at random, to the upper (or profi cient) division in some subjects and to the lower (or stupid) division in others. As before I hovered about the top, but not quite at it, whatever division I happened to be in. I think the masters regarded me as a boy who might go far but probably wouldn’t. The school, however, was then in a bad way. I soon learned that a metropolitan education might be defi nitely inferior to a provincial. The chief reason, I suppose, was that the recently appointed head-master, W. L. Carrie was not a success. Indeed the Governors got rid of him at the end of his third year as headmaster (which was my only year at the school) for a combination of ill-success and a tendency to lift his elbow. We were all very sorry for him and later were proud of him for conquering his failing and doing useful work in the Edinburgh Training College. (He died rather early and, I suppose, not unwillingly). Still, as I say, the school was in a bad way, lax in discipline and shoddy in its standards. Apart from that it wasn’t at the time much more than Autobiography of a Scots Professor 9 a glorifi ed cramming establishment, and not so very glorifi ed at that. I was not sorry to have only a year of it. Some of my class-mates at Watson’s were unusually interesting, especially a certain B. B. Gray. Gray was a nephew of the celebrated Dr Joe Bell whom we all admired in Edinburgh (and therefore called him “Joe”) because he was supposed to be the original of Sherlock Holmes. Gray was tall with classical features, curling black hair and a white lustre of complexion. He was a great walker and with some companions (not me) would walk for over fi fty miles in the twenty-four hours, he being then seventeen. Apart from such occasional feats, he was lazy, too lazy to make a success of anything. He strained after a spectacular Bohemianism. But he was very clever, and contrived, before he fell in the fi rst Great War, to pack his life full of adventure, creditably persisting in eccentricity. One of his efforts was to tour Spain with a barrel organ (and sans the monkey that he acquired for the expedition but lost in London). He meant to write up his experiences; but I think the writing received a miss. He had the experiences, however, including sundry incarcerations in Spanish gaols for shortish periods and, I have no doubt, deliberately earned. Later he was the centre of some wild doings in Peru, but I never learned what they were in detail. II Edinburgh University

It has been my fortune, especially in the middle years of my life, to attend a large number of dinners in which the alumni and alumnae of Scottish Universities celebrate the departed felicities of their student careers. That sort of reverent stock-taking has many excellent qualities, not to speak of its slightish tendency to increase the Old Age Pension of an inevitably needy and rather grasping Alma Mater. I confess, however, that I fi nd these occasions rather pathetic. I don’t mean only that the tone of them is wistfully reminiscent and apt to show the sort of inexactitudes that are supposed to be appropriate to obituary notices. To be disappointed on these grounds would be to commit the bêtise of forgetting the spirit of the occasion. I mean rather that the attitude towards the past displayed by most of the speakers is largely conventional and very largely hollow. There is a superstition to the effect that youth is invariably a delightful season, that Universities are the only places where free young spirits have free young scope, where merit is seen to be just what it is and rewarded accordingly, and where everybody lives the life that befi ts an intelligent youth or an intelligent girl, where there is no pretence about high spirits and about enthusiasms invariably generous. I cannot believe these things. I allow that it is rather hard for elderly speakers to recapture the quality that they say their lives once possessed even if they are speaking the when they say so. If, in fact, they recall and recount little more than futile half-remembered pranks with a sham order of youthful vitality there may be more than a fi fty-fi fty chance that they are failing to express a zest that they really did have and that there was a good deal of fun in what appears so silly and so trivial. It is possible, again, that what they say about their teachers was a genuine impression drawn out of the past, that the light that they say broke upon their souls really was effulgent or seemed to be. For the most part, however, I suspect that things didn’t happen as, on these occasions, they are said to have happened. In short I am inclined to attribute to conventional romance much, indeed most, that passes for genuine recollection at these dinners. Here I may very well be generalising illegitimately from my own case. Up to a point, of course, I should be prepared to go along with these speakers. I 11 Edinburgh University engaged in a good many pranks, believing myself to be asserting my glorious student status. No one had his suit more thoroughly or more determinedly ruined by ochre at a Rectorial Election fi ght than I. I was excited about a host of inconsistent ideas that were new to me. Sometimes I was almost uncontrollably excited about them, and seemed to have intellectual vistas that would fi re me for ever. I was glad and indeed overjoyed, at seventeen, to believe that I had become a (young) man and that I had ceased to be a boy. So far my reminiscences would agree with the conventional ones, but the agreement would stop there. In that case it could be only a thinnish agreement. Perhaps my student life was atypical. For one thing it may have been a pity that I was living at home. If I had been in digs, like most of my fellows, I might have seen a good deal more of “life” than I did. For another thing, I was much more studious than was good either for me or for my studies. I had formed the impression, due to my father, that one’s showing at the University obliterated everything that had happened before and shaped one for life. That is a common attitude among university professors. They seem to think that a good academic record is more than an earnest of subsequent performance. They think as if it were the true performance of a lifetime. This is not a common attitude among the young (who are saner). I had quite modest expectations about what my success was likely to be. What I took for granted – I cannot say “what I resolved”, for the thing was too deep for conscious resolution – was that I would grasp the time of opportunity as vigorously as it was in me to grasp it. Such an attitude leaves very little play for the exuberance and the high spirits usually associated with youth and never completely dissociable from it. When I found myself beginning to score in competition I grew more and more nervous about coming to grief in matters too high for me. They weren’t too high, judged by ordinary standards. They were adapted to the capacities of students who were not super-students. But that is the sort of truth (or truism) that is hidden from the idolaters of “a good university degree”. In those days (1904 – 1908) an Edinburgh student in the Faculty of had a pretty tough time between October and March if he wanted to seize all his opportunities. In each of his classes (except for honours classes where lecturing was less persistent) he had to attend a hundred lectures at the rate of fi ve per week with a fortnight off at Christmas. I suppose one could have done well enough had one cut a fair proportion of the lectures. One might even have acquired a more or less liberal outlook. Hard-working people, however, reacted quite differently. They rushed to the counter of the reading-room, afraid only of being forestalled by some other hard-working wretch, or order Autobiography of a Scots Professor 12 to consult any book that was mentioned, even casually, in a lecture. They pored over their lecture-notes as if the Archangel Gabriel had written them. They were told that originality was encouraged – as indeed certain forms of it would have been had such forms appeared – but they thought it was safer and more remunerative to know their lectures very well indeed, and to reproduce them with the reverence due to a far-off vision of a master mind. In my last winter at Edinburgh I worked on the average about seventy hours a week, a feat that was made easier, and rather less stupid, by an unexpected remark of my father’s. He said, to my astonishment, that he didn’t see why I shouldn’t work on Sundays if I wanted to do so. In earlier winters I was rather less assiduous: but not much. Our summers were very much easier. There was a summer session, but most of us took it in a happy-go-lucky spirit: and we didn’t read much in the vacs, or, at any rate, didn’t study very seriously. My general programme was to study classics in my fi rst year, to experiment in other subjects in my second year and to select an honours group from one of the experiments unless, through ill success, I had to fall back on classics; in the third and fourth years to study for honours. It is plain that I was aiming at an academic post for my life-work, although I never admitted as much to others or, quite explicitly, to myself, the goal seeming so distant and so high. I think my attitude was as follows: an academic career is, in all probability, a forlorn hope but it is my heart’s desire. So let me try for it, a little secretively, without actively expecting a miracle to happen. If I fail (as I expect I shall) something else may turn up. I admit, however, that I thought seriously in my second year of going to Canada and becoming a bank-clerk. A tout had been sent to gather such recruits, and he had some success. I stuck very closely to my schedule. Indeed I never altered it by a hair. I did well enough at classics – better than I deserved because I could always make a better show in examinations than I could support by actual merit. The sort of thing that was tested in these examinations happened to suit me. I chose History and for my experimental subject in my second year, adding mathematics for general utility but not for competitive achievements. I had no doubt at all that I would prefer logic and philosophy – unless the experiment proved to be a fl op. It didn’t fl op, since I was fi rst in the class of over two hundred. So this logic medal – a bronze affair – and a prize received from the hands of old Campbell Fraser himself, thin white hands with the veins very blue and like the pallid old face made still more impressive and saddening by 13 Edinburgh University the magnifi cent red gown of an Oxford D.C.L., settled my career for me. I may add that luck and even iniquity took a hand. At a critical point in the race for this minor distinction, as I worked very late and the fi re had gone out, I found that I was stifl ingly hot. Investigation showed that I had a rash on my chest, in short that I had German measles. My mother entered into a conspiracy to conceal the matter. Indeed she egged me on with some help from the time of the week. It was of a Saturday night that I made my discovery, and the next Monday was Meal Monday, our one holiday of the term. On the Tuesday I regret to say that I was back at my classes feeling very ill indeed but with no tell-tale rash on my face. So I won the logic medal and had bronchitis for the rest of the year. I doubt if I would have had the courage to tell this story (for I know it is discreditable) if I had not discovered in the year in which I am now writing (1940) that this way of dealing with German measles at examination times is almost as much the rule as the exception. There was a very bad epidemic in the present spring. Except for another medal in English in my third year (which was an extra taken to see whether I should be fi rst in English in the University as I always had been in all my schools) I stuck to philosophy for the rest of my course. I didn’t do nearly so well in as I had done in logic or indeed in most other subjects. Indeed I found the approaches to philosophy (as opposed to mere logic) rather heavy going, and at one time John Baillie, now a divinity professor in Edinburgh was getting decidedly ahead of me. We ended equal as the class lists, still tricked out in gold in the Logic class room in Edinburgh, testify. But each of us had his fi rst class with a good deal to spare. George Saintsbury, Professor of English Literature was the only man among my Edinburgh teachers who seemed to me to approach greatness, and he was something of a misfi t in the Ordinary Class of a Scottish University. He kept very indifferent order and was untormentable only because he despised nine-tenths of his auditors – very justly but also very obviously. I doubt, even, if he was mortifi ed by the refl ection that his allusions to their unmannerliness were too witty to be generally understood. I do not say that he was a good lecturer. He was not. He used to read rather closely from well-thumbed sheets of cardboard, about notepaper size. These were only a digest of his History of English Literature, our unrevered text-book. If we had chosen we could have told him most of what was coming. But he made running comments too, full of gusto if he liked his author, and he found something to like in most of his authors. He had an amazing catholicity of literary enjoyment and the sight of him with his quizzical eyes, his rather dissipated face and nose, his straggling Autobiography of a Scots Professor 14 beard with a black tie gleaming through it and his air of faint disdain lingers in the memory. I should like fi rstly, to say something about Scottish University education at the time I underwent it, and secondly about that education in philosophy. In the nineteenth century, I suppose, the Scottish M. A. degree was an asset to a struggling nation. It fostered most of the desirable elements in a “good general education”. There were seven subjects, all compulsory and including classical languages, mathematics, physics and two courses in philosophy. The standard, no doubt, was humble, and there must have been a good deal of rather tricky steering in the passage from the plough to a master’s cap. The breadth of the curriculum, however, made some amends for that and a decent high-school standard (which was all that was attained) was a respectable achievement. The effect was that most Scottish schools, even remote ones, and nearly every Scottish manse was peopled by men whose education had neither been very hurried nor defi nitely nominal. The general advantage to the country was enormous. It put the commonalty of Scotland very high among the world’s inhabitants. When the twentieth century began, Scotland, as compared, say, with was losing many of these differential advantages because of the growth of new Universities in England. She had, however, stiffened her standards in some respects – by entrance examinations and the like – and had also broadened her curriculum by the inclusion of history, modern languages, economics and so forth. Since more than seven subjects could not reasonably be required, a certain elasticity had to replace the old rigidity. That had some advantages, and was, in any case, inevitable. All the same the pass degree in my time was still pretty rigid and was vastly superior, say, to a “pol” degree at Cambridge. I don’t think the same qualifi ed praise could be given to the Scottish honours degree at any time, and, more particularly at the time I am describing. The honours system had been grafted upon an older system and refused to unite with it. It may have gained from the fact that it was not wholly specialised. Some outside subjects, on the pass standard, had to be taken by every honours man. Thus mild obeisance was done to the of a general education. Again there would be unfairness in the censure that the honours degree took too long i.e. that it took four years, although I suspect that the length of it was dictated principally by the professors’ convenience and not the pupils’. But the objections were serious, none the less. My chief complaint about the honours schools were set in motion, and 15 Edinburgh University kept in being, by a small staff which did little except lecture and very properly declined to lecture for an unconscionable number of hours. I allow that the honours curriculum was well planned, comprehensive and sometimes even ambitious. The standard would have been high had it not been chained, quite overtly, to the chariot wheels of the lecturing system. It was the professor’s duty, or so he thought, to present and discuss in lectures every mortal thing that was liable to be tested in the fi nal examination. Thus the standard, although at least as high on paper as the standard anywhere else, was a good deal less exacting than it looked. There was the further trouble that the student supposed that what he had been told was all that was worth telling. That is a danger everywhere, but it is diminished if there are many teachers. In Scotland there was just a professor or two in any given honours school with some assistance from lecturers and assistants who were sedulously docile. These remarks, I concede, may be coloured by my experiences in the honours school of philosophy. So let me turn expressly to that school. My teachers were the Professor of Logic, A. S. Pringle Pattison – who had been Andrew Seth before the estate of the Haining in Selkirkshire was left him by will whereupon he changed his surname – his brother James Seth the Professor of Moral Philosophy, R. P. Hardie and Henry Barker (lecturers) and John Handyside (assistant and lecturer supernumerary). Handyside was just beginning and seemed very unlike the type of man to fi ght and fall as an infantry offi cer in the Great War. Yet such was to be his fate. Barker was an able man, and I shall have something to say of Hardie later. Substantially, however, the school was Pringle Pattison. His brother James was universally loved. He was the sort of man that is called “very human” and I have heard a parson say that he was “a great soul”. My neighbour whispered “but a poor creature”. The balance between the parson’s statement and my neighbour’s would come, I think, pretty near the truth. Seth had a gift for elementary teaching, always supposing that suggestion and vivacity can compensate for a certain lack of precision. No one could say that he was a considerable philosopher, and his honours teaching was thoroughly disappointing. I remember Baillie saying with a sort of puzzled resignation “Seth was no better than anyone else in the class”. In short, Seth was an attractive pedagogue who had spent the best years of his life in America. So Pringle Pattison was the school. When Andrew Seth, as he then was called, came very young to the chair in Edinburgh, having vacated the chair at St Andrews in the early ‘90’s, he was (as I have always been told) the most attractive lecturer in the whole Autobiography of a Scots Professor 16 university. Fine features, a fi ne beard and an admirable voice helped him, but the main factor in his success was the elegant prose of his lectures. (He always read them, being no speaker.) Here his training had helped him. His duties at St Andrews had included English literature as well as philosophy. He had been a leader-writer for The Scotsman, and all his life his writing had a journalistic quality, but of so high a grade as to be very near indeed to being literature. In my time there was a change. His larger classes had become more restive than most. His lectures to them were type-written and they sounded stereotyped. The same was true of his honours lectures which had found fi nality, it would seem, and so, because they were not proceeding, were dead. In his youth he had had the reputation of being a bold and rebellious innovator. In maturity a smooth equipoise had been sedulously established. I discovered later, on a visit to the Haining and on other occasions, that there was another side to all this. He read avidly in recent philosophy. He had an adaptable mind and had views of his own. But little of that appeared in his lectures. The whole course smelt of lavender. The underlying assumption of the lectures was that there was one great philosophical tradition, philosophia perennis, subtle and varied as its disguises might be. The business of philosophers was to master the tradition, the business of students to obtain an inkling of it. The tradition made some concessions to modernity and even to national fashions. In essentials, however, it was Greco- Cartesian-Hegelian with certain concessions regarding its . In a broad sense there was much to be said for such a conception of university teaching in philosophy. Anyone who neglects the tradition, or traditions, in philosophy that may justly be called “great” does so at his peril. In most cases he will be struggling with ideas that are far less novel than he supposes and will be ignorant of the replies to them. He will be like a chess- player who has neglected the study of opening moves and of end-games. In short, there is a very good case for an honours degree in the history of ideas. Such a degree, however, is not a degree in philosophy. In it the students are taught to practise a wary docility. They do not understand, or at any rate they do not feel, that “idealism”, , , determinism and the like are disturbing and explosive notions that stir men’s and tear them in sunder. At best they learn that such disturbances sometimes happened in the past. Instead there is a detached and even an antiquarian interest about the way in which “philosophy” deals with such topics. Such an attitude is mischievous; and it was ours. I have mentioned R. P. Hardie. In later years I was to see a good deal of 17 Edinburgh University him, and, quite frequently, to be a member of a rather charming golfi ng party he used to have at St Andrews at Christmas. It included Oxford professors such as Joachim and J. A. Smith, young dons such as Hardie’s nephews, some divines and some philosophers. But I am thinking now of earlier days. During my time at Edinburgh Hardie was the only one of our teachers who treated his senior students as equals, socially and intellectually, who happened to be rather younger than he was. That, I suppose, is the perfection of the Oxford, perhaps of the Cambridge spirit. It was rare in Scotland in those days and, even now is commoner among the English-bred than the Scottish-bred university teachers in Scotland. One of Hardie’s greatest services was to have a small philosophical society in his rooms, held together by R. P. H. This society should have been of the greatest assistance to me. The fact that it wasn’t is not very creditable either to me or to my Edinburgh training. Here is what happened. G. E. Moore, later Professor at Cambridge and the man who (as I suppose) has had a greater effect upon British philosophy than any other in his generation, was living in Edinburgh at the time, and regularly attended Hardie’s club. He was then at the height of his powers and had written some famous papers as well as his Principia Ethica. He impressed us, of course. I shall always remember the light yellow of his hair, his immense excitement about anything he was saying, the number of matches he used per pipe. There was nobody else that we knew to whom breath and philosophy seemed to be the same thing, or who argued with the same vehement pertinacity whoever the opponent might be. But we had been told (I won’t say by whom) that “of course he was all wrong”. So we listened to him with the indulgence of those who knew what philosophy was. We were quite willing to hear what certain people were doing in Cambridge, for instance Bertrand Russell about the principles of mathematics. But of course they were all wrong too. The whole affair seemed to be interesting gossip and no more – which was a pity. One of the good things about Edinburgh University at this time was the prestige of various debating societies such as the Diagnostic and the Philomathic. Most of us, in short, learned to speak, in the sense that we were not tongue-tied when we stood up in public. The Union debates attained a fairly high level. Ian Macpherson (later Strathcarron) used to turn up occasionally as some other young barristers did. I remember some admirable speeches from Frederick Whyte (as he now is) including one in which the handsome and gesticulating speaker dealt his seconder an unintended but Autobiography of a Scots Professor 18 vigorous smack on the face. The Union itself was a doubtful benefi t. I like billiards and I like cards; but there was too much of both in the Union. When I graduated I very nearly arranged, with Professor Seth’s connivance, to go to Cornell with a studentship, take my Ph. D and try my fortune in America. In the end I chose the better if the more usual course of going to Cambridge. Trinity took me in, and I spent a part of the intervening summer as a matriculated student at the University of Heidelberg. It was the fi rst time I had been abroad since our celebrated winter in Pau. I sailed with my father from Leith to Antwerp in bitter April weather; but we had a jolly time in Antwerp, Brussels and Cologne despite the inclemency of the spring. At Cologne I entrained alone for Heidelberg knowing no German at all but with a grammar and a dictionary in my pocket. With the help of these I fi xed up a lodging in a German pension in the Anlage, and contrived to fi ll in rather lengthy documents at the University about my parentage, religion and so forth. There was no diffi culty about matriculating. My Edinburgh degree, handsomely attested with seals, saw to that. (It didn’t admit me to Cambridge). It may seem pretty fatuous to attend lectures in a language one doesn’t know. Our Scottish Entrance Board today insists upon an examination in “Special English” for those who have another native language. And I can hardly pretend that I learnt much German in the ten days before lectures began, though I managed to make myself understood, in a week or less, in all-German society. As to the lectures, however, the process resembled the learning of a new language from the study of its New Testament. One knew what was coming. Besides had then a double vocabulary, Latin-derived and German-derived; and lecturers, when they say anything say it several times over in slightly different words. The double vocabulary must have been a great boon to the German teachers. Moreover I picked up a good deal of German, though nobody could puff me up about it more than by saying that I spoke fl iessend and with a reasonably good accent. (The latter is easy for a Scotsman). Oddly enough the German student with whom I conversed au pair had had a similar exchange with another aspiring Scottish philosopher during the preceding summer. My predecessor had been Bowman of Glasgow, and I learned that Bowman had been a prodigy of industry as well as of ability. He began at fi ve in the morning and went on for the rest of the day, advancing hourly. “You are a clever man” I was told very politely “but you are not as Bowman”. I wasn’t on any showing, but I may have had more of the holiday spirit than Bowman had. If I learned some German I learned very little philosophy. The lectures 19 Edinburgh University

(by Windelband who had, and had deserved, quite a high reputation) were old stuff adapted to a large and, for the most part untrained audience, quite largely composed of Poles and Russians. His seminar should have been better, but it was about Aristotle’s , Book I, and R. P. Hardie had known more about it than Windelband did. So much of the present century has been occupied in bitter confl ict with Germany that a sinister interest attaches to all contacts with that country before the First Great War. So far as I remember, the war spirit was not very obvious in Germany in 1908 though it was present. It was quite usual if one was introduced to a man to be told that we should probably meet quite shortly on the battlefi eld; but there didn’t seem to be much feeling about it, except a feeling of inevitability which I didn’t share. Of course, I picked up English and American acquaintances. We had a rowing club, mixed German and English, where we rowed scarcely at all but had boats which we attached to the trains of barges that would tow us some eighteen miles up the Neckar, after which we fl oated back. I had also an excellent walking tour in the Schwarzwald with a Scottish companion. For the most part, however, I stuck to the Germans, and I came to know some of them rather well. I attended Kneipen, or beer-parties, and contrived to swill some fi ve litres of lightish beer in the course of an evening. I also saw a Mensur (or duelling contest) in the Hirschgasse, but only once. I didn’t like it. The combatants, body-protected, eye-protected, ear-protected, nose-protected and second-protected (for the seconds were interminably striking up the swords even when there wasn’t a Pause) presented a grotesque appearance, furchtbar unästhetisch. But the thing demanded lots of pluck. The strikable surface was small but tender – the left cheek and the lips. One of the combats, I remember, was a shocking spectacle. The Burschenschaft (or club) that had invited me was relatively new to the business, and its leading swordsman was something of a novice. His opponent was seasoned and skilful. For a few minutes (including Pausen) there was some superfi cial semblance of equality. Then skill told and every stroke drew blood form the weaker swordsman, the stronger being untouched. The duel was stopped before its allotted time was up, and the vanquished had twenty six stitches. It is not true that he never winced, but he gave a very good imitation of a Red Indian who had had a piece of bad luck. In a Burschenschaft one had to fi ght at least three duels. So the German people tested its courage. III Cambridge

I had what military apologists call a “set-back” just before I went to Cambridge in the autumn of 1908. I had been expected, and had myself expected to win the Ferguson Scholarship in philosophy open to recent graduates in all the four Scottish universities; but I wasn’t even second. That was saddening. I was twenty one and was anxious not to be a burden on my parents. But when I went up to Cambridge all I had to relieve their expenses was an Edinburgh Scholarship of £100 for three years of which more than a year had already elapsed. These fi nancial matters, however, speedily improved. In December 1908 I won the Shaw Philosophical Fellowship which is also open to the four Scottish Universities but a bluer ribbon than the Ferguson Studentship and much more lucrative. It is a bluer ribbon because of the larger range of competitors. The period at that time was within fi ve years of graduation instead of within two as with the Ferguson Scholarship; and all or nearly all of the recent Ferguson scholars competed for it. It was worth £150 a year for fi ve years while the Ferguson was but £80 for two years. At the fi rst available opportunity at Cambridge, viz. in March 1909, I was awarded a Major Scholarship at Trinity, and that was another £100 for fi ve years if I chose to remain so long in residence. So I was well endowed. The impression prevails that Cambridge men very seldom attempt to give a pen-picture of Cambridge while Oxford men are prone to that employment. It may be so, and if it is so I shall follow the fashion. In the main, I have to speak not about Cambridge undergraduates in general, but about a particular class of such graduates, those namely who assume beginner’s status at Cambridge after graduating in some other place. To be still more precise I shall be thinking of Scottish graduate-undergraduates in Cambridge and not of Welshmen, or Australians, or graduates from Hindostan. Such demoted undergraduates were and still are fairly numerous. Outside the it was rare for Scottish graduates, who went to Cambridge, to read forthwith for a higher degree. For the most part they preferred to go through the mill again. The reason was that a high place in the Tripos had a meaning all over the world (which the new-fangled higher degrees never had) and that it was much more likely, even in Scotland, to lead to a University assistantship, or Autobiography of a Scots Professor 21 some other such post, than a Scottish degree however good. There was also, of course, a better chance of a career in Cambridge itself. On the whole I think that this practice is regrettable. It means that graduates are competing with undergraduates. If they fail through slackness or sheer weariness of seven years of examinations, the failure is devastating. Also there is considerable waste of their time – although nowadays most of these people accept the privilege of being excused one of their three Cambridge years. Many of these graduate-undergraduates could get a fi rst class in the Tripos without any attendance at all and with a minimum of special preparation. Three years or even two years is a long time under such circumstances. It is marking time in order to gain seniority, and youth should be obviously as well as actually on the march. I allow that here is another side to the question. Speaking broadly all British universities have different actual curricula, plans and ideas, and in some of them, such as Cambridge, there is a distinctive ethos of the place in almost every branch of study. Elementary work – which is often the most essential of all, especially to a would-be professor – may have a new meaning when one returns to it under new teachers and in the atmosphere of a different tradition. In any case recruits cannot easily be too well drilled, and it is largely their own fault of they feel that they are being too much drilled. Moreover it is an advantage not to begin academic teaching too young; (but there are other ways of avoiding that). When I was at Cambridge many if not most of the Scottish graduate- undergraduates (and nearly all the Aberdonians) kept themselves pretty much to themselves, admiring without envying the wealth and grandeur of England but, in Rousseau’s phrase, preferring to be “strangers among the citizens”. I knew these people and liked them and spent many pleasant hours in their company; but I thought that their exclusiveness, whether it was intended or not, was a great mistake and a mistake that I ought to avoid. On the other hand it was idle to suppose that I could either pretend to be, or could really be, just like the other freshmen. I was always rather out of things. It might have been different, I daresay, had I been able to play rugger or to row in the boats, but I had chronic and hereditary trouble in both knees, and so had to avoid these things. Consequently I remained a little aloof, being extremely anxious not to do so. I am not a good mixer by temperament, and am fond of the joys of solitude. Except for Broad, who was later to become so eminent in philosophy, I had no close friends. I shall make some incidental remarks about life at Cambridge before I go 22 Cambridge on to say something about what I thought at the time of its philosophers and of their philosophy. The Union, as compared with the Edinburgh Union was a wholly different place – no billiards, no cards, and very little talk. Its austerity, however, was relieved by the copious light literature in its library. I and many others read a novel a day on the average. The debates I thought were good. I remember J. M. Keynes who was then a don and a past President though his brilliance at that time was harsh and his manner nervous and awkward. “Ronnie Knox”, as he was generally called, came over from Oxford and delighted us all with his humour. When I heard him many years later in the pulpit of a catholic cathedral it did not seem to me that his skill in preaching approached his skill in debate. Geoffrey Butler, a President of the Cambridge Union in my time, was also a delicate humourist; but he read his stuff. So did Norman Birkett if my memory does not deceive me. He had a great speech about the need for the revival of Puritanism in the country which he worked off at a Union debate after rousing his college (Emmanuel I think) on the subject. He never looked back and I have often gone to hear him at the King’s Bench, delighting in his masterly cross-examinations and comparing him then with what I remembered of him earlier. (I never heard him in a criminal trial and never attended one. I hated the idea of being present in such a grim place and could never accommodate myself to the idea that the verdict of guilt or innocence seemed to depend almost as much upon the barrister as upon the evidence). It was also rather marvellous to fi nd that so many eminent men were willing to take part in the Visitors’ Debate at the Union each term. In College the various small societies, frivolous, serious or frivolous-serious seemed, from what I saw of them, to be rather peculiarly admirable. I thought also that the sociality in term-time was not excessive, in short that most of the men had learnt how to mix work with friendliness during term and also to make due use of the vacations for study. That, at the time was one of the chief differences between Scottish and English University life. The English seemed to me to be the masters of their own technique. Another important contrast was that in Cambridge we had examinations but once a year. In Scotland we were lucky if we avoided an examination (probably trumpery) for so much as a clear fortnight. Scottish students, in consequence, were much better versed in the tricks and low cunning of examinations; but they were little the better for that and, on a long view, much the worse. I had very little personal acquaintance with the men of my time who later became most famous. I saw, but did not meet, Rupert Brooke, looking very Autobiography of a Scots Professor 23 splendid with his golden hair and fresh complexion though perhaps rather too plump for an ideal poet. We had no doubts in our minds about his fame even then. Similarly I did not meet Lytton Strachey, who was senior to me (though he came up pretty often), and had his future as a man of letters still before him. His sparse reddish beard, and his gaunt shambling frame were very defi nitely noticeable whether he were paddling a punt or strolling on the Backs with a friend. I saw something of Flecker (who came up from Oxford for a term). He admired Broad and had to endure Broad’s friend. It may be guessed that I didn’t like him, though I suppose there was a lazy profundity in about half of what he said. I think he was afraid of the phthisis to which he succumbed so early. One quaint little incident seems to stick like a burr in my memory. I was dragged by someone or other to some kind of society that was airing its anti-female-suffrage views. The argument seemed to be that politics always depended on face, and so that the forcible sex should alone have the vote. This batch of opponents of women’s suffrage was composed almost entirely of Jews. I like Jews for the most part, but I didn’t like these ones. They seemed to be grim and personally unmartial. I disputed their thesis on philosophical grounds, little thinking of the era of violence that was to come so swiftly and to last for so long. But let me turn to Cambridge philosophy (if I may use the singular) as I thought of it at the time. The lectures had rather a loose relation to the Tripos questions, although, of course they had some relation. That, I hold, is as it should be except in the case of beginners who should, in general, be drilled though not in mnemonics. The scope of the Tripos examinations was very restricted as compared with Scotland, but the examination itself was correspondingly more exacting and more fi nicking. I think that Part II of the Tripos was quite defi nitely over-specialised. Indeed people from other schools could and did take it in a single year, knowing no philosophy to start with, and if they were bright and industrious could extort a fi rst-class. Eminent people like Moore and Russell did so; but others also who could never approach eminence. For my part if I had to examine a Moore or a Russell I would give him a fi rst class with a star if his actual study of the subject had been confi ned to a single Long Vacation, but I would not give a fi rst to a merely talented candidate unless he had adequate, and therefore prolonged preparation. If the nature of the examination tied the examiner’s hands in this matter, so much the worse for the examination. 24 Cambridge

Our contacts with our teachers were much friendlier, more personal and even more collaborative than in Scotland. That was due in part to the smallness of the philosophy school at Cambridge. But only in a small part. In the main it was the tradition of the place in all Triposes. It was also very healthy to see that none of my teachers, Ward, J. M. Keynes, McTaggart, Johnson, Sorley and Myers agreed with one another though they tried not to parade their differences in front of their pupils. All however seemed to be very nearly united on two points. The fi rst was that outside Cambridge there was very little . There was Bradley at Oxford, and Ward would have included some Germans as well as M. Bergson; but Ward was the only one who conceded so much (Moore and Russell were not at Cambridge when I went up but I am counting them for present purposes as Cambridge philosophers). The second point was that inside Cambridge all the teaching philosophers were very good (though McTaggart made at least one reservation). The essential difference between Cambridge philosophy and Edinburgh philosophy was that in Cambridge one took it for granted that the problem was the thing, in Edinburgh one took it for granted that tradition and background were pretty nearly everything. I am exaggerating slightly, of course. Even in Cambridge, traditional philosophy did come in. It was tradition, in the main, that had selected the problems that we attacked. Tradition had underlined their centrality. Nobody in Cambridge tackled brand-new problems hitherto neglected by all mankind. Nevertheless the attempt to isolate, track and kill single problems instead of attempting to reach a general, massive and rather tepid “system” that would answer almost every problem, or at any rate enable one to speak in a superior way about every special topic and argument, was quote distinctive, and was not the attitude of a traditionalist although it may very well have been the attitude of the dii majores in the tradition itself. The problem-tacklers felt very much alive. It may be doubted whether the traditionalists ever did. In Cambridge one thought one was seeing (philosophical) things and going (philosophical) places. It was not that we thought that so-and-so had settled such-and-such a problem for ever or that we might do so, although even that idea might occur. The point was that we seemed to have landed in a manageable fi eld, and not to be bathed in a vague if superior atmosphere. And starting from the problems – no doubt carefully selected – we seemed to be dealing with something that mattered in spite of (or perhaps because of) the austerity of its abstraction. Is esse percipi? If so, Autobiography of a Scots Professor 25 what about tables and electrons and one’s friends and oneself? No evasions please. No solemn remarks about what somebody said about what Reid said about Berkeley. Is the “will” free or isn’t it? If it isn’t must we be fatalists, and, if not, why not? No quibbling please. Say “Yes” or “No” if you can, and if you can’t, explain why in the world you can’t. Here be straight problems. Try to keep your thinking straight. It was a slap-dash method, perhaps, and very different from the labyrinthine methods of modern analysts who prefer geodesics to Euclidean straightness, and, I daresay, are nearer the light than we were. But it was a heartening business. In my time James Ward was recovering from an operation. He lectured very seldom and only to students for Part II. My acquaintance with him, all too brief, came after I had left Cambridge. I wish I had known him in his prime. In his age he seemed to me a miracle of candour, a saint among intellectuals, sometimes harsh, seldom urbane, but always a man. McTaggart was the man who infl uenced us most. His unusual appearance did him no harm. He had several double chins at the time I am speaking of, and was much too corpulent for a man in the early forties. He was odd in his gait, I believe, from some species of mild agoraphobia. He was even more untidy than most of the dons. On his tricycle, his only form of exercise, he added to the gaiety of Cambridge. Seated on his chair, and sunk in his double chins, he contrived to look like a fatted mystic, as an excellent photograph by Mottram showed. It was published, and McTaggart was very proud of it. This oddity in his appearance had something to do with notoriety that he certainly achieved and, I think, rather liked. I have always understood that they made him President of the Union on the strength of one captivating and successful speech, but half in jest since he looked so quaint. As a lecturer he perambulated incessantly and very stumpily, reading the while from foolscap manuscript. In debate he was sharp and determined to score, but he was also profound in about ten per cent of his successful rejoinders, and he had a curious way of convincing his interlocutors that there was some sort of world-signifi cance in the logic that he chopped so often and with such gusto. Cambridge used to fl ock to his popular lectures at the beginning of every session. They were always the same lectures, and the fl ock was also the same. It invariably came near to vanishing before the course was through. Yet the thing was a triumph. For the course was on metaphysics, and not on cheap metaphysics although sometimes it was cheaply illustrated. It was, so to say, an institutional course in Cambridge. McTaggart was a Hegelian – some would say “Heaven knows why”. He was 26 Cambridge certainly very unlike most Anglo-Hegelians, and he was English all through. But he was also both a rationalist and a mystic (as perhaps Hegel was) and had a passionate determination to prove the diuturnity of the human soul, including the soul of John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, both before the birth and after the death of that historical person. (Since he wanted something deeper than time I suppose I should speak about super-diuturnity, scholastic aevum only rather more so). Impelled by this desire and convinced that nothing but rigorous proof could satisfy it, the English with which he began (namely, J. S. Mill’s which he devoured at Clifton) was entirely useless to him. A very high-fl ying idealism was his only resource. This he found in Hegel who was nothing if not ambitious. Having found it he took an impish pleasure in showing, or in trying to show, how very wrong most Anglo-Hegelians were. McTaggart made himself into a profound and exact commentator upon every part of Hegel’s philosophy that really interested him, and delighted in turning the current English notions about Hegel inside out. For him the was Hegel and was a genuine and quite special logical instrument. For the others it was little more than a device. For him the wooliness of Hegel was superfi cial and easily discounted. He thought that the others (excepting Bradley in three pages of his Logic) were all wool. For him Hegel was a spiritual pluralist; for the others a watery monist. So McTaggart, as I say, turned the other Hegelians inside out, I won’t say upside down. If I did, I should be suggesting that McTaggart was rather like Marx, and there never was a pair of philosophers more unlike one another than McTaggart and Marx. McTaggart had no followers, or as good as none, and he did not expect to have any. His great infl uence (which extended throughout his teaching career at Trinity) was in method, not in doctrine. There was a keen dialectical tang in the air whenever McTaggart was about. No other classroom was half as stimulating. That is true even of his lectures on the history of philosophy which were poor unless he happened himself to be interested in the man he was discussing. I told McTaggart something of the sort in later years (omitting the qualifi cation). McTaggart said that he hoped it was so, and that, if it was so he had indeed been successful. He had. Broad and I attended a short course of lectures from him that was, in fact, the embryo of his later magnum opus The Nature of Existence. The course was called “The Dialectic of Existence”. I don’t suppose that our criticisms had much effect upon McTaggart, or that they deserved to have; but Hegel’s dialectic, in its stricter sense, was hedged about with several reservations in the completed work. Autobiography of a Scots Professor 27

Moore and Russell were McTaggart’s most brilliant pupils, and there is no doubt about his infl uence upon them. Both are dialecticians. They practised their dialectic upon McTaggart when they were undergraduates, pitting Bradley against McTaggart. That was the natural course of events. They opposed McTaggart within narrow limits, and Bradley was the only English contemporary that McTaggart respected. Moore and Russell, however, developed a philosophy of their own, Moore being the originator, Russell after he had become a rather tardy convert produced his great Principles of Mathematics in 1903 and so inaugurated a forward movement in analytical philosophy that has continued ever since. In my time Moore’s ideas, backed up by Russell’s achievements had captured young Cambridge. We thought, rather parochially, that the pair of them were a match for the rest of the world. In my fi rst years at Cambridge they infl uenced us entirely in absentia, but Russell returned to Trinity in my last year, having expatriated himself for some seven years in Oxford, and Moore returned shortly after I left. We welcomed Russell with the loyal admiration one accords to a prince and a great man. He on his part, if not altogether modest, was frank and friendly and aristocratically uncondescending. We hung upon his lips which at that time were protected by a luxuriant black moustache. (I think he made a mistake when he abolished it, and came to look too much like the March hare in Tenniel’s pictures in Alice). At the time he had just completed his admirable Problems of Philosophy and was engaged upon Principia Mathematica with Whitehead who came up spasmodically from London for the purpose, having ceased to be a Trinity don. We had the felicity of admiring Whitehead’s Victorian looks, and of enjoying his gentle and witty conversation. But Russell was our idol. His manner of lecturing seemed to us to be, as indeed it was, perfect in a diffi cult kind. It was easy, gay, witty, telling, lucid, orderly and instructive. He gave some of us, and not necessarily the best of us, precious uncovenanted hours of private unpaid tuition à deux in his rooms in Nevile’s Court. He kept open rooms for us on Thursday evenings. There was never a better host. I don’t pretend that I mastered Russell’s philosophy – which was changing rapidly – or Moore’s – where the changes were slower. Indeed I suppose that my reaction was rather crude. I thought that Moore and Russell had, at long last, put a stop to the overweening pretension of , that is to say to a tendency that had overshadowed three centuries of European philosophy, the idea, namely, that a study of the ways of knowing was not only the best 28 Cambridge but also the only legitimate method of trying to understand the ways of being. “Know thyself. Thus shalt thou know the world”. These authors, I thought, had defl ated epistemology in a salutary way, by abating its excessive presumption while at the same time leaving it a legitimate sphere. Minds, I held, were minds and could know; but they didn’t mentalise anything by the mere fact of knowing it, and there was no reason why they could not know quite non-mental things “as they are in themselves”. The result was to emancipate metaphysics. If were composed of spiritual beings (as it might be), the thing had to be proved by arguments that were not epistemological. Our understanding might make , but it need to make Nature. The universe might be super-spiritual as well as super-material. It might contain much that was neither mind nor matter. It might, in large tracts of it, be sub-material. The gates were opened and philosophers, entering them, need not enter them in epistemological blinkers. In substance I still retain these crude opinions, though I have a better understanding now of the reasons that incline so many philosophers to fi nd them dissatisfying. When I was at Cambridge I had no doubts at all. To say, as Bradley and Joachim both said, that these things were half-true, the sort of matter-of-course, that had to be considered but overcome, seemed to me to be an evasion or worse, I believed them just to be true. So I became a Cambridge realist, pattern 1910. I tried to dispel what I thought were the mists of my previous training, hoping to discern a few clear outlines and content if I came anywhere near to doing so. I retained my interest in the history of wide ideas, but declined to admit that these should be my major interest. That is what I still think about myself. I tend to choose a largish theme, and then I poke about with a smallish torch. Some philosophers, I suppose, are born, not made. Many of my friends have told me about the intimations of metaphysics that gleamed through their childhood. A of my acquaintance (who is a poetess and also a mother) thinks that metaphysics should be one of the early school subjects. I can recall no such early intimations, expect a tiny one about dreams. I dreamed very little as a child, and I dream quite seldom now. As a small child, the word “dream” conveyed only a hearsay meaning to me. But one night I woke up suddenly having “seen” (as I thought) a grenadier with a red hat in my room. It came upon me like a fl ash that there had been no solider in the room. But how could I have seen a red hat in the room when there was no red hat there? It must have been a dream; and lo! I had discovered what other people meant by dreaming. I was vastly excited; but I don’t remember any other occasion on which I was Autobiography of a Scots Professor 29 a metaphysical boy. When I read Berkeley as a student I simply assumed that he was wrong, and that his ingenious paradoxes (as I thought them) were just academic playthings. In short I was a made, not a born philosopher if ever there was one. Philosophy has now become second nature to me, and a second nature more engrossing than the fi rst; but the process was slow and was not in an advanced stage even after I had done with Cambridge. For the most part, people with a philosophical bent come to the study of serious philosophy along one or other of two roads. One of these roads is the road of the sciences. There are some minds who fi nd the perplexities, and still more frequently the unadmitted perplexities of the sciences a gadfl y that stings them into wider speculations. My friend Broad was one of them; but I had no scientifi c education or as good as none. So I did not belong to this particular class. The other road is religious-theological. Men turn to philosophy in the hope of resolving their doubts about Christianity. That did not happen to me. I had no troublesome doubts about this subject because I had no active beliefs to perturb. What I heard about such things never seemed to me to be more than a fairy story. Therefore atheism and agnosticism neither alarmed me nor excited me. It is true that I “joined the Church” when I was about seventeen, and so had to make some tepid acknowledgement of personal belief. The thing seemed to me a formality like standing up when the band played “God Save the King”. In a wider way, I daresay, my philosophy, such as it was, had a theological origin. I was at least familiar with what was said about these deep matters, and was nourished on the metaphysics of them. When my father talked to us seriously he talked theology. God, he would tell us, had put us into the world for a purpose. We ought to try to fathom that purpose, as well as to play up to it. That sort of statement used to impress me despite my lack of conviction. But it was not till I was fi fty and writing Gifford lectures that the strength of theism as a metaphysics began to impress me. I found its impressiveness rather disturbing. One interesting part of my time at Cambridge was a rather frequent set of trips to London where I learned how the rich lived. The reason was that I had a wealthy uncle there, and could enjoy his table and his pictures and the luxury of the place as well as some quite expensive amusements of the town. There was also his shooting in Scotland although I had had some experience of that before. I wouldn’t like to be rich, and I would not envy the life of Edwardian merchant (retired) if such a way of life could ever happen again. But I am glad to have known what it was like. After my uncle died (in 1911) two 30 Cambridge of his brothers who were bachelors kept on the establishment but gradually let it fall into decay. The elder of them lived till 1935 after which I inherited some of the pictures and a share of the remnants of a much depleted fortune. So I was affl uent for a few years before the second Great War. That was pleasant too, although, if even that modest degree of comfort will never recur to British rentiers, I cannot think that they have any just reason for complaint. All the same they may have regrets. IV St Andrews

While still at Cambridge I had agreed to go to St Andrews to assist A. E. Taylor, the Professor of Moral Philosophy there. I began work in October 1911. At the same time, Broad, who had just been elected a Fellow of Trinity, also went to St Andrews to assist G. F. Stout the Professor of Logic. We began rather sumptuously since St Andrews was celebrating its fi ve hundredth anniversary – its Quingenary as Punch called it. In an academic sense, and in most other senses, no expense was spared. There were, for instance over eighty honorary graduates including Asquith himself and, in philosophy Diels, McTaggart and Royce – “a preachy old boy” as Taylor called him. We heard Rosebery orate (reading his manuscript) and we heard Balfour speak – an unprepared effort that seemed always to be about to get going and never did. (In general, when Balfour spoke in public about philosophy he would spend about twenty minutes in waiting for ideas to come, and then, for ten minutes or so, would be really brilliant. On this occasion, however, he wasn’t speaking about philosophy). Asquith wasn’t asked to speak at all. It would seem that Prime Ministers were cheap at a quincentenary. We had an enormous banquet, or rather a banquet at which an enormous number of banqueters were present. I would have been a very good banquet if food didn’t have a tendency to cool. That was in September, before the session started, and St Andrews in its ancient, comely and delicately sober grey looked even more adorable than usual. McTaggart, I remember, greatly admired the red gowns of the students. In Cambridge he said only the doctors had their red gowns, and very few of them had the complexions that the colour demanded. In those days there was a dignity about St Andrews that it has since partly lost. Its subsequent growth has been its aesthetic misfortune. Even the least perceptive of philosophers must have sensed that dignity. There is a very keen pleasure in emerging from a position of tutelage and in becoming a salaried worker. In those days, too, an assistant was expected to work for his £150 a year. Owing to a change in regulations several classes had to be split up and had to study different programmes. So I had complete charge of one of the ordinary graduating classes for two terms out of three. I had also 32 St Andrews to correct all the essays and examination papers of Taylor’s larger graduating class, and, in the summer, to take over quite an appreciable part of the honours course. After some ups and downs at the beginning, the downs being rather low, Taylor began to be fairly confi dent that things were going well enough. Students of St Andrews, I think, have a deeper and naiver loyalty towards their University than in any other place in these islands unless it be Trinity College in Dublin. There is no division of loyalties between university and college as there is in Cambridge. For in St Andrews the “colleges” (excepting Dundee) have retained no corporate sense to speak of. As compared with other Scottish University towns, the students’ loyalties are not dispersed by the size of the cities in which they reside. I allow that nothing could be more idolatrous than the attitude of most Glasgow students towards Gilmorehill. But Glasgow is a big place. Tram, railway and bus estrange, despite the warmth of Glasgow hearts and the febrile temperature of Glasgow enthusiasms. I hardly think that the residential system that St Andrews has recently developed much more fully than anywhere else in Scotland will intensify this loyalty. In my time there were no residences except the women’s. All the same, the men, in all effective senses, lived corporatively just as much as in a Cambridge college. They “bunked” and “co-bunked” within a very restricted area. Again the juniors among the teachers were friends and acquaintances of the students, much as young dons were at Cambridge. (And the girl students should not be forgotten). It was a good place for assistants and lecturers and their kind. Regarding Professors and other seniors the story may be more complicated. There were very bitter feuds between some of the professors (and between their families). A small place favours such feuds and makes their concealment impossible. Some professors had to cut other professors dead for a lifetime, and one knew one had to exercise a certain caution if one spoke about Professor X to Professor Y. Apart from such serious trouble, however, the wheels of life turned very smoothly even for Professors. There were small informal clubs. There was much friendliness among the teachers without respect to rank, and although the St Andrean habit of ranking every single professor, lecturer or assistant, after a few months’ probation, as either a world-leader or an illiterate goose was almost incredibly naive, there were compensations when swan met swan, as happened on every pavement. It took some time before I passed for a swan, and I was never quite so swan-like as some. But in about three months I was a kind of a swan. I gained a great deal by the change from Cambridge to St Andrews. On Autobiography of a Scots Professor 33 earlier pages I have spoken of the contrast between traditionalism and problem- tackling in my philosophical itinerary. At St Andrews I was introduced for the fi rst time into the vigorous working atmosphere of another and of a better kind of traditionalism, a live traditionalism in which the great masters, being dead, are supposed to speak for all time and incidentally to our present age. In that sort of traditionalism Taylor was unequalled in these islands. And, in the matter of Greek philosophy, did not live just beside the harbour? When I was his assistant, Taylor had abandoned his excursions into general philosophy, where his Elements of Metaphysics – a sort of Bradley-for- the-million combined with much informative vivacity about contemporary scientifi c philosophy – had earned its unusual success. He had turned to the main interest of his irrepressible literary career, the re-discovery (as he thought) of the historical and of the historical Socrates, of the Platonic tradition, and of the unconscious of the modern world. Here he out-Burneted Burnet, but without very much active discussion with Burnet. More suo, he imposed a certain strain upon his interlocutors who were expected to make intelligent remarks about Greek dowries, or any other sweeping from the Platonic epistles. But even if one couldn’t help, one could admire and be excited. I had never met, or at any rate had never known a philosopher to whom the Greek or any other past philosophy had been the burning heart of present existence, fresher than the morning’s news. A traditionalism of that kind, especially when combined with such a range and versatility of application would stir the intellectual pulses of the humblest. Besides, Taylor was much more than a Grecian with a darting eye for all the Atticisms of the modern world. He refreshed himself continually from many other wells in the philosophical and cultural tradition, and, at the time I am recording, had become engrossed in another of his major interests, St Thomas Aquinas. There we did not try, or pretend to try, to follow him; but he seemed to assume, quite undaunted, that we were respectable medievalists as well as passable Grecians. He always spoke as if his own enthusiasms extended over all the literate earth. We, for our parts, thought that Taylor’s excitement about St Thomas was just an aspect of his attitude towards Christian theology and the Christian religion, an attitude that we didn’t share. In his boyhood, I believe, Taylor had been a Methodist lay preacher, or as much of one as a boy was permitted to be. Not very much later he became a high-church Episcopalian, a member of the Church Catholic though never a Roman Catholic. In our eyes that was an eccentricity but I dare say that our eyes were holden. We were not greatly moved by Taylor’s new . 34 St Andrews

I shall never forget these days of my assistantship. On any given afternoon, and there were very few afternoons when Taylor did not walk and talk with his assistant as a matter of kindly course, the odds were that one discussed Greek medicine, Dante’s genius, the character of Bishop Bonner and the delight that was Max Beerbohm. Mrs Taylor would join us at tea-time and conduct a cross conversation about Dickens and Anthony Trollope. Some quick thinking was necessary to keep both streams of conversation going, and I fear that I did not always mix my “Yes’s” and my “No’s” quite accurately. In that case there was a lull, sometimes a surprised lull, but not for long. For self-protection I read rather widely at that time. G. F. Stout, one of the chief British philosophers of his generation was, as I have said, the Professor of Logic at St Andrews. He also was a traditionalist but always, in intention, a constructive traditionalist. I once knew a man who, being offered some books to read when stranded in a country cottage went to bed because, as he said morosely “he had read all books”. That, in a way, was Stout’s attitude towards philosophy. He had read and mastered (as he thought) all the books that mattered in the two thousand years of philosophy’s mature history. Selecting from the chief of them (and his preferences were for Locke, Leibniz and Kant) he had elaborated an independent philosophy that they had nurtured, not forgetting the psychological foundations of the subject. Little except the psychology, it is true, had been published. Little of it, except a belated volume of Giffod Lectures (re-typed about half a dozen times) was destined to be published. The point was that the truth was there, unmodifi able except in detail. Stout had grasped the right end of the right stick. The gods had sheltered Stout from his cradle in South Shields. They had fashioned him on a minute physical scale, with hands and feet to correspond and without making the head too large. There was nothing indecently intellectual about the look of the head; but it was a very good head indeed. Despite their kindness, the gods had allowed him to become deaf very early; but he used his deafness adroitly. Especially in debate, where he heard just what he wanted to answer. Indeed the gods had been niggardly to his special senses, those special senses that he discussed so faithfully in his psychology. His eyesight, in particular was very bad – he suffered from cataract in later years, and I have seen him reading a detective story line by line with the aid of two pairs of strong glasses and a special reading lamp. In this respect he showed the greatest patience and the greatest fortitude. In the main, however, he was so obviously unfi tted for the hurly-burly of life that he attained a position of privilege by a sort of natural right. Autobiography of a Scots Professor 35

In himself, his resources were vast. What he could have done for himself when he was by himself, I do not know. When I fi rst knew him over a dozen years had passed since Mrs Stout had left the benches of his psychology class- room to share his life, to teach him the use of the bicycle, to mother him as well as to make him a father, to type for him, to search in the waste paper basket for contributions to Mind that had gone astray, and to induce a semblance of punctuality in his editing of that journal. Good, honest, bustling, Stout- conscious Mrs Stout. We used to smile at the self-suffi ciency of the Stout household. But its self-suffi ciency was so frank and so little ashamed that it was accepted as something too natural to amuse except in an idle hour, and it was combined with the greatest kindness to all juniors and, indeed, to all others. Stout used to perch himself on the arm of a chair, sitting cross-legged upon it. So poised, he would placidly expound the most breath-taking generalisations about the universe. As one gasped, the calm obstinate clever voice went steadily on. There was no shaking his inner imperturbability, and although he liked to score in debate and was very well qualifi ed for doing so one felt that such trivial successes were only the by-products of a going concern. I should also like to say something about David Morrison, another member of the philosophy teaching-staff at St Andrews. Morrison’s career was like that of an old-timer among Scottish University teachers than it was like anything modern. I have always understood that he went to St Andrews at a later age than most undergraduates, and that even then he assumed the air of a man of the world. After a student career that (I suppose) was respectable he was unable to fi nd a profession that suited his genius, and, having just enough private means to support him frugally, he settled down in St Andrews to a few odd jobs such as examining and helping Stout with the editing of Mind. His principal employment was to be an arm- chair critic of those who had posts in the University. A year or two before I went to St Andrews he had been assimilated, being then forty or so, into the St Andrews teaching staff and taught logic there, relieving Stout of most of the work of the Ordinary Class. Stout had little interest in that body and, besides, could seldom be heard owing to the continuous concert that went on unreproved by the deaf Professor. Later Morrison became successively University Lecturer (after Broad) in Dundee and, when Taylor went to Edinburgh, Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews. During my time at St Andrews Morrison found it was harder to teach than 36 St Andrews to criticise other teachers. Consequently, although he taught well enough, he was more subdued than he had been before and than he became at a later date. On the other hand he was a sort of magnet for the junior teachers, holding court in his comfortable house till all hours of the morning, and expressing opinions, mostly romantic, with immense emphasis, in a voice that almost anyone could mimic afterwards in a way that had to be recognised. As a professed man of the world he had little competition in the ; and it was true that he had seen a good many European cities and visited a good many theatres. The truth was, however, that Morrison never went on a journey, even to Cupar or to Dundee, without encountering some adventure that continued to gain in the telling until it was superseded by another of the like kind. Everything he did was magnifi ed and everything he suffered (for he had ailments like other people) was magnifi ed still more. Paratyphoid was the least of his complaints and he once explained that he must have been quite seriously ill because the doctor had diagnosed rigor mortis. In his last years the shadow of his infi rmities was long and black and grim. He had had two strokes, or, as he said, he was “two down with one to go”. Even then, however, he narrative impulse found ample scope and he would tell of the amazement of the medical profession in Bath at his journey there “with over an ounce of undigested blood in my brain”. At the end he gave up his house and lived uncomfortably in rooms. He collected debts in a way that would have affrighted most people, though I don’t think he had much conscience about them. I was only a year at St Andrews, but I often went back to it on one pretext or another or on no pretext. The more I saw of it, the more I liked it. Indeed I liked the place very much better after I had ceased to be domiciled in it professionally. A part of this was sentimental. I began my professional career at St Andrews and as I have said, enjoyed the beginnings of responsibility, even if the said responsibility was not very grand. It was something for instance to belong to the same profession as, say, Bosanquet and Sir James Frazer, both of whom came to St Andrews at that time, Bosanquet on a visit from Edinburgh where he was Gifford Lecturer and Sir James Frazer who was Gifford Lecturer at St Andrews. Bosanquet’s distinction of person and of manner was inescapable, but I made a gaffe, I remember, by attempting to fi nd something good in Proportional Representation. Frazer (and Lady Frazer who was very deaf, an enthusiast for French plays and a tout for her productions of the same) were less impressive and I didn’t attend many of Frazer’s lectures. So far as I can Autobiography of a Scots Professor 37 recall, they dealt with some particularly bloody cults that were supposed to have something to do with the idea of immortality. Another privilege was membership of the Scots Philosophical Club which included all teachers of the subject in Scottish Universities ex offi cio. Nowadays I fi nd no particular thrill in attending its meetings although the discussion is usually better than in most other similar societies, and although they are preceded by a dinner that is almost always pleasant. At the beginning, however, I was an enthusiast. Perhaps the level of discussion was higher. Perhaps interest was enhanced by the presence of famous men, such as A. J. Balfour and Haldane who usually attended the meeting at Christmas time. I well remember the fi rst meeting I attended. It was in Edinburgh and Stout was to have given the paper. But Stout was lazy and persuaded Broad to deputise for him. Broad, who was then writing his fi rst book, refused to take the occasion too seriously, and read us a college paper about McTaggart’s views about time which he had written for McTaggart himself some years before. McTaggart’s views about time were elaborate and closely argued and not at all well known outside Cambridge. In short Broad’s was a very esoteric performance. Broad’s paper was shortish for him. It took less than an hour to read. When he had fi nished Haldane remarked that there was often an awkward pause on such occasions. So he himself would step into the time-breach. He proceeded, as if from the Woolsack to give a summary of Broad’s argument and took fully three quarters of an hour to do it. The summary wasn’t quite accurate. Under the circumstances complete accuracy would have been a miracle. But it was an astonishing effort of memory. Having given his summary Haldane left the meeting, After all he was a Minister of the Crown. Balfour remained, as he would have done whether in or out of offi ce. As always, his remarks were as keen as a blade. As a dialectician in philosophy he outshone the professionals, and with ease. V Nova Scotia

In the early summer of 1912, news went round that Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia wanted to acquire a Professor of Philosophy from this side of the Atlantic. There was no advertisement; but there were feelers. Various “kennt men” in Scotland, as Stevenson’s Alison would say, were being asked to give advice, and each was addressed as if he were the only referee. One such person in Edinburgh told my father that he was recommending me. Subsequently he changed his mind and recommended Bowman of Glasgow instead. He did not tell my father about this slight alteration. It didn’t matter. I never counted unhatched chickens, even when I could see no good reason against their incubation. Another incident of this kind was rather more amusing. The Scots Philosophical Club met in Aberdeen that summer, and Baillie, the Professor of Moral Philosophy there, very kindly asked me to stay with him in his luxurious house at Norwood. Another guest was John Watson of Kingston who was then giving Gifford Lectures in Glasgow. Watson was all compact of bluntness and honesty. He had been an honest stonemason, I believe, before he went to the University of Glasgow as a student; he was an honest philosopher when he turned to that subject. But there was plenty of blunt candour about this visit. Watson offended his hostess, I remember, by telling her that “the inferior sex” was indeed excluded when she complained, pro forma, that the Club had no gallantry about it, being then exclusively male when it dined. He also found me very trying. I argued with him, not very wisely and, I suspect, not very well, but certainly volubly, subjecting him to a sharp and varied bombardment of Cambridge realism, a type of philosophy which he detested because he thought it was all a sham, and, what was more, a treacherous sham. Baillie was benign, and very much amused. At the end of the visit, Watson told me that he understood I was thinking of going to Dalhousie, and that he would recommend me. I passed the matter over lightly, believing he was just being generous. But Watson, honest man, could not be generous in any casual way. He was, in fact, the plenipotentiary in the business. Looking back on this incident, I think he put up with a good Autobiography of a Scots Professor 39 deal, had the sense to distinguish between the impertinence of keenness and the impertinence of a merely swollen head, and that he had the supreme intellectual virtue of being able to suspect that even his most cherished convictions might, after all, be mistaken. So I didn’t think much of my Canadian prospects and went up to Cambridge for the Long. It was time for me to write. I had at least to fulfi l the conditions for the Shaw Fellowship, and give a course of lectures in Edinburgh. I meant to publish the lectures, and also thought I might submit them for a Trinity Fellowship. I had decided to write about personality and I thought, rather too easily perhaps, that I had sound ideas on the subject even if they weren’t very new. I agreed with Descartes that the self was immaterial. A mere negative however was of little moment. There might be much in the universe that was neither physical nor mental. What was important, therefore, was to describe the actual integrity of selves, and so to distinguish them from all else that was, or might be, non-physical. I thought that this could be done. The stuff of our minds, I thought, was just our acts of attending, desiring and the like. These were just what we experienced them to be – not “sub-conscious” since the sub- conscious was sub-intelligible. They always formed a personal unity, even if there were temporal gaps during sleep and trances. That, I laboured to say, yielded a perfectly good sense of our immaterial “substantiality”, and the principal thing that had to be done was to avoid fi ctitious descriptions that had obscured the whole topic, for example a “self ” that “owned” its experiences but was not they, or a “pure” ego that was contrasted with an “empirical me”. I had no more sympathy with the last of these than I had with the notion of contrasting a pure metaphysical sandbag with an empirical non-metaphysical sandbag. I agreed with Bradley that a self that pretended to be more than its “psychical fi lling” was a “mere monster” but I also thought that Bradley’s objection to the sort of self that was not a monster were ill-grounded. I thought, and I still think that it was quite important to put these ideas upon paper, although the justifi cation, of course, depended upon what one put upon the paper. Commonplace ideas may rise above the commonplace if their exposition is faithful and patient and, with luck, acute. I thought I might be able to express myself very soberly and very clearly, and I had a useful lesson about that at this time. At St Andrews I had supposed that it was quite easy to produce work about as good as appeared in the current philosophical journals. One had only to sit down and write, as one might write an examination paper. So I sat down and wrote. I found, however, that more than one editor was 40 Nova Scotia very sticky. They said they couldn’t publish anything so badly arranged. I had to rewrite the thing four times before it eventually appeared (in the International Journal of Ethics). That experience was salutary. Well I went to Cambridge in the heat of summer, and began to write for many hours a day in my shirt sleeves. But I had only about a fortnight of that. Bowman accepted a post at Princeton where he was to teach brilliantly for many years. I was appointed to the post at Halifax. I was to sail in a few weeks. So I said Good bye to composition for the time being; and to my slender hopes of a Trinity Fellowship for ever. While I was at Cambridge I had rather sparingly fed my appetite for foreign travel in the summers, but I had never gone on a long voyage, and the crossing of the Atlantic, although not really a long voyage, seemed to be something of an adventure. It was longer and more adventurous than some Atlantic voyages. Very few boats, and these small, called at Halifax in the summer. I sailed on one of them, a 5000-ton vessel called the Mongolian in mid-August. About half an hour after we had left our dock in the Mersey, the cable attached to our tug broke and we buried the ship’s nose on a mudbank. We got off on the next tide with the aid of a dozen tugs or more, but had to put back to dry-dock in Liverpool and so had two days’ delay. After that we took twelve days to reach Newfoundland. There were very strong head winds. One day we only made forty knots. The voyage, I suppose, was very uncomfortable; for the boat was crowded. To me however it seemed almost luxurious and I had no more sea-sickness. The passengers were a mixed lot – Newfoundland people who seemed to me to be romantic because they lived in Newfoundland, a journalist taking his family to some crazy adventure in mid-Canada and presenting us all with some little books that he had published, some whose past seemed a mystery, several commercial travellers who could vamp on the piano and tell interminable smutty stories in the smoking room, some bridge fi ends, a French Canadian priest, a bride-to-be, and so forth. I think I composed some light verse, or what passed for such, that was sung at the ship’s concert. I know that I was in the highest of high spirits. When we dropped anchor in Newfoundland, slipping, as it seemed, through the narrowest rocky aperture and then seeing what looked like a town of cards in the bright sunshine, I felt gladdened by the new world. (But, for that matter I had been excited by the porpoises, blackfi sh and whales of the last twelve days). The Devonian- Scottish look of the island, and a short excursion over abominable roads took my fancy mightily. Autobiography of a Scots Professor 41

I don’t suppose I should have been intimidated had the population of Halifax been 100% Canadian, though I should have been saddened had it been obviously plutocratic or too obviously American. It was neither. The Maritime Provinces in those days were very much less Americanised than central Canada, and there was no ostentatious opulence. Indeed there was no opulence at all. There were also strong links with Britain, and, for that matter, with Scotland. The younger men, it is true, were Canadian schooled and bred. They spoke Canadian. They felt Canadian. They looked to the West or to the States for their careers. Their fathers, on the other hand, had very often been educated in England and still more frequently in Scotland. Nova Scotia was still in large part Caledonian. When I landed at Halifax of a pleasant Sunday afternoon, the President of the University and two of the Governors met me, drove me about in a car, fed me, whiskied me and deposited me at a hotel or boarding house near the Arm and not too far from the University. The President was a physicist called MacKenzie. He had been a professor in New York but he told me confi dentially that most people thought there was too much of the God- darned Britisher about him. It did not seem so to me. The two Governors had Scottish names and one of them had a Scottish tongue as well as strong Scottish sympathies. Birchdale – for that was the name of the boarding house – had a lovely site among the fi r trees. It was run by a genial Mr Bowes, formerly a journalist, or rather, I suppose it ran itself under his management. Bowes published a little journal for the place; and most of us contributed. By “us” I mean naval and military offi cers, an odd professor, a banker or two. I learned to play what might pass for bridge, being the weakest in a very good four that played every evening. I found the life very jolly, though my dislocable knees were a sad trial when the winter came. Even then, however, I found curling feasible and a grand game it was on the perfect surface of the (indoor) rinks. Professional ice-hockey was an entrancing game to watch. With the puck always in play (for it rebounded from the fence which was the touchline) the excitement never wavered and the feats of the players were astonishing to me. They would relax a yard or two from the fence, going at top speed, and take no hurt. They would jump over one another and if it came to a fi ght as it sometimes did the sharp- angled hockey sticks were desperate weapons. I had other relaxations too and even made a successful speech at a St Andrews dinner. I mention this because it was the only successful speech I ever made in my life. I still remember the 42 Nova Scotia joy of it. I told all the stories I had heard at St Andrews, an anecdotal place. The fi rst went off well, and all the rest was easy. Such recollections, I fear, are only chicken feed, and I have nothing full- grown or historical to record unless it be meeting Lord Milner. He was very reserved in his manner and when he mounted the platform made one of the worst speeches I have ever heard. He spent twenty minutes explaining that platform work was a perpetual torment to him, a fact that needed no explaining. Then, for the rest of the hour, he made apology for the misdeeds of F. E. Smith. He had to. Smith had been talking about Canadian elections, and had told the world that all Liberals were traitors. The Canadian liberals were hard to appease, and insisted that their brand of liberalism was their own affair. I may be expected to say something about Canadian education at the time. Well, I was in Canada for one session only, from September to April, and I have no records of the sojourn. So I hesitate to set down recollections that are rather hazy. Nova Scotia in those days was very much over-instituted. I think there were fi ve universities in the Maritime Provinces, and although amalgamations were in prospect (some of which have since occurred) the process was slow. At Dalhousie there were about 500 students in arts engineering, medicine and science. I forget about law but am not including the fl ourishing Presbyterian College at Pine Hill. I don’t remember whether Logic was compulsory or whether, through the infl uence of the Scottish tradition, it was just generally taken. In any case the elementary class in Logic was large – as I recall, over 70. The other (three) classes that I conducted were a good deal smaller. In addition I had three honours students, earnest young men, one of them lively, with an eye to an American career, perhaps in philosophy. My work, I remember, was rather pleasantly divided – Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, then a break till Wednesday afternoon and so on till Saturday morning. It appals me now to think of the amount of work I cheerfully took on – for I had never lectured on any of my four courses or on the honours work either. Still I had been well drilled, and just carried on with the day’s work. I meant to enforce the standards to which I had been accustomed in Scotland – at any rate according to the best of my belief. That was inconsiderate. The Halifax students had to take twelve courses for degree instead of seven as in Scotland. On the other hand, a Logic course on the Scottish plan is not above the capacity of any student who doesn’t slack; and lectures on the Autobiography of a Scots Professor 43 subject fall into an even tempo that, like brick-laying, is seldom hurried. My students at Halifax had not been very well taught in school, but no schools teach logic, and I did not fi nd them very different from the St Andrews men. I may have been too kind to them; for most of them passed. But that, in one way or another, happens in most Universities. On the whole I should have to admit that a young professor, younger than quite a large proportion of his students, without an external examiner to check him, with fl uid standards in the University, and working under pressure has a rather ampler discretion than is altogether wise. I am opposed to the system of appointing outside examiners. It paralyses by stereotyping the entire system of education in the region from which outside examiners are drawn. In the guise of fairness it casts a slur upon the individual teacher. If he is fi t to teach, he is fi t to assess the results, and although in practice the outside man nearly always accepts the views of the inside man, that working arrangement is not satisfactory. I allow, however, that there are cases in which an outside man has his advantages. As I have said, I believe that I decided fairly upon the elementary work. I am sure I was too lenient to the more advanced pupils. Regarding the honours students I decided in a way that with ampler experience I would have avoided. It is possible that my youthful criterion, namely evidence of ability with or without solid , was right in itself and capable of being pushed to extremes without great hurt. I have not heard how the men did in later life; but some of them, I think, had rather a raw deal at the start. The Faculty meetings at Dalhousie gave me my fi rst insight into University business. I have had plenty such experience now, and hold a low opinion of collective academic wisdom. A collection of academic experts, in my opinion, seldom forms a good academic team, especially on matters of general policy. A good many are incapable of appreciating any general principle at all, unless, perhaps in their own monographs. Very few appreciate the importance of consistency. Nearly all are fertile in objections, sometimes for the fun of the thing, sometimes for reasons that are only ostensibly public. On the whole I think that the Faculty meetings at Dalhousie compared rather favourably with most others. They were free and easy, and most of the members were part- time people with positions in the town and a habit of getting things done. The exceptional case was that in which local and personal interest plainly came in. One such case occurred in my time. It was very unpleasant and quite unashamed. I say this although I was only a spectator. I left Halifax in mid-April on the Royal Edward, the fi rst boat available after 44 Nova Scotia the session ended. That was not because I wanted to leave the place. On the contrary I would gladly have spent several years in it, including most of the summers. I still have an affection for it. I was just a miser of my time. I needed, I thought, a whole free summer to get on with my writing. Edinburgh had given me a year’s grace for my Shaw Lectures; but only a year was left, and the winter would be all too busy. I new saw Halifax again though I had some later glimpses of Canada. On this occasion, except for a pleasant visit to Toronto and Montreal at Christmas time and a solitary expedition to Sydney in Cape Breton Island (where I made a very bad speech) I had really seen very little except Halifax and its environs. When I left the ice was breaking in the Arm, and the changes in temperature were remarkable. Once there was a drop of fi fty degrees between my going to my afternoon lectures and my return from them two hours later. Despite that, I had a settled affection for the maritime provinces. VI Northern Ireland

I went to St Andrews to write my book, and despite an Amateur Championship and other distractions – I was not, of course, a competitor in the Championship – I made some progress. Soon it became known that all the world wanted to go to Belfast, that is to say all the juniors in British philosophy who wanted to better themselves. The Chair of Logic and Metaphysics in the Queen’s University of Belfast was vacant. I shared the general belief that he should push himself who could. In due course I was notifi ed that they wanted to interview me. Seven others – or was it eight – were told the same thing. The usual reason for so long a list is that nobody seemed to be outstanding. The expedition promised some amusement. I had never been offi cially interviewed before; I had never been in Ireland before; and my sister was doctoring in Lurgan where she was assistant surgeon at the infi rmary. So I went to Lurgan, fi nding great interest in rural Ireland, and in the “No surrender signs” which competed with King William on his white horse on the gable ends of so many houses. The most romantic thing about Lurgan, I think, is that it is near Lough Neagh. The interview duly took place. The day was fi ne. The candidates – most of whom were described by the porter as “gentlemen from abroad” – were or seemed to be very friendly towards one another, and were all, on the surface elaborately unconcerned about the result. I made my fi rst acquaintance with an Irish jaunting-car at the Great Northern Station, and was rather surprised to see a look of bewilderment on the driver’s face when I asked him to convey me to the University. After consulting his colleagues, who were also bewildered, he concluded that the University must be somewhere near University Road. So he drove me there, rather behind time, and made enquiries. He was at the University, and he laughed almost to suffocation. He had known the place all his life as the “Queen’s College”, and had not heard of its three-year-old acquirement of University status. I didn’t laugh since I was late. The interview itself may have been unusual. The President had paralysis agitans and shook his head all the time when he was questioning. How old 46 Northern Ireland was I? Twenty six. A shake of the head. What experience had I in teaching? Two years. Another shake of the head. Did I think I could keep order? Yes. The head shook even more. Everybody seemed to be very kind and rather commiserating. They knew very little about philosophy, and were obviously unwilling to give themselves away upon that subject. So the questions were desultory, and my answers, I am told, were very nervous. I could have sworn that I was carefree and entirely at ease. Certainly I had no burning desire to leave Canada or to live in turbulent Ulster. But a behaviourist would have said I was very nervous, and behaviourism I am told is all the fashion in psychology They reduced our numbers to three and adjourned for a week. H. O. Meredith, the Professor of Economics and an elector, very kindly invited the survivors and also the rejected to lunch at a restaurant. At that function there was rather less insouciance and rather less amity than before the decision. Most of us sailed by the afternoon boat. The sea was rough, and I was the only one of the party to remain on deck. My sister, who was crossing too, was alarmed at the appearance of one philosopher. But he recovered. A week later, and in my opinion quite against the weight of evidence, I was selected, and private information was sent round to Cambridge and to other places. But not to me. The committee’s decision had to be ratifi ed by the Senate whose next meeting was some weeks ahead. It was improper to say anything to me. So for a time I was being widely congratulated by people who knew more about the matter than I did. The ratifi cation was not a matter of course, but, after a row, the committee’s decision was upheld. So Good bye! to Nova Scotia. There was no inaugural lecture, but there was an informal inauguration ceremony. The incoming professor was seized and chaired by a mob of students, mostly not his own. I tried to escape by labyrinthine ways; but my guide, a porter, knew what he was about. So I was delivered to the customary ritual. They carried me through the streets to the great delight of a girl’s school and of its headmistress who stood by the window laughing. Her expression changed when they tried to deposit me in her school. Then the school took hasty defensive measures and, in the end, I was left in its grounds. Ulster in these days was strenuously resisting the threat of Irish Home Rule. I never saw the province calm in all the eleven years that I spent in it. First there was the Ulster Volunteers; then the Great War; then the murderous exploits of the I.R.A. But I doubt whether anyone now alive has seen or will see the province calm. I don’t suppose the Ulster Volunteers were ever intended to be a serious Autobiography of a Scots Professor 47 challenge to the British Empire. A remark that was made to me at the time by a strong supporter of the movement is evidence enough of that. Speaking of Winston Churchill he said “The bloody fellow now wants to take a gunboat to us”. The Volunteers were the outward and visible sign that Ulster was in earnest, or, at any rate, in greater earnest than a mere political struggle, however bitter, would warrant. Much might have happened (and much more than was intended) if the European War hadn’t put an end to the business. Even so the gun-running at Larne seemed to us to be intensely exciting and what people call “historical”. It is safe to say that there was less excitement in Ulster than about Ulster especially in foreign countries. I remember an incident that happened in Venice in the spring of 1914. I had gone there on a trip with my brother, and like other tourists was beguiled into watching the process of glass manufacture and eventually of making a purchase that I afterwards regretted. The salesman was aghast when he heard where I lived. “You live in Ulster. You live in Belfast. Now you are come here”. The enormity of the action almost overcame him, but, belatedly he remembered his manners. “I tink it is all right. Askveet he tink about it”. I don’t think these political disturbances made much difference to the spirits or to the application of my students. Outside the University one’s other acquaintances looked askance at any Briton, like myself, who did not conceal his liberalism however determined he might be to be professionally non- political. Such an one they either thought should be in with them, or get out and stay out. I was treated indulgently, however, by almost everyone though I have little doubt that I gave more provocation than I need have given. I found my students rather too docile but very willing to learn. I had only a handful of them, however. The University at that time had not succeeded in becoming the place of learning in Ulster. Those whose parents could afford it went to Trinity, Dublin, or to Oxford. The medical faculty in Belfast was large – about 500 students – but the other faculties were much too small for a large city and district. In Arts there were only about a hundred. What was worse from my point of view was that the University seemed to regard philosophy as a luxury. It had found its models in the North of England, in Liverpool, say, or in Leeds. That was hard on a philosopher who had been accustomed to Scotland and to Nova Scotia. Indeed the framers of the Arts curriculum in Belfast seemed to have suffered from schoolmaster’s myopia. They regarded the Arts Faculty in a University as the continuation of instruction in school subjects, and compelled fi ve-sevenths of the ordinary degree to consist of 48 Northern Ireland such subjects. One requirement was a double course in English. For that there may have been a partial justifi cation. The students with a few notable exceptions were ill-read in their own language. Ulster lived almost without libraries, for private libraries were few, and there were no Carnegie libraries as in Scotland. Nowadays I suppose, when people read so little and hear so much “on the air”, something approaching general illiteracy is characteristic of Scotland and of England as well as of Ulster. In 1913, however, Ulster was much more illiterate than Scotland – though it had some native writers of merit, and a fl ourishing stage. Nevertheless a University is not a continuation school, and I am confi dent that the curriculum was badly devised. My colleagues were interesting people. The most famous of them was Sir Samuel Dill, an Olympian from Ballymena, exported from Belfast to Corpus in Oxford. Dill had resigned the headmastership of Manchester Grammar School in a huff and was rather lucky to fi nd a vacancy in the Professorship of Greek at Belfast just when he sorely needed a job. That, however, was soon forgotten and all Ulster was proud of his fame as a writer and scholar. In himself he had a splendid urbanity, and his fascinating conversation matched the urbanity especially when he talked of Mark Pattison and and an Oxford that even in those days seemed incredibly remote. His appearance was as distinguished as his manner, and he was solicitous of his physique. I remember walking into town with him, on hot streets and in hot gusts of sooty air one sultry July morning when he was seventy fi ve or so. We both perspired, but Dill was apologetic about it; he thought it a crime not to be fi tter. Powicke the medieval was the only one of us who was destined to achieve the highest academic distinction. It took no great discernment to see that such a future was likely; but some were blind. Meredith the economist had a most versatile genius. He excelled in everything that he undertook – until he tired of it, which was usually pretty soon. (This includes economics). I never remember talking to him for any length of time without hearing him say something that seemed to me to be memorable, or at any rate worth remembering for several weeks. A. C. Dixon the Professor of Mathematics was a Wesleyan Senior Wrangler who fulfi lled his early promise in the abstruser branches of his , was generally able to see where the rest of us were wrong on matters of common business, but was quite unable to elucidate the mistakes he detected. (Events usually showed us how he was right.) D. L. Savory the Professor of French was an enthusiast who lived by rules, largely concerning phonetics, that he never questioned. One wondered, indeed, whether he had ever questioned anything; but his card-index system was too elaborate and too Autobiography of a Scots Professor 49 well organised to challenge easily. He spoke better English than an Englishman, better French than a Frenchman, and better German than a German. Such is the virtue of phonetics. Gregory Smith the Professor of English was a shy man whose shyness escaped into vanity. He could be charming in private but his public appearance, especially when he meant to be genial, was more brittle than I have observed in any other human being. He spoke to most of us from beyond a great gulf. For he had written some scholarly books. Our leader in University politics was our remarkable professor of Latin R. M. Henry. Belfast trained, the son of a minister whose conscience had forced him to leave one church after another (but always taking most of his congregation with him), Henry loved to be a rebel wherever rebellion could be. He was an ardent Home Ruler in 1913, later something like a Sinn Feiner and invariably an All-Ireland man. He was so quick, so devastating, so formidable and so unscrupulous in debate that his talents were wasted on a mere university. It may be doubted, however, whether his infl uence on the University was benefi cent. He despised and harassed the governing body (i.e. the Senate, which was chiefl y composed of local dignitaries) and rallied the Professors (i. e. the Academic Council) to the colours every second month. We heard very little about what went on in the Senate but were always told that we had to stand up to the Philistines on such and such an academic issue. Henry was the obvious man to become the next Vice-Chancellor. Equally obviously this would be an impossible appointment. He never achieved that dignity although, when he retired, he was for a time Acting Vice Chancellor. Then, superannuated as he was, he became Professor of Latin at St Andrews and some half expected that he would fi nish up as Governor General of Ireland. At the time I am writing (1940) that hasn’t happened. The outbreak of the Great War in 1914 was, I should suppose, the biggest thing in the life history of any of my contemporaries, unless it was the beginning of the next Great War (which I have to consider but a continuation of the fi rst). I do not intend to discuss its effects upon my own feelings and character, although I allow that some such discussion is reasonably to be expected even in the most reticent autobiography. Again I shall not discuss my own inaction. In a more general way, what one recalls most easily is the contrast between 1914 and 1939. 1914 brought our world into ruins, but there was excitement at the start, a not unjustifi ed belief that somehow we might muddle through, an expectation that the war would be short, and that even a defeat would not be irreparable. In 1939 all was grim. We all knew we could gain nothing, and felt that disaster, if it came might well be permanent. It is 50 Northern Ireland well that in 1914 we could not foresee the course of European history in the interim of the peace. We did not realise how much had been shattered by the fact of the fi rst Great War. As I write now I cannot bear to look forward. The province of Ulster rallied briskly to the British fl ag. Its divisions were fi ne troops and its military war effort was thoroughly creditable to its patriotism and good sense under diffi cult conditions. What might have happened in the rest of Ireland is a matter of speculation. There was sad mismanagement there, and the Easter Rebellion of 1916 surprised nobody. One of its effects was that Ulster had to be prepared to meet internal as well as external trouble. Conscription was never enforced in Ulster although nominally introduced in 1918. Wages were high and there was no rationing except in sugar. We had war-bread and tobacco was sometimes scarce; but in general Ulster never felt the pinch of the confl ict and so was very different from Great Britain. The war seemed very remote. A few German submarines were about. The navy and an odd sausage balloon could be seen at sea. Of course, since the province contributed as largely in men as the rest of the country did in a voluntary way, the war was very close to very many homes, and there was no great slackening after the fi rst enthusiasm of the struggle had passed and its grim and dreary diuturnity oppressed everybody’s thought. Still the war seemed more remote in Ulster than in most other places. The University was much depleted of students, but more at the beginning of the war than in its later stages. In the later stages most of the young men (and women) had made up their minds about their action, the choice being theirs. In the earlier stages, and particularly in the fi rst year, there was a steady effl ux of students. About a third of the boys in my logic class took infantry commissions during the fi rst year of the war. I think they all fell, usually pretty quickly. For the rest the University machine continued to work. I had for instance quite a creditable little honours school, and could feel that something was being done for the future of the country if not for its immediate needs. And several of my best students, men and women, would not have been conscriptible under any system. Universities in war time naturally suffer from arrested development except in technological matters required for the struggle. For one reason, most changes need money, and neither private purses nor government grants are available inter arma. In Belfast, however, we could not stand still because our new University (which had achieved University status less than seven years before the war) had to overhaul its methods in the light of experience. Autobiography of a Scots Professor 51

Unfortunately our teaching staff in the University was a mutilated body since several of its members were away on military or government work. The rest of us had rather frayed tempers and made, I fear rather frayed decisions. In particular we suffered from the Irish disease, although few of us were Irish. The aetiology of the disease is this. Motives not principles are supposed to govern everyone’s conduct. Such motives need not be selfi sh and need not be despicable but are always supposed to be personal. Therefore nobody is supposed to mean what he says. Argument is only a trick and a façade. So tricks should be met with tricks. On the stage, all stage-play is equally legitimate. This disease, to be sure, is not exclusively Irish; but in Ireland it is so prevalent that it isn’t even noticed. My Shaw lectures on personality were accepted for publication, though not by the fi rst publisher who approached me, about six weeks before the war; and my fi rst proofs came in just about the time when the war seemed to be as good as inevitable. The early exhilarations of authorship, accordingly, were sadly mutilated in my case. I could scarcely feel that my proofs were the fi rst thing that mattered, that every phrase was a hostage to a potentially eager world, that I had the right to be heard, that if my lamp went out the world would be appreciably darker. In fact the publication of the book was delayed until 1917 by which time my interest in it and its fate, while still lively, had enormously abated. The book was called Problems of the Self. Having already explained what I wanted to say in it, I shall say no more about its contents. Years afterwards, I read a story in which a young author faithfully recounted his experiences in the fi rst few weeks after fi rst publication. He expected a spate of clippings from his press-cuttings , to begin almost as soon as publication, a large fan- (and anti-fan) mail and so forth. Instead he began with a brief and tepid notice in the Times Literary Supplement, collected a few other scrappy and slighting obiter scripta, and waited in vain for the fuller review that the Times, in those days, accorded to any book that it thought worth anything at all. The fate of this fi ctitious author was so very nearly mine, especially in the matter of the Times, that I had to smile rather wryly as I read. True, in matters of philosophy, the daily press is not, for the most part very serious in its comments or very conscientious in its silences, and the same is true of the weekly press. Still one gains an idea from these sources whether the book is readable or not, and I had hoped to be read. Nor could I cheat myself into the belief that the war had spoilt my chances. Paper shortage had indeed compelled certain restrictions, but people read widely in those days, partly for distraction, and were not averse to distracting themselves with something 52 Northern Ireland pretty stiff. The review columns, indeed, were fairly full, and the reviewers for the most part, quite competent. So I had every reasonable chance. As time went on my early depression lifted. For the fi rst six months or so I had to confess that whatever serious attention I received was largely due to infl uence either local or, in the case of a review in the Nation, academic (for I am tolerably sure that Bertrand Russell must have been the author). It made no difference that I never suggested or arranged such matters (I have never done so, or attempted to do so, in all my life). But later reviews, especially in the technical journals did something to restore my spirits. There was infl uence there, no doubt, but on the whole a proper infl uence. Such journals exist in the main for professional readers and the editors select according to their professional conscience. I had a friend to review me in Mind viz. Broad who was very kind to me and, as usual, not short. But I had not pulled any wires in that business, and nobody could deny that Broad was one of our very best reviewers. Still later Bosanquet, who had a habit of discussing new authors as if they were better than new paid me quite lengthy attention. Dean Inge said that Bosanquet had “gibbeted” me. But if I was executed, I was at least beheaded in state. I have no other literary events to record in the war years. I published a few articles, but, for the most part, wrote and destroyed, re-wrote and re-destroyed. What I didn’t destroy I might as well have destroyed, for I never looked at it again. At long last the war came unbelievably to an end, and life seemed to begin again, November though it was. Soon afterwards I married. Of that event I will only say that if I had a hundred lives I could not expect to be so fortunate matrimonially in the other ninety nine. I soon began to write another book and my Study in Realism appeared in the spring of 1920. On a previous page, when explaining the sort of beliefs I came to entertain about the end of my stay in Cambridge, I said enough (I think) to explain what the book was about. It was, I suppose, my best book, certainly the book that was supposed to stamp me more than any of the others. If known at all, I became known as a “realist”. That was not altogether an advantage, for it is quite usual to say “So and so is a realist. Therefore he must hold this or that. Therefore the sticks that belabour other realists raise immense weals upon his shoulders or upon his behind”. That happened pretty often to me, and was unfair insofar as the realism that I “studied” was expressly declared to be only a theory (or description) of knowledge and was not a realistic metaphysics. The theory of knowledge, in my contention, had Autobiography of a Scots Professor 53 very few implications regarding the nature of things that were not knowing things. It prevented certain common inferences of that order, but that was about all it did in the metaphysical way. My later speculations, it is true, such as they were, tended more and more in the direction of a metaphysical “realism”. Here my views about theory of knowledge interposed no obstacle, but my more metaphysical “realism”, if defensible, had to be defended (and as I believe, was defended) upon independent grounds. So I may have deserved a drubbing for reasons outside my Study, but I admit I should prefer to have my Study castigated for reasons that pertained to it, and not on account of presumptions that had nothing to do with that work. The times, I think, were propitious for such a book. The English philosophical idealists had become tired after a very long innings. They may have mastered the googly bowling of the early pragmatists but were not vigilant enough in the presence of straight good-length stuff from the new realists. The new realism in England (as I thought) and especially the Cambridge form of it, had reached a stage in which something like system and comprehensiveness might be attempted if there was any health in the doctrine. The time had passed when forays like Moore’s Refutation were enough, and Russell’s Principles of Mathematics for all its splendid range was rather specialised. I thought in short that a realistic theory of knowledge should be able to say what it had to say not merely about perception and general notions, but also about remembering, and imagining, and assessing worth. I tried to do just that in a series of essays which achieved a certain unity because each had the same task. The task was obvious but there was plenty of room for it. Of necessity much that I said was rather sketchy. No individual essay could overtake the immensely complex analysis that perception, memory or the intellect require and are constantly receiving from philosophers (especially in Britain and in America). But sketches have their uses, and perspective is something. In short, the book had a purpose. I wrote it, I admitted, in rather too allusive a style. I was sometimes artifi cially lively. I regret certain phrases. I tried to be both solid and provocative, succeeding better in the latter. I thought my fi rst book had been a little too drab. So I made the second one rather garish, knowing that I was doing so but believing, over-confi dently, that I could avoid the perils that I foresaw very well. I gingered up the various articles that I had written or destroyed, thinking that there was art in what I did; but I may have produced what was rather too hot for a philosophical effort. I have said that there was room for the book, but I should also have to admit that it was rather belated. It was overshadowed, of course, by Alexander’s 54 Northern Ireland great Space, Time, and Deity where realism, turned metaphysical, made one of its grandest gestures. Russell had already turned from realism to “analytical method in philosophy”. Moore was following him cautiously and critically. So was Broad in a way of his own. In short I was a little too late if timeliness means moving with the fl ood. I don’t regret the circumstance for I am myself inclined to regret or at least to be suspicious about these so-called advances. I would like to look at them and to learn from them, not to bow before them. I have never been sorry that I wrote the book “dated” though it be, and I have not seen my way to abandon very much of it. For the rest of my stay in Belfast I wrote no more books, but wrote several articles. I may say something about these years immediately after the war. The teaching in Belfast was in better shape than in some other places. The immediate effect of the war (or of the peace) upon most British universities was sensibly to lower their standards. War degrees had to be given rather easily and on a shortened curriculum to the men who returned (and for the most part, were subsidised by the government). These war degrees, it is true, had been very hard earned in a moral and in a manly sense, but they did not imply very much profi ciency in the academic training for which they nominally vouched. Where such profi ciency was really necessary for after life, I fear that these shortened curricula did a serious disservice to their recipients. Indeed I can think of many whose careers have been sadly damaged in that way. Again, the schooling of the country had suffered badly during the war owing to the drain of teachers to the colours. It took several years before this leeway was made up, that is, before the universities could do their job effi ciently. Another disquieting circumstance was that many universities went science- mad for the time-being. This, at any rate was disquieting for those who taught the humanities. I allow that if we had foreseen that we should have to fi ght for our lives again, with only a very brief respite, it might have been better for universities to go completely technological, and leave the humanities to some distant Utopia. If, however, there was any chance of civilising the barracks-cum-arsenal idea of national life the humanities, and they alone, could effectively maintain that perspective. These educational troubles, as I have said, were less perturbing in Northern Ireland than elsewhere. There had been less dilution of labour in the teaching profession, and we were not science-mad. The continuity of Irish university life during the war made a revolution much less likely. We had a good many ex-service students and some of them got their degree rather Autobiography of a Scots Professor 55 cheaply. Old stagers who had gone to the war were granted what may be called compassionate degrees. In the main, however, we were rather stiff with the ex-service men if they went in for any sort of honours. I think we were right. The mere fact that we were known to be stiff made harshness unnecessary. The men knew where they were, and took the right measures. In general my honours classes were very well attended and I could see that I was fulfi lling a social function. One unintended result, I fear was that I turned some young men away from the Church. It was a rule of the University that nothing should be said that would offend anyone’s religious convictions. I loyally tried to respect that hard rule. Still philosophers do talk about “God” even if that philosophical entity is not the First Person of the Trinity. It is diffi cult to teach philosophy without covertly suggesting that much Christian theology is more of a fi gment than of a metaphysics, indeed that there is at least some nonsense about it. I am glad that I did not turn many aside; but some I did turn. Although the war was over, civil commotion in Ireland was not. We heard about the Black and Tans although we did not see them in Belfast. The struggles of Ulster to reconcile itself to the divisibility of an indivisible province were painful and acute. Even “Sir Edward” who made an occasional jaunty appearance had lost most of his glamour. The marching of the Volunteers was past but the days of the curfew and of the murderous I.R.A. were upon us. They did not stop University work, or the commerce of the town, but they diminished life’s amenities pretty drastically. The curfew, which extended from ten at night to six in the morning was an onerous business in a city of 400,000 inhabitants, spread out rather lavishly in a sprawling, low-edifi ced way. If you were supping with anyone except a near neighbour you might have to streak for home before the supper was well begun. Dances had to go on all night – a toilsome amusement. It was no joke to be caught. A night in the cells is never pleasant and the fastidious did not relish the proximity of the unwashed. Moreover, worse might happen. My mother- in-law’s maidservant had a fi ancé. Visiting her one evening he outstayed the curfew, and was put in the patrol waggon. As he neared his home he jumped and made a run for it. The soldiers fi red and a ricocheting bullet ravaged his leg. He died in about a week. The British troops enforced the curfew but gave very little other help to the Royal Ulster Constabulary. That body had a very thin time. Four or fi ve gunmen would attack a constable on point duty, and having disposed of him, would retreat shooting. In the areas in which Catholic streets adjoined 56 Northern Ireland

Protestant ones, conditions, one would have thought, were intolerable. The houses in some of these streets never saw the light of day for two years. They were sandbagged and gaslit inside. They were tunnelled beneath so that if the police searched any one house, their quarry was in another. Murder for many became a sort of game. Men would go potting with revolvers just for a sort of perverted fun. At one time there were over fi fty admitted murders in a week, and actually, in all probability about three times that number. At the peak of the disturbances the I.R.A. or their sympathisers took to arson, and seventeen large buildings were blazing in a single day. In our section of the city there was no fi ghting and there were no stray bullets. One might be bombed in a tram; but it was unlikely. I never saw shooting but once. Then, on the top of a tram there were shots on a main thoroughfare. The whole population fl ocked into the streets in a moment, eager to see what was afoot. In the early days, when there was machine gunning in the streets the curious populace was equally avid. They trotted after the armoured cars. So my wife tells me. She was present on once such occasion. One incident amused me. On a certain Sunday afternoon our house was empty. When my wife and I returned to it the bell was rung, and our doorstep was fi lled by an obvious plain-clothes policeman. He had seen a suspicious- looking man, he said, shabbily dressed and with very defective boots, walking rapidly down the Lisburn Road. This person had turned abruptly, and, as it seemed to the policeman, furtively into our avenue, and had called at our house. Since the house was respectable the policeman’s suspicious were allayed, only to revive again when, half an hour later, he saw the same man ringing the bell on our doorstep. The policeman suspected that the man was on the run. He even thought that it might be Mike Collins himself. When I asked him whether he did anything about it he replied that he didn’t have a revolver. So the suspect escaped within a couple of hundred yards of a police barracks. Later I was able to reassure the force. A colleague had called twice and had found the house shut on both occasions. I didn’t ask him what boots he was wearing. VII California

In the ’20’s America was swarming with British lecturers. It was the Great Depression, not the exhaustion of America’s patience, that put an end to them later. And after that there was a revival. I had the luck to be asked to go to the University of California as a visiting professor for the year 1923 – 1924. Many Americans say that there is no point in travelling on the American continent. You go vast distances with nowhere to reach. So you excuse the American motorist whose solitary boast is his mileage. I allow that there are not the rewards of European travel, still less, I suppose, the rewards of Asiatic. Yet I found the journey of intense interest, quite apart from its academic resting places. It was well worth one’s while, I thought, to do odd things like writing books about philosophy, if a trip like this were to come out of them. The magnifi cence of the St Lawrence as a waterway, the glories of Quebec (I later spent a week there and I could have delighted in it for months), the charm of French Canada between Montreal and the frontier, the scrub, the lakes and the noble timber of the Adirondacks, the dirty vast rolling prairies, the dirty vast rolling Mississippi, the galloping Indians in their reservations beside the Santa Fé railway, the deserts and the cacti of Arizona, the storm effects on the unirrigable screes near Phoenix – all these things fascinated me. If much of the journey required a stout battle with boredom, if many of the prairie towns seemed like pinkish unlaundered undergarments on an untidy body, if the heat and humidity of August (for in that month we had to travel) needed hope and high spirits to make it tolerable, the whole experience was well worth such incidental discomforts. I had no objection to American sleeping cars and although my passion for tobacco made the smoking-room-cum-lavatory rather a dubious post when the temperature went up to 130 or so, and when the ice one wrapped in a towel gave no moisture but only a certain coolness of evaporation to one’s forehead, I still enjoyed the trip. Also, although it is garish, I can still salute the Grand Canyon of Arizona as one of the wonders of the world. It does achieve a magnifi cent quality of 58 California surprise. The and other grand mountains have to be approached slowly. Their effect grows. It need not overwhelm on the instant. This latter is just what the Grand Canyon of Arizona is bound to do. You climb some thousands of gradual feet in the long journey from Williams. The woods give place to scrub, and to oaks so straight and sparse and un-oak-like that one would take them for feeble bamboos. You disembark and enter a discreet looking hotel. Still there is nothing to see but a slope. You go on to the terrace, and lo! the Canyon is before and beneath and to the side of you, a mile deep or more, about 250 miles long (with local storms putting up a display fi fty or a hundred miles off) carven everywhere into great rock masses like kneeling Buddhas in red and purple and bluey-grey, a geological pattern of strata illuminated by nature’s crayons, eaten away by the Colorado river that looks like a thin and abashed trickle at the foot. It is an unpaintable canyon and few could paint it in words. But it is unforgettable. University life at Berkeley is very pleasant and visiting professors are very comfortably quartered, married ones, for the most part, in Cloyne Court – a boarding house so called because Bishop Berkeley was Bishop of Cloyne – unattached males in the Faculty Club. The University Campus, although the buildings suffer from a mixture of styles, and some of them from pretentiousness, has a certain glamour. Strawberry Canyon behind the Campus, and all the foothills are a pleasant climbing ground, even if one hates waterless nature where every trickle is hoarded for irrigation. San Francisco has a peerless site. Even petrol storage cannot destroy the majesty of the great bay. The Golden Gate, and the redwoods on the north are prodigal of stately . Whatever grows is gigantic – heather six foot high, laurel clumps forty foot high, and the like. I could never admire the eucalyptus trees with their untidy peeling bark, like the skins of imprudent sunbathers, and the live oaks seemed to me to be aping the cactus. Nevertheless, I could roam the hills with great delight, taking my chance with poison ivy and even with the tics in the lavender clumps. Motoring, too, was very pleasant though the roads in 1924 were rather like British roads ten years later, no place for people who thought that roads should be walked on. Monterey, Carmel, the Sacramento Valley, the wilder country to the north, some natural marvel like a petrifi ed forest – these were the bait or the excuse. But little excuse was needed. It was pleasant also to know that, except in the valleys, there was no excessive heat. A punctual fog rolling in at eight in the morning, receding at noon and returning about four saw to that. Early in our stay we had something next door to adventure for there was Autobiography of a Scots Professor 59 a really considerable fi re. A forest fi re propelled by a very dry wind thrust a spear-head over the foothills and licked its red way into the town. The San Francisco and other fi re brigades pursued a policy of drift. It was an extra- territorial fi re. So the eucalyptus blazed, and soon the fi re leapt in great sheets of fl ame from terrace to terrace. Burning shingles from the roofs were carried half a mile or so. In a very short time the invading fl ames had reached the edge of the Campus and had swept round to the business centre of the town. The solider buildings offered some resistance, but few buildings were solid. By a miracle, as it seemed (and I have heard that it was in answer to prayer) the wind suddenly changed and blew the invasion straight back. Had it not done so, nothing could have saved the town. I was lecturing at the time – it was afternoon. There was a sultry, sulky yellow as I looked out of the window. I told the class that I knew nothing about the Californian climate, but that if they, the knowing ones, thought that there was anything amiss I would stop. They told me to go on and repeated their statements at intervals, until some one thought that there must be some sort of fi re. The matter was then beyond doubt. So back to Cloyne Court, swift packing of what seemed most important, the transfer of bags to Wheeler Hall (supposed to be fi reproof). That for me and my wife. On the roof of Cloyne Court a student and a Jap were doing heroic work. Perched on the roof they fl ung down the burning shingle as it fell. They saved the place. In the Campus there was a swarm of fugitives, some dazed, some making frantic enquiries, some carrying quite useless, indeed not quite decent, articles. As it happened there were no casualties of any importance. The students fought the fl ames gallantly. Fire brigades began to function. The Offi cers’ Training Corps assumed military control. By nightfall what remained of the confl agration was well in hand. We could even walk about, with parched throats, through part of the devastated area. Nothing remained of the frame houses save their chimneys and burning gas pipes – especially the gas pipes in the higher parts of the town. I didn’t like the Californian climate so much as I expected to like it. Even the fog did not excuse so much blue sky. The rains, in the year I was there, forgot to come till January. In consequence the famous golden hills of blue- and-gold California were really bleached. When they did come the rains worked a magical change. All was green and wild-fl owered; but one’s usual and half-conscious time standards were gravely perturbed. Except – a biggish except – for the magic of the rains there was no visible tempo of the seasons. Each species of plant seemed to have its own time for getting busy with bud 60 California and blossom. In short the seasonal landmarks were too subtle for a mere visitor to appreciate. So life dragged, especially in a fi fteen weeks’ term. It was rather surprising too that colds and infl uenza should be just as prevalent in California as elsewhere. A Spanish friend once told me that he thought there was a more delicate beauty in the greys of British skies than in the winey brilliance of the Mediterranean. This opinion, coming from such a source, seemed odd to me. But there is something hard about the sun. On the other hand, California looked and was very gay. I am not talking about spurious gaiety. The effect of prohibition was to stmulate the opinion that it was chic to be grisé, especially among the girls. I am talking about the gaiety that one saw, particularly in the looks of the girls and in the bright dresses that matched their very artful complexions. They aged very rapidly, but they had their hour in looks as well as in physique. The men were stout fellows to look upon although their habit of wearing shapeless corduroy trousers and sombreros – for all the world like unspurred and domesticated cowboys – would have been aesthetically false anywhere. In the main I thought that the Californians were very sensible about sex, petting parties notwithstanding. If one paid a call upon a colleague in the evening, the daughter of the house – and she need not be more than sixteen – was pretty certain to have a swain in attendance. Instead of sitting with their elders all evening, or pretending to have an engagement at the pictures, the pair would get up and go to another room after a decent interval of small talk. Everyone seemed to agree that at their time of life their main business was the experiment of getting to know one another. They could be trusted; and there was no hush hush. California rejoiced in its historical youth – with just enough about Drake and Spanish missions to prevent the felicity of complete non-history. Civilisation, the Californian thought, had moved westwards until it was stopped at long last by the Pacifi c. The Orient might be neglected. Civilisation had been cradled there but had not grown up. There was or there professed to be a few “native sons” and “native daughters”, that is, a few who were descended from the forty-niners. There was also a largish elderly population from the middle west escaping from the rigours of a prairie winter. They congratulated themselves from November to March. Essentially, however, pride of youth was the ruling passion of the state. That was true even within the University staff. The great majority of the University teachers, it is true, came from the Eastern states. Most of them felt themselves to be exiles even if they seldom said so. But even the exiles had imbibed and may have been intoxicated with the paulo- Autobiography of a Scots Professor 61 post-pioneer spirit. That was sometimes shown in silly ways. For instance they were always growing mushroom traditions, and revering fi ve-year-old ones as if they had the fi rmness of tradition proper. They may also have affected the silly airs of those who hold that all that is old is effete. In the main, however, their self-conscious and joyful juvenility was not at all silly. I thought there was a very high standard of effi ciency among the teachers, higher than the law of averages would suggest in an institution that, in one way or another, had about 2000 teachers, including the part-timers. Cynics, it is true, pointed to a bridge in the Campus in which the “a” of Hanc pontem had not been completely obliterated by the masons. Nevertheless the perpetrator of this crime was a very good Latinist. I thought that the teaching of the arts was in very capable hands, and could assume that the teaching of the sciences was not in worse hands. Democracies always worship something, ideal or idol as the case may be. In America generally, I believe and certainly in California, the ideal (or the idol) was education. Its cult was a religion and although priests are not always revered where religion is revered, it was something to be a professional exponent of a thing that was worshipped. In view of this attitude towards education, I thought that California might have done better than it did. Part of the trouble, no doubt was as good as inevitable at the time. If your ideal is a University education for all, you can hardly expect the same standards as if you try to educate a select few. To be sure, not all young Californians did actually attend some University. There were about 11,000 whole-time students in Berkeley, 2,500 at Stanford, about 10,000 in the two universities at Los Angeles, some thousands in scattered degree-granting institutions mostly of churchly origin, and a few specialists at Pasadena, in the Observatories and in the medical school at San Francisco. Still, if Universities are put within the reach of all, especially state-universities like Berkeley where there were no tuition fees and a very good chance of earning enough (as a waiter, say) for one’s keep, the inevitable result was that many came up to the university with very insuffi cient schooling. Entrance was by a schoolmaster’s certifi cate and the standard of the schools was very low. The University turned some fi ve hundred away every year, after they had shown what they were (or weren’t). But the residue was largely pretty weak. Indeed the underlying assumption appeared to be that nothing much could be done with a student until after he had taken his degree. Then the Ph.D. system began to operate. It has been much reviled and quite unjustly. The doctorate simply meant that the successful candidate was judged worthy of undertaking 62 California university teaching. Here the level (although unequal) was high and the tests well devised although the ordeal of undergoing a public oral examination for at least three hours had amusing aspects. On the other hand, no school can be healthy if its main object is self-perpetuation. Therefore the excellence of the graduate schools scarcely compensated the defects at the beginning. Again, the graduates specialised very narrowly, perhaps on an insecure foundation. Such defects might have righted themselves. The schools might be improved. There was plenty of money since petrol was converted into education by a tax of so many cents on the gallon. Again it might have been perceived that the ideal of university education for the many implies, as a corollary, the provision of another kind of education for the able few. I thought that money was squandered from another cause. In Great Britain we may err in a different way from the Californians. We are accustomed to hold that a certain basic routine, very little varied, is essential in this or in the other subject. In each subject the teacher traverses this beaten track year after year, and is lucky if he fi nds any by-ways at all to dally in. His teaching may even tend to be a mortmain. Its dead hand may mortify the minds of most of the pupils. But at any rate the specialists have been drilled before they specialise. In California, I thought, the error was all the other way, and was egregious. The teachers, to prevent themselves from getting into a rut, were road-making all the time. In philosophy there had, of course, to be instruction in Logic, Ethics, and in some other standard subject, but, even there, there was a disposition, wherever possible, to prevent the same man from giving the same course year after year. When a man began to improve his technique in Logic, say, he had to turn to . Indeed he was encouraged to manufacture subjects when there weren’t any. The University Calendar was tricked out with neologisms in the titles of courses; and so the teaching staff had to grow. Versatility among teachers may thus have been encouraged but the students (as it seemed to me) had to pay too high a price. They were asked to undertake adventures without any equipment that could be called such. The students were democratic. They invigilated themselves at examinations. That was called the “honour” system. Since the teachers were excluded I have no fi rst hand knowledge of how the system worked, but I have something more than a mere suspicion that if any part of a paper were judged unfair such information as anyone possessed was placed at the free disposal of the others. I suspect, too, but I only suspect that a good many lame dogs were helped over a good many stiles. Autobiography of a Scots Professor 63

Another thing that seemed odd to me was the extent to which the examinees systematically distrusted the examiners. The size of the classes – there might be 1000 and there were very often 500 – implied a large staff of correctors. These were, for the most part, “readers” i. e. young graduates, often proceeding to a higher degree, who did the necessary spade-work for a small wage. The students believed that there was no intelligible relation between the marks awarded and the standard attained. At fi rst when parents wrote to me about it, I only smiled; and similarly when the students themselves made complaint. But I had my eyes opened when a girl, who came to tell me that she was invariably an A and never a B – showed complete amazement when she learned that I myself had awarded the mark. Such a possibility had never entered into her head. I confess that I had no great respect for my “readers”, though they varied in quality. Unless there was just one right answer they were very querulous, and if a question involved any preparation on their part they would solemnly warn me that this sort of thing wouldn’t do and that I must ask what they were used to. I cannot say that I enjoyed lecturing to enormous classes. My biggest one, on elementary logic, was 600 strong and sat in Wheeler Hall which would seat 1100. The acoustics were imperfect. The hour, 2 p.m., made for somnolence. Having once had a good platform voice I had smoked most of it away, and what I said, if it wasn’t pure English also wasn’t good American (I don’t know how they expected me to pronounce the most ordinary logical terms). So that class was not a great success, and I was lucky not to break my neck at it. There was an immense platform, often used as a stage, the edge of it at least six feet above the fl oor with nothing enclosing it. I perambulate while lecturing and, once at least could hardly keep my balance at the extreme edge of the platform. I was glad to have a smaller logic class in the second term and so to proceed to a smaller and less dangerous lecture-room where I could address my 450 students (or so) in comparative comfort. It seems to me that there are limits to the size of a class that can be effectively taught. You can’t teach if you can’t converse, and you can’t converse if you have to make a public speech. I think 120 or thereabouts is the maximum for a conversational method of teaching. If there is to be effective discussion between teacher and taught I think the maximum is about 25. That was the size of my seminar at Berkeley, and I found it stimulating and of good quality. I have mentioned the stage at Wheeler Hall. I may add that the students had much talent for acting, and that many of them wrote plays that were produced and acted either in Wheeler Hall or al fresco in the Greek Theatre. 64 California

Their education fostered this sort of initiative, and I commended it in my heart accordingly. It has always seemed to me that students of literature shouldn’t merely talk about literature but should also try their hands at making it. They did make such attempts in California, not merely as the spirit moved them but also as their instructors demanded of them. All the great go sometime to San Francisco, and quite humble people have a better chance of meeting persons of renown than they would have in London or in Paris. I don’t think we met anyone really famous though we heard about several in a gossipy, intimate sort of way. But I heard Chaliapin sing and saw Duse act. Duse was staging a come back for fi nancial reasons and was quite exhausted. She plyed the exacting part of the mother in Ibsen’s Ghosts when I saw her, and the pathos of the occasion was all the greater for me because she was so very like my mother, especially in the play of her hands and features. My mother was then very ill, and when I had last seen her looked as Duse looked, eyes unnaturally bright, the face bones showing where once there had been fi rm and comely fl esh. I found that evening at the theatre infi nitely depressing. Duse died in the States about a month later, but I was to see my mother again. The University of California made elaborate contacts with the outside world by a system of importation of temporary teachers from Europe and from the eastern seaboard of America. The representatives of English culture in my time were Sir Paul Vinogradoff, a Russian, T. R. Glover who had been born in Glasgow and was scarcely a representative of Cambridge although he was public orator there, myself who was Scotch and Sir John Adams, formerly Professor of Education in London who was very Scotch indeed. Vinogradoff had poor health and failing eyesight. Glover made the mistake of supposing that the sort of wise-crack that went down in Cambridge was understood in California. But Adams was a remarkable creature. He was a little man, a bearded Punch to look at, though without the hump. He was indefatigable. He would go to Texas to lecture, and returning to California put in a lecture there on his way home from the train. He and his wife tapped continually on their two typewriters in the same room. (They had the opposite landing to ours in Cloyne Court). Some little time after we left, Sir John Adams sailed for New Zealand, of course to lecture. He fell down a gangway and fractured his skull, blood pouring from one of his ears which was destroyed. But he didn’t allow a little thing like that to upset him. He said he had still one good ear left. Adams gave me a dinner when I was leaving California, and one incident at the dinner amused me very much. He made a speech, of course, and Autobiography of a Scots Professor 65 commended me for doing things quietly instead of talking about what I meant to do. (That was true. I have always been very secretive about a book, say, until it is actually in the press). Then he told the company that he was going to let me in to a secret. He had been the publisher’s reader for my fi rst book and therefore regarded me as a sort of godson. What he did not say, and may have forgotten was that the book had been declined. It was another fi rm that published it. We had a week in the Yosemite Valley before we left California, enjoying it vastly as well as the Mariposa Groves, and the encounter not too distant of a bear in the woods, and, less happily, a rattlesnake. We returned by the Feather River Canyon, Salt Lake and Denver. The ducks on Salt Lake were almost entirely above the water resting on it as if it were land. This route took us over the “top of the world” at about 11,000 feet. The altitude had a sad effect upon a fellow traveller whose sleeping berth, as it happened, was next to my wife’s. He was seized with religious mania and like Borrow’s hero went on repeating that he had sinned against the Holy Ghost. Later during the night he possessed himself of a knife, I don’t know for what purpose, and the negro attendant in the Pullman had to disarm and imprison him. So the negro said; and my wife heard something of the business while I was sound asleep. We spent a fortnight in New York. I had a pleasant short visit to Harvard and another to Princeton. I also saw some of the Columbia people including Dewey. Dewey’s personal charm was unforgettable although, at the time, he didn’t seem to have a single moment to spare. He and I, unknown to one another, arrived at the Harvard Club in New York, where we were to be introduced and lunched, about a quarter of an hour before the due time. Dewey looked like a rather shabby journalist. He produced a huge mass of newspapers from the pockets of an untidy overcoat, took out a blue pencil and proceeded to use it diligently. We had the pleasure of travelling back with Bertrand Russell on the Celtic. I hadn’t seen him since Cambridge days. For a good part of the time he was writing for the popular journals, and deploring the style he was forced (he said) to adopt for that purpose. But his talk was not less brilliant than it had been, and he gave many hours of every day to that. I had only one other visit to America, going to Texas in the summer to lecture about two years later. Texas in the summer was as hot as I expected it to be. I found I could stand heat, but not with pleasure. I got very thin in a very few weeks (I had to break off the enterprise for private reasons before its due completion). However I broke a bone in my foot within a week of my VIII Aberdeen

When we returned to Ulster in June of 1924 the gunmen seemed to have left the place for good and the prospects of a placid life to be distinctly more favourable. I sat down to write a book on ethics, having prepared the way by giving a course on that subject in California. The time passed pleasantly, but a sort of general post among the professorships of philosophy in Scotland was rather disturbing. Lindsay left Glasgow to become the new Master of Balliol. James Seth retired from Edinburgh. Hetherington took Lindsay’s place, A. E. Taylor went from St Andrews to Edinburgh, and Morrison succeeded him at St Andrews. There seemed to be no place for me in all Scotland and I was sorry for it. Once a professor, I had always hoped to be a Scots professor. Besides I thought that I had been long enough in Belfast and that Belfast thought so too. As it happened there was yet another vacancy in Scotland since Baillie of the Moral Philosophy Chair in Aberdeen became Vice-Chancellor of Leeds. I very nearly missed the appointment. I knew that the chair was a Regius chair but didn’t know what every Scotsman at the time was presumed to know, viz. that any one who fancied himself for such a post was supposed without invitation to send an application accompanied by testimonials to the Secretary for Scotland. (That is changed now. Instructions are given in the press). So I looked and went on looking for an advertisement but found none. I supposed that the thing was being done clandestinely as had happened in all the other Scottish philosophy appointments that summer. In the end I learned the true state of affairs from two sources, the fi rst from a man who wanted a testimonial from me unless I were applying myself, the second Pringle Pattison who wrote to enquire why on earth I wasn’t applying. I thought the opportunity had passed but I wrote to the Secretary saying that I was probably too late but that, on the chance that I wasn’t, I would ask certain people to send him testimonials direct. I never saw the testimonials, and I prefer that way of making application. Rather unwillingly, but with some curiosity and without active resistance, I was shown excerpts from some of them later. They were franker than most such documents. One of them said that I was rather attractive after my fi rst shyness Autobiography of a Scots Professor 67 had worn off. At any rate I was appointed, and so am able to call this narrative “The Autobiography of a Scots Professor”. In my youth, at any rate to one of my upbringing, the title seemed well worth coveting. In those days a Scots Professor was ex offi cio something of a person. He isn’t now. There are too many, for one thing. Still, although my head has no illusions on the point, my heart almost fl utters from an older strain in me. The venture was almost entirely fortunate. I had been afraid that my wife would regret the change, in sort, that she was being self-sacrifi cing when she encouraged me to make the move. But she became even more of an Aberdonian than I was. That is saying a good deal. I like smallish cities preferably rather remote where the town grows out of and does not overshadow the country. I hope I shall be able to spend the rest of my life in Aberdeen and am glad that I never tried to leave it and never allowed myself to be enticed out of it. What I wanted, most of all, was greater leisure for writing. There I succeeded almost too well because my honours classes in Aberdeen became and remained much too small. This decline had begun in Scotland before 1914 and was very marked after 1918. In all the other Scottish universities, however, there was a constant if diminished fl ow of honours students in philosophy, or, at any rate, in an honours course that included philosophy as a major constituent. I discouraged all such combinations and in pure philosophy (as we call it, rather sententiously and not very nicely) I had very few honours men and occasionally none. The pass courses, being compulsory were large, but, by themselves, were scarcely a whole-time job. The general reasons for this decline were clear enough. In the old days a philosophy school bred divines and lawyers. It could not fl ourish if its business was only to breed professional philosophers. In Aberdeen there were very few would-be barristers and, if there were any, new schools like economics or history attracted them more. In Scotland the divines were the majority of the school; and metaphysical or for that matter theological sermons had gone completely out of fashion. The divines took to English literature instead, and so, I suppose, became more graceful and interesting. I believe they also became less effective. Theology is nothing if it is not metaphysical and an untheological minister may be a parson and a saint but must always be a vague creature intellectually. Indeed I can dismiss the teaching part of my life in Aberdeen in very few words. Moral philosophy is a rather restricted subject unless one interprets it over-generously in order to expatiate at large. I had no mind to do that, 68 Aberdeen although, when I had honours classes, I used rather arbitrarily (though by arrangement) to teach subjects that, strictly interpreted, belonged rather to the domain of my colleague in Metaphysics. The students worked hard, and I daresay that they shared my prejudices about morals. At any rate I found them rather too easy to convince, and very unwilling to be moved to scepticism even of the most provisional kind. Still as each year rolled on I had the very genuine pleasure of noticing what seemed to be a surprising advance, like the coming of spring although not quite so rapid. It was largely illusion, I daresay. My pupils – there might be eighty or there might only be forty – learned to imitate the way philosophers talk and to select the sort of point that philosophers select. They need not, really, have been much more perspicacious about moral questions than they had been before they had me to talk to them for a hundred lectures per annum. But I certainly effected a change and so could truthfully say that I had really been doing something. I tried to think, perhaps correctly, that in a general and often in an oblique way they were being educated. I can also, I think, be rather brief about matters of administration. That also is part of one’s job as a Scots professor, and in Aberdeen, where the administrative work went round, it occupied altogether rather a large part of one’s time. I hoped to keep out of committees, but I attended them very regularly if I had to serve on them, and I talked more than most on nearly all that I did attend. I think I had my way in about sixty per cent of the decisions, that is to say I was in the majority for about that proportion of the cases. I was Dean of the Faculty in due course, and for a shortish time served upon the University Court which is the governing body of the University although in Aberdeen it has usually the sense to let the Senatus play its proper part in governing also. Looking back upon all these committees, and Senatus debates, and discussions in the Court, and inter-university gatherings (such as the Scottish Universities’ Entrance Board of which I have been a rather voluble member for many years) I have recollections of an inevitable but also of an interesting evil. The interest indeed was quite considerable. If I had the novelist’s art and a dictaphone to remind me I could make quite an interesting story about acuteness, professional ethics playing for position, party spirit, offended virtue, subterranean trickery, misunderstandings, stupidity and what not. On the whole I think it is likely enough that academic bodies show democracy at its worst. It is rare for anyone to have a policy, still rarer to have a sense of proportion. Nearly anyone can make points (for nearly every one has some ability) but most of them slide round their points as if they were holding on Autobiography of a Scots Professor 69 to a lamppost on a frosty street. It is unusual for a University administrator to retain very much of a conscience and few bodies can be the equals of University bodies in overriding established rules of procedure for the sake of what is said to be convenience. One point that struck me very forcibly was the debility of these bodies in matters of discipline. If a single man is in charge of such matters, he may, I suppose, be very arbitrary and often quite unjust, but the thing at least is hidden and is regarded largely as a personal matter both by the delinquent and his judge. When committees do the work, or when there is an appeal to a larger body such as the Senatus, there are few of the advantages of private rule and nothing to compensate in the way of public tradition and precedent. Everybody tries to be just and to treat each case on its merits, but since they disregard all rules and precedents, they land themselves in the most deplorable inconsistencies. I had never understood how essential long experience is to the working of any sort of court until I saw how university bodies fl oundered about in their well-meaning way. The lawyers in the Senatus were as bad as the rest. For example they would say that since X had not been confronted with the witnesses against him, this being undesirable when the said witnesses were fellow students, nothing could be accepted except X’s own confession. This meant in effect that X’s story, such as it was, was interpreted in the light of what the witnesses had said, and, in fact, disbelieved in important respects. But perhaps there were worse people than the lawyers, viz. the amateur lawyers who made a practice of reading the law reports in The Times. I remember a debate (not about discipline) in which the question was whether words were to be taken in their ordinary sense, or in the extraordinary sense that might perhaps be presumed to have been in the mind of the party who spoke them. The muddle was unimaginable. I shall say something about some of my colleagues at Aberdeen. When I went there the Principal was Sir George Adam Smith, formerly one of Scotland’s foremost preachers who, when Professor of Hebrew in Glasgow had reawakened a lively interest in the Hebrew prophets. He had also been one of the best raconteurs in the country and it was impossible to spend half an hour in his company without enjoying and admiring the geniality of his distinction. It is another question whether the Principalship was his proper métier. Ramsey MacDonald said it was his burial. Admirable on all ceremonial occasions, he was not an administrator and he thought of the Senatus as a rather bewildering Kirk Session. In general his determined efforts to shed the sacred and assume the secular, except in his dress and when he preached, were 70 Aberdeen quite unconvincing. He was also rather indiscreet; but in his house he was wholly charming and immensely kind. His human-heartedness combined with his early pastoral experience made him an ideal guide for any student who was not quite fortunate. On all ceremonial occasions his admirable voice and the opulence of his rhetoric made his performance memorable. His rare lapses from resplendent dignity came from a ministerial habit of paying fulsome compliments to local worthies. I have heard him spoil a funeral service by reading a telegram from an estimable man whom everyone knew to be worlds inferior to the deceased. He remained a great preacher although, towards the end of his active career the contrast between the beginning of the sermon (which was old) and the end of it (which was new) was a little saddening. He sometimes forced his voice in the pulpit; but it was a noble instrument. Among the others Arthur Thomson was best known to the outside world, Hector Macdonald was the ablest, Jack was the rhetorician and Harrower came the nearest to becoming legendary during his lifetime. Sir J. Arthur Thomson came of clerical stock and had himself had some training in divinity. In his early days, I am told, he was very shy, but the information may not be quite reliable. It was given me by a former pupil in a very genteel girls’ seminary in Edinburgh. However that may be, he had lost all traces of nervousness at the time I knew him, especially in his public speeches which were always works of art. The last time I heard him speak was at a huge concourse in the Music Hall of Aberdeen when he proposed the vote of thanks to Lloyd George. There was a dreadful moment when the elaborate biological analogy he had skilfully built up nearly fell to pieces since he forgot the name of the little bird that was to clinch it. (Lady Thomson forbade all further public speeches). Except for faint traces of the pulpit the speech was a thing of beauty, immensely better than Lloyd George’s on that occasion. Thomson was a literary and moralising biologist. True, he loved birds and beasts and delighted to learn and to speak about their habits, but chiefl y for their human interest and for the parables that might be drawn from their ways – whether, for instance, the earwig was a good mother or the hippopotamus monogamous. In later life the habit of writing had become a disease. He had little fresh to say but would sit for hours round his fi re (his heart was very bad) covering small sheets with large writing and strewing the fl oor with his deft observations. Collected they became a weekly column in the Glasgow Herald, and, later, a purling stream of little books. His house was a sort of literary factory. One Easter vacation his daughter was writing children’s stories (at which she excelled), a son, about to take up a post in Autobiography of a Scots Professor 71

Canada was trying to win a prize with a detective story (he won the second prize), Thomson was producing his Easter book and I think that yet another member of the family was keeping the printers busy. Macdonald’s ability would have shown itself in any company. In saying this I am thinking not so much of his own special subject, which was mathematics and more particularly mathematical physics. There I suppose (although I do not know for certain) his career was, on the whole, a not inadequate indication of his status – high honours in Aberdeen, a good place among the wranglers at Cambridge, a Smith’s prize, a Clare Fellowship and later an honorary fellowship, an early Fellowship of the Royal Society, a medal and other recognition from that body, sundry books of importance in their time. When I knew him it is possible that his ideas about mathematical physics had become rather ossifi ed. He was pre- rather than anti-relativity. (In that matter we had G. P. Thomson, later a Nobel prize-winner, to give us the other side). But, as I say, I am not talking about his mathematics. What I am thinking about is the range of his various capacities. A son of the soil, of the Rossshire soil, he seemed to gather into himself all the rich strength of the best peasant stock. He was shrewd, cautious and penetrating in his judgment of men and of things – of all sorts of men and, of things, chiefl y of fi elds and of stones and mortar. I allow that he was farther away from omniscience than he thought. One does not become a universal historian by having studied the history of the Byzantine Empire in one’s youth. But all his conclusions were based on evidence and on the native logic of a powerful, independent mind. He would tolerate folly because he expected it but he despised everything that seemed to him to be complex without being subtle and he prided himself upon a subtlety that could dismiss needless complexities. In build he was squat, and enormously strong, with long powerful arms. He was proud of his mountaineering exploits in Switzerland, I do not know with what justice. In later life his many hill walks were laborious affairs, and I saw little evidence that he was what he thought he was, a sort of biological compass inerrant in its sense of direction. I am sure, judging from his golf, that he must always have been very bad at ball games, though he said he quite frequently made breaks of 70 or so at billiards. He was round-headed, rather slow in speech, the perfect peasant to look upon. In public he said little, waiting for an opportunity to say something telling, and almost always making it tell. He abhorred a set speech and I never heard him make a good one. In private, however, his conversation had the rare merit that survives the most sceptical retrospect. His jests which were frequent but never too frequent had 72 Aberdeen an invariable and most singular appositeness. So were the stories he told, and all the more because he was sparing in his use of them. His humour was as deep as his wit was sharp. I saw a great deal of him, for we met at least twice a week either in his house in mine. For the most part we discussed subjects on the borderline between his professional interests and my own. He knew perfectly well that my ignorance of mathematics was deeper than a mere lack of familiarity with its technique, but he contrived to reach and sustain a level on which interchange was possible. Since my mother had come from Rossshire and had indeed been a near-contemporary of his in a school in Tain he chose to regard me as a sort of stepson, but our interest in and affection for one another survived even that pseudo-relationship. When Macdonald returned to Aberdeen in the early years of the present century he devoted himself from the fi rst to Scottish education, to University business, to the stones of King’s College chapel and to the farms that the University owned. Within a few years he had become the effective administrator of the place, in fi nance as well as in other matters. His régime lasted for twenty years and aroused opposition towards its close. His views about fi nance may have been overcautious and peasant-like and his ideas regarding the country’s needs in education may have been rather inelastic. Certainly he held the reins so long that other hands seemed clumsy when they so much as touched them. At the end he felt the opposition very keenly though he complained not at all. In that as in other things he was a great peasant-. When he knew that the disease he dreaded above all others must have its way with him he literally gave up the ghost within a very few days. An exploratory operation, a week of mental readjustment without much suffering, and then the last tired breath. Professor Adolphus Alfred Jack was (and, in his retirement, still is) a master in the cultured picturesque. He required time to develop his art when he spoke, and space when he wrote. He took both. He lived in a world of belles lettres and it was diffi cult to separate the substance of what he said or wrote from the byplay, the embellishment and the sheer inconsequence of it; but it was impossible not to listen to him and very diffi cult to tire of his urbane, unexpected and engaging periods. He was all-compounded of Universities. His father had been Professor of Mathematics in Glasgow and also editor of the Glasgow Herald. An ancestor had been a professor at Aberdeen. His wife, a cousin, was the daughter of another Glasgow professor, Nichol of English Composition fame. of Peterhouse was another relative. When his portrait was painted Jack said he was glad to hang with his ancestors. His Autobiography of a Scots Professor 73 private library was a treasure house of books that looked to be something and also were something. He was beloved and admired by a crowded generation of students, many of whom advanced and adorned English letters. Oddly enough, however, one of them brought a law-suit against him for unwarrantable harshness. John Harrower became Professor of Greek in Aberdeen when he was young and remained Professor of Greek when he was old. He succeeded Geddes of the Greek Grammar, who became principal, and married Geddes’s daughter (who therefore was only a few months out of the Greek Manse). I am told that Harrower could squeeze the last drops out of half a page of Herodotus in about three lectures, and in his own way he was a very fi ne teacher, provided always that the pupil conformed to pattern. Like the man in the Bible, Harrower always held that the old was better, at any rate if it was old enough and Greek as well as old. Given that standard of perfection he could be scathing about everything else; but he liked young people if he abhorred young ideas. He could be almost unbelievably cantankerous. Once I asked him to meet Dewey at dinner. He chose to say and repeat that all democrats, and all Americans and all socialists were riff-raff who should be shot, Very often, however, his violence would subside in the face of ridicule. Indeed he was rather a timid big stiff man, but he always breathed fi re until he was stopped and the fl ames were entertaining as well as scorching, His conventionalism accepted modern games at which he was industrious and not inexpert. Until he was nearly forty he employed a professional to bowl to him at the nets. He was very fond of golf and arranged and cultivated an annual golf match with Glasgow which was a great and growing success despite the stiffness of its elaborate ritual. (For a long time it was decided by holes and not by matches). All his students loved him and so did most of us. His wife who died soon after we came to Aberdeen was a wholly delightful neighbour for the brief space we had of her company. Like her husband she was rather timid and, unlike him, she was rather silent. She could talk, however, and talk well, especially about Old Aberdeen and the strange people who used to live there in her girlhood, One pair of old ladies I remember went about veiled, summer and winter, for fear of sunstroke. Mrs Harrower put some of her reminiscences down in writing, but spoilt the effect by writing in a starched and glossy style. It is a pity that so much of her lore has been lost. One thing that I thought very odd about Harrower was the extreme prudishness of his tastes in literature. I had not expected that of a classic; but it was so. He seldom missed an occasion of railing at the University of 74 Aberdeen

Aberdeen for having given Thomas Hardy an honorary degree. Was not Hardy, he asked, the author of Jude the Obscene? I see I have been talking about colleagues much my senior. I am now one of the seniors myself, in standing if not very obviously in years. Of the juniors (G. P. Thomson having left long ago) much the most distinguished was Lancelot Hogben, a live wire with the current always on, and inclined to spark pretty often. I have seen less of him than I would have liked to see, but have heard many of his dangerous duly advertised as such. In conversation he was one of the country’s brightest young things, and I do not doubt that he had one of the quickest brains, and one of the quickest tongues in Europe. As I make these refl ections Mr Hogben has been having a much more exciting time than the rest of us. In the spring of 1940 he went to his beloved Uppsala to lecture. He was in Oslo when the Germans invaded Norway, escaped to Sweden, made his way across Siberia to Kobe and is now in New York. The rest of us have just completed a session to which the Nazi War made surprisingly little difference, largely because the Government decided not to call up young men under twenty. I don’t suppose that our numbers diminished by as much as ten per cent, and we had no Air Raid Warning till the examinations were over. At our graduation, with nearly a thousand people present, we had a stroke of luck. The ceremony took place a day before our fi rst serious daylight raid when H. E. bombs were dropped within fi fty yards of the building where the ceremony had taken place. I was promoting the Arts graduands and would have found my scarlet gown rather less appropriate than the Warden’s tin hat I wore next day at the same hour and place. During the raid there was a large crouching unhurt wedding party in the chapel; but there were casualties quite near. I should perhaps have said more about my time at Aberdeen. I may return to the subject if I survive the present war and am able, in relative tranquillity, to let my memory rove over the last fi fteen years and compare them with the new order of things that is almost certain to succeed the present appalling struggle. For the moment, however, I prefer to say no more but instead to give some account of my prolonged attempts to write philosophy. As I have said the chief aspiration of my life was just to write, if possible creditably, if not, at least to try to express myself as well as I could. It seemed to me, going to a comparatively leisured post at the age of thirty-seven and with some experience of the writer’s trade, that the time had come for me to write whatever was in me to write. Philosophers, on the whole, mature later than Autobiography of a Scots Professor 75 most other authors, and I had some acquaintance with the depths of my own ignorance. I thought, however, that if I delayed I would do no better and might do worse or nothing at all. I did not expect to have a long life, although, until I was fi fty, there was no particular reason for expecting a short one. Anyway I enjoyed writing, and proposed to give myself that enjoyment so long as opportunity served. Looking back on these fi fteen years I do not see how they could have been more fortunate for one of my temperament. A charming house, agreeable surroundings, a climate that suited me, enough of books, enough of travel, enough of business, enough of conferences and such like half-instructive play-work, some friends, no enemies or none that mattered, and, for many years, quite fair health. Above all a vivid interest in most that I did and enough to endure such boredom as came my way. IX Writing

As I have said, I intend to conclude this narrative with an account of my labours with the pen at the time when I thought I was best able to use it, but I should like to explain, or, for that matter, to explain all over again, the spirit in which I am doing so. I am writing this so-called autobiography for my own amusement, and not because I conceive myself to have much excuse for writing an autobiography at all. Such an excuse, I think, would have to belong to one or other of the three orders. An extrovert has an excuse for autobiography if he has been active in stirring events, and can speak, at fi rst hand, about famous men. If he had art at his disposal (but he would need a good deal of it) he might give a vivid picture of lesser events and of lesser men provided that his record was of crisp human interest describing what was signifi cant for the type although perhaps obscure until it was noticed in the individual. I am not an extrovert; my life has been as quiet as the times allowed; I have had little to say about famous men; and I do not have the art that makes lesser men shine out in all the rich humanity that somehow they possess. An introvert has an excuse for autobiography if he can subtly record himself and make a moving drama (let us hope, a truthful drama) of the progress or decline of his own spirit. I am an introvert, but I have no moving inner history to record, and, if I had, I should prefer to be reticent about what might pass for such a story. So I have deliberately attempted nothing of the kind. The third excuse I might have had would be of the personally impersonal order. If my philosophy had had a beginning a middle and an end, unfolding itself in a continuous clear development I would have been entitled to tell that story even if I knew that the worth of the achievement was highly questionable. Such a story would be personal in one sense, impersonal in another. It would be my history but also the history of the birth and growth of a certain set of ideas. To a lesser extent, had I produced work of note I might supply psychologists with material for what Schiller might have called the psychologic of intellectual discovery. These excuses also cannot be mine. I wrote when I thought I had anything to say, but never with the expectation of making more than an interim, ephemeral contribution, writing and re-writing (for I never wrote easily) until the thing seemed to have taken such shape as I Autobiography of a Scots Professor 77 could give it, and then publishing it, not because I came near to being satisfi ed, but simply because the thing might be worth someone’s perusal. I wrote on a variety (although upon a rather restricted) variety of topics, several of them estranged from one another although not (I hope) mutually incoherent. I produced nothing that could be called a philosophy. As for achievement, there was properly speaking none. In any important sense I have to record a failure. I have already survived most that I wrote and expect to survive the rest even if I do not live very long. I was never at any time regarded as a leader in my own country and at my own moment, to say nothing of other countries and of other moments. Mine was just a voice from the gallery occasionally heard when there was a casual lull. I have no regrets about this. Philosophy is a diffi cult subject. I was better fi tted for it than for anything else but I hadn’t the brains to do really good work of any magnitude in any subject under the sun. I had my chance and I enjoyed the attempt to seize it. I fumbled but am not ill content. On the other hand, I want to admit, very frankly, that a story of this kind, although interesting to me, need to have the slightest interest for anybody else. So much in general; and I have already told what little I chose to tell about the two sizeable books I wrote before I went to Aberdeen, the fi rst about personality, and the second about realistic epistemology. I may shorten the remaining narrative if I make some brief remarks about the extent to which I later pursued these special themes. There is not much of importance to record. On the theme of personality I wrote a second book, this time a little one, for a series. It was written and also published while I was in California. The title was The Idea of the Soul. In part, and in a very broad sense, it was a résumé of my earlier conclusions but was less precise and, for that reason, not so good. The entire series was remaindered fairly soon, and my contribution to the series deserved to be. So, I think did most of the others. I also wrote a short book about body and mind for the Clarendon Press series of World Manuals. That I did, not because I liked the subject – for I preferred to approach it in other ways – but because I thought it would be cowardly to funk the thing. I couldn’t pretend that it was off my beat. I don’t commend the book. It defended a species of dualism, or at least of pluralism in which attention was confi ned to a plurality of two for the purpose in hand, but on premises that at the time seemed delicate and now seem to me to be so shaky as to give no promise of stability at all. Briefl y the question is whether, if X has quite peculiar functions, it must therefore be a quite peculiar substance. In one sense the answer is plainly in the affi rmative. That is the sense (which needs careful 78 Writing defi nition) in which a thing is what it does. It does not follow, however, that if we who are embodied exercise mental functions (which are quite peculiar) we are therefore compounded of an unminding body and an unembodied mind. We may just be minding bodies or (comparatively) shapely minds. In my little book Our Minds and Their Bodies I didn’t, I think, put the case quite fairly. Epistemological realism remained a life interest, and I often returned to it in articles mostly written in rather chastened vein but attempting to be fi rm in the end. That is still my attitude although it is opposed to most that has been written in this country during the last twenty years. I made only one elaborate attempt to return to it, and then in an oblique way. A friend of mine in America asked me to write a book on realism for a series he was editing. After ten years, he said, I ought to be able to review the subject all over again and he was willing to give me all the space I wanted. I told him that I was tired of realism as such but that I would like to discuss epistemology in general; and I was greatly attracted by the space allowance for in most of my books I have been haunted by the fear that the public couldn’t stand a very full treatment and so that one had to condense much beyond one’s desires. In short I fell for the offer and produced my longest book Knowledge, Belief and Opinion. It was not successful. Those who were interested in the subject wanted minuter treatment of the several themes (and they were legion) that I had to discuss. For the others there were too many minutiae and nothing very substantial to take hold upon. There is a place, and I believe there is need for such a book, but mine (very properly I have no doubt) was in little demand and will be in less. If I had given my life to it I might have made it better, but I doubt whether many would have thought so. The verdict almost certainly would have been “Quite a creditable effort one must suppose; but life is short; and so-and-so is much more stimulating about imagination” – or about probability. When I was in California I had elected to give a course on ethics because I intended to write on that subject. It had always interested me and although I had not taught it since I left St Andrews I thought that it suited my turn of mind. Returned from California I spent that summer in writing most of a projected book on ethics, and I published the book a year later, being by that time a professional moralist. The book was called A Study in Moral Theory. I fear the Study suffered from over-confi dence. It seemed to me to be clear that only the goodness of actions justifi ed them morally – either the goodness in them or the goodness that fl owed from them – and that Moore was utterly right in maintaining that “good” was a unique property, intellectually discernible, that certain human actions and experiences actually did have. Autobiography of a Scots Professor 79

Where Moore was mistaken I thought was in holding that “Good” in this general sense (i.e. intrinsic good) was necessarily or peculiarly ethical. Moral goodness seemed to me to be a species of goodness in general, aesthetic goodness e.g. would be another species. In short, Moore’s Principia Ethica, as I thought, would have been more correctly called Principia Axiologica. If this were so it was necessary (a) to distinguish ethical from other “good” and (b) to examine the quite special obligation that attaches to moral duty. On the fi rst point I thought that a question became moral when one either tried or neglected to try, to do one’s best, and I argued – this was the new fruit – that this attempt to do one’s best was a self-imposed categorical imperative. These contentions, sketched rather rapidly, were the exordium of the book and also the backbone of its argument. Most of the rest was intended to be a psychological and sociological development of the theme though always in an abstract way. The general argument seemed to me to be too obvious to be original – indeed Rashdall had said much the same. I tried to develop it in my own way. As I say I was over-confi dent. Moore’s account of the concept “good” may well be correct, and in substance I still believe it to be true; but it has to be argued, at least in the sense that many opposing plausibilities have to be developed to the top of their bent before they are discarded. Similarly much more discussion was needed about the central question whether the morally right is a derivative of doing one’s best. Finally the Kantian doctrine of a self-imposed imperative is plainly wrong, if taken literally, whether or not the doctrine is defended in Kant’s way or in the un-Kantian way that I had chosen. One cannot, strictly speaking, command oneself or obey oneself, and if the authority of the moral conscience is analogous to the command of a rightful superior to a subject who should be loyal, the actual relation should be examined instead of this metaphorical representation of it. When I wrote the book I was sensible, although insuffi ciently sensible, of the cursoriness of my treatment of the fi rst point, and was already planning another book expressly on that subject. The other points, as I shall record, came home to me with greater force owing to the trend of ethical discussion in these islands. I set myself then to examine the notion of goodness, worth or value in the most general sense, and after three years labour produced The Idea of Value. After showing (as I thought) that economic value (i.e. utility-value and still more obviously exchange-value) presupposed “value” of another kind (since economic value means “good for”, i.e. “good-for-something-else and since 80 Writing

“good for” is plainly an incomplete expression, like “father-of ”, requiring its proper complement before it is signifi cant) I proceeded to examine the sense if any in which there might be “value” in mere self-maintenance; the sense, if any, in which “value” could be derived from desire or from pleasure; the sense, if any, in which value could, as Moore thought, be a discernible property of something. It seemed to me that if a fern used water, or a magnet attracted steel fi lings, this “natural selection” gave an intelligible sense of “valuing” which extended far beyond , indeed far beyond life, but that this conception of “value”, as well as all conceptions based upon pleasure or desire, were relative to the valued. The only sense of value that was not relative to the valuer must be the other sense in which “value” was a predicate intellectually discernible. I believed that this third sense of “value” was the most important and that it was defensible, not merely by the failure of the others to give any meaning to “value” except a relative meaning, but also on the merits of the case. I also attempted to discuss, rather fully, how far “values” were comparable and such-like questions, taking a lot of trouble over these but perhaps not quite enough. (They are very tricky, sometimes in a semi-mathematical sort of way, a fact that should have conveyed to me at least a “yellow” warning). The book I now think was of very unequal quality. Some of its analysis, in Macdonald’s phrase, was complex without being subtle, I could be forced to unsay a good deal that I did say, although (as I protest) mainly on minor points. From the standpoint of exposition, I made a bad mistake. I had certain classical views about “value or worth” principally in mind – Spinoza’s, the British moralists’, Von Ehrenfels’s and Meinong’s, Kant’s; and I tried to make my points by a running commentary upon these notable contributions to the subject. It would have been better either to state these types of value-theory seriatim and then attempt to bring them together (despite the protests of these dead or dying authors) or else to develop the discussion directly without referring to any famous names at all. If a reader were unfamiliar with these authors (and few would be familiar with them all) they would only entangle and distract him. If he were familiar with them he might easily neglect nearly everything except the history. I had hoped to be able to use historical material in a non-historical way, that is to say, to roam through the ages in order to extract arguments that could be presented in an undated fashion each as the best that could be done in its kind. I fear that I didn’t succeed; and that was a pity. The book was fairly well received. Only one reviewer said what I expected half of them to say, namely that my book contained no idea of value. Autobiography of a Scots Professor 81

My Idea of Value appeared in 1929. Soon afterwards I tried my hand at writing some dialogues. These reached the public in 1931 under the title Morals and Western Religion. I found this species of composition very agreeable but I could not please many readers and so with great regret had to abandon that kind of writing. One thing of some interest that I discovered was that, although there was quite a stream of philosophical dialogues in English about that time, very few people (to judge from the reviews) knew anything about the various types of dialogue-writing. Everyone seemed to think that Plato’s early dialogues were the only standards in this genre. It would be sad if it were so; for Plato is inimitable and his Socrates has a position of superiority that should not be copied unless the author has the right to believe that his own or his master’s ideas are miles ahead of the rest of the fi eld. I had chosen the Ciceronian model – debates in shortish set speeches rather than a conversation – and this method, as Cicero said, is very appropriate to subjects which are generally believed to be doubtful and in which several distinct points of view are likely to be upheld with strong conviction by different very competent persons. My subject, I thought, was of that kind and the Ciceronian method appeared to me to be feasible, avoiding as it did both the wooden A and B method (as with Hobbes) and the supreme artistry that would be required (along with a sort of mortal God) of the Platonic model. If I had been a Cicero I would have forced the critics to agree with me; but I was no Cicero. I was only an inglorious imitator who would have done better to have been mute. About this time I felt that I had exhausted all I could say with any pretence at usefulness on the special subjects I had pursued viz. the philosophy of personality, epistemology and, for the time being, ethics and allied subjects. The alternatives, as I thought, were silence or history. I had no mind for the latter since, although the history of ideas is important it has always seemed to me, at any rate since my Cambridge days, that an ounce in the way of original philosophy is better worth attempting than sackfuls of history, and that too many philosophers who have some independent ideas convert themselves into antiquarians instead, with woeful results for the young who often grow up with the idea that their lives should be spent in that sort of employment, and that the lucky man in the profession is he who can discover some defunct philosopher who is not wholly obscure and yet has not been written up too much. Moreover, since I was an inaccurate linguist, although capable of reading books on philosophy in a fair number of languages, I could not produce good work upon anyone who had not written in English without a much more 82 Writing prolonged and intensive study of some other language or languages than I was prepared (or, for that matter was young enough) to make. There was one exception, however. I had been an expositor of Hume’s work pretty continuously for twenty years, and during nearly all that period had cherished the design of some day writing about him. When a kindly importunate publisher therefore pressed me to write a book – any book – for him, I agreed to write about Hume. And I did so. Such a book might take various forms. In many ways, in spite though in part because of his inveterate eighteenth-centuriness, Hume is curiously modern, and many of his ideas, especially his biggest ones, keep cropping up persistently in sheaves of contemporary writing. Hume’s present immortality was therefore one possible theme, and a good one. That, however, was not what I wanted to do. Indeed I deliberately refrained from saying anything at all about his infl uence. What I thought had to be done was a piece of preliminary spade work where I was not the fi rst to dig – for Kemp Smith in this country and some others abroad had done a good deal of digging in the way that (on the whole) I approved – but where, as I thought, more elaborate digging was required. In this country, despite the work of Kemp Smith and others, there was still too marked a tendency to succumb to a plausible and partially justifi ed but pernicious myth to the effect that Locke began and Berkeley continued a sort of rake’s progress in philosophy which Hume completed and brought to a waster’s end. In terms of this myth Hume’s actual argument, and all the niceties and honesty of his elegant genius were either disregarded or treated casually as the exhibitionism of a fop. I wanted to describe the genuine Hume bent on exploring the experimental method in all the human sciences, clinging tenaciously to his phenomenalistic method despite certain inconsistencies that he saw and others that he did not see, regarding the book that was most famous to later eyes, namely the fi rst book of his Treatise, as a preamble to the construction that he only partially accomplished, defi ning his position as a student of human nature with special reference, on the one hand, to people like Shaftesbury (with whom he broadly agreed) and on the other hand to the which he rejected and to the scholasticism which he despised. I wanted to produce a generalised commentary paying some attention to the sources but more to the sinuosities of the system. On the whole I do not think that I failed. My book was the fi rst of several about Hume that appeared in these years. I am told it has been studied with profi t although not very widely. In short I am glad I wrote it. In delving into the books that Hume had read pretty carefully I conceived Autobiography of a Scots Professor 83 a great affection and a tempered but fi rm admiration for Hobbes, and when Stocks approached me with a request for a contribution to his Leaders of Philosophy series I said I would be very glad to give him one on Hobbes. I enjoyed the writing of that book very much, and, I am told, gave some enjoyment to others. There were rather special diffi culties. The plan of the series required a general account of Hobbes’s entire philosophy as well as a biographical and historical introduction and a fairly full account of the author’s infl uence. Croom Robertson in this country had written a most admirable book with the same general plan and Tönnies in Germany and Levi in Italy had written very good ones. Still there was recent special work of importance, such as Brandt’s (of Copenhagen) on Hobbian physics, the Hobbes-Gesellschaft at Kiel had accumulated several biographical scraps, contemporary pamphlets and the whole fascinating subject of the transition from medievalism to had to be examined – in short there was scope for useful and intensely interesting study. Even more importantly the actual course and the internal consistency or inconsistency of Hobbes’s circumnavigation of the intellectual globe was not a matter that could be decided once and for all and then repose on the shelf, whatever the excellence of some previous expositions had been. By an evil chance, although I verifi ed some thousands of references in proof, I falsely assumed that I had verifi ed all the dates whereas in fact I hadn’t. There are two obvious blunders of this type early in the book and I have since noted a few other corrigenda. I tried to give chapter and verse for everything I said, a laborious business but, I think, essential. The book on Hobbes, my second historical adventure, was also my last in that kind; for a little book in Recent Philosophy that I wrote for the Home University Library and published in 1936 dealt with near events, the specious historical present from 1910 onwards and so has to be distinguished from the antiquarian sort of history. In this contemporary fi eld I approached my task with many misgivings, but thought I knew what was needed. I also thought I could do what was needed as well as many – at any rate that I ought to try. As it seemed to me, philosophy had been very much alive but also greatly distracted in the present century, not in England only but also on the Continent and in America. There was no dominant movement but, instead, several independent armies, most of them pretty loosely organised, occasionally making contact (either friendly or inimical) but for the most part content and indeed anxious to remain aloof from one another. Setting aside ethics and such like philosophy (although that also had to be treated) there were, at the very least, idealism, realism, phenomenology, logistical , and various types of 84 Writing meta-biology. The problem was to describe this distraction fairly (and without imposing a concord that few would accept) without also distracting the reader beyond endurance. A second although minor problem was the mention of prominent although not outstanding names in such a way that the book would convey information and give guidance for further study. That had to be done without simply producing page after page of a catalogue only half raisonné. The book was not greatly liked but most people seemed to admit that it was more impartial than most and more informative than many. I mentioned some pages back that my fi rst book on ethics had been over- confi dent in its main argument, and that the fact had become increasingly apparent owing to the turn that contemporary discussion of abstract ethics was taking in these islands. I am not referring to all ethical discussion in Great Britain or elsewhere. Much of this discussion was essentially sceptical, a plea for mere or for emotionalism in the subject. In these ways, a place might be found for ethics and some sort of bowdlerised account of conscience and of moral judgments might be given, with the bowdlerisation inverted. Such questions are, of course, inescapable by any serious moralist, whether or not they are posed with a serious intent; but they resemble the ‘sceptical doubts’. I am speaking now about the people who, after due refl ection, are disposed to regard duty and goodness and such like conceptions as true ideas not to be liquidated in any bland or patronising way, not to be reckoned among superstitions that should be translated into something else although perhaps into something distinctive. I may illustrate the main point by mentioning a trivial anecdote that reveals my former state of mind. Long ago I read a book by a negro author in which he said that the practice of infanticide in certain African tribes was restricted, almost entirely, to mis-shapen or imbecile babies. This I took to be a defence of the practice, but apparently it was only an explanation, for the author went on to say “Of course the killing of infants is wrong”. His comment at the time seemed to me to be amusingly quaint. I thought he was exchanging a reasoned defence for a mere taboo, presumably a Christian taboo, and I suppose that there are few contemporary moralists who would go so far as to say that the question of euthanasia for monstrous or imbecile births could be settled in this way by an prohibition impervious to any other moral consideration. Many, however, would hold that “right” and “wrong” are conceptions quite distinct from “good” and “bad” whether or not it is goodness that justifi es or badness that condemns them. In my fi rst Autobiography of a Scots Professor 85 book (like many others, I suppose) I had seen the point, if only in a dusky mirror, and had shown the same by affi rming expressly and emphatically that the statements “This is the best I can do” and “Therefore I ought to do it” are not equivalent, as the “therefore” in the second statement showed. I defended the “therefore” as a true inference on the ground that “good” was relevant to and determinative of “right” in many obvious cases, and that I was aware of no other proper determinant of “right”. The distinction between “right” and “good” had been persistently pressed in Oxford, and Prichard in Mind of January 1912 had asserted that nearly all moral philosophers had ruined their theories by ignoring it. It was not till 1930, however, when Ross’s book The Right and the Good appeared that the subject became a topic of eager and general debate in the small arena of professional British moralism. I wanted to defi ne my attitude towards it, partly on my own account, partly because I had treated it far too lightly in my fi rst book. I could not believe, with Ross, that anything could be right that was not good or right although it was worse than some alternative course, that there was in fact any determinant of rightness except goodness, or that there was any intelligible hierarchy of “rightness” such that, in case of confl ict, one “right” action could be “righter” than another. But all such questions, I thought, deserved and required prolonged argument. Moreover it seemed plain to me that if “right” was derivative from “good” (as I believed) it was not derivative from intrinsic , at any rate if by an intrinsic good one means a good that is intrinsic to some experiencer. Thus if a man hungers after justice (as many do) he is hungering after a set of interpersonal relationships whose nature is not exhausted by the private satisfactions, or other “intrinsic goods” of the men who rejoice in being justly treated. In short it seemed to me that these relational goods determined and defi ned the sort of “rightness” that Ross and Prichard were defending. That, in the main was the line I took in my Enquiry into Moral Notions published in 1935, although I began the book with a discussion of the nature of virtue (often developed into a separate type of moral theory) and attempted several pieces of ethical classifi cation and analysis that interested me and that seemed important. Alas for all my projects! The book was applauded by the Daily Mail and trounced in Mind. That is a cheap and snobbish comment made for brevity’s sake. I am not in fact very uppish about the Daily Mail, and I am aware that there is a lot of poor stuff in Mind. My book however was intended for the 86 Writing experts. Since its principal theme was being widely debated among these experts it was not worth writing unless according to their standards it was thoroughly workmanlike. The complaint was just that it was not. The Mind reviewer, Mr Carritt, was a very competent although a rather crotchety and dogmatic moralist. His brief and contemptuous comment was that I had no idea of using the English language with precision. I was attempting analysis and was no analyst. No “quality” of the book could redeem its persistent slovenly inaccuracy. I tried very hard at the time, and I have tried very hard since, to treat this matter with proper detachment. I knew well enough that I was constitutionally more sensitive to censure than to encouragement. (I put this down, with a rough logic not wholly defensible, to a persistent desire to improve and so to learn from actual or reputed mistakes). An adverse review, even from a competent and honest quarter was a small thing in itself, and the fact that some later technical reviewers followed suit need have no great signifi cance. (One of them, for instance, quoted certain phrases which I did not think I could improve and remarked “such inaccuracies abound”). I could not, myself, accept either Mr Carritt’s censures or those of this reviewer, but I had to believe that there was something in them, perhaps much, that had escaped and continued to escape my busy eye. In short the matter was serious. It would have been annoying, in any case, to be treated like a pretentious meddler and to hear the sentence “Out with his loose and babbling tongue”. It was more than annoying to be treated so, presumably with some justifi cation, with regard to a subject which I had taught persistently, and indeed almost exclusively, for a dozen years, and at a time when I was a mature and practised writer. There was no solace in the thought that people were sick of all this pother about “right” and “good”, and were disinclined to read more of it unless they were told, through the usual channels, that they could not conscientiously avoid doing so. The book was not worth writing unless it deserved to have that very effect. I had to admit that in all probability it deserved to be passed over; and it certainly was passed over. I could be reasonably certain that it would remain unread. In sort, as a moralist my name was mud, and mud that had already evaporated. On the whole the disaster seemed to me to be so complete that I would be wise to stop writing for publication – I could not stop writing – for a prolonged period, if not for ever. So I scribbled about metaphysics, a subject about which I had hitherto been almost silent and yet the main interest of every philosopher. I liked that employment and might have continued with it, very Autobiography of a Scots Professor 87 happily, for many a year. There came a change, however, and rather rapidly, for in the spring of 1937 it seemed that I was about to begin the most strenuous time of my whole life. First came an invitation to be a visiting lecturer at Columbia. I had declined a similar invitation two years before, the reason being that I had just had three months leave of absence from Aberdeen owing to a mishap in Amsterdam where I had been knocked down by a motor car and had had my skull fractured. I thought I could not decline the renewed invitation unless I bade good-bye to all such expeditions for the future; and I loved to sample new climates, especially if they were spiced with a certain academic novelty. So I accepted and began to prepare lectures on metaphysics. Two months later came another request. The University of Glasgow asked me to give them Gifford lectures in 1939 – 1941. That invitation, to my mind, was a higher honour than I had ever expected to receive. Naturally I accepted it with alacrity. Almost at once I had an unpleasant surprise. I did not feel well and soon had no diffi culty in diagnosing my complaint as diabetes mellitus. This diagnosis was speedily confi rmed and it also appeared that my blood pressure was fantastically high and that some other things might be wrong. I had in fact to readjust my views about myself very considerably; for I had always thought my health secure, at any rate for the purposes I had most at heart. I resigned the Columbia appointment and resolved to write my Gifford lectures very slowly, after giving Glasgow the opportunity of annulling the appointment if it so desired. Glasgow gave me its blessing, very kindly, and I went on the way I had planned. Having selected as one of my troubles the disease that modern medicine can deal with best, I found that I had plenty of energy and a very tolerable existence. I did not even need to be sentimental about myself. At the present moment I have given the fi rst series of these lectures and prepared the second. The fi rst series has been published – three days before the Germans invaded Belgium. It will be some time before the time comes, if it ever comes, when many will be disposed to read it. The second series is stored for safety in a strongroom that I hope the Germans may spare. It is a matter of speculation when, if ever, it will be given. I think, however, that I have found a suitable moment for suspending this narrative at any rate for the duration of the war. X World War II

I am writing this in October 1945 on the eve of the fi rst University session after VJ Day. Having done nothing to help our war effort and having seen very little worth recording, my recollections of World War II are not in themselves worth setting down. No doubt a record of a little life during great events has a certain value if it be faithful; but already there have been plenty of records of British civilian life in the second world war, from pens much more vivid than mine. And there will be many more. For civilians World War II was a much more exciting affair, at any rate in this country after the Sitzkrieg, than World War I. Not at the outset perhaps. When the Germans invaded Norway my colleague in the Chair of Humanity gesticulated with excitement and talked about Hybris. A day or two later he and the rest of us pulled long faces over the outwitting of the British fl eet whatever their boldness in Narvik Fjord. The overweening effrontery of the Germans in challenging us at our own amphibian game seemed now to be a prudent calculation on their part. Still, these events in April 1940 were less overwhelming than the staggering clash which was halted at the Marne in 1914. When the invasion through the Low Countries and the Ardennes began we said “Well. They’ve taken on a big job”. But we said that only for a day or two. The fl ight of the Dutch Queen shook us up pretty thoroughly. Things were at least as exciting as in the time of Le Cateau; and even gloomier. Dunkirk made us proud of our genius for improvisation, but not too confi dent about the invasion most of us expected. We may not have known how bad things were but we knew they were very bad indeed. The winter of 1940 –41, calling for fortitude and endurance without much hope, did resemble World War I, especially in respect of the not too distant threat from the submarines, much more formidably based than ever before. Tobruk, no doubt, seemed much more cheerful than the Dardanelles. But when we had to bolt from Benghazi that solace also was equivocal. At home we had Jerry’s attentions from the air. Here in Aberdeen we had a relatively lively start. Single aircraft were attentive and the sirens busy. In July 1940 a harassed German plane, soon to crash in a skating rink in Aberdeen, unloaded half a dozen small bombs in King’s College playing fi elds and then some Autobiography of a Scots Professor 89 more in the town and in Hall Russell’s shipyards. That, as it happened, was the nearest any bomb ever got to my house. A window was broken; there were several fi zzing bomb fragments in the garden and our housemaid promptly fainted, recovering very neatly when the plane was over the harbour. There was no siren, and for the rest of us in this part of the town, the thing was too quick to affright except for one or two who were mortally wounded. In the town the deathroll was over thirty – as a cousin said to me with modest pride the biggest casualty list anywhere in the United Kingdom during that month. We had soon to abate these pretensions. We were not as London, Liverpool, Hull, Glasgow or Belfast. There were alerts galore, and anxious nights and some small-scale bombing. There was plenty of trouble at sea; but in the main we were badgered without being hurt. I was a warden, though not a good one, and my wife drove her car as an auxiliary ambulance. So we had to turn out pretty often. Sometimes I managed to sleep on the fl oor of the post. But I never had to do anything useful, and from the Cromwell Tower had an interesting if chilly view of fl ares, tracer bullets and nasty black bombers. When America, thanks to the Japs, came in at last, defeat seemed unlikely and any acute apprehension of invasion had already passed. Victory was another story and it looked as if we might have to fi ght forever in order to stand by Australia in partial return for her staunch support of us. The loss of the Prince of Wales and the Renown, as it chanced, was the only disaster in the war that made me personally physically sick, though the escape of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau through the Channel was almost if not quite as disheartening. The landing in force in North Africa, I think, seemed to most of us the fi rst indication that we might really be victorious – for even Alamain by itself (though “cracking good news” as the BBC commentator said) seemed to be just the relief of Cairo after a very near squeak and the prelude to more in and out work in the neighbourhood of Benghazi. As time went on the prospects of victory seemed to recede. There would have to be D-day and who could be confi dent about that, even if Dieppe were nothing of a guide. Germany, I suppose, was crushed at the Falaise Gap; but since the Germans were going to fi ght to a fi nish it looked as if America, Russia and ourselves were in for a very long struggle. Neither VE day nor VJ day were very exuberant here. Both were damp. The fi rst was not the end and the second missed fi re through inconveniently late announcements. A point of some interest I suppose is just where the shoe pinched most. In the literal sense, shoes were a bit of a problem, especially the shoes of young children. For others, despite apparently formidable restrictions upon the 90 World War II activities of cobblers, “make do and mend” seemed to be pretty successful; and here at least the smaller, older cobblers did not overcharge. The forced economy of clothing coupons, more generally, stirred up a good deal of ingenuity. I suppose we are all incredibly shabby to look at now: but nobody seems to mind very much; and many women are still relatively complacent before a mirror, though with less cause than in former years. (The purchase price of non-utility dresses is certainly outrageous, and the shopwindows of Dublin a miracle to any with short memories. Still it is astonishing to fi nd the amount of life that old clothes have). Housing, pots and pans, carpets and chairs certainly deteriorated terribly. Aberdeen, a “neutral area” except for the harbour had fewer refugees (of all kinds) than most other cities and the renting of rooms and of furnished houses and the like was less of a racket than in some other places; but there was a dangerous and deplorable degree of under-accommodation. The better-to-do took lack of domestic service so much for granted as scarcely to complain though the bigger houses were unworkable without such service. If anyone took ill the misery was great. Queues and crowded buses did not help elderly gentlemen and harassed housewives to avoid winter ailments. Nor did it matter if the said housewives, being working women, were earning good or goodish money on the side to an extent they had never thought of before. Food in Aberdeen was fairly plentiful without too black a market. It was not even very monotonous if one took pains, There was a good deal of shivering, though, compared with most of Europe and much of Britain, little to describe as genuine hardship. On the whole most civilians were relatively opulent, hard-working, dully fed and rather frightened. I say “rather” frightened here, because in Aberdeen, as I have said, the bombing bore quite a small proportion to the alerts. We had just one intensive raid with 170 bombs of all kinds in the city and rather more than one death per bomb when the military casualties were added to the civilian. That was in April 1943 on a beautifully clear night with a full moon. It seemed as bright as day about three a.m., four hours after the two-hour raid, when I was searching the town for traces of my wife (who in fact was busy with her ambulance after she had been machine gunned though not hit). I didn’t much like that “baby Blitz” though I was less frightened than I had been before when patrolling at night with an apparently monstrous German bomber low overhead or even in the day time attempting to persuade students that glass windows were not good cover and that a snowball fi ght was not a very good idea when enemy aircraft were attacking a damaged Beaufi ghter Autobiography of a Scots Professor 91 over the bay. Aberdeen talked about its “major” raid for the whole summer afterwards. I heard little discussion later. On the night of that raid my air raid post and sector were confi ned to their own limits and did nothing at all except to confuse between chunks of tombstone (for a neighbouring cemetery had been hit) and unexploded bombs. These orders may have been wise. A renewed attack was always possible, though our night-fi ghters would not have been caught napping for a second time. But I didn’t know and didn’t discover on patrol that Bedford Road, only a quarter of a mile away from my house, had been badly hit with thirty dead or dying and I still regret that, in sheer ignorance, I was away from that patch of utter wretchedness, doing nothing to help my own students even, two of whom, lodging there, were killed. In a general way the Civil Defence Services, I think, were reasonably effi cient and amazingly diligent in their attendance for dull instruction and duller meetings. Their commanding offi cers seemed to think that tests and even examinations, of the memorised type familiar to the police were what education meant. So they educated them. Later as head fi re-guard of the Group I had to sit an examination for an instructor’s certifi cate and give a “lecturette” for better measure, an Edinburgh fi reman and a commercial traveller being the examiners, and the instructor a retired postal offi cial who was a crammer if ever there was one. I was very near the top in my written (if not quite there – I never heard precisely) and was allowed just to scrape through on my lecturette – all of which was probably just though not encouraging. (Some admirably effi cient head fi re guards were ploughed, to the great disadvantage of the service). In short the Scottish service, to keep itself busy, fell back upon the least defensible part of our educational system much, I supposed, as the fabled seamen in their drifting boat took up a collection for lack of other recollections of a religious service. Personally, however, I did learn something about democracy in this service. Among the fi re-guards I was, in effect, a petty offi cer with pettier offi cers below him. These I met weekly, and, being a democrat, was determined to have government by discussion. I got the discussion or at any rate endless reiteration on the part of a few grousers. What government there was came out in the voting and was quite unaffected by the discussion. Yet the meetings were well attended despite their frequency. Scottish education did not shine with much refulgence during the war. I may deal with it here from University entrance upwards. The summer of 1939, when we all knew war was coming but pretended 92 World War II to ourselves that it might after all be averted, perhaps with another and still more humiliating “miracle” of Munich, was a period during which all sorts of bodies planned all sorts of schemes of possible action should war break out. The Scottish Education Department, ostensibly upon the false premiss that a bomb dropped anywhere would upset all the examinations all over the country (but perhaps for ulterior motives) planned the abolition of their Leaving Certifi cate examinations and their replacement, during war time, by school records adjudged by local panels. A feature of the scheme was the Department’s refusal to grant passes in individual subjects though they would grant a total pass. The Scottish Universities Entrance Board who were pledged to accept the Leaving Certifi cate as the “normal” means of entrance to Scottish universities on the part of Scottish schoolboys, meekly agreed, in the uneasy peace of that summer, to cooperate in the scheme. Then came war, and the Board empowered a committee to settle details with the Department. The result was that this committee pledged itself, for the duration of the war, to conform with the scheme. The result, of course, was disaster. Not only had Scotland, the least bombed part of Great Britain, the humiliation of refusing to carry on when the rest of the country did, it had also to recruit its universities in the most cumbrous method imaginable. Since such entry required specifi c passes in specifi c subjects what was arranged was that every candidate for matriculation wrote to the Department which in turn supplied to the Secretary of the Board the candidate’s local marks, and that the Board, on this evidence, granted passes in requisite subjects though the Department took no responsibility. (Since passes in individual subjects were often wanted for purposes with which the Universities had nothing to do, this, the only method open to Scottish schoolboys to obtain such individual passes was very freely used). The correspondence involved was mountainous. It is a matter for argument whether the Board or the Department was the stupider in this affair. I think myself that the Department was pursuing a policy designed, in the end, to force the Scottish Universities to accept every Leaving Certifi cate irrespective of its content. The policy failed but it was quite astute. In my opinion it was the Board (of which I was a member) which was stupid. No doubt the quality of the instruction in the schools was a good deal more important than the method of testing the quality. Here I think Scotland did pretty well. With depleted and diluted staffs, and with requisitioning of school buildings for which the teachers were not to blame, a fair though a Autobiography of a Scots Professor 93 lower standard of instruction was retained. In the universities, medical and physical science were active with plenty of reserved men (or cadets) to teach; but teaching in Arts was pretty dreary. I like teaching young women, but prefer to have at least some young men in the class, and these with some appearance of health. In some ways the war had its educational advantages. Fire watching led to some academic discussion. The Ministry of Labour demanded a certain profi ciency. So the students, despite the burden of their various war duties had very strong motives for diligence in their studies. On the whole, however, nothing could be more gladdening to a teacher than the partial return of the status quo ante bellum in October 1945. One had forgotten how interesting one’s job used to be even for persons like myself who are not enamoured of teaching.

John Laird

Recent Philosophy

Chapter I Introduction

A WRITER on recent philosophy may properly be asked to explain what he regards as recent, and what he accounts a philosophy. On the fi rst point, 1 have seen the suggestion that nothing is recent unless it is “post-depression,” and am familiar with the view that everything in philosophy is a back number unless, spiritually or chronologically, it is at least a lustre younger than the Peace of Versailles. If these opinions are admitted to have an exaggerated look, the explanation may be added that the present age is a period of acute philosophical fever where the changes are far more rapid than in other eras of more indolent incubation. To prevent misapprehensions on this score, therefore, it seems best to explain that the present little book is meant to be a sequel to Mr. Webb’s in this series, that it is convenient to call anything recent that bears the stamp of the present century, that considerations of continuity may compel certain modestly archaeological investigations so far back as the nineteenth century, but that to-day, for our purposes, may reasonably be regarded as a little more interesting than yesterday, whether or not it is of greater historical importance. Prophecies regarding to-morrow are too easily upset to be appropriate to the present series. On the second point it seems clear that a liberal interpretation should be given to the term “philosophy”; in short that everything should be called “philosophy” which assumes that title and, in the vulgar phrase, gets away with it. In statelier language we may say that philosophy exists wherever it is reputed to exist by any considerable body of tolerably expert opinion. We need not, indeed, expect the whybrows to admit that Mr. Heidegger is an eminent philosopher, or expect to compel all the highbrows to assent to the opinion that the late Mr. Meade deserved that appellation. But unless a man is content to believe, as the great Leibniz hinted, that there is only one eternal philosophy, a philosophia perennis whose divine right to that title is much more readily apparent than in the case of any human monarch, it is impolitic to be other than hospitable to all serious self-styled philosophies. If there is a 98 Introduction certain risk of gate-crashing, that risk should be taken, Although this conclusion seems certain, however, the grounds for it deserve rather closer consideration. It is commonly said to-day that philosophy, distracted herself, is peculiarly distracting to anyone who would woo her. What is needed, we are told, is a “synthesis” (glib word) that will give us a “world-view” or universal perspective not quite obviously all too human. Wide prospects, along with a certain appearance of stability, are eagerly longed for. Without these, it is said, there can be no genuine philosophy. With them even a man who cannot pray may divine a certain substance in the things he hopes for, or at least can learn to acquiesce with a certain understanding. Such a statement may be consistent with the view that there may be much (as well as some) novelty in philosophy, or even (with reservations) that there may be several distinctive philosophies. It might even be intended to include the possibility that the present age, like Galileo’s, is the dawn of a new epoch; that, as some men say to-day in Germany, philosophy at long last is coming to understand its own proper function, the failure of Hegel and of Marx between them having shown that philosophy had in the past attempted far too much; that one of the greatest advantages of a long-continued culture, one of the fi nest legacies from famous men who are dead, is precisely the privilege of being able to choose between several highly developed world- perspectives. In the main, however, the statement seems covertly to assume that philosophy is a single institution, or comity of institutions with a single dominant tradition, and that its present “distraction” is a proof either that the present age has forgotten the central fact of such a philosophy’s existence or is suffering, at the moment, from a sort of nervous allergy which, because of the medicinal force of man’s naturally metaphysical mind, should shortly give place to a healthy restoration of “perennial” philosophy. It is therefore rather important to inquire whether in fact there has, in essentials, been but one perennial philosophy in the past, and whether the present age is peculiarly anomalous in this matter. Those who believe in a single philosophia perennis, developing, indeed, as an institution develops, but remaining substantially the same on account, rather than in spite, of its changes, have a diffi cult case to defend. This eternal philosophy, it would seem, must be a good European philosophy, and indeed be rather eclectic within the European peninsula; except, of course, for selected portions of the new Europe across the Atlantic. Suppose, however, that India, Persia, China, Babylon and really do not in this matter, Recent Philosophy 99 and even that England and Russia are, in different ways, not quite European enough. The diffi culty remains that there is more than one claimant to the title of perennial philosophy, and, still more seriously that, for one at least of the claimants, there is no effective standard for distinguishing the gold from the dross. In the name of philosophia perennis, the Roman Church to-day has fl own the pennon of a new mediaevalism or continuing scholasticism. For the most part, however, perennial philosophy is an idol of the textbooks, that is to say it refers to a certain metaphysics in the grand manner which is supposed to constitute a single dynasty with Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibiniz, Kant and Hegel among its more splendid sovereigns. Even if the stature of these great fi gures be admitted, however, it is far from certain that the royal blood in their veins belongs to the same group (especially in the case of Kant), and there are serious diffi culties about people like Hume who did not belong to the dynasty, and devoutly thanked the originating principles of things (if there were any) for the circumstance. Such men, it must be supposed, have their exploits recorded in the textbooks, because they were rebels of note, and compelled the dynasty to exert itself – an explanation, surely, that is desperately diffi cult to accept. If the rebellion had been successfully crushed, why trouble to display the corpses? If it was not crushed, how is the dynasty secure? And if the confl ict was of a seriously philosophical order, must not all the combatants be accounted philosophers? Therefore I think we should infer that there has been no single dynasty of superlative philosophy in the past, and that a philosophical career has been open to many talents during a very long stretch of recorded time. In that case, the mere circumstance that the prismatic appearance of contemporary philosophy seems peculiarly diffi cult to reconcile with the white radiance that has been sometimes supposed to belong by right to the subject ceases to be a major diffi culty. Heroic solutions become unnecessary. It may be true, as some modern analysts aver, that the great philosophers of the past attained their eminence not, as is commonly supposed, because of their metaphysical powers, but in spite of these powers and because of their analytical subtlety. It may also be true (and it is more plausible to say) that philosophy at the present moment is desperately pursuing a variety of different clues either in a maze of speculation or in a haze of probabilities. But there is no compulsion to accept these opinions unless they are proved by the evidence in detail. On the other hand, this question of unity versus multiplicity is the very meaning and aim of philosophy has to be encountered very early in any 100 Introduction inquiry into current philosophical tendencies, and so is a suitable and even a necessary introduction to our subject. As I have said, it is not altogether a new problem. Indeed, there is no contemporary movement that cannot show distinctive affi nities with famous contentions of earlier centuries. Nevertheless it may also be true that time is giving evidence of the depth of philosophical disparities rather than of their underlying philosophical solidarity, or at the least that this possibility should be considered. It would certainly seem that many philosophies of to-day treat other philosophies not as brothers or even as enemies, but as untouchables. One of the reasons for this is the increasing technicality of philosophy, not in its questions and answers only but also in the language it is concerned to develop. To be sure, philosophers have always had to discuss technical questions, and, for the most part, have made use of technical terms. Nevertheless, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several of the greatest philosophers were able to express their principal ideas in an adequate and even in a splendid prose that was understood by the educated and serious public. Such achievements in these centuries marched with the decline of Latin as a universal scientifi c language and with the rise of the vernacular for scientifi c purposes. Descartes and Hobbes, Malebranche and Berkeley, Shaftesbury and Hume were notable examples; and although Kant and Hegel changed all that by compelling most philosophers to have a certain acquaintance at least with a more technical way of speaking, the change, if in some ways regrettable, was less serious than it seemed to be on the surface. After all it is not so very diffi cult to learn one new language; and if philosophers, for most practical purposes, had the choice between employing the new “transcendental” language (perhaps sparingly) on the one hand, and, on the other hand, using ordinary speech with a very small addition of technical terms (as Comte or Mill did), their readers may indeed have been wistful but need not have been dismayed. To-day there is some excuse for dismay. Among certain philosophers of different types, the normal attitude appears to be one of complete linguistic isolation. Each seems to say to the others, “I don’t want to talk with you unless you take the trouble to learn my language.” Moreover, the menacing part of the situation is that many of these languages are exceedingly diffi cult to learn, not to speak of the circumstance that they rapidly become out of date. The reading public, it is true, can extort a remedy. It expects and fi nds that someone will turn up to tell it in simple (or, better, in lively) language what such and such an abstruse philosophy is really after, and although few philosophers Recent Philosophy 101 have been as successful in this respect as some eminent physicists, several have succeeded very well. The trouble is rather with the leaders themselves. If they cannot understand more than a few of these different languages, they have to ignore all except a few among the philosophies of the day. Regarding the other philosophies, the leaders (if they are so charitable) have perforce to pick up a few general ideas from somebody’s ABC. All of which is distinctly unfortunate. The evil may indeed be temporary, among other reasons, because some of the new languages may be able to simplify themselves and because others may turn out to be unspeakable. But the cure, from obvious causes, may be very slow. On the whole the most prominent philosophical ideas in the present century appear to have been those of absolutism (or one of its variants), positivism (perhaps rather unmilitant), analysis, phenomenology and realism. This statement, however, if acceptable at all, must be accepted with great reserve. Many would say, for instance, that the century has had to chronicle the decline of absolutism, and that the variants of absolutism (so-called) are departures from it, either intentionally retrogressive, or impatiently and impenitently different. Others, again, would insist that the decline of old- fashioned positivism is quite indisputable and that the newer “positivism” is misleadingly so described if it refers, as it should, to the new spirit of mutual accommodation between philosophy and the natural sciences, so characteristic and (it is generally thought) so healthy a feature of contemporary thought. Phenomenology and other such terms, it may be conceded, describe characteristically twentieth-century movements whatever the standing of the phenomenological and other philosophies may happen to be at the present moment; but the omission of names such as , instrumentalism, behaviourism, objective relativism, the philosophy of organism and the like may seem quite remarkable; and it is plain that the work of many prominent philosophers escape from the crude meshes of all these names. I shall let it go at that. Any selection of this kind is bound to be arbitrary, and I prefer not to argue about the degree of its arbitrariness. Instead I shall say that even if my selection is less defensible than I think it is, there is convenience in giving a preliminary indication of the meaning of these particular terms in the present place, and for postponing the necessary explanations regarding other general names and the more individual contentions of particular men. (1) Absolutism is a general term for . Historically speaking this type of philosophy was developed so notably by G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) that it is not unusual to regard Absolutism and Hegelianism as 102 Introduction convertible terms. It would be embarrassing, however, to insist upon literal equivalence; for many “Hegelians” explain that their Hegelianism consists only of an admiration for Hegel together with a profound sympathy with his points of view. Other Absolutists, in Italy for instance, dissociate themselves from the Hegelian form of Absolutism; and Marx’s followers are Hegelians without being idealists, since they accept Hegel’s “dialectical” method, but put it, they say, “upon its feet,” that is to say develop it materialistically. Accordingly, it seems best to identify “absolutism” with “absolute idealism” and to signify by the term “absolutism” any philosophy that asserts that Mind is the source and principle as well as the measure of all things, having nothing outside it that could hinder or control it. (2) Positivism was the name that Auguste Comte (1798–1857) selected to describe his philosophy. According to Comte there was clear sunlight for man when (and not before) he had overpassed, fi rstly, the twilight of theology and, secondly, the wan rays of metaphysics. Only the third or scientifi c stage of thought had any place in the sun. Philosophy therefore had to abandon metaphysics and had to become scientifi c, but it need not on that account become a mere waggon-load of scientifi c results. The sciences formed a hierarchy, and the study of the higher generalities of the sciences formed a distinctive if elevated stratum in which philosophy was truly at home. In this general sense any philosophy may be called positivistic if it affi rms that philosophy and the sciences belong to the same world and if it also denies that philosophy (from a “higher” or from any point of view) can correct or transform scientifi c thought either generally or in detail. In that sense there are many modern positivisms. On the other hand, certain types of dogmatic positivism are decidedly out of fashion. Few modern authors would be content simply to accept the sciences and ascertain their hierarchy. The reason is that the more developed sciences, at the very moment when their prestige stood higher than ever in the world before, became themselves distrustful of their own fi nality. Consequently the dogmatic type of positivism ceased itself to be positivistic enough. (3) The modern school of “analysis” is also called “” in certain of its developments. Speaking generally, all the great philosophers in the past have busied themselves with problems of philosophical analysis. They have been the microscopists of the critical conjunctures of theory as well as the telescopic spectators of all time and of all existence, and there is nothing peculiarly novel in the idea that philosophy, for a time at least, should restrict itself to analytical questions and make haste slowly in that domain, although Recent Philosophy 103 there may be an unusual degree of heroism in the resolution with which this arid-seeming programme is pursued. In the form of “analysis” called “logical” or “logistical positivism,” however, the emphasis is laid upon language. A science develops by elaborating an adequate technique of expression. Philosophy deals with the most general problems. Let it therefore track pure generality to its lair. When it does so it necessarily deals with the pure form of expression, with generalized logical syntax. That is what philosophy, the science of the general, necessarily comes to; and that is its logical positivism. Such a theory, it is admitted, is incomplete in at least one particular. Pure form can say nothing factual about fact. It describes what would be true of any fact, and consequently what is characteristic of none. Hence the theory must be supplemented by an analysis of certain other generalities, and particularly by an account of the conditions under which it is legitimate to say anything about anything. In this part of their philosophy the logical positivists are for the most part either empiricists or pragmatists or both, but some of them attempt to reach a more dogmatic type of positivism by holding that the “physical” mode of speech is not only of paramount importance everywhere, but also may actually be based upon certain scientifi c “protocols” that are impregnable either to scientifi c or to philosophical attack. (4) Phenomenology is the term employed by E. Husserl to describe his “eidetic” philosophy. It is a name, we may say, for the view that the structural essence of any science that has a structural essence may be compelled to reveal itself to a suffi ciently unprejudiced and suffi ciently painstaking eye. In short it is the attempt to let the larger generalities speak for themselves. In a wider sense, however, any method may be called phenomenological if its purpose is to give a minute and faithful description of central things in the expectation that the picture so formed must tell a true and also an extensive story. This method is being diligently pursued in many quarters. “Phenomenology” is not “,” for phenomenalism is the theory that sense-appearances tell all that there is to tell, but if phenomenalism were not confi ned to the senses the two would coincide in method, for both would deliberately adopt the method of letting the appearances speak for themselves, of giving them a very long and very patient hearing, and of concluding that their complete and genuine testimony must be regarded as ultimate. (5) While the terms “absolutism,” “positivism” and “phenomenology” seem obviously to need some explaining, “realism” like “analysis” might appear to be quite generally intelligible. That is its misfortune. It suffers and does not gain from its title, because in its modern dress (which is not quite 104 Introduction in the latest fashion) it has to deal with highly technical matters in a highly technical way. Certain philosophical realists it is true may attempt to be on the plain man’s side in the matter of the “reality” of tables, carpets and planets. That, however, is only a part of their philosophical interest. For the most part they are discussing very abstract things, recondite, unplausible and, very likely, unreadable. These terminological observations are intended, fi rstly, to facilitate and abbreviate future explanations, and secondly, to give a rough preliminary indication of the major topics that will subsequently be discussed. As a further introduction, I propose to give a brief survey of the state of philosophy at the beginning of the century. Chapter II The Beginning of the Present Century

In the fi rst half of the nineteenth century the salient philosophical events were the completion of Hegel’s absolute idealism and the elaboration of Auguste Comte’s positivism. In the year 1859, however, Darwin published his Origin of Species. Thenceforward philosophy could not afford to be pre-Darwinian, although it could (and frequently did) attempt to be super-Darwinian. It also could not afford to neglect the rapid growth of physical, medical and historical science, where discovery stimulated theory, and theory, in its turn, made discovery almost inevitable; but a few philosophers held themselves aloof from these affairs on the ground that the scurry and bustle of the sciences should not affect the serenity of men who contemplated all existence under the guise of eternity. Towards the close of the century, although the sciences were very nearly international, even among monoglot nations, the same could not be said of philosophy, except in so far as some given philosophy took its cue from some science. Europe became Darwin-conscious, as one might say, overnight. England became Hegel-conscious in about a generation and a half. But the fact is no proof of England’s philosophical insularity. Indeed, in the most recent edition of Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy it is stated with some complacency that German philosophy to-day has been almost entirely undisturbed by foreign philosophical infl uences, and that the ultimate cause of the fact, without any doubt, is Germany’s peculiar native talent for the subject. To be sure, not all the countries were as Germany was in this particular, either in respect of the fact or in respect of its alleged cause. For that matter, young Scotsmen and young Americans, before the Great War, regarded Germany as the Mecca of philosophy, and so did young Russians, young Poles, young , young Turks and even a few young Englishmen. On the whole, however, it seems convenient to be semi-geographical in the present place, that is to say, to attempt to give a rough indication of what was what in philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century among the German-speaking, French-speaking, Italian-speaking, and English-speaking 106 The Beginning of the Present Century philosophers. It might be more accurate, and fairer to the smaller countries, to make the dividing line that of habitually reading or writing in some one of these languages, rather than of habitually speaking it; but limitations of space may excuse a certain injustice to the smaller peoples. At the opening of the present century there was little disposition among the Germans and the Austrians to assume the mantle of Hegel. On the other hand the mantle of Kant, sometimes turned and often dyed was frequently worn, partly because many noted scientists, such as Helmholtz, had been (physiological) Kantians, partly because it seemed safer to make a stand behind the lines of Königsberg in view of all that had happened to Hegelianism in the name of religion and of communism. Indeed the slogan “Back to Kant,” fi rst raised by O. Liebmann (1840–1912), became very popular, although a more accurate catchword might have been “Back to Kant, and scatter.” For some of the new “critical” (or Kantian) philosophers were, in the main, psychological, others metaphysical, others chiefl y interested in pure logical “knowledge”; and so forth. Thus J. Volkelt defended a metaphysic of subjective transubjectivism”; Windelband, Maier and Rickert pinned their faith to the validity of certain norms, including the of truth (which was logic); and the two most prominent members of the “Marburg school,” Cohen and Natorp, published works on the logic of “pure experience,” rationalistically understood, in 1902 and in 1903 respectively. The most important contribution to the theory of knowledge, however (that is to say, most important in the eyes of retrospective wisdom), was “critical” without being predominantly Kantian. This was the work of A. Meinong (1853 –1921) and of E. Husserl. Meinong had been a pupil of F. Brentano’s in Vienna, and Brentano (1838 –1917), who possessed one of the acutest and most seminal minds of all the philosophers of the last three generations, was Aristotelian, not Kantian, in his antecedents. Meinong’s On Assumptions, the most infl uential of his systematic works, appeared in 1902. Two years earlier. Husserl, then a Professor at Göttingen, published his Logical Studies, and this work (although not his fi rst) may be said to have established the “phenomenological” school whose subsequent activities in Husserl’s Yearbook has been one of the major infl uences in contemporary philosophy. All these writers were interested, not in presenting a world-picture but in the deeper secrets of this sort of picture-making; but of course there were many philosophers more interested in the picture itself. Thus E. Haeckel (1834–1919) was the occasion of many a pilgrimage to Heidelberg and of Recent Philosophy 107 some religious tumult within that ancient city in the early years of the century. His Riddle of the Universe (1899) sold half a million copies and its animate or half-animate materialism aped, or was, a creed. E. von Hartmann, again, widely known for his theories of pessimism and the “unconscious,” but also a devoted and indefatigable philosophical world-builder, wielded an active pen until his death in 1906. To return to Haeckel, a German “band of monists” formed itself in his honour in 1906, and included such well-known scientist- philosophers as J. Loeb and W. Ostwald. The philosophical interest of the logico-mathematical work of such men as Schröder, Dedekind, Cantor or Frege, and the entire German contribution to non-Euclidean geometry is incontestable, and was strong in our period although, in the main, of somewhat earlier date. So also were the German contributions to what used to be called “natural knowledge,” that is to say to the knowledge of physical nature. Here, in special, the “Kirchhoff ” school should be mentioned, and more specially still the work of E. Mach (1838– 1916). Mach’s Analysis of Sensations, one of the best known of his books, was published in 1900, and his Knowledge and Error in 1905. The theory of this Viennese professor is best described as pan-sensualism. It was the view that sensations are the sole reality, and it was combined with the explanation that all our principles are only a sort of shorthand; but Mach, an admirable and a most acute critic of classical physics, clothed this rather inadequate skeleton with the robust appearance of vigorous life. The researches of R. Avenarius (1843–96) into “empirio-criticism” and into a “natural world-notion” derived from “pure experience” had a certain affi nity with those of Mach, although the philosophy of Avenarius was biological-neurological rather than pan-sensualist. And Avenarius chose to express his views in a forbidding terminology. He had, however, a considerable international following for several years after his death. None of these authors, however, had the encyclopaedic range of W. Wundt (1832–1920). Psychologist, logician, moralist and sociologist, he had the energy and the equipment, although he had not quite the genius necessary for “the Leibniz of our age,” and was a signal example of the possible range of a single human mind at a time when extreme specialization was generally supposed to be the only way to prevent the best intentioned investigator from being choked by a surfeit of scientifi c knowledge. In particular (although it is somewhat misleading to particularize when so much was important) Wundt’s Folk Psychology, published in 1900, was a landmark in European sociology, especially in its description of language and myth and institutions regarded as 108 The Beginning of the Present Century abiding and developing structures within men’s minds yet greater far than any particular mind or small group of minds. Some of the German moralists were pretty frankly positivistic. Thus Jodl (1848–1914) was engaged in developing a humanistic and naturalistic theory when the century was young. O. Liebmann, despite Kant, clung to the thesis that thinking alone makes anything good or bad. Simmel (1858–1918), the greatest moralist in this kind, defended a descriptive, and relative, as opposed to a normative, absolutistic ethics, although he conceded that there were strong idealizing tendencies within mankind. And many voices continued to assert that the State was “the armed conscience of the community.” On the other hand the Stoic-Kantian-Herbartian view that duty was the stern daughter of the voice of reason continued to be in power. It pervaded the social humanitarianism of Cohen, and the new philosophy of value that Windelband, Rickert and some others proclaimed. It prompted T. Lipps and others strenuously to deny that a man’s good is what attracts and is agreeable to him. On the other hand the analytical value-theory of the Brentano school, especially in the hands of Meinong and von Ehrenfels, affi rmed, with skilful and patient assiduity, that love, pleasure or desire were constituents of the very meaning of anything good. Again, the former type of value theory (i.e. that of Windelband and of the others) tended to develop a theory of cultural norms closely associated with the history of political peoples. On the whole this endeavour to catch the quintessential if fugitive spirit of the great historical civilizations was the most signifi cant feature of German humanistic philosophy of the time and partially united many schools. (Wundt’s Folk Psychology, for example, included an attempt to portray the character of the greater nations of history, and Simmel, accepting the autonomy of sociology as a science, drew ethical consequences regarding the value of types and attitudes of the human spirit. In Poland, a patriotic Messianism was an interesting development.) On a wider scale R. Eucken of Jena (1846–1926) tried to seize and to amplify the faint traces and confused echoes of an interpersonal “world” higher and more spiritual than the “world” that most men contemplate. He was a pioneer in the movement that led to “existence” philosophies in Germany after the war, for he attempted to discover the foundations of a restricted idealism which, content with something less than the totality of being, should fi nd security for the spirit in its proper habitat and so give an answer to mere this-worldliness, positivism and . Beyond all doubt, however, the greatest name and the greatest infl uence in the humanistic-historical department of philosophy was that of W. Dilthey Recent Philosophy 109

(1833–1912). This author, it is true, designed more grandly than he could complete. He was the builder of abandoned palaces; but none approached him in the power of restoring the deep reverberations of past ideas or of persuading his readers that the Geisteswissenschaften (i.e. the sciences of the spirit), suitably approached, could be made to tell their own story. In France the infl uence of Comte and his positivism remained very strong. At the very least, the French philosophers felt constrained to defi ne their attitude towards Comte’s views, and many adhered to those views, at any rate if positivism be regarded, in general, as the theory that metaphysics, like theology before it, is something that human sanity has outgrown, being replaced by simple or “positive” science. For in that sense most that is traditionally known as philosophy is simply a portion of the positive science of psychology. Hence it may be claimed that Ribot (1839–1916) was the obvious as well as the distinguished successor of Comte, Taine and Renan; that Binet and Paulhan were also notable; and that the work of such men as P. Janet in abnormal psychology did much to rid sensible people of false psychological mysteries. Again, with certain reservations, it may be legitimate to inscribe the name of E. Durkheirn (1858–1917) in this part of the temple of humanity. Durkheim, it is true, spoke in the name of “reason,” not in the name of Comte; but Comte had originated much more in sociology than the name of that science, and Durkheim, the chief French sociologist of his time, may reasonably be said to have continued (although he altered) the Comtian tradition. What “reason” declared, according to Durkheim, was that institutions were genuine things. He attempted, since Comte in certain ways had bungled the affair, to become the Descartes (or, better, the Galileo or the Lavoisier) of institutional thinghood, and his deductions concerning religion were designed to supplant that ex-Queen of the sciences, metaphysical theology. It was for their criticism of the sciences, however, that the French were most renowned throughout Europe in the early years of the century. This general statement would apply to medicine and biology under the enduring infl uence of Claude Bernard (1813–78), to Bergson’s work in psychology and in biology, and in other such realms. It also applies, however, to mathematics and to physics, particularly to the work of H. Poincaré (1853–1912) and, a little later, to the work of P. Duhem. To Poincaré’s clever and charming work, indeed, much of the change in the spirit of present-day physics may be directly traced. Physics, as we all know, has become inquiring not dogmatic, and Poincaré’s subtle intellectualism, too subtle to regard science as a mere conventional convenience, too acute to ignore the extent to which conventional 110 The Beginning of the Present Century convenience permeates the advanced sciences, too sane to be overbalanced by an accumulation of “facts” or by sudden gusts of irrationalism, was admirably fi tted to introduce the present fashionable way of thinking. After Comte, C. Renouvier (1815–1903) had the greatest infl uence of any nineteenth-century French philosopher. At an early stage in his career he set himself to develop in France the Kantian thought that (as he supposed) Kant’s native country had abandoned. Hence there is a fl avour of (often very pronounced) in most modern French philosophical dishes. Renouvier’s Kantianism, however, was relativistic and phenomenalistic. He did not believe in a Limbo or in a Heaven of translucent and supposedly intellectual fabric, yet he held that everything relative was imposed by thinking persons, since all relations were so imposed. A great part of his work, again, was devoted to a passionate defence of human freedom, and he was eager to analyse human history. Consequently there was much Teutonic infl uence in France, little of it Hegelian, with the exception (in some measure) of O. Hamelin’s “integral “and “nöodicy.” F. Ravaisson-Mollien (1813 –1900) was another author whose work profoundly infl uenced the France of the early century, especially in the direction of exploring the spiritual implications of individual personality. His studies on Aristotle, on habit, on art, and on “creative” movement in general had an importance altogether incommensurable with their bulk, and advanced the “dynamic spiritualism” defended, long before, by Maine de Biran. J. Lachelier (1834–1918), the teacher of Boutroux and Bergson’s head master at the École normale supérieure, although in the main a Kantian had much in common with Maine de Biran and Ravaisson. He was one of those scholars who, although they wrote very little, were among the acknowledged leaders of their generation. In general the maxim “Know Thyself,” applied to the individual human spirit and enriched by a widely cultural interpretation appealed strongly to the French philosophers of the period whether they were Kantian-Biranists or not. One may mention, among many, V. Delbos, who died in 1916 at the height of his powers, and L. Brunschvicq, who in 1900 gave an earnest of many welcome volumes of the future in his Introduction to the Life of Mind. Both these men, as well as Bergson, E. Le Roy, Lalande and M. Blondel were pupils of the celebrated E. Boutroux (1845–1921), best known perhaps for his polemics in favour of radical contingency or indeterminism and for his denial that a psychology or sociology of “religious experience” could be Recent Philosophy 111 a serious treatment of that great subject. A summary statement of this kind, however, is but a feeble indication of Boutroux’s vigour, scholarship and lively mind. All these infl uences and many others were drawn together and transmuted in the mind of H. Bergson whose fame probably exceeds that of any other living philosopher, and who unintentionally has divided so many philosophers in so many countries into Bergsonians and anti-Bergsonians. Instead of offering any account of his views at the present stage of my story, I shall simply call my readers’ attention to certain dates. Time and Free-Will, to choose its English title, was published in 1889, Matter and Memory in 1896, the articles on metaphysical (“Introduction to Metaphysics”) and on psycho- physical parallelism in 1903 and 1904, Creative Evolution in 1907. Positivism was very active in Italy, its most notable exponent being R. Ardigo (1828 –1920), whose pen was busy in the present century as well as in the last (for he wrote on “Spencer’s Unknowable and Kant’s Noümenon” in 1901, and in 1909 on “The Perennial Character of Positivism”). He had many followers. German infl uence was also very strong. The idealism of that country seemed the proper antidote to naturalism, to positivism and also to the revival of mediaevalism (or neo-Thomism) that had become the offi cial Catholic philosophy over all the world after the encyclical Aeterni Patris of 1879, but aroused more philosophical antagonism among the Italian liberals and patriots than elsewhere. Of Italian neo-Kantians, Masci (1844–1923) was perhaps the greatest. Another and younger is Martinetti. Varisco’s works (beginning with the century) are very generally known, and give admirable proof of the breadth of Italian culture. The view that Italy has become pre-eminently the home of an exiled Hegelianism must, however, be received with some caution. It is true that Vera in the middle of the nineteenth century was a Hegelian of European renown, and that B. Spaventa (1817–83) thought along Hegelian lines. The Italian idealists of to-day, however, fi nd in Spaventa the beginnings of a new absolutism that was not Hegel’s at all. In the new absolutism, they say, Being is shown to be creative process, not the sterile logical category to which Hegel falsely attributed a mysterious fecundity; and it is plain that the great philosophical event in Italy of the early century, that is to say the publication of Croce’s Æsthetics in 1902 and the start of his journal La Critica (with G. Gentile’s co-operation) in 1903, is not, in any simple sense, the manifesto of a victorious Italianate Hegelianism. 112 The Beginning of the Present Century

On the contrary, as Croce himself explains in his delightful philosophical autobiography, he was not consciously a Hegelian in those years. He had known Spaventa, it is true, he was much better versed in German philosophy than in any other, and he had invariably been opposed to naturalism and to positivism. He had also acclimatized himself to an “immanent” idealism. His major interests, however, were not in philosophy but in Italian national culture and principally, despite all their astonishing width, in the general essence of F. de Sanctis’s account of literature. Croce’s Æsthetics, therefore, although full of Teutonic idealism, was meant to be a studious but quite personal defence of the view that art is an independent realm in which the imagination is free and also mature, not in the mystical sense of D’Annunzio, but as the imaginative expression of a man’s reason. Croce defi ned his own attitude to Hegel later, after a resolute study of that author, attempting to separate the living from the dead in Hegel, and defending a new philosophy of the spirit. Again, Croce’s collaborator in these years, Gentile, was about to develop a philosophy of the “pure act” designed to be a great advance upon Hegel’s imperfect ideas concerning the Absolute and the Spirit. According to Mr. Santayana, “Philosophic tradition in America has merged almost completely in . In a certain sense this system did not need to be adopted: something very like it had grown up spontaneously in the form of and unitarian theology. Even the most emancipated and positivistic of the latest thinkers – pragmatists, new realists, pure empiricists – have been bred in the atmosphere of German idealism; and this fact should not be forgotten in approaching their views.” Santayana himself was an undergraduate at Harvard in the ’eighties, and like nearly all the other American philosophers of his time, completed his studies in Germany. At the beginning of the century he himself was teaching in Harvard and acquiring a high reputation. Consequently, his comment, at any rate as respects New England, was particularly well-informed; and it would also apply to California, Chicago, Yale, Cornell or Princeton. At an earlier date, indeed, America had had its full share of Scottish “Common Sense” and Protestant intuitionism, and had struggled, like other reputedly Christian countries, to accommodate itself to Spencer’s evolutionism. Again, it must not be supposed that this German-American idealistic atmosphere was predominantly Hegelian, although Hegelianism had made its landfall under the leadership of W. T. Harris (1835–1909), and although W. James writing to Renouvier in 1880, complained of Palmer’s Hegelian propaganda at Harvard. Recent Philosophy 113

“It is a strange thing,” he said, “this resurrection of Hegel in England and here, after his burial in Germany. I think his philosophy will probably have an important infl uence on the development of our liberal form of Christianity. It gives a quasi-metaphysic backbone which this theology has always been in need of, but it is too fundamentally rotten and charlatanish to last long.” James’s horror of Hegelianism, however, is evidence of the infl uence of that theory, and his wide acquaintance with German psychology together with the infl uence that the neo-Kantian Renouvier had upon him, are evidence of the correctness of Santayana’s observation. The outstanding fact about at the beginning of the century was its emergence from an undistinguished novitiate into plenary philosophical rank. In James (1842–1910) and Royce (1855–1916) it possessed two philosophers who were the equals of the eminent in other lands, and these men were at the acme of their powers when the century opened. In 1901 James, eleven years after the triumphant reception of his Principles of Psychology, was giving his Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh (the “nuclear Boston”) on the Varieties of Religious Experience, and his later activities in the philosophy of pragmatism had been foreshadowed by his Will to Believe (1897) and by his California address on “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” (1898). Royce’s Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, under the title The World and the Individual, were published in 1901, and received wide general recognition. The personal infl uence of these two men, in their own country, was at least as great as their literary. Santayana, Perry, Lewis, Hocking, Montague, to mention no other prominent writers of to-day, have testifi ed to the fact from their personal experience of Harvard. And Münsterberg, imported from Germany, was also teaching at Harvard during these years. New England, however, was not the only great philosophical centre. Dewey, whose “instrumental” pragmatism had different aims from James’s, was at Chicago “drifting away from Hegelianism” as was evident in the Studies in Logical Theory he published in 1903. G. H. Howison (1834–1916) was forcibly inculcating the (personal and spiritual) limits of (mere) evolution and J. M. Baldwin was also developing a type of genetic idealism at Princeton. In short, philosophy was very much alive throughout the country. A point of some interest is that the work of C. S. Peirce (1839 –1914) has greater fame to-day than in his lifetime, although James, characteristically, proclaimed him the beginner of pragmatism. In the British Isles the Anglo-Hegelian movement, as it was called, 114 The Beginning of the Present Century dominated the dawning century. The name may indeed have been inaccurate, for neither F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) nor B. Bosanquet (1848–1923) could be said to have had a “typically” English mind (if there is such a thing) and they wore their Hegel with a difference. Indeed the best English expositor of Hegel, at that stage of his career, and almost the only one to pin his faith seriously to Hegel’s dialectic, was J. M. E. McTaggart (1866 –1925) who had as English a mind as a scholastic patience and a disciplined bent for mysticism would permit. But Bradley, the greatest British philosopher of his generation, and Bosanquet also, were certainly absolutists; and the century began, in large measure, with various attempts to defi ne an idealistic position, broadly sympathetic towards Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893) and Principles of Logic (1883). There was hesitation, however, concerning Bradley’s sublimation of personality in the Absolute, and at the consequences of his principle that the intellect worked with terms and relations, that its methods were an affront to the unity of Total Experience, and so that most human thinking had either to be transfi gured or condemned. The common belief of the youth of the land, however, was that these hesitations were rather “woolly,” and that genuine philosophers had to choose between Bradley on the one hand and, on the other, a resolute return to Hegel himself. This (I suspect) was the attitude of G. E. Moore and of B. Russell when they were students of McTaggart at Cambridge, and there is interest in noting how much Moore was thinking of Bradley in his early papers, and how much of an idealist Russell was in his Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897). Indeed, it is reasonable to say that Moore’s celebrated paper on “The Refutation of Idealism” (Mind, 1903) shows the dominance of Anglo-Hegelianism precisely on account of the sort of idealism it set itself to refute; and although Russell’s Principles of Mathematics (1903) – which claimed to be derived “in all its chief philosophical features” from the anti-idealistic philosophy that Moore had evolved – opened a new scene of thought to British explorers, Russell’s subsequent polemics concerning the philosophical problems of relation showed how seriously he regarded the enemy he set out to destroy. In short, the “new realism” in England, as it came to be called, was born in controversy, and was directed against one great opposing view. Moreover, British pragmatism, especially F. C. S. Schiller’s, was another attack on the same enemy. Here the line of argument was that the Absolute was frankly mad, and that what Bradley called the “makeshifts” of psychological and other science were not only all that humanity had to go by, but were good enough for anybody. Recent Philosophy 115

Nevertheless, although Anglo-Hegelianism had such great importance in the early years of the century, both as a cordial and as an irritant, it and its affairs did not exhaust the British perspective. After all Herbert Spencer (1820 –1903) lived into the century and Huxley (1825 –95) very nearly reached it. (1832–1904), the chief of British “evolutionary” moralists, was also alive; and James Ward’s Naturalism and Agnosticism (1899), if a little belated, could not be called an anachronism. Shadworth Hodgson (1832– 1912) persistently interrogated the metaphysics of experience in his own un-Hegelian way. Robert Adamson, the best Kantian scholar in the country, was developing a Kantian form of “realism” when he died, too early, in 1902. In Oxford, Cook Wilson (1849–1915), more Aristotelian than Kantian, was teaching independent and quite un-Bradleian logic. In St. Andrews, G. F. Stout, fortifi ed by a wide acquaintance with Brentano, Herbart and other continental authors as well as with the philosophy of ancient Greece and of Britain, worked essentially along his own lines. He was indeed a formidable critic of the Anglo-Hegelian view that “reality as a whole” is the ultimate subject of all our assertions, but his primary interests, if “realistic” (and “idealistic” too), were not in the reigning house. Again “Scotus Novanticus” (S. S. Laurie, 1829– 1909) had “returned to dualism” despite his unusually adequate knowledge of what Kant and Hegel had said; and Laurie defi ned his attitude to ultimate problems in the high metaphysical way in the Gifford Lectures (Synthetica, 1906) that were the fi nal result of very many years of very hard thinking. It is further to be remarked that in the ordinary academic teaching of philosophy in the British Isles, the work of J. S. Mill, particularly his Logic and his had (and still have) an important place despite their years. An “empirical” logic such as Venn’s of Cambridge was commonly regarded as a useful commentary on the fi rst, and in ethics H. Sidgwick (1838 –1900), although a much clearer-headed utilitarian than Mill, was still a professing utilitarian. While the “Anglo-Hegelian” ethics of “self-realization” (not very Hegelian, in this instance, and English enough to be frequently non- conformist) were very prevalent in the form that T. H. Green and Bradley had given them, they were certainly not unchallenged, and the reception of Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), although frequently hostile, had a more restricted acerbity than in the instance of the “new realism.” Moore’s book may be regarded as a development of Sidgwick’s views, since it was founded, fi rstly, upon agreement with Sidgwick regarding the ethical necessity for insight (or rational intuition) into “good,” and secondly since it developed an ethic of benefi t which was in effect a wider utilitarianism than the earlier hedonistic 116 The Beginning of the Present Century form of that theory defended by Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick. A great part of Moore’s thesis was adopted by Rashdall in his widely-read Theory of Good and Evil published in 1907. Here I shall end this semi-geographical chapter, and I shall try to follow logic rather than geography in the future. I should like to repeat, however, that I regret the omission of the smaller countries, and particularly the names of Höffding in Denmark, Norström in Sweden and Masaryk in Bohemia. The last of these, as all the world knows, became the venerated philosopher- President of Czecho-slovakia and proved that Plato’s dream, if it came true, need contain nothing of folly. In the early century Masaryk and Krejče were the chief philosophers of their country, Krejče’s positivism being more extreme than Masaryk’s. I must also apologize for including so many names and for omitting so many. Chapter III Absolute Idealism

Absolute Idealism may be in a less fl ourishing condition to-day than it was thirty years ago. Nevertheless, it is the natural starting-point for a logical, ungeographical division of our subject. Tradition gave or seemed to give it a certain priority. It is, or it seems to be, a logical extreme, and consequently a convenient boundary. The main reason for beginning with it, however, is that so many contemporary philosophies were designed either to modify or to supplant it. It is not dead or even moribund, but if there were doubts about its continued vitality, its critics would supply the oxygen. Pragmatists, new realists, phenomenologists, naturalists, and humanistic scientists have developed alternative theories largely in express opposition to it. Even if the opposition had succeeded, and absolute idealism, for the time being, had become a sort of Shadow Cabinet, the marks of its former greatness would be plainly visible upon most of its successful rivals. Idealism has many species, and each of these species has several varieties. Thus the term may stand for a pan-spiritual , that is, for the doctrine that nothing exists save spirit and its states, and such an ontology is pluralistic if it asserts that there are many spirits, monistic if it asserts that there is only one. The term may also stand for idea-ism, that is, for the view that anything thought about, including the entire universe, is by that very circumstance an idea-ed entity, and in some sense, mind-saturated or “mental.” Pan-spiritualism, however, may be defended by arguments that do not imply idea-ism, and is, to say the least, a doubtful consequence of idea-ism. Thirdly, “idealism” may stand for a metaphysic of ideals rather than of ideas, and in that case it asserts that what is deep, central and stable in our lives is also deep, central and stable in the universe itself. A caricature of this statement would be the assertion that the principal business of the universe is to make itself safe for civilization. This third view might be defended independently of the other two, and commonly is so defended by Christian theologians, not all of them unsophisticated. Indeed, an alliance between it and the other two is apt to be rather uncomfortable. 118 Absolute Idealism

Absolute idealism, in its usual forms, is a combination of pan-spiritualism, idea-ism, and idealism in the above senses (the second sense being indispensable to it), and has learned a great deal from Hegel. If a brief statement of a large subject may be pardoned, we may say that Hegel’s fundamental contentions were that the “ideas” entailed in idea-ism must be rational ideas, that reality lives in their atmosphere, and that there is a dialectical process by which rational thought, starting with the poorest principles, is forced to travel by way of their complementaries, and so is conducted by a series of reconciliations to the infi nite opulence of an absolute all-inclusive principle. This, in its turn, is the logical essence of Absolute Spirit. In the present century, apart from the special case of Russia, the chief developments of (or from) this type of theory were Anglo-American and Italian. So I shall treat of these. In England Bradley had concluded his Appearance and Reality (1893) with “the essential message of Hegel. Outside of spirit there is not, and there cannot be any reality; and the more that anything is spiritual, so much the more is it veritably real.” Further, he had defended this conviction by affi rming that “all we know consists wholly of experience. Reality [being a seamless unity] must be therefore one experience . . . We can discover nothing that is not either feeling or will or or something else of the kind.” He also believed he could prove that “that which is highest to us is also in and to the Universe most real, and there can be no question of its reality being somehow upset.” A price, however, indeed what some accounted a stiff price, had to be paid. Nothing fi nite, not even human personality itself, could be completely real, and since the intellectual aspect of experience was not the whole of it, the intellect failed to reach reality and could not cure itself intellectually. Space, time, number, cause, substance and all other principles beloved of the intellect were consequently not quite real. They fell short of the divine (or more than divine) unity of experience made perfect in its totality; for they traffi cked in the makeshift of terms and relations, although relations could not really unite their terms and were “external” to them. To join a relation (Bradley held) to the terms it professes to unite would require a new relation between term and relation; and so on infi nitely. The moving principle of Bradley’s metaphysics was similar to but more fl exible than Hegel’s dialectic method. “The internal unfolding of any one portion [of reality or experience],” Bradley had maintained in his earlier Logic, “would be the unblossoming of that other side of its being, without which Recent Philosophy 119 itself is not consummate,” and this “movement of the whole within its own body” (which was the rhythm of all thoughtful experience) could not cease until in “the unmixed enjoyment of its completed nature, nothing alien or foreign would trouble the harmony.” Consequently, this metaphysics, like Hegel’s, could be regarded as a form of logic. America’s principal dialectician, Josiah Royce (1855 –1916), argued similarly, yet also dissimilarly. Like Bradley he held that “whenever in dealing with Experience we try to fi nd out what, on the whole, it is and means, we philosophize,” and he agreed with Bradley that realism, by putting its faith in “reals” that had to be “external and opaque” to thought, could reach, at the best, convenient half-, while its opposite, mysticism, condemned itself to a fatal immersion in “the ineffable immediate fact that quenches ideas.” He further argued that the value-philosophies of Münsterberg, Rickert and others, despite the “stately” (Platonic) tradition behind them, surreptitiously transmuted mere logical possibilities into ultimate actualities and consequently produced “reality” by a sleight of mind. Royce’s own solution was the discovery that Reality is what fulfi ls our ideas. An idea (he held) is essentially an intent, purpose and activity. What fulfi ls it is life rather than thought, and in the end, the Divine Life. The puzzle resulting from the (alleged) facts that an idea, being a questing thing, fi xes its own goal and yet searches for what is beyond itself was solved (Royce thought) by the refl ection that all purposive ideas seek their own determinate completion in a responsive and consubstantial reality in which they are perpetually at home. Further, by insisting with much care and subtlety upon the social and communal character of all our thinking, Royce was able to join a philosophical communion of saints to his philosophical deity, and to give the entire picture a natural as well as an inspired appearance. In direct opposition to Bradley, Royce maintained that the fi nite need not necessarily be transmuted in the absolute. Bradley’s opposing view, he said, depended upon an unphilosophical rejection, of the actual infi nite in its ordinary sense, but modern mathematicians had shown Bradley’s error. A self-representative system (e.g. a beer-bottle with a picture of itself upon its label), would mirror itself to infi nity without contradiction (although there are insurmountable practical diffi culties in the case of the beer-bottle). Finite systems, therefore, need not burst, metaphysically speaking, through the mere circumstance that their purpose, if achieved, would embrace infi nity. On the other hand Bernard Bosanquet’s views kept very close to Bradley’s, particularly as regards the logic of his absolutism. “If you ask what reality is,” 120 Absolute Idealism

Bosanquet affi rmed, “you can in the end say nothing but that it is the whole which thought is always endeavouring to affi rm. And if you ask what thought is, you can in the end say nothing but that it is the central function of mind in affi rming its partial world to belong to the real universe.” In short, Bosanquet (1848 –1923) did obeisance to “logic as the essential criterion of value and reality throughout experience, in accordance with the principle that it takes the whole reality to elicit the whole mind.” In his Gifford Lectures (1912), his chief work on metaphysics, the spinal column of the argument was contained in the second lecture on the “concrete universal,” and the marrow of the phrase was that thought or logic strove after totality, and hence was “concrete” because it was “universal,” that is to say, all-encompassing. Its inevitable ideal was “a system of members such that every member, being ex hypothesi distinct, nevertheless contributes to the unity of the whole in virtue of the peculiarities which constitute its distinctness.” In a letter written in 1902, Bosanquet called Appearance and Reality his “gospel among all modern philosophical books,” but he preached a rather diluted and suave form of the gospel. On certain points, indeed, such as the “indigestibility” of personal that sought to set the self or its freedom and immortality in some sort above the realm of being, he was as fi rm as Bradley had ever been, but his view was that anyone who saw that “the universe was so obviously experience” and that it “must all be of one tissue” need not be very greatly concerned with anything else. When he spoke of “mind” or even of “minds” in the plural he thought of impersonal mental implications, not of this or the other man’s soul, and he understood the vague phrase “reality must ultimately be of the nature of mind or experience” in a sense that seemed to fi nd a home for physical bodies (quite unsubtly interpreted) provided that these could elicit a supervenient intelligible connectedness. Indeed it might reasonably be suggested that Bosanquet’s absolutism was not, like Bradley’s, idealism proper; and Bosanquet said himself, “I want to give up the term idealism and say ‘Speculative philosophy’ or something of that kind. The muddle with is so recurrent.” Bosanquet, I think, has much greater infl uence in England to-day than Bradley has, although Bosanquet was the lesser of the two. Part of the reason is due to the fact that Bradley, although a trenchant occasional disputant in the early years of the century, had ceased to be a full-time writer when Bosanquet’s pen became nimbler than ever before. Indeed the Bosanquet, who in 1912 held that “in the main the work has been done, and that what is now needed is to recall and concentrate the modern mind out Recent Philosophy 121 of its distraction rather than to invent wholly new theoretical conceptions,” became convinced, very shortly afterwards, that British realism, German phenomenology and Italian idealism were so “new” and also so important as to demand at least a restatement of the “work” with special reference to them. This phase of his indefatigable energy will be mentioned later, but it seems expedient now to give some account of the work of another and very different British idealist, J. M. E. McTaggart. McTaggart’s mind may indeed have resembled Bradley’s. Neither of them feared a paradox. Both of them delighted in clear argument, and in making one phrase do the work of three. Each was avid to describe the subtler phases of his own experience. Yet it would be hard to conceive of a greater contrast than between the mind of McTaggart and the mind of Bosanquet or of most other Anglo-Hegelians. For McTaggart, logic was what a lawyer or a scholastic thought it was, that is an attempt to say precisely what one meant and no more, and to infer simply what followed. For the others every statement was a veiled philosopheme, and wrapped in an infi nity of “tissue.” Consequently, the fact that McTaggart as the best British commentator on Hegel in his generation may be disturbing to those whose ideas about Hegel come through British spectacles, and McTaggart’s early view that the dialectic was what really mattered in Hegel, and that it could be an instrument of rigour and of immense metaphysical potency was intentionally and most pointedly opposed to current Anglo-Hegelianism. McTaggart long contemplated the writing of a new Dialectic of Existence, but his magnum opus, The Nature of Existence, took certain liberties, very carefully restricted, with Hegel’s triadic dialectic. Its result was a spiritual ontology, pluralistic despite its fervour for cosmic unity, and defended without any traces of idea-ism, its major contention being that spirits alone could exist since they and they alone had the characteristics that any existent must possess. All substances, it was held, must be infi nitely divisible, and a substance could contain parts within parts without end on one condition only, viz. that it was related to all other substances by “determining correspondence.” The perceptions of perceiving substances were capable of this relation, and McTaggart could not conceive of anything else that was so capable. He also believed he could prove to demonstration that any other candidates for admission to the status of existence (such as physical bodies) must be promptly ploughed. McTaggart never concealed his belief that his passion for metaphysics 122 Absolute Idealism began and was nurtured by his desire to prove the eternal pre- and post- existence of himself and of other spirits. He differed from so many other absolutists partly in the frankness with which he avowed this circumstance, but principally in his scrupulous, lifelong insistence that such desires were irrelevant to, and indeed a snare in, the actual business of philosophizing. The proof was the thing, just as (we formerly supposed) in Euclid. A further difference between McTaggart and most of his contemporaries was his belief that there was a genuine science of metaphysics that could prove these important and exciting things. McTaggart was an idealist, although not an idea-ist. “The fi nal stage of the C-series,” that is to say, ultimate reality, was good, and of this good we knew “that it is a timeless and endless state of love – love so direct, so intimate and so powerful that even the deepest mystic rapture gives us but the slightest foretaste of its perfection.” He described the loving-kindness of spiritual union with immense power and beauty, and lavished his great gifts upon the effort to show how eternity might embrace time in such a way that the “fi nal stage” of the universe did not come after the other stages and yet, in intelligible senses, might and should appear to do so. To speak generally, contemporary philosophy has been more assiduous about Time than most other epochs. The evidence for this statement springs from a host of quarters; and absolute idealists (who for the most part cling to the fundamental position that there is passage within but not of the Whole and believe that Time is more superfi cial and less respectable than Eternity) admit that they have to look seriously to their defences in this matter, lest Time should overwhelm them. Bosanquet, indeed, devoted most of the last busy years of his life to the vanquishing of two philosophical “extremes” which he believed to be new, formidable and pernicious. One such extreme (he held) was the new realism which robbed “mind” to swell the bank balance of mind’s “object.” The other extreme was the new idealism in Italy which, according to Bosanquet’s belief, turned the Whole into a passing stream and was mad enough “to put all the best things ahead.” Let us turn, then, to Italy, and principally to (who has, however, an international reputation and infl uence especially in England, in Germany and, because of Ortega, in Spain). Croce developed his Philosophy of the Spirit in his works on Æsthetics (1902), The Practical (1909), Logic (1909) and History (1916) as well as in his journal La Critica (founded 1903) and elsewhere. An important stage in his development was completed in his essay on the living and the dead parts of Recent Philosophy 123

Hegel’s philosophy (1907), for in it he defi ned his attitude to that author, having previously breathed an atmosphere super-saturated with views of the same general type. The major error in Hegel’s method, Croce came to think, was an exaggeration of the logical functions of opposition in philosophical dialectic. The “Spirit” is a unity of “distincts,” not a tension of opposites, as may be seen in the great spiritual phases that dominated Croce’s interest, aesthetics, science, economics and ethics. Thus, in the practical sphere, economics (which Croce arbitrarily defi ned as private utility) is not the opposite of universal good (or ethics) since (Croce believed) ethics presupposed such an economics, and economics, like aesthetics, could grow from its own roots as a fl ourishing and (almost) independent spiritual body. Hegelians might retort that the opposition, in their view, arose when the essence of any department of the Whole was taken to express the entire essence of the Whole. (Self-interest, for example, although not inevitably opposed to universal good, would be so opposed if it were regarded as the whole truth of the matter. For selfi shness is anti-ethical.) They might also complain that even if the fl owers of the imagination in art, of the intellect in science, of self-interest and of cultural humanity in practice could bloom together in the same garden, what was needed, philosophically speaking, was some intelligible principle according to which each of them implied every other. Croce, borrowing a phrase of Rosmini’s, proclaimed the unity of reality in a “solid circle,” and he believed he could show how two of his “distincts” were built upon two others. Yet the result of his doctrine seemed still to be a matter-of-fact-unity of a highly spiritual kind. But Croce shocked the intransigent absolutists more profoundly still. In his view there was no such thing as one metaphysics, or one philosophy. Such a belief was the ghost of mediaeval theology sitting uncrowned in academic halls. Universal philosophy was as great an absurdity as universal history, for philosophy was the “methodological moment” of brooding self- consciousness, moving as the spirit moves in an inexhaustible deep. Indeed, philosophy was identical with history. Both were the self- consciousness of “life” itself, and their identity was easy to establish. Knowledge, being always knowledge of existence, implies a sensory, that is, a historical element, and also implies thought, that is, implies philosophy. Pursue the matter and you must see that the refl ective consciousness of process is at once history and philosophy. Again history is really (in a special sense) contemporary. It is a present vibration “of ” life in the refl ective spirit. As 124 Absolute Idealism

Croce said, “When chronicle has been reduced to its proper practical and mnemonical function, and history has been raised to the knowledge of the eternal present, it shows itself to be identical with philosophy, which for its part is never anything but the thought of the eternal present.” There may be some excuse for those who would like to know how this “eternal” present differs from the ordinary passing present, how a historian can re-live the past unless there truly was a past just as veritably as there is a present, how a past not re-lived could be identical with nothingness, and on what grounds self-consciousness of life must necessarily be accounted philosophy. And even if these vulgar objections are due to commonplace misunderstanding, there is a considerable body of enlightened idealistic opinion in Italy eager to maintain that Croce’s principles should have carried him further than he went. According to these authors (e.g. Ruggiero and U. Spirito) the man who grasped what Croce had just missed was G. Gentile, Croce’s collaborator on La Critica, until he founded his own Giornale critico, in 1920. (There is room for dispute regarding the independence of the two.) Gentile (who also revised his Hegel) developed a new dialectic in his best- known work The Theory of Mind as Pure Act (1916). Hegel, he said, was right in his general conception of “the dialectical nature of thought, the thought which understands itself as unity of the variety, and things as the variety of the unity,” but wrong in treating thought as something perpended, a dead concept. The truth was that thought (and also reality) was becoming, pure living spirit or “subjectivity” of the universal (not the private) spirit, the producer of multiplicity and . It was the pure “I”, the Io trassendentale. It was simple going with nothing that goes and with nothing gone; and if the profoundly simple but profoundly diffi cult principle of pure passage that does not pass away was fi rmly grasped all the standing puzzles of philosophy were triumphantly overcome. Since Time itself was caught up and incorporated in this pure activity of essential going, it was a mistake to confuse theory (as Bosanquet did) with the passage of time. The pure act, although essentially movement, could never be dated. Nevertheless, it was “history” (in a Gentilian sense) and there must be one philosophy since the Spirit is one. Contemporary philosophy in Italy, as in many other parts of the new Europe, is a political as well as an educational force, but the relations of the Io trassendentale to and to the Vatican, however interesting and important, are of lesser account than the relations between philosophy and Communism in Russia. In that country it is an axiom that philosophical “ideologies” refl ect but Recent Philosophy 125 also affect the tension of social and political existence. Consequently the entire development of mankind must be made manifest in philosophy and also stimulated by that subject. The relevant philosophy, as all the world knows, is the “militant dialectical materialism” of Marx and Engels revived by Plekhanov and (since Plekhanov had regrettable Menshevik tendencies) brought to established Bolshevik orthodoxy by Lenin himself. According to Leninist ideology the real world is a tension of opposites and evolves by means of this tension. The “dialectical method” transcribes the fundamental law of natural and social development, but the ideology has to be militant because ideas are active forces instead of being idle dreams. Lenin himself believed that Hegel was more of a materialist than an idealist, as left- wing Hegelians, and a good many of Hegel’s critics have always believed; but, apart from that, he held, with Marx and Engels, that Hegelianism must be forced to descend from its idealistic cloud-cuckoo-land and set upon its broad realistic feet. The theory, therefore, is a “materialistic” absolutism (or, more accurately, a natural realism of this type). Marx and Engels, profoundly infl uenced by the religious “materialism” of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) believed that a simple and decisive transposition, similar to that of Columbus and the egg, would rescue Hegelianism from its idealistic extravagance and so make it invincible. In the present century Lenin, apprehensive of the egg’s stability, resolved to make “orthodox” for ever secure. His intensive study of philosophy during his exile in Siberia between 1897 and 1900 was succeeded in 1908 (on a visit to London) by his chief philosophical work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in which the folly of debasing Marxism with the whimsies of Mach and of Avenarius was effectively castigated. Mach and the others were shown to be but pseudo-realists, indeed to be little better than Bishop Berkeley himself, and their veiled idealism was declared to be “foul and false.” When Lenin triumphed in Russia and overwhelmed the fl accid ideas of Kerensky and the “Second International,” his “sound philosophical basis of revolution” might have seemed to have been fi nally vindicated. All, however, did not remain quiet on the philosophical front. Indeed, the organization called “The Society of Militant Dialectical Materialists” had to show incessant vigilance. According to all good Leninists the “materialism” of Marx was opposed in principle to “mechanistic” materialism, that is to say to the doctrine that man’s ideas are simply a part of physics. The persistent world-wide tendency towards “mechanism” in philosophy had therefore to be extruded from Russia, and the Soviet Union had also to be defended against internal 126 Absolute Idealism disorders arising out of the “eclecticism” and even the “idealism” of Trotsky and of Zinoviev. In 1929, at Moscow, A. Deborin showed decisively why and where the dialecticians should abjure mechanism. But Deborin himself was tainted with “formalism,” therefore with Menshevik error, therefore with something like idealism, and he publicly confessed his errors in the year 1930. In Lenin’s philosophy a classless equilibrium would correspond to Hegel’s “absolute Spirit” or to McTaggart’s “fi nal stage of the C-series.” At the moment, however, the dialectical world-process decrees the expropriation of the expropriating bourgeoisie, the Soviet Dictatorship and the expansible Five Years’ Plan.

Chapter IV The Humanistic Disciplines

Ceoce’s theory of the unity, and even of the identity, of philosophy with history, together with his opposition to Marxism on the one hand and to positivism on the other hand, must inevitably be compared with recent German philosophical accounts of the “humanistic” or “cultural” disciplines. Generally described, these theories renounce a part of the claims of Hegelian absolute idealism in order to strengthen and defend the rest of it. Instead of maintaining that “mind” or “spirit” is the source and sustaining principle of all things, these humanists hold that it has achieved an independent sphere of its own, both fi ne and fi rm. Hence philosophy has no quarrel and relatively few contacts with natural science. On the other hand, they repudiate positivism, and they also repudiate Marx. The failure of Hegelianism (which they admit) does not, in their view, lend support to Marx. The lesson of the failure is simply that a different philosophical strategy should be pursued. This movement, in the main, had its origin in the long and active career of W. Dilthey (1833 –1914), who in 1882 succeeded Lotze in Berlin, and it is essentially a contemporary movement, although Dilthey’s celebrated Introduction to the Humanistic Sciences appeared so long ago as 1883. For Dilthey was active during the present century, his infl uence became much more marked after his death, and it increased very rapidly in the years succeeding the war. The son of a Calvinistic preacher, and himself trained for that calling, Dilthey found his life’s interest in a philosophy of the spirit which should extend and clarify what religion had always accepted sub-philosophically, that is to say the active, teleological social unity of “life.” Here he found a congenial theme in his early study of Schleiermacher and of that philosopher’s attempt to derive the varieties of the religious spirit from the central fact of “absolute dependence.” But history impressed Dilthey even more. The Berlin of his youth was the Berlin of Humboldt, Savigny, Grimm, and his ambition was to produce a “Critique of the Historical Reason” that should supplement the Critiques of Kant, and do for the humanistic sciences what the great Helmholtz (it was thought) had done for the natural. As Dilthey 128 The Humanistic Disciplines said in 1903, “Culture is a union of teleological tendencies. Each of these, like language, jurisprudence, myths and religion, poetry and philosophy, has an inner lawfulness determining its structure and hence its development.” He also said that history alone could show what humanity was. Thus although he was profoundly interested in the inward essence of science (whose structure of ideas he accounted rich in revelation), his aim, from youth onwards, was to apprehend the substance of the “great humanistic positivities” as opposed to the contracted and shallow positivism of his time, and even to Comte’s sociology, Mill’s science of character (ethology) or Hume’s earlier attempt to supply an experimental science of human nature. According to Dilthey, the autonomy of the humanistic sciences had to be defended upon lines other than these. “Their material,” he said, “is the special sciences, their principle the autonomy, that is, the freedom of thinking and of human life itself.” The natural sciences were a part of man’s struggle to master his environment and to develop his personality. The materialists therefore were philosophers – Democritus, Hobbes, the encyclopaedists, and certain positivists – but they were not very good philosophers because they forgot that nature was only the correlative of mind, and therefore could never make a mind. On the other hand, Dilthey denied that the higher-fl ying idealism of Heracleitus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Shaftesbury and Hegel had succeeded, and he advocated an idealism of free self-development as in Plato, in Christianity, in Kant, in Maine de Biran and in Carlyle. In a certain sense, Dilthey set forth a “descriptive, analytic and understanding psychology.” Like so many others he honoured the maxim “Know thyself.” For him, however, the personal mind was the bearer and interpreter of a great tradition. If therefore the kingdom of philosophy could be entered by a species of self-observation, all philosophical questions were really attempts to compel the spirit of culture to declare itself. The atmosphere and structure of a man’s spiritual life was his participation in a great social totality. The terms that Dilthey principally employed were “life” and “living experience.” He would rather say “I live, therefore I am,” than with Descartes, “I think, therefore I am,” but “life,” in this special sense, had to be lived through at a very high-grade level. It was a spiritual achievement, overtaking, joining and continuing the blood-stream of cultural history. A man’s life was the way in which he gathered reality into himself and moved with its deeper trend – indeed Dilthey interpreted it in the same general spirit as Christian theologians have described the movement of the human soul towards God and towards redemption. Recent Philosophy 129

In certain senses Dilthey was anti-metaphysical and even sceptical. School- metaphysics, he held, was bound to strain itself to the point of rupture. The reason was that school-metaphysics, like Greek philosophy before it, had over-intellectualized its interpretation of the human spirit. The history of the spirit, however, need not so destroy itself, and a symphony of the aesthetic- intellectual attitude of Greece, of the Roman and Stoic imperial philosophy of the will, and of the Christian redemption theory might achieve, in its own peculiar way, a universal metaphysics. Towards such a metaphysics Dilthey contributed certain large and magnifi cent fragments, each broken off abruptly as if overweighted by the splendour of its own structure. He was undoubtedly the fi rst philosopher- historian of his age. In his view, in so far as there could be a philosophy distinct from the distilled essence of the sciences, of poetry, of social idealism, of religion and the like, it would be the science of sciences and the theory of theories. In the main, however, the great matter was to allow Shakespeare, Goethe, Roman law, the Fathers, the schoolmen and the more modern “secularistic” or unregenerate humanists to declare the substance of their living thoughts and reveal the master passion of their aspirations. Consequently there is a certain resemblance between Dilthey’s philosophy and Husserl’s later phenomenology. According to Dilthey, however, the understanding of these matters is cumulative, massive and brooding. According to Husserl (as we shall see in due course) it is rather the immediate insight into some shining essence too often hidden from the careless eye. The work of E. Troeltsch was in many respects a continuation of Dilthey’s, although it is signifi cant of the times that, in Troeltsch’s view it was Marxianism rather than simple positivism that had to be corrected. In his youth Troeltsch had medico-biological interests, but he came to believe that history should be approached from the side of jurisprudence. As a student at Göttingen, however, he decided that theology was the subject best suited to his designs, that is, to the attempt to unify history and metaphysics. Sympathetic towards Darwinism and Dilthey’s “understanding psychology” his special interest lay in the way in which Christianity had its roots in the Life of humanity. An unhistorical Christianity would be an absurdity and so would be a Christianity not regarded as an abiding source of power in human society. Such questions were closely united with the fi nal and absolute worth of Christianity, with the spirit of Protestantism, with the gradual secularization of the authoritative attitude in historical Christianity and with the view that “Europeanism” is the only thing that in history proper. In Troeltsch’s 130 The Humanistic Disciplines opinion, Rickert and other value-theorists had vainly attempted to discover an autonomous, unhistorical, abstract standard of values, and Dilthey’s researches had been too little controlled by an intelligible governing logic. Admitting that he himself “had no philosophy” in the more academic sense of that term Troeltsch believed that he knew how to coax historical matter-of-fact in its wholeness to declare its fundamental trend, including the way in which it dominated such relatively special domains as civil philosophy, jurisprudence and similar studies. History itself, he thought, should be able to deliver us from a chaos of ostensible world-totalities, and so would perform its proper offi ce. It should admit the truth in Marx’s variety of socialistic fundamentalism and in such works as Kautsky’s Social Democracy and the Catholic Church, but it dared not admit that man’s humanity and social existence could be despiritualized, economicized, naturalized. It should not (like Nietzsche in Troeltsch’s opinion) attempt to break with the past but should use the time-process to help us to understand what we now are. It should be able to produce something parallel to Harnack’s great History of Dogma (another of the major infl uences of the age), but in the way of life and of sociology, not simply in the way of theological theory. Many modern tended to become a straggling army of special inquirers or even of sharp-shooters with a propagandist intention. The remedy was an endeavour after totality. History had its own methods. The fall of empires, in France or in Russia, could not be mathematized like the descent of bodies on an inclined plane; but history was not unintelligible in consequence. In 1915 Troeltsch went to Berlin and worked still more earnestly at the problem of historical interpretation. Historical activism, he said, should supersede historical contemplation, that is to say he favoured a peculiar and in intention a very elevated type of pragmatism. It also seemed to him that there was a “concrete” or “historical” logic, much as it later seemed to the logical positivists that there is a physical as well as a pure logic. (Culture-language may be just as intelligible as physical language. It is “metalogic” or “Real-dialektik.” It gives the totalities and the hierarchy of sociology, typology, ethology and other such studies and “instinctively” divines their essence and their realistic core. In the end Troeltsch says that genuine philosophies in the full sense have been rare, although anything more usual has been a feeble substitute for philosophy. Modern writers, for the most part, were only epigoni, or as one might say, bottlewashers. Such writers, however, if they were something more than epigoni of epigoni, may do their age a service, and may contribute Recent Philosophy 131 towards a genuine philosophy when it comes. To say this may be to make a virtue out of necessity; but there are necessitated virtues as well as freer ones. Max Weber (1864–1920) has had a wider general repute than any of the others mentioned in this chapter, partly on account of the provocative and stimulating character of one of his answers to Marx. This was the essay entitled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and its leading idea, perhaps over- emphatic, was that Lutherans, Calvinists and Puritans were fortifi ed in and beckoned towards their capitalistic enterprises by the conviction that their fervent repudiation of slothfulness in business was a high and sacred calling despite its this worldly reference. Cupidity, Weber admitted, was no new thing, and diligence had been the creed of many and the practice of some since the days of Hesiod if not since the days of Adam. He also did not deny that the silver mines of Mexico and other such factors had a good deal to do with the overwhelming importance of pecuniary wealth in the modern world. Weber’s thesis, however, was that unless ideas had the force of (or were actually incorporated in) a religion, nothing that was lasting could occur in social history. Ideas led, and were not (as with Marx) mere products. What had to be explained, therefore, was the worldly asceticism, the self-dedication of so many Protestants (and Jews) to the accumulation and employment of pecuniary resources for private profi t. Weber’s continuing and considerable infl uence, however, cannot be based upon this one essay, however great its importance may have been. A jurist by training, he devoted his short but precious life at Freiburg, Heidelberg and latterly at Munich to the keen analysis and to the wide study of politics, sociology, economics, history and philosophy in their interrelations. His aim was the “rationalization” (that is, the logical elaboration) of those ideologies that had dominated social existence. In addition to his General Economic History and other economic-philosophical investigations, he studied the effects of religion upon the Chinese, the Jews and other ancient peoples, and his conviction that Germany’s rulers had too little philosophy in them gave him a prominence that was also a responsibility, before the war, at the peace, and after it. To distinguish science (whose strength lay in its ethical neutrality as well as in its discoveries regarding technological possibilities) from values and guiding ideals, to understand the place of “rationality” in both these domains, to study history faithfully without regarding it as the expositor of someone’s philosophy – these were among the aims that Weber set before him and towards which he contributed so much. N. Hartmann (b. 1882) of Berlin, whose extensive contributions to ethics, 132 The Humanistic Disciplines theory of knowledge and theory of reality have made him widely renowned, may here be mentioned as one of the many who have recently attempted to elucidate the philosophy of humanistic reality. Hartmann is commonly called an “aporetic” philosopher, since he has a predilection for appending metaphysical question marks to the strenuous phenomenology in which he attempts to expose the nerve of some particular system of reality. In his book The Problem of Spiritual Being (1933) he argues that Hegel, the discoverer of this new branch of philosophy, attempted over hastily to bring it within the ambit of a majestic monism, as Marx, his follower and supplanter, also did in his own reversed way. Hegel tried to construct from above downwards, Marx to build from below upwards; but reality is intractable to both their . It is not of one piece, but contains several different principles whose relation is that the lower principles are the stronger although the higher principles are nevertheless free and autonomous. According to Hartmann, living conscious men and women are the bearers of culture, and neither culture nor the timespirit should be regarded as a sort of divine substance of which men and women are, in the end, only ephemeral manifestations. The autonomy of the “objective” spirit, however, is not, on that account, lessened in any way, and the business of humanistic philosophy is to accept the fact and explore it. Consequently history, that is to say, the appreciation of the continued life and present meaning of social institutions and traditions has a unique and highly signifi cant function in this part of philosophy. If the term “existence” be confi ned to men and women, cups and saucers and other such things, history has to do with “super-existence,” something on the other side of “existence” in this narrower sense. On the other hand men and women would be less than human if their souls were not directed as well as nourished by this higher if more volatile kind of reality. Hartmann further attempted to show that “objectifi ed” (as opposed to “objective”) spirit had also a greater tenacity and continuity than most people supposed. The plain man would say, for instance, that painting and sculpture had a spiritual message when the art galleries were open, but not, except in living memories, when they were closed, and that the characters of a forgotten language had no spiritual immortality at all if their meaning remained a complete mystery. Hartmann, however, appears to think that even such “objectifi ed” products of the spirit have a certain superiority to the vicissitudes of time and to the accidents of human forgetfulness. K. Jaspers of Heidelberg (b. 1883) is another distinguished exponent of a somewhat similar philosophy. His Man in the Modern Age (English trans. 1933) Recent Philosophy 133 was written for the people, his Philosophy (Berlin, 1932) for the academics. In the former work, Jaspers sought a way of salvation from the vacuity, the dying faith, the restless eroticism and the despairing politics of the modern industrialized herd of human beings. The decay of the west that Rathenau had noted before the war and that Spengler had revealed at the war’s close had to be arrested. Man had to confi rm himself in a faith independent of revelation, that is to say by means of philosophy. For men had learned, at long last, that they were genuinely historical beings. In other words, their lives were not mere episodes in a divinely appointed drama but, in the literal sense, epoch-making. For that reason, human life could not be simply the drifting passage of an aimless temporality. It had to be interpreted in metaphysical earnest, that is to say as authentic existence. In most languages, the word “existence” seemed poorer, not richer, in signifi cance, than, say, life or love or experience. The “existence philosophy” of Jaspers and others in contemporary Germany, however, repudiates any such interpretation, and holds that “existence” in a very special sense of that term is something fuller and more profound than the “life-philosophy” of Dilthey which it is designed to supplement and indeed to supplant. It might be called, less colourlessly, the philosophy of transcendent actuality; but no doubt it knew its own business when it elected to call itself by the name that Kierkegaard had chosen. In a general way, however, we may remark that the term “existence” is designed to mark the contrast between “existence- philosophy” and phenomenology. The latter, according to the existentialists, is a name for the attitude of a mere spectator, the standpoint of an outside observer. The former indicates the position of a participant in actuality who fi nds that his genuine human station points inexorably “with an enlarged index-fi nger” to the transcendent “existence” in which he has his being. As regards its name, therefore, the “existence-philosophy” of Jaspers was derived from the Dane, Sören Kierkegaard (1813–55). As regards its contents it was derived from that author together with Plotinus, Bruno, Kant, Schelling and Hegel in the remoter past, and from von Humboldt, Nietzsche and Weber in the nearer past. It was a philosophy in quest of the Absolute, but it denied that either Hegel or the positivists, for different reasons, could ever have succeeded in their search for the absolute. As Jaspers opined, Hegel’s Absolute Idea, despite Hegel’s solicitude concerning it, had worked itself loose from history and from matter of fact. It had tended to become a phantom and, like rnany phantoms, was rather crudely materialized. The positivists, on the other hand, were crude rationalists, devouring gobbets of raw logic without 134 The Humanistic Disciplines adequate inquiry into the purpose and function of such a diet. “Existence-philosophy” had to avoid both these mistakes. It had to be wiser than positivism, less exuberant than idealism. But its affi nities were with the latter. Transcendent actuality must always be ultimate. Man in his deepest and highest experience, that is to say in his free and momentous decisions, in his profounder communication with his fellows, in “the possibility of being thoroughly contemporaneous” in history, not only saw and grasped, but also was transcendent actuality. For thought and being in their purity were the same. Nevertheless, Jaspers came nearer to Kant than to most other great philosophers in his interpretation of these transcendent matters. Transcendent actuality for him was an inescapable and inveterate stimulus to searching rather than a fi nal achievement. It was the “heuristic” pole of whatever in mankind is more profound than his vitality, his observations and his logic. In short, it pertained to philosophical faith and was seldom if ever swallowed up in a union more penetrating than vision. It was a religion freed from the superstition of heathen mythologies and also from the incubus of a supposedly exclusive revelation. Yet when Jaspers tried to take his bearings in a metaphysical way he looked fi rst to myths, revelation and dogmas, and secondly to positive science. Moreover, he accepted the traditional metaphysical proofs of the reality of an un-Christian God. Chapter V The Pragmatists and M. Bergson

Pragmatism, in essentials, was, and, for the most part, still is, an Anglo- American movement, although its recent alliance with “analysis” may have made it more cosmopolitan. What is more, its connection with Anglo- Hegelianism, especially in its earlier phases, was very close indeed. In England, as we saw, F. C. S. Schiller argued, sometimes rather boisterously, that what Absolutism condemned as mere human make-shifts were all that humanity could get and as much as it should want. In America, “damned the Absolute” with all his heart and with all his eager will. C. S. Peirce said that his “pragmaticism” was closely allied to Hegel, and John Dewey moved away from something very like Absolutism to something that remained rather like it. Accordingly, the present chapter is, in some sense, a commentary on the third chapter. Its inclusion of M. Bergson, however, needs some defence. For Bergson manages his own affairs. One may say, however, that both James and Schiller regarded Bergson as a very great ally; and that is something, although it may not be quite enough. Besides, this is a short book. It is sometimes held that pragmatism blossomed and drooped with James’s own activities, but the statement is false both as regards James’s pragmatism and his “radical empiricism,” which pair he sharply contrasted. James’s radical empiricism was a lifelong conviction. As early as 1885 he had written to Howison:

My trouble, you see, lies with monism. Determinism = monism; and a monism like this world can’t be an object of pure optimistic contemplation . . . Make the world a pluralism and you forthwith have an object to worship. Make it a Unit on the other hand, and worship and abhorrence are equally onesided and equally legitimate reactions.

Pluralism, then, was ultimate. The universe was “strung along,” not as beads are, but straggling like a buttercup. James rather liked the summary one of his weaker students gave. “The universe is a vague pulsating mass of next-to-next 136 Pragmatists and M. Bergson movement, always feeling its way along to a good purpose, or trying to.” It contained relatively stable portions, but the growing part of it was the more exciting, especially its fi nite, growing God. Its “next-to-nextness,” again, was an experienced continuity. It was not, as Green or Lotze or the Kantians had held, the interpolation of relational forms that were above experience. According to James, the “fl ights” and the “perches” of human experience were defi nitely contrasted, but both of them were bits of experience in the same sense. It may be correct to say that James’s philosophy was bio-centric, and also that he was a commonsense or “natural” realist regarding the relations of nature to mind. Certainly he often said so, speaking metaphysically as well as psychologically. The principal emphasis in his philosophy, however, was laid upon “pure experience.” This, in its purity, was his radical empiricism. He was, he hoped, a better, because a purer empiricist than Mill, or Comte, or Shadworth Hodgson. He was also more adventurous, since he believed that a systematic survey of the jungle, scrub and wilderness of experience, in mysticism and in abnormal psychology, was full of instruction for philosophy generally. Again, the perspective of his empiricism was at least as much continental as English. He worked for the “unstiffening” of neo-Kantianism, as may be seen, for example, from the special form of the argument in the most important of his later papers, “Does consciousness exist?” This was the contention that “consciousness” had become (for neo-Kantians) only the empty statement that experience had to be thought. In reality, James said, mentality is not a stuff, but an arrangement and a function. The genuine (and plastic) stuff of reality, taken in a context of interest and appetition was “mental” or “conscious”; taken in another context it was “physical.” The later development of Behaviourism, with J. B. Watson for its chief exponent, is logically distinct from this argument. Behaviourism is a laboratory- metaphysics holding that because the most promising line of psychological research, in rats and in men, is their physical reactions, therefore the human as well as the animal mind consists wholly of such reactions. It is not a two- context theory, but a one-piece affair. Nevertheless, James also held that the soul, if it were anything, would have to be breath, and that bodily “warmth and intimacy” was the root of the interest-context. Hence in certain respects he could be called a favourable witness to behaviouism, although he was also the best introspectionist of his age. The pragmatism that James distinguished (oversharply, I think, except as Recent Philosophy 137 regards the details of James’s temperamental impressionism) from this “radical empiricism” stood for two things, fi rstly a method, and secondly a genetic theory of truth. The method was the principle that “to attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve, what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare.” The theory was a generalization from the method, somewhat amplifi ed in a metaphysical sense. It asserted that truth was always life’s instrument, conceptual truth a shortcut, and most “ideas” working substitutes for actual sensation. And it took for granted that the gangling ambulation of human thinking must include the totality of human truth. In other words, it employed the philosophy of immanent idealism, and not the philosophy of “natural” or of any other realism. In the main the “practical differences” on which the theory turned were differences of (sensory) belief, and a satisfactory practical verifi cation was assimilation with “the beliefs in stock.” Other “satisfactions,” however, were also contemplated; for beliefs may be reinforced in divers ways, largely emotional. Buck-u-uppo may be as good as calomel. But at this point James’s theory bewildered himself and everybody else. James, with emphatic acknowledgments, said that his account of the pragmatic method was borrowed from C. S. Peirce (1839–1914) and Peirce himself says that the theory was a consequence of certain debates during the “earliest seventies” in the “Metaphysical Club” of Old Cambridge (Mass), either in James’s study or in Peirce’s own. For one of the main subjects that this knot of young men discussed was Bain’s theory of belief, viz. “that upon which a man is prepared to act” or the philosophy of “You bet.” According to Peirce, Bain was therefore pragmatism’s grandfather, and many of its critics have said the same, adding, however, that the grandfather had been refuted by Bradley in his Logic, and so that the grandchildren should not be heard. James’s private opinion was that Peirce was a “queer being” and a “hopeless crank,” but James also said that he “never knew a mind of so many different kinds of spotty intensity or vigour.” On this judgment time has taken a certain revenge, for Americans are now agreed that Peirce was one of their greatest thinkers, and his collected works are appearing in eight sumptuous volumes. In these there is spottiness and some amiable eccentricities, especially a passion for word-coining – phaneroscopy and coenoscopy, sumisigns, dicisigns and suasisigns, cotary propositions (i.e. whetstones) and the like. Otherwise, however, the “crank” has become a man of the world, for Peirce’s major interests in symbolic logic, in the nature of signs and their use, in the theory 138 Pragmatists and M. Bergson of probability and in abstract scientifi c methods, in “speculative grammar,” in Duns Scotus and in other scholastics are, at the present moment, the last word in philosophical up-to-dateness. Peirce described himself as “saturated through and through with the spirit of the physical sciences,” but also as a most diligent student of Kant, Mill and Duns Scotus (and Scotus, as it happens, was a theological pragmatist as well as a tonsured logician). Of all disciplines logic seemed to Peirce the fi rst and chief. There he was an innovator of note, such another as Boole or Schröder. He further believed that “the present infantile condition of philosophy” made that subject a fussy and a foolish guide in affairs of morality and of religion, although the subject might be useful, despite its fallibility, if it set its logical house in order and went to physics for instruction in domestic science. Hence, although his account of the pragmatic method in the essay “How to make our ideas clear” (Popular Science Monthly, 1878) had obvious affi nities to James’s views, there were, to say the least, strong temperamental differences between the two men, especially regarding “meliorism,” optimism and the “will to believe.” According to Peirce, pragmatism was a logical thing, a way of preciding (as he said) or of making precise. The maxim he originally formulated for it was, “Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.” This view was a part of Peirce’s general contention that “the life of thought and science is the life inherent in symbols.” Just as a hypothesis in science is a fairy tale unless it can somehow be tested in practice, so an idea is a piece of vanity unless it is subject to a similar control. The whole question concerns the logical process of the “abduction” (i.e. of the appropriate development) of an idea that really is an idea. In order to retain his independence Peirce, in later life, called himself a pragmaticist and not a pragmatist, but, whatever the name, his point was that he believed his theory to be “a method of ascertaining the meanings, not of all ideas, but only of what I call ‘intellectual concepts,’ that is to say of those upon the structure of which arguments concerning objective fact may hinge.” That was a logical method, not a philosophy. The allied philosophy he called synechism. The pragmatic method, he said, would “largely clear up” metaphysics; but “concrete reasonableness” or synechism yielded a still higher degree of clearness, and was a general description of the manner in which individual reactions of a knowledgeable kind contributed to the development of ideas. Such synechism was “founded on the notion that the coalescence, Recent Philosophy 139 the becoming continuous, the becoming governed by laws, the becoming instinct with general ideas are but one and the same process of the growth of reasonableness. This is fi rst shown to be true with mathematical exactitude in the fi eld of logic and is thence inferred to hold good metaphysically.” (Like many moderns, however, Peirce was a “tychist,” that is to say he accepted randomness as well as law.) Although John Dewey (b. 1859) does not seem to have been strongly infl uenced by Peirce, his pragmatism is in many respects more like Peirce’s than James’s; for it was an experimental and evolutionary “concrete reasonableness.” Dewey describes his philosophical career as a transition from absolutism to experimentalism, and his essays in the Studies in Logical Theory (1903) show how deeply he had drunk from the former well. Indeed, as late as 1930, he remarked that “there is greater richness and greater variety in Hegel than in any other systematic philosopher” – Plato excepted. He delighted, it is true, in the bio-centric parts of James’s Psychology, and proclaimed himself a “natural realist” when it came to shoving his boat, the Experience, into water. Yet, as in James’s case, the boat, once under way, seems to fl y the colours of idealism, and turns out to be the whole human world, not a boat at all. Dewey, in his realistic rôle, explains that “experience” is a tentative adjustment to an environment, better illustrated by the behaviour of the dog Argus when Ulysses returned than by the episodic fulgurations of consciousness. There are, indeed, “consummatory” experiences of a sensory or emotional kind, but these have little to do with philosophy. That subject is a criticism of criticisms. It is refl ective thought engaged in self-refl ection, and refl ection, including logic, is not consummatory but transitional. Thought is an instrument for solving problems. Its concepts (as Professor Bridgman says) are operational, and it points or denotes in the special sort of transition that we call meaning. This “ meaning,” as we now have it, is massive social experience rather than James’s “pure” experience. It is thickened experience, but the theory, like James’s, is totally opposed to the vain endeavour of getting the perfect Absolute to sit for its portrait. What Peirce called “concrete reasonableness,” therefore, is treated by Dewey as the experimental and tentative social organization of thought’s mediations, and is attended, as in James’s case but in a much thicker way, with the explanations that “experience,” being human and in the making, cannot so much as contemplate non-experience, that “situations” can be puzzled and problematical as well as men, that “mind” and “matter” are affairs of a double 140 Pragmatists and M. Bergson context, that both persons and their universe are historical, growing things, necessarily precarious although relatively stable in parts. Dewey’s philosophy owed much of its infl uence to its serious (indeed solemn) concern with physical science, and to the general line of argument that H20 was common water and something more, that is, was water plus the power of chemical planning. Nevertheless his theory began with “experience” taken with the utmost naiveté and catholicity “as the common man takes it when he experiences illness and prosperity, love, marriage and death,” and it retained this catholicity to the end, although it reserved an ample place for subtle and complicated developments, such as the delicate reciprocal adjustments of mathematical symbols on which Peirce had frequently and James had occasionally insisted. In short, instrumental refl ection had to adjust moral, economic and cultural situations as well as technological ones, and was the organ of a democracy of public achievement. Its very meaning was social, not merely some few of its ideals. In the future it will probably be held that G.H. Mead’s analysis of the notion that meaning in its very essence is a part of social behaviourism is rather more searching than anything from Dewey’s pen, but judgment on this point must be reserved until Mind, Self and Society (1934 and post-humous) is succeeded by the rest of a projected trilogy of Mead’s volumes of lectures. In the fi rst of the trilogy, Mead explained that by social behaviourism he meant, not Watson’s denial of inner or private experience, but an approach based upon the reciprocities of animal action. In this sense (he held) mind and self, allowing a certain bodily individuation, are social through and through. “Gestures,” that is, actions adjusted to the future responses of others, come before mind or self, and consciousness emerges from gesture situations, that is to say it is the sort of thing that might turn up in such a situation and is functionally intelligible nowhere else. The essential problem, however, concerns meaning not consciousness. From gestures, symbols are developed; in other words, symbols are gestures that indicate to another agent how he should respond. To use a symbol is to be a mind, and the “self ” emerges when a mind is self-conscious, that is, indicates to itself its own rôle in a reciprocal gesture situation. Symbols, in general, are linguistic. Therefore there is mind where there is speech, and a self wherever self-communing occurs. An interesting development in America and elsewhere is the alliance between pragmatism and the tougher of the new . According to C. L Lewis, for example, pragmatism went to work “wrong way on.” The mind’s business is nothing but logic; its only possible activity (i.e. its pragmatism) is the weaving Recent Philosophy 141 of logical patterns (which also exhaust inter-communication). It is the non- pragmatic that we are “up against” in sensation and other vital interests; in technical language it is the “given.” The “given,” however, includes dream- facts and fantasy, and we do not call these “real” even when they give us a jolt. “Reality,” then, is a selection from the “given,” viz. such a selection as can be logicized. And here we must proceed tentatively and hypothetically. (In this, as in other such theories it is not quite plain how the recognition that an experiment or hypothesis has worked is itself hypothetical, experimental and in the making. And it is odd, too, to regard such recognition as either alogical or a piece of pattern-weaving.) In England F. C. S. Schiller has been the chief exponent of pragmatism, or, as he would prefer to say, of “.” Schiller, however, despite his many gifts, was happier as a desperado than as a pirate king, and was so determined to refute (traditional) “formal” logic that he had very little cloth left with which to cover the “psychologic” that he proposed to substitute. From the recent writings of another English pragmatist, Mr. A. Sidgwick, one is led to suppose that “modern” pragmatism has become pretty tame, being designed simply to prick verbal bubbles by asking what sort of verifi cation would be suffi cient. In Germany, the fi ction-theory of truth of H. Vaihinger (1852–1933) in his As if philosophy may be regarded as super-pragmatic; and Müller-Freienfels and others had a certain sympathy with pragmatism. Again, the view of H. Dingler that science is simply a set of practical directions seems more pragmatical than most pragmatisms. In Italy, Papini, at one stage of his career, advocated a pragmatic faithp-hilosophy that greatly heartened William James; and voluntaristic or activistic philosophies have abounded in many lands. Let us turn, however, to Bergson. It is debatable whether Bergson is the greatest of pragmatists or no pragmatist at all. He himself, in his introduction to the French translation of James’s Pragmatism, wrote in a detached mood and showed a good deal of reserve. Nevertheless the atmosphere of his philosophy, although very un-Peirce-like, is sympathetic towards James’s. It is bio-centric, sedulously immersed in the vital sinuosity of moving passage, prophetic of an “open” future. It also attempts to outmanœuvre Kant by the use of peculiarly mobile fl ying columns taking for granted that pure experience is full and ultimate reality and the clue to all semi-. Bergson’s Time and Free Will (1889) was designed to make room for an inverted Kantianism. Instead of imposing forms (largely geometrical) upon our world, our minds (Bergson said) were hindered by externality, and found 142 Pragmatists and M. Bergson themselves ungeometrically in a free vital spontaneity that, with luck and resolution, could be grasped by an “intuition suitable to man.” What this intuition grasped was “lived time” or durée (for physical chronometry was really spatial). In Matter and Memory (1896) Bergson argued that our sense-glimpses, instead of representing “matter,” were selections of what was salient for purposes of action, that reality was a one-piece continuation of our plans of action, that the brain was the organ of habit, not a storehouse of ideas, and that memory took either the brisk form of recalling the past in serviceable detail or the lambent form of routine. His short Introduction to Metaphysics (Rev. de mét. 1903) carried these questions further. His contention was that metaphysics is the attempt to grasp the reality round which symbols can only hover, and that “intuition” alone can succeed in the attempt. One may analyse reality, but no one could ever reconstitute it from analytical elements. In short, metaphysics must be intuitive. Such intuition was a sort of spiritual auscultation enlarged by sympathy, using methods that intelligence knoweth not, methods that for most of us are a sort of aureole on the margin of our (materialistic) “practical” thinking. Such methods, however, are capable of fuller development; and what they grasp is durée. When Bergson’s Creative Evolution appeared in 1907 the times were over- ripe for a new philosophy of evolution. Consequently the average man was almost ready for this new philosophy of the subject. He could follow Mivart’s objection to neo-Darwinianism (viz. that it had to pretend that what was useful in promise only was an actual vital advantage) and consequently was prepared to accept the doctrine of an unconsciously prophetic vital urgency (élan) at any rate if the neo-Lamarckian theory of acquired characteristics accounted for comparatively little in evolution. Moreover, Bergson elaborated his theme with zest, grace, learning and distinction. Hence he persuaded a host of readers that the heart of change was beating within them, and that Nature had provided them with adequate stethoscopes in their instincts and in their sympathies. According to Bergson the principal obstacle in the way of this spiritual auscultation was man’s inveterate tendency to intellectualize. Intuition (and instinct) was neglected in favour of intelligence. (But it is not entirely clear whether he meant to restore a neglected element by the method of complementary over-emphasis, or was still more radically anti-intellectualist. The answer, I think, is that the neglected element, and it alone, was metaphysically ultimate, but that in ordinary experience both elements could, and should, be present.) Recent Philosophy 143

In general, Bergson’s contention was that science (and intelligence) dealt with discontinuous fi xities, and yielded a sort of solid geometry. Our intellects were practical, because they were tool-users, the tools being inorganic and adapted to inorganic things. (He did not object to tool-makers, but only to phrase-makers.) These opinions seem strange in a world that contains shepherds and policemen, that is to say, in a world where intelligence actually is applied to other animals and to other men. It would hold of levers and wheels, not of thumbs and legs, indeed it is quite certainly exaggerated, unless the meaning be that “science” tends to lose itself in a mechanical waste. Even so the times were somewhat unpropitious for Bergson’s thesis, for he argued that science dealt with frozen discontinuous immobilities at the very time at which the mathematicians had developed a very defi nite doctrine of continuity and the physicists were volatilizing “matter.” The trail of Kant is very pronounced in Bergson’s pages. Kant had held (a) that time is the form of psychology or the “inner sense,” (b) that it has to be represented spatially by drawing a line, (c) that the time and the space of physics corresponded very precisely indeed. For Bergson time is the mind of life and is misconstrued by physical science which treats it as a fourth dimension of space. His complaint therefore was that physics omitted the essence of time, viz. transition and history. Physical chronometry was really non-temporal and should be superseded by a bio- or psycho-chronology. Bergson’s critics maintain that this psychochronology omits too much, or all, of the “ology.” They also maintain that he should have formulated a somewhat similar doctrine regarding space (as he himself once or twice suggested), that is, should have distinguished a psycho-megethology of sensory bigness from the conceptualized geometry that be criticized. Further, it would seem that Bergson, in his description of a cosmic as well as of a vital élan in his Creative Evolution, attempted too much. Let it be granted that the universe is historical, perhaps growing, that stable things are only relatively permanent eventclusters, and that dead matter, however interpreted, is contrasted with living plasticity. In that case if the universe, starting from a condition neither dead nor alive, split into a dead part contrasted with the living part, there really would be a dead part (although its rigor mortis would not be pure immobility), and the intellect, instead of purveying useful fi ctions, would be describing literal fact so long as it confi ned itself to the inorganic. In the quartercentury that intervened between Creative Evolution and his 144 Pragmatists and M. Bergson next big book, Bergson’s interests revolved in part round a Plotinian as well as a vitalistic account of human personality, but he was chiefl y engaged in keeping his account of durée up to date. Hence in a small volume (1923) lie examined Einstein’s relativity, arguing in general that Einstein had developed physical chronometry as it should be developed, but that his theories did not affect the absolute time of animal experience. To each of us succession was succession whatever the measurements from another frame of reference might be, and there was no good reason why this absolute psychological succession could not be shared in neighbourly sympathy. If the chronometry from another frame of reference indicated a time-lapse where no succession was experienced, such a time-lapse was “drawn out of nothing,” a bookkeeping transaction that added nothing either to life or to history. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) Bergson continued to develop the contrast between stability and transition. In ethics, he held, a closed society (determining the obligations of duty) was opposed to the open mind; in religion various defensive social reactions were anti-thetic to what, at its limit, would be the pure mystic spirit. Such a mysticism was the bounty of Nature, the source of Nature, not a part of it, and Bergson found himself able to affi rm that the universe was love and the need for love, in tangible and visible form. (So God was love, although He was in the making.) While in this theory it was not apparent why there were not obligations towards open- mindedness, or why the prophets should not be preachers of social peace, both the exposition and the comments on latter-day affairs had the author’s characteristic luminosity, and his explanation that the natural units of a closed society were small made it easier to unite the “open” type of religion and of morals with the cause of humanity. Early in the century Bergson had established himself as the most widely read philosopher in Europe, and as one of the most widely translated. No one except Russell has subsequently approached him in this particular and his infl uence was commensurate with his renown, although there may not have been very many pure Bergsonians (except perhaps Bergson). Many writers, however (as the late Wildon Carr and Mrs. K. Stephen in England or G. Dwelshauvers in Belgium), have been pretty nearly Bergsonians; and very many philosophers have either been semi-Bergsonians or have de-Bergsonized themselves lengthily in print. In France Bergson’s aesthetical illustrations infl uenced M. Segond and the late M. Thibaudet and stimulated J. de Gaultier to develop a “Bovaryism” of super-Bergsonian self-deception in art. The mysticism of The Two Sources, Recent Philosophy 145 again, may have been tutored, in part, by the semi-Bergsonian mystics Péguy and Delacroix. G. Sorel’s Refl ections on Violence was also an interesting sequel; for its author employed Bergson’s philosophy, along with Marx’s, as a romantic basis for his Syndicalism, with personal addenda concerning the “myths” of the Class-Struggle and the General Strike. The chief French Bergsonian has been E. Le Roy, Bergson’s successor at the Collège de France. This author, having begun as a scientist of the Poincaré type, later discussed evolution in the spirit of one of his sub-titles “Marginal Commentary on the First Two Chapters of Creative Evolution.” In La Pensée Intuitive (1930) he treated of “the return to immediacy,” “creative imagination” and the like. Regarding Christianity he was a modernist and also a mystic. G. Wilbois was a pragmatist who developed a positivistic but “instrumental” theory of reason and its works. R. Berthelot, a vigorous anti-Bergsonian, attempted to climb back to Plato and Hegel over the corpses of the three “pragmatists,” Nietzsche, Poincaré and Bergson. M. Pradines, on the contrary, declined to follow Bergson because, in his view, Bergson was not a pragmatist. In 1893 M. Blondel, in his essay on Action, had defended an activist logic and philosophy with a devout élan towards deiformity. His later book on Thinking (1934) attempted to supply a radical cure for all philosophy (including Bergson’s) by following, faithfully, this more devout path. Chapter VI

Two “New” Philosophical Disciplines

The present chapter will deal, in the main, with Meinong’s theory of objects and with Husserl’s phenomenology. Both of these disciplines accounted themselves “new,” and correctly so. There may, it is true, be nothing absolutely “new” in philosophy, but there is an important relative sense of novelty in that subject in so far as a philosopher’s persistence in elaborating his answer to a question that may not itself be unfamiliar consolidates a position that may have been visited but has never been held. This type of novelty characterizes both the theories we have here to consider. Of the two, Husserl’s has the closer connection with the idealistic tradition in philosophy, that is to say with Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Absolutism. In its later developments especially it might reasonably be regarded as another alternative to absolute idealism, additional to those we have considered in former chapters; and since it purports to be a philosophy of “pure,” and even of “immanent” experience, it has further affi nities with a part of the last chapter. It is also, however, an alternative to positivism, and a species of analytical philosophy, that is to say, its connections with the later chapters of this book are at least as close as its connections with the earlier chapters. Again, the work both of Meinong and of Husserl, despite their differences, has an intimate bearing upon the various forms of we have next to discuss. On the whole, then, it seems best to regard the work of Meinong and of Husserl as independent philosophical expeditions, infl uencing the general situation in a multiplicity of rather complicated ways. These expeditions were also independent of one another. Both, however, owed much to Brentano (1838–1917) who sowed the seeds of them although he later criticized the harvest. This circumstance introduces a further historical complication. Brentano, in the main, went back to Aristotle, and refused to travel with Recent Philosophy 147

Kant or with Hegel. He was greatly indebted, it is true, to Hume and to other empiricists. Indeed, he is largely responsible for the circumstance that so much in recent philosophy resembles the eighteenth century in its prime rather than any part of the nineteenth. But Brentano’s highly original answer to Hume (and to positivism) was not at all like Kant’s, and did not resemble post-Kantlan idealism. In metaphysics Brentano held fast to the existence of personal, immaterial, indeed null-dimensional souls, and to each man’s immediate experience of his own soul. The most stimulating contention of his Psychology (1874), however, was the use he made of the revived scholastic theory of “intentional inexistence.” On this view the essence of a knowledgeable soul is to refer. Our experience is always of something other than itself, and we are acquainted with ourselves only and always in the exercise of this referential function. Our

“inwardness” is the inwardness of “outward”-directed beings. In Brentano’s view, this conception, faithfully followed, yielded a sound (indeed the best) philosophical method. The intent and direction of experience defi ned and would clarify its possible achievements in the knowledge of existence, and justifi ed itself in the cases in which full evidence could be attained. What was necessary was fi delity to the facts. There would be the fallacy of mere “psychologism” if it were forgotten that our minds had a business, the business of apprehending that to which they referred. There would be the fallacy of “irrealism” if it were forgotten that we invariably endeavour to apprehend real things. But both fallacies may be avoided by suffi ciently strenuous patience. Professors Kraus and Kastil have been engaged for some years in editing Brentano’s writings and correspondence. Consequently the learned world is now better able to appreciate what Brentano himself stood for, and his views concerning the development of what is loosely called the “Brentano school.” For the purposes of the present narrative, however, we have to do with the infl uence of Brentano’s teaching at Vienna (1874–95) rather than with what he later wrote in exile, or with his earlier career at Würzburg before his inability to accept the dogma of papal infallibility together with his reluctance to join the Old Catholics put an end to his career as priest-professor there. Let us return, then, to the method of the Psychology, and consider its infl uence upon Alexius Meinong (1853–1921), Brentano’s most distinguished pupil at Vienna, and the founder of one of the “ new” philosophical disciplines that are the subject of this chapter. Although Meinong gradually transferred his interests from mental processes 148 Introduction to the entities to which they referred, he was a practising psychologist all his life and a devoted follower of psychological clues. Such clues, he believed, could be found in the “contents” of the mind, in terms of the threefold division into “acts” “contents” and “objects” that the Polish philosopher Twardowski had elaborated in 1894. In Meinong’s philosophy the term “act” had a very formal status. It was not necessarily an activity and it designated in the main a difference in the mind’s attitude. This may vary when nothing else does, e.g. when we suspend judgment without any apparent variation in the fact judged. (Thus judging and supposing are different “acts.”) “Contents” and “objects,” however, were not of this formal order. The “objects” are all the things to which we refer – this book, that table, Cleopatra’s nose. The “contents” are the special experiences through which we refer to such objects. The experience of blue differs inwardly from the experience, say, of sour, and all such inward differences are differences of content. (It was natural to hold that these differences of content helped us in discriminating differences in the objects.) A part of Meinong’s theory resulted from his attempt to employ the distinction between “act” and “content” in interpreting the entities to which they conjointly referred. In particular his work on Assumptions (1902) explored the hinterland between bare apprehension and explicit judgment and drove all the entities that could be entertained before the mind, but were neither believed nor known, into the same pen. (Here play, and fancy, and explicit supposal, and scientifi c tours de force had each its place; and so had much else.) His dominant interest, however, was in the sort of topic which he gradually developed into a Gegenstandstheorie, or theory of cognoscible entities. This, as he believed, was a genuinely new philosophical discipline that had never before been investigated for its own sake only. It seemed clear to him, on refl ection, that there was great unsubtlety in the bald statement that our minds (complete with “acts” and “contents”) referred to “objects,” at any rate if by “objects” one meant existent things. The proper question, here, was, “What precisely confronts the mind when it judges, supposes, or infers?” If we allow that we may apprehend existing things, as Alexander did when he tamed Bucephalus, it is also plain (Meinong thought) that very frequently the entities directly before the mind are not existent things. Bucephalus existed, and Alexander could see, tame and ride him; but when Alexander made judgments about Bucephalus what was directly before his mind was something like “the fact that Bucephalus was spirited,” “the spiritedness of Bucephalus” (or, again, the charger’s non-existence when Recent Philosophy 149

Alexander named a town on the Hydaspes after the dead Bucephalus). Such entities are not existent things. (For example, Alexander could ride a horse but he could not ride a fact.) In short it is only our “prejudice in favour of the actual” that leads us to hold that existent things always confront us when we think. The thought-universe, that is, the sum of the entities of which we think, is immensely wider than the sum of existent things. The new science of Gegenstandstheorie was based upon the apparent verity that whatever a man thinks of (or even supposes) must somehow be, and that much that we think of manifestly does not exist. In arithmetic, for example, we deal with numbers, and numbers do not exist, although twelve eggs may exist in one basket. The numbers subsist. Again the similarity of two peas does not exist even when the two peas exist. This particular distinction between existence and subsistence is plausible, and so is the general doctrine that our thoughts range beyond mere existence, contemplating possibilities as well as actualities, negative facts as well as actual things, and so forth. Again, Meinong’s account of “states of affairs of a higher order,” of “incomplete objects” and of other such matters have provided the present generation of philosophers with a fascinating and also with a highly instructive fi eld of inquiry. Nevertheless (as with many philosophies) the fi rst steps are easier to take than their successors. Many who were grateful to Meinong for his distinction between existence and subsistence were thoroughly uneasy when they were asked to believe that the pseudo-Dionysius had a pseudo-existence or that a round square must somehow be, and be both round and square, because what one contemplated in that case was a round square. Such critics would be glad to believe (with Brentano) that Meinong had built a house of cards – very good cards but not the best – and that a little further subtlety would show that it was Meinong who was unsubtle. (The general line Brentano took was to say that a phrase like “the non-existence of X” is plainly incomplete since it implies that someone believes X not to exist. Such beliefs are actual facts, and all mental processes that seem to refer to “quasi-things” can be shown, with suffi cient patience, to be someone’s actual judgment, true or false, about genuine things.) Meinong used the technical term “objectives” to describe the entities before the mind in judgment and supposal, but his analysis was not confi ned to “objectives.” Our awareness, in general, he held, was directed towards presentations, and we had also to consider the “dignitatives” of emotion and the “desideratives” of desire. For emotion and desire also referred beyond 150 Introduction themselves, although they were blended with and, in a sense, based upon a knowledgeable awareness. Hence Meinong’s doctrine of emotional presentation and of value-theory in general. Brentano had held that the good was the goal of right loving just as the true was the goal of right judgment. Meinong, who had studied economics under Menger, elaborated (and altered) this theory on the general lines that the composite experience of valuation, in which emotion was integrally contained, indicated a corresponding set of value-facts. The infl uence and interest of his repeated researches in this fi eld were outstanding, and will be reconsidered in our penultimate chapter. Meinong described himself as one who built “from below,” and he did not expect to construct a metaphysical edifi ce that had many storeys or any towers. He had worked towards the view (he said) that evidence (as Brentano also had held) is self-justifying and fi nal, towards a rationalism that was not afraid of empirical matter of fact, and towards the emancipation of psychology from “psychologism.” In his work on Probability, however, he attempted a metaphysical proof of universal causation, and tried to assess the nature of induction. He also employed a distinction between penetrating and merely contemplative inquiry in the service of an unprejudiced exploration of the “actual.” Meinong realized that a philosopher must always be lonely. He himself had had to vindicate his independence from Brentano, although, after Brentano’s death, he gladly acknowledged the bright sunrise of his youth when Brentano was at Vienna. Nevertheless he was glad that he himself had had an appreciable infl uence (and an admirer has called him the Plato of a movement in which Brentano was the Socrates). The early death of S. Witasek, a favourite and distinguished pupil, affected him deeply, and he was pained to see that the “mountain of injustice” that succeeded the war had become a barrier between his ideas and the rest of Europe. In this respect, however, he exaggerated the size of the mountain; and in the Teutonic countries, the support of such men as Höfl er and Pf änder counted for much. The second “new” philosophical discipline we have here to consider is the “phenomenology” of E. Husserl (b. 1859) and of his followers. This theory, as its author emphatically allowed, derived its initial impetus from Brentano’s doctrine of the intentionality of the experiences (Erlebnisse) men “lived through.” Moreover Husserl in the years 1884–6 had been Brentano’s pupil in Vienna, had responded with alacrity to Brentano’s “cataleptic” eagerness, had assimilated Brentano’s descriptive psychology of the intellect Recent Philosophy 151 and of the fancy, and so had resolved to turn from mathematics to philosophy. On the other hand, Husserl was always less of a scholastic and more of a Kantian than Brentano. The one “perennial” philosophy, he believed, required Cartesian-scholastic sharp-wittedness, but it also needed Kant’s profoundly penetrative genius. The Kantian development was more than a licence for mystifi cation, and philosophy should be refashioned phenomenologically. Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) paid special attention to the newer mathematical theories of Cantor, Dedekind and others, and was succeeded by his celebrated Logical Studies (1900). In that work he argued in the fi rst volume that the invincible clarity and pure generality of mathematical forms were but a part of the intelligible non-empirical structure of universal science, and demanded a survey of the entire domain of “logic” that is of such general facts as “states of affairs,” unity, plurality, relation. The second volume investigated the intentions of logical assertions in greater detail, and had a family resemblance to much in Meinong. (But in Husserl’s opinion, it had a better philosophy behind it.) In the Logical Studies, the term “act” was interpreted widely, its “quality” corresponding to what Meinong called an “act,” and its material “to the Meinong-Twardowski content.” In Husserl’s later books, however, i.e. his Ideas (1913) and his Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), this standpoint shifted appreciably, partly because the self was said visibly to dominate all so-called “acts,” and partly because the whole doctrine was directed towards a “pole” of impersonal selfhood. Husserl’s phenomenology is the “logos” or science of all that appears, and so is a philosophy of pure experience, although not in James’s way or in Bergson’s. Its aim and canon is to permit our experience to reveal its essence and structure. Such experience, Husserl said, was, in a sense, realistic. Except in our acquaintance with selves and their acts we referred to a world that is not made up of selves or of their experiences. On the other hand our experience grasped and meant a world whose structure and essence, both generally and in the more special “regions” of the developed sciences, was a logical structure, correlative not antithetic to mind. Experience was of an object; but all objects, by parity of argument, were for (the “pole” of ) subjectivity. Most idealists, however (according to Husserl), had lost their way. They assumed, overtly or surreptitiously, that objects must somehow be in some particular self. And that was “psychologism.” Husserl had no objection to psychological descriptions of the intentions of human experience. Indeed, 152 Introduction he began his account of phenomenology in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (14th ed.) with a psychological section, and many of his followers had a distinct preference for that aspect of the subject. Nevertheless it was essential (he held) to “bracket” or suspend the assumption that such phenomenology was only a description of the life-history of this or the other particular being. Let experience declare its intentions. Let it fulfi l these intentions where it can. But do not let it presuppose common-sense theory or any other theory. Principles there must be. But let them come at the end. They belong to the summing up, not to the opening of the case. And the end is very far removed indeed from “psychologism.” This insistence upon a resolute preliminary suspense of judgment or epoche, more resolute even than Descartes’s, is a cardinal feature of Husserl’s philosophy. Its success may be more doubtful, for presuppositions have a way of creeping in, and the avoidance of all presuppositions may well be a counsel of perfection, impracticable in an inadvertent world. Thus Bosanquet complained that Husserl invariably succumbed to at least one devastating initial prejudice, the prejudice namely that regions of verity may be detached, and that the innermost shrine of reality may be penetrated, here and there, “on the faith of mental vision as you have it before you.” Others made similar complaints. They could not believe that mere intensity of understanding could succeed if breadth were lacking. But Husserl, although he often compared himself to a solitary and bewildered if astute pioneer in a new continent, believed that he had lived long enough to attain a great deal, having presupposed precisely nothing. As he thought, he had attained his “eidetic” goal, because the method of “phenomenological reduction” had not failed him. These terms describe the other two cardinal features of his philosophy. The word “eidetic” was intended to describe the transparent intelligibility of formal, logical structure. It marked the penetration by essential insight into the logical constitution of reality and into the broader generalities of certain of its “regions,” these being further specifi ed in sensible or “hyletic” experience. The “phenomenological reduction” was the method of philosophical refl ection, an improved Cartesianism and Humianism in which after long pondering and suspense of judgment the eidetic clarities blazed forth in their own dry light. When they did so, they confounded the foolishness of psychologism. The “reduction” was in terms of the universal “pole” of subjectivity, not in terms of our brief thinking lives. In it our minds acted in their universal capacity and the method was “new” because it was Recent Philosophy 153 so very thorough. In no other way could the one perennial philosophy bring salvation to “the present confused day.” A recent historian (A. Metzger) represents phenomenology as a latter- day elaboration and secularization of Cusa’s philosophical theology of the fi fteenth century, according to which rational souls were the living descriptions of eternal and infi nite wisdom in which a hidden deity was “contracted” yet fi tfully and sometimes luminously made manifest. There was an ultimate “preponderance” of rationality in human life, for, as Aquinas had said, “things are nobler in the mind than in themselves”; and human reason sought its own. That, if it be true, seems to describe the aim and status of philosophy in the opinion of certain prominent phenomenologists rather than the essentials of the phenomenological method. In particular Aquinas’s statement might itself be subjected to severe phenomenological criticism, and Metzger’s summary of the position would accurately describe only a few of the detailed phenomenological discussions in Husserl’s Yearbook (begun in 1913). On the other hand it would seem to express Husserl’s later views, and it faithfully records the sort of contention that M. Heidegger (Husserl’s successor at Freiburg), and the late M. Scheler of Cologne, commonly regarded as Husserl’s most eminent followers, brought into prominence. For these authors united Husserl’s phenomenological method with an attitude towards metaphysics and towards history that closely resembled the philosophies of Dilthey, Weber and Jaspers. Heidegger (b. 1889) in his celebrated book Being and Time (1927) used the phenomenological method. He went, he said, to the facts themselves in all their innocent power, interrogated them without asking any leading questions, and waited patiently for their answer. He believed, however, that the answer was broad enough to reach the farthest horizon of metaphysics and of all reality, since it displayed the inner spring and ultimate status of time itself. There is deity (of a kind) in man and also in the dust of which man is made. The dust is not simply “there” for man’s spirit to reckon with, and the work of philosophy is unfi nished when man is content contemplatively to characterize himself and his dust. Philosophy is the quest for reality, and reality, in its primary and authentic sense, has to be elicited from the anxious solicitude of each phase or department of existence for every other. In the Quaker phrase that Whitehead also employed, nature, and even the dust of nature, is “concerned” with man’s spirit just as truly as man’s spirit must be heedful of nature. This universal heedfulness, however, is in the making and unconsummated. It is therefore bent on futurity. It must die to live; and so it is temporal and historical in its 154 Introduction very essence. Consequently, what philosophy has to learn to do is to immerse itself in the time-process itself and decline to be misled by specious substitutes. The Greeks and more especially Parmenides understood the gravity and the overwhelming importance of the problem. The moderns should stand on the shoulders of the Greeks instead of being content either with a pick-a-back journey or with no journey at all. Scheler (1875–1928) was a pupil of Eucken’s at Jena and in 1901 joined Husserl at Halle, but his restless spirit was avid for results and could not long endure the restraints of Husserl’s epoche. This eagerness, although it professed to rush to the facts in a phenomenological spirit, extended beyond naturalism to supernaturalism and Scheler preferred the clarities of emotion to those of simple reason. So he reached a set of value-structures (pleasure-values, “life-values,” holiness) set in a universe whose essence was love; and in his chief work on ethics (1916) he showed himself to be a vigorous as well as an acute critic of Kant’s formalism in that subject. His later writings were chiefl y concerned with religion; and there his attitude to the Catholic Church remains tantalizingly problematical. His account of the essential unity of human and divine in the mystical body of Christ has a certain resemblance to Cusa’s position, pretty thoroughly de-intellectualized; but he had learned as much from Nietzsche as from Husserl. Important contributors to Husserl’s Yearbook were A. Pfänder (b. 1870), M. Geiger (b. 1880), O. Becker (b. 1889), A. Reinach (1883–1916). Some of these authors were pioneers of phenomenology, for example Pfänder who published his Phenomenology of Willing in 1901. The subjects they (and others) treated either in the Yearbook or in separate works covered a wide range – the senses, logic, epistemology, aesthetics and the unconscious (Geiger), geometry (Geiger and Backer), individuality (Löwith), art-theory (Utitz), ethics (Hildebrand and Bauch), religion ( J. Hering). All these phenomenological discussions kept close to Husserl’s ideals. In a wider sense of the term, phenomenology is everywhere apparent in Central Europe and also in other parts of the globe. Chapter VII Realism

The term “realism” has had so many meanings in philosophy, and these meanings have so often been unstable that the name, when it recurs in the history of the subject, is frequently abandoned or deprecated by those who are supposed to welcome a realistic theory. There is no doubt at all, however, that a movement generally and not inappropriately called “realism” was characteristic of the present century, and that, even if there has been a general disposition during the last few years to drop the name quietly, many of the recent philosophical debates in many countries are marked by fresh and livid realistic scars. In the sense of the term that is suited to these controversies we may perhaps distinguish between epistemological and naturalistic realism. The former is largely negative, and offers a counter-analysis to what I have called ideaism in any of its forms. It asserts (to be brief) that men are capable of apprehending some non-experiences without altering them in any way by the mere fact of apprehending them. Accordingly, epistemiological realism, on its negative side, runs counter to a great many current idea-istic inferences. It denies altogether that the entities we apprehend must necessarily be “mental”. On the other hand this repudiation of the shadows supposed to be inevitably cast by our thought does not of itself give information regarding what is reputed to be unshadowy. That is an affair of positive description where the witnesses need not necessarily agree. Naturalistic realism on the other hand usually undertakes to show that the human mind is a natural growth whose function of understanding the world is itself an inevitable part of the world’s behaviour. It is physical realism in a wide sense of the word “physical” and not in the narrower senses of “materialism”. This view, it would seem, might (logically) be sustained, as it frequently has been sustained (although not always very logically) by many “natural realists” in the past without the acceptance of epistemological realism. On the other hand a friendly alliance between the two doctrines offers an attractive programme. “Realism,” however (neglecting the special historical sense which refers to 156 Realism the controversy regarding “universals”), may be interpreted more widely and more vaguely still. In its widest sense it has often been ridiculed but has never been extinguished, and has had several lively independent developments in many countries during the present century. Some of these were scholastic- Aristotelian; and the Roman Church in particular has consistently maintained that esse (i.e. existence and primarily physical existence) cannot be based on nosse (i.e. upon knowledge, as Descartes and the majority of his successors are supposed to have held), but, contrariwise, that nosse must always be based upon esse. Others were Hegelian, as Marx’s was. Others again were neo-Kantian, for example the work of R. Adamson (1852–1902) in Scotland and G. Dawes Hicks (b. 1862) in England. In Germany O. Külpe (1862–1915) argued in his book Realizing that although direct perception, induction and ”reason” could not severally establish physical realism, they made that doctrine very probable indeed when taken together. Rehmke and Linke, and the Russian, N. O. Lossky, now a Professor in Prague, were also prominent realists, and there were strong (Aristotelian) realistic movements in Oxford and elsewhere. The most vigorous realistic growth of the century, however, was a particular form of the doctrine in England and in America. It began (epistemologically) with G. E. Moore in England, was enormously stimulated by Russell’s early writings, and quickly gained a general renown. Then it underwent a transatlantic change at the hands of the “new” and of the “critical” realists in the United States. Lastly, S. Alexander in England (naturalistically as well as epistemologically) produced his great book Space, Time and Deity (1920). So far as I know neither Moore nor Russell ever called themselves realists (although Russell gave his prompt and emphatic blessing to the “programme” of the six American “new realists” when it appeared). Indeed the later development both of Moore’s and of Russell’s philosophies towards “analysis” took as straight a line as could reasonably be expected from a slow advance over intricate country. Even their early work was nearer in spirit to Meinong’s and (with reservations) to Husserl’s than to realism of the naturalistic kind. Nevertheless “analysis” is very friendly to epistemological realism, and Moore and Russell, in their early writings, were realists in a positive sense, Moore because he held (1903) that we were directly aware of material things in space, and Russell because he held (1912) that the “instinctive” belief that there were physical objects corresponding to our “sense-data” was, in all probability, true. Moore’s “Refutation of Idealism” (Mind, 1903) vigorously asserted that the verb “to be” had a perfectly precise meaning, viz. quite simply, to be. If any idealist maintained that it had a further meaning (e.g. “to be perceived” Recent Philosophy 157 or “to be thought”) he was adding something that the verb could not and did not mean. (For the benefi t of later writers one might add that the same argument applies to additions like “to be verifi able,” “to be in relation,” “to be correlative to a transcendental subject”.) Hence anyone who maintained that all reality was idea-ed must produce arguments that had nothing to do with the meaning of “being.” The idealists were asked for a show-down, and were informed that even if their spiritual philosophy of reality was right, they had always given at least one wrong reason in support of it. Moore, however, more than suspected that they had confused between the act of knowing (in Husserl’s sense of “act”) and the object known. What is experienced need have none of the properties of the experiencing of it. In other words, Moore (unlike Bradley) held that this distinction was more than relative, and (unlike Husserl) that it was more than correlative in the sense that an object, somehow, required an act, as an act, plainly, requires its object. (The “contents” of the Twardowski-Meinong analysis as good as disappeared.) Part of Moore’s task, therefore, was to give an account of “acts,” and he began by holding that “acts,” although (nearly) “diaphanous,” could be inspected directly, and must have some internal differences to account, say, for private associations. This part of the theory speedily induced traditional as well as novel doubts, and was generally abandoned, although (perhaps) it should not have been. The more exciting part of Moore’s task was the rescue of objects from the pale cast of idealism, and British philosophy busied itself all over again with its favourite problem of the status of the “objects” of sense-perception. It was easy to show that most of the traditional arguments did not prove that perceived entities were mental. If, for example, ten men, looking at the moon, have ten distinct visible apparitions before them, ten cameras, similarly situated, would also take ten different pictures. It was also fairly plain that colour, sound, and other “secondary” qualities had every right to be regarded as non-mental if the “primary” qualities of shape and size had such a right. On the other hand it was diffi cult to believe that if a physical object had one shape, one colour, etc., men’s visual glimpses (which must differ for young and old, nearsighted and emmetropic, etc.) could be identical with physical objects, even in part; and it was odd to suppose that a few privileged glimpses, and, more generally, a few tactile “feels,” odorous whiffs and audible reports, revealed reality while the others revealed appearance only. Hence the renewal of ancient debates, but on non-idealistic lines. Did we perceive “sense-data” and, through them, become acquainted with another 158 Realism entity, the physical object? Could it be held, despite numerous and formidable diffi culties, that we did or might glimpse part of the surface of a physical object? Was it possible that a “physical object” was just a name (in a “Pickwickian” sense) for a family of sense data, i.e. for all “whiffs,” “feels,” etc., and for the enormous family of all visual glimpses from all points of view? If so, what about the glimpses that were not sober? Such inquiries, no doubt, must be minute and may be tedious; but they do investigate a genuine problem. Moore did not hold that “to be” necessarily meant “to exist,” and much of his argument referred to what Meinong had called “subsistence.” When Russell, who, by his own statement, had left Bradley’s camp for Moore’s about 1898, published his very important Principles of Mathematics (1903) this part of Moore’s philosophy received close attention. Russell could not (he said) develop “any even tolerably satisfactory philosophy of mathematics” unless he accepted, with Moore, “the non-existential nature of propositions (except such as happen to assert existence) and their independence of any knowing mind.” He was also constrained, with Moore, to accept “the pluralism which regards the world . . . as composed of an infi nite number of mutually independent entities, with relations which are ultimate, and not reducible to adjectives of these terms or of the whole which these compose.” At the same time, in a study of Leibniz, Russell came to see (as he believed) that the doctrine common to Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel and Bradley, viz. that every proposition has a subject and a predicate was false, and that its rejection shattered the metaphysics of all these philosophers. The crusade against monism and against omni-mentality was fought in the high upland regions where the internality or externality of relations, and other such abstract matters, habitually dwell. It was held, against Bradley, that relations really do relate their terms although they may do so extrinsically (i.e. x in the relation r remains quite simply x, and is not a different creature Xr just because it is in relation). It was also held that relational propositions need not be subject-predicate propositions, and that our judgments do not normally attempt to characterize “the whole” (e.g. the man who counts three sixpences, counts these three sixpences only). A prolonged reiteration of these deep generalities ensued and may have been necessary for tactical purposes. Essentially, however, they were a defence of a type of philosophy which England and even Europe had largely forgotten, and Russell’s general inquiry into the philosophy of continuity and into the nature of mathematical and dynamical series were shining if disputable examples of a renewed alliance between philosophy and (at least) the more rigorous sciences. Recent Philosophy 159

They also showed the need for attacking philosophical problems piecemeal instead of systematically neglecting every tree in the hope of discerning some traces of an invisible wood. The claim, in short, was that much had been done, and that much was waiting to be done. Much more had happened than the blowing of a trumpet to arouse a slumbering philosophy from its (alleged) idealistic monistic inertia. And although logic and mathematics, along with the theory of perception, were the headquarters of the new strategy, other regions were also in evidence. In ethics, most particularly, Moore, in his Principia Ethica (1903), debated the meaning of good and its application to well-being and to human conduct with a rigour that had long been absent from British moral philosophy (some of Sidgwick’s pages and a few of Bradley’s always excepted). In the year 1910, six American realists, believing that the time was ripe for teamwork in philosophy, and particularly for the allocation of special duties to the different members of the team, published their “Programme and First Platform.” As one of them later said, “We set out with high hope of success, confi dent in one another, and in the sympathy of our big brothers in Europe, Russell, Moore and Meinong.” Their book The New Realism appeared in 1912. The authors agreed that logic and the sciences for the most part study non-mental entities, that logic was prior to all mental facts and not itself mental, that there are external relations, and that what one of their number (R. B. Perry) called the “egocentric predicament” (i.e. the plain fact that all questions and answers about “knowledge” must be the questioner’s) does not logically entail any tincture of selfhood or mentality in the object of thought. They also offered elaborate defences of “analysis” in various fi elds, attempted to return to “primordial common sense” (although not very naively), paid special attention to the problems of error (because they were sophisticated, not naive) and saluted the dawn of a “constructive” realism, cordially co-operating with the special sciences. It may be doubted whether their unanimity could have lasted. In the main the American “new realism” came to be regarded as a combination of the above “platform” with “neutral monism,” and with a species of behaviourism, rather liberally interpreted. This development was sketched by Perry in his account of Present Philosophical Tendencies (1912), and later elaborated, more stridently, by E. B. Holt, another of the six, in The Concept of Consciousness. It was an attempt to unite the realism of the European big brothers with James’s later speculations concerning consciousness, and asserted the double-context theory of mental and physical (the elements being “neutral” when out of context). It further explained that awareness was always to be regarded as a 160 Realism function of “contents” which might quite well be physical things, and that “specifi c responses of the organism” were the sole other relevant fact in an affair that tradition had misrepresented for so long. According to Holt, error was to be regarded simply as a natural occurrence like a badly fi tting pair of gloves. Perry himself ceased to be a militant realist and came to prefer “Peace without Victory in Philosophy” (1928). He also developed a theory of value as a function of interest, very different from Moore’s contentions, in which he believed he could incorporate what was true both in idealism and in realism. In short, he went his own way; but even if he had not, the concord of the six would have been broken by the refusal of W. P. Montague, the most eminent among them, to agree with their general views concerning consciousness and concerning error. Regarding the latter point, Montague believed that the “sad trend” towards the inclusion of mistakes and illusions into “reality” was puerile; regarding the former point that the “sad trend” towards behaviourism (even without psycho-phobia) was profoundly unjustifi ed. He described himself as an unrepentant “animistic materialist,” holding that the “space-time mode of existence” called potential energy could be and was actually transformed into a “time-space mode,” that this time-space mode was observable as a mental state, that it had mechanical, vital, sensory and rational levels, and might persist after death, perhaps only in the form of a sort of air-pocket of feeble memories, but perhaps much more vigorously. Another American team, this time containing seven members, produced a volume on Critical Realism in 1920, four years after the volume had been projected. They were anxious to “escape the many diffi culties” of the “new” realism, and were opposed both to a “physically monistic” and to a “merely logical” realism. The lead was taken by C. A. Strong who, at that time, agreed with the views of another member of the team, G. Santayana. According to Santayana, “substance” and “appearance” could not be identical since the latter might be illusory or fantastic, but there must be a certain identity if the appearances were relevant and reported substance. The identity (in his view) was identity of logical essence, and the “transitive report” of a substance was due to active movement. Later, in 1923 (as in subsequent writings) Santayana argued, in his brilliant Scepticism and Animal Faith that what was “given” was always essence, never existence. The “given” was mere appearance, “all surface,” and the depth, power and persistence of substance could not be inferred from the “given” by any logical process. It was an affair of animal faith. We act, as all living beings do, on the faith of a world of Recent Philosophy 161 physical existence, and confi rm although we can never demonstrate this faith by pursuing and avoiding physical existences.

Since “appearing” is a natural event it is diffi cult to believe that sense- (and other) apparitions are mere logical essences (which are general and are not events). Hence Mr. Strong did not remain for long in full agreement with Mr. Santayana, his “realism” being more adequately stated in his Essays on The Natural Origin of the Mind (1930). The problem was to understand “how the mind can arise naturally.” This could occur (he said) only if mental and non-mental were fundamentally similar, and it could be understood if the correct distinction were drawn between things as they are and things as they appear. Error apart, we do directly perceive houses, chairs and other such things, and direct perception would occur if, having sensations which are mere feelings, we used these sensations as signs in such a way that we generated senseappearances out of sensations and projected these along the lines that we had learned in our physical movements. In true perception the appearance would have the properties of the physical thing (which would therefore appear to be what it really is), and the errors of representationism and of phenomenalism would both be avoided, the former because there would be no deputies between the self and what it perceived, the second because no attempt would be made to suppose that physical reality was made up out of mere appearances. In general, critical realism came nearer to a dualism of minds and things than most other theories, and Mr. Lovejoy, one of the seven, argued forcibly in favour of a pretty full-blooded dualism in his book The Revolt Against Dualism (1930). Here he diverged from the others by being, in fact, a representationist, and his book supplies interesting evidence of the moribund condition of realism in America during the nineteen-twenties. The “new” realism, Lovejoy argued, had been superseded by “objective relativism” and by various attempts to unify mental and physical. The latter we shall meet again. The former, being convinced by Whitehead that we should not “bifurcate” nature, and that the relativity of our experience to varying conditions is not in itself evidence for mentalism, appears to assume that the traditional perplexities about the nature of knowing are negligible pieces of moonshine. But let us return to England and consider Mr. Alexander. According to Alexander, space-time is the stuff of all reality. “It is for me an ether of pure motions,” he says, “chaotic at fi rst, and without differences of quality (the one quality is that of being motion) but of intensity and direction.” Metaphysical (not primarily mathematical) description showed that 162 Realism space-time was one, that is that space must be timed or be nothing, and that time must be spaced or be nothing. A very fundamental mode of experience (called “intuition”) revealed certain pervasive features of all space-time, i.e. such “categories” as substance, cause or relation, which consequently were subsequent, not prior, to space-time. Substances were “groups of motions within a contour,” and were therefore distinguishable from mere “stuff.” In addition to the pervasive (or categorical) properties of space-time there were also particular (or empirical) confi gurations and qualities. These, in Lloyd Morgan’s language, “emerged,” that is to say were “new” in the sense that they could not be deduced from more fundamental confi gurations, although they were based upon these. Thus the “secondary” quality of colour “emerged” from certain vibrations and was stippled over surfaces in such a way as to seem to suffuse them. Similarly life “emerged” and, from life, minds. Minds, like all else, were bits of space-time and so were not unextended. In our experience they were “continua of acts.” From the standpoint of physical science they were described as continua of neural motions within the brain. The general type of relation involved in knowing was not at all peculiar. It was simply “compresence,” togetherness in one space-time. On the other hand the perfection of minds was very “empirical.” The quality of consciousness belonged to very few substances. (Hence Alexander reluctantly refused to be a behaviourist, and kept aloof from American new realism.) But although minds had the privileges of their perfections they were natural emergents, and in many ways the relation of consciousness to its neural basis resembled the relation of other emergents to their bases. Thus colour was (almost) the “mind” of certain vibration-patterns, and time, rather more vaguely, might be called the “mind” of space. So minds were put in their natural, realistic place. Since they could not directly inspect themselves, they were said to “enjoy” themselves (even in toothache) and they “contemplated” other non-mental things. Such contemplation yielded direct awareness of the non-mental. In sensation there was awareness of sensa, in perception of percepta, and so forth. The object of contemplation was what it declared itself to be, where it declared itself to be, when it declared itself to be (and was literally a past event in the case of memory). For the most part, these results were said to be a mere transliteration of the facts, when these were subjected to “strenuously naïve” scrutiny. But sometimes they were described as a gigantic but coherent hypothesis. And Alexander claimed that error and illusion did not impede his views. “Mere” Recent Philosophy 163 appearances, he argued (as with the mountain that seems blue when it is not), came about through mistaking the blue of the atmosphere for the colour of the mountain’s surface. In “illusory appearances” the brain process elicited the appearance but did not create it. An illusion was a genuine selection from genuine space-time, but was attributed to the wrong place. Further, according to Alexander, certain objects of human contemplation had a more intricate relation to “enjoyment,” for the “tertiary” qualities of truth, beauty and goodness implied a certain “union of mind with its objects” (but depersonalized). Regarding deity, Alexander held that the universe was busily approaching that quality, although the quality of deity had not as yet emerged. Alexander’s later work has been principally concerned with aesthetics, as the volume Beauty and Other Forms of Value (1933) attested. In certain prefatory observations to the re-issue of his Space, Time and Deity (1927) he hoped modestly that the book “may still be useful as one ingredient thrown into the fermentation which is now taking place in philosophy, from which I believe some important result is about to issue”; and that is a note on which the present chapter may fi ttingly close. Alexander’s book may have been lonely. Certainly, “realism,” for the time being, has lost much of its fi rst superb confi dence. It may not be “life without air” as fermentation was once supposed to be, but, temporarily at least, it seems to lead a lingering life without any clear mission. It is evaded if not actually cold-shouldered in many quarters, and it may, no doubt, have asked the wrong questions. Still, it asked very searching questions, and it should not be condemned simply because it has become slightly unfashionable. In a general way, it is legitimate to suggest that epistemological realism, even if it went to work rather too quickly, brought a salutary freedom into contemporary theories of knowledge. Its challenge to the reigning idealism was effective enough to arouse a general and keen inquiry into the foundations of natural evidence, and to upset a complacency that bespoke danger. It is not so easy to be confi dent about naturalistic realism. In so far as that doctrine attempts simply to de-anthropomorphize – which is Mr. Alexander’s way of saying that the human mind should renounce a position of miraculous privilege – it must command very general sympathy. More generally, the attempt to show that all the marvels of man’s mind have a parallel although not an equal in a pervasive subhuman current of natural process may seem to promise an escape from superstition. As we saw, however, the connection between these views and epistemological realism is rather slight, and may have 164 Realism been injudiciously exaggerated by many who thought epistemological realism so important that it ought in some way to be made the basis of a metaphysics. That it could never be. According to its own premises, epistemological realism has to go to the “object” hat in hand. It begs for what it cannot give, the manifestation of that object as it really is. It is a permissive, not a declaratory theory, allowing the “object” to declare itself to the mind but, for that very reason, renouncing the very idea of enforcing or instigating any particular sort of answer. Chapter VIII Natural Knowledge

Through fear of positivism (which they regarded not as a philosophy but as a philosophical pest) many philosophers in the nineteenth century and some in the the twentieth were anxious to avoid all contacts, even very general ones, with natural science. In particular, absolute idealists and many humanists argued in this way; and only a limited number of the philosophers we have considered in earlier chapters (e.g. M. Bergson, the instrumental pragmatists and certain realists) have entered into serious negotiations with natural science on terms of approximate equality. As we saw, however, the internal condition of physical science itself has made this philosophical attitude increasingly diffi cult to sustain. At the very moment when physical science seemed to have become almost omnipotent – a menace to civilization because of its destructive potencies, a leader, as it would seem, of the Churches (which had ceased to struggle against it), something sacrosanct in the eyes of “common sense” – physical science itself appeared to lose (a certain kind of) faith in its own foundations, and voluntarily became very philosophical indeed. To be sure it did not lose faith in its strength. Its explosive and productive capacities have not diminished; but it is no longer prepared to be either contemptuous or indifferent towards attempts to question or drastically to revise its own fundamental conceptions. In short the acquiescent type of positivism (which accepted the principles as well as the results of the natural sciences as a sort of unquestionable datum) seems at least as naive to most scientists of the present day as ever it did to a philosopher of yesterday. The reason is that natural science has brought about a revolution within its own domain, and that, like so many revolutionaries, it has been moved towards a Declaration of Ideas. The circumstance is fortunate for philosophy, since philosophy has never fl ourished except in alliance with the sciences, and also has never fl ourished when it was prepared to plod humbly after them. On the other hand, there are certain embarrassments in the situation. It is hard on good philosophers who 166 Natural Knowledge are also bad physicists, and it should be hard on good physicists who are also bad philosophers. Further, it imposes rather too much of a strain upon the few persons who are eminent in both departments. Someone has suggested that the scientists should put up a notice – “Structural alterations in progress. No admittance except on business,” and should give private instructions that inquisitive philosophers should, most particularly, be excluded. If so the instructions should also include a stern veto on philosophical gossip irresponsibly communicated after lunch. And, as has been said, it is the scientists who are most eager to mix philosophy with their business. The revolution in physics was particularly well mentioned, partly in respect of available scientifi c instruments and of the power to produce new ones, partly in respect of the results of a rather slow evolution of relevant mathematical ideas. It is too much to expect that the appropriate philosophical ideas should have the adaptability of the former, or should synchronize with the fl owering-point of the latter. Therefore we should not be surprised if the affair is as it seems to be, that is to say, if most of the better physicist- philosophers decline to be rushed, if most of the better philosophers, while excited, are still more cautious, if there is general agreement that something of vast philosophical importance has occurred, although it may not be wholly apparent what that something is. Since the scientists have taken the lead, and have cheerfully devised a good deal of metaphysics, it seems best to give a brief account, in the fi rst instance, of the revolution they have (pretty unanimously) proclaimed. Here Lorentz’s terms, “macroscopic” and “microscopic” are convenient (although the latter usually describes what is ultra-microscopic). The “macroscopic” is what is large enough to be on a perceptible scale, the “microscopic” what is more minute. Using these terms we should say that there have been two revolutions, one in the macroscopic metric fi eld, the other regarding what is very tiny indeed. The fi rst revolution brought about the triumph of relativity theory, the second concerned atoms and quanta of electricity. The consolidation of the two revolutionary fronts is still a strategical problem, but in both of them a certain type of logical courage has been the dominant consideration, apparent certainties being treated very unceremoniously, but the greatest deference being paid to what is logically tangible. For philosophers the most interesting feature in the mathematical landscape about the beginning of the century was probably the attempt to arithmetize Recent Philosophy 167 geometry (e.g. by holding that points were numbers) and to logicize arithmetic (e.g. by holding that numbers were classes of classes). In the elaboration of this theme the paradoxes of the unending, that is, of infi nity and continuity, touched traditional philosophy very nearly, and the “tidying up” of mathematics in its very determined attempt to distinguish between genuine logical meaning and mere operational convenience had also an important bearing upon traditional philosophical arguments. Hence Dedekind, Frege and Peano set a large number of problems for philosophers, and the great Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (1910–13) was, among other things, a philosophical achievement of the highest order. The purely logical interpretation of all mathematics, however, was not universally accepted. The fi nitists, such as Brouwer, would not accept it; and the formalists, such as Hilbert, regarded most such questions as “metamathematical,” that is to say, as outside mathematics proper. Indeed, Russell himself later maintained (1927), that, whatever might be legitimate in pure mathematics, geometry was important only when it was interpreted as a part of physics. In the geometrical domain there had also been bold logical adventures, and among them several that started from the experimental denial of Euclid’s parallel postulate. About the ’30s of the nineteenth century Lobatschewsky and Bolyai proved that a hyperbolic geometry was self-consistent, and Riemann shortly afterwards showed that a spherical geometry, in which space would be fi nite and a straight line could return into itself, was also self-consistent. Accordingly Helmholtz argued that Kant’s deduction of the necessity of (Euclidean) space in all human experience was fallacious, and Tannery maintained that there was no genuine necessity about geometry. Russell and some others held that there was experimental proof that our space was very nearly Euclidean. Others, with Poincaré, denied the possibility of such a proof on the ground that our measuring instruments could not be assumed to be invariant but might alter with the changes in local space curvature. According to Poincaré, “Euclidean space” was a series of disguised defi nitions, that is, a particular sort of scientifi c language. There might be many such physical languages, and there was no more sense in asking whether any one of them was “true” than in asking whether German was “truer” than French. The theory of relativity administered a further shock to the plain man. Early in the present century Michelson proved that the measured velocity of light was independent of the velocity of the measuring instrument. Accordingly, a certain transformation of the classical theory of the composition of velocities 168 Natural Knowledge was required, indeed ‘a moving body should be represented as contracting in the direction of its motion according to the formula that had been suggested by the Irish physicist Fitzgerald (1851–1901) and the Dutch physicist Lorentz (1855–1928). It could also be inferred that what seemed simultaneous to an observer in such and such a local fi eld would not be so recorded on the clocks on a distant moving body. Indeed “before” and “after” in time would have no meaning at all for bodies moving faster than light. We should regard the physical universe, Minkowski-wise, as a four dimensional fi eld in which there is neither “time” nor “space” but an indissolubly united space-time. This was the fi eld of the “special” theory of relativity. The “general” as opposed to the “special” theory of relativity was not confi ned to co-ordinate systems in uniform rectilinear motion, and was held to have completed the identity of geometry (or rather of geo-chronometry) with physics. It implied the abandonment of all direct relations between distant events, space-time relations being confi ned primarily to smallish “local” sets of “occasions.” According to Einstein (at one stage) the cosmos was Riemannian and fi nite; gravitation was only a measure of the warping of space-time, and “matter” indicated a hummock or pimple of greater space- time curvature than the normal. It is commonly said that, by 1915, Einstein had brought the domain of fi eld physics, i.e. the treatment of matter, electricity, radiation, energy, etc., on the macroscopic scale into good order, and that Weyl and others have subsequently unifi ed the gravitational and electro-magnetic fi elds, making the relation of gravitation to space-time self-evident and indeed a matter of book- keeping. Such statements, it is true, do not imply that there is only one way of doing these things. (Thus Whitehead argued, in 1922, that emendations of the traditional gravitation formula were preferable to the theory of differences in local space-time curvature.) They also do not imply that anything approaching fi nality has yet been reached. (Thus Jeans, in 1935, said that no one was satisfi ed with the present position regarding the kindred problem of an “expanding” or of a “contracting” universe and the contentions of Lemaître, de Sitter and Einstein about it.) On the other hand, there is little or no disposition to pretend that the revolution, after all, may be only a temporary tumult, or that it does not have profound general signifi cance. On the microscopic front, Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895; radio- activity was another new discovery and the theory of the electron soon took shape. In general terms, electricity came to be regarded as the basis of all physical behaviour, the new electric-atomic theory was able (very nearly) to Recent Philosophy 169 give a personal introduction to its protons and electrons by means of von Laue’s optical gratings and other such devices, energy was shown to have defi nite units (possibly ultimate) and to have mass or inertia even in the form of light. In 1900 Planck put forward the theory that changes of energy from matter to radiation could take place only by defi nite amounts or quanta, i.e. by discrete multiples of the very small quantum h and this idea was included in Bohr’s model of the atom (Niels Bohr, the Dane, having developed Lord Rutherford’s model). Einstein further suggested that the (quite general) photo- electric effect was an instance of quantum behaviour in terms of h. If so, an electron could not pass continuously from one orbit to another and could not even “jump” from orbit to orbit except in a fi gurative sense. Its motions had to be in some multiple of h, and, for a time, it was supposed that philosophers and everybody else must simply accept the fact of ultimate discontinuity in nature. Later, when the Bohr model became a little out of date, it was said that this particular discontinuity should not be taken too seriously. It was an important fact of physical description, but insuffi cient in itself to prove the ultimate discontinuity of nature. On the other hand the “principle of uncertainty,” associated with the names of Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dime and other contemporary workers in this fi eld purported to be equally exciting to a philosopher, for Heisenberg discovered that if the position of a particle is very accurately determined its momentum is very uncertain (and conversely), the range of uncertainty being “round about h”. On this ground, principally, certain physicists have roundly asserted that the bottom has been knocked out of determinism. Indeed, h is always turning up. The prevailing theory today follows De Broglie in holding that motion in these atomic regions is both wave-like and corpuscle-like. The electrons cannot be treated as mere particles, but have to be regarded as particles associated with a wave whose length is h/mv, that is Planck’s constant divided by momentum. Picture-thinking, therefore, is becoming increasingly diffi cult in such demesnes. It is becoming harder and harder to imagine to anyone’s satisfaction what kind of electrical stability occurs, and how it is related to electrical fl ux. Again, these Heraclitean tendencies of the theory are accentuated in the plain man’s mind by the discovery that the transmutation of chemical elements is not absolutely impossible. The fi rst successful transmutation occurred in 1919 when nitrogen yielded to bombardment by α-particles. In the light of these results, both macroscopic and microscopic, it seems 170 Natural Knowledge necessary to ask whether every philosophy should also be profoundly modifi ed. (1) The relativity of space is nothing new in philosophy. It is the denial that space is a sort of empty box in which things move combined with the assertion that what we call space is always a property of bodies. If, as Eddington has recently said, “our goal is not to reach an ultimate conception, but to complete the full circle of relationship,” the chief philosophical problem would seem to be whether the completion of the full circle would not be ultimate both for philosophers and for everybody else. (2) The inter-relativity of space-like and time-like in indissoluble space- time patterns, together with the denial of (or the doubts concerning) one homogeneous spacetime, seem much more profoundly innovative. With regard to time in particular, there is a peculiarly stubborn and very general conviction that succession in one’s own experience is something entirely absolute whatever the clocks on distant bodies might have to record, and that the substitute offered by some relativists of an absolute “interval” that may be time-like is insuffi cient. On the other hand, if this stubborn conviction could be overcome, the doctrine of local space-times might not even seem paradoxical. (3) A recent writer in the Jubilee Number of Nature (May 4, 1935) has said that the “rejection of unobservables” is the battle-cry of the new revolution, and that its primary contention is that “in the logical correlation of experience the concepts employed shall be such that whatever is not generally observable by physical means is necessarily meaningless.” This statement, although often accepted, seems plainly to be false. There is nothing meaningless in the conception of experiencing what is not physically measurable by any instruments that either exist or are at all likely to exist. Obviously there are such experiences in our dreams; and if we raise the question how far the sounds, smells, and other phases of nature that are actually experienced by mankind, either are or could be recorded in the pointer=readings of accurate instruments, and what assumptions are made when reliance is put on these pointer-readings, we can hardly deny that the restriction of all meaning to a particular set of recorded measurements is arbitrary, if not simply silly. Philosophically speaking, the alleged privileged status of measured observations is, most emphatically, a problem. (4) It should not be inferred, however, that philosophy, in its struggles with this problem, can remain indifferent to the newer physics. In the past many philosophers were generally supposed to be mere paradox hunters, and a little mad, because they persistently showed that it was very questionable Recent Philosophy 171 indeed whether men could perceive bits of “matter” that retained their perceived properties when nobody perceived them, and could be moved about in “space” without undergoing any alteration of their perceptible spatio-temporal properties. For the most part, the scientists, except in a very academic way, shared the general view about philosophers, and supposed that their own withers were quite unwrung. In short, it seemed that science and “common sense” might be in essential agreement. But the revolution in the sciences has changed all that. It is impossible to pretend that “space-time curled up in the proximity of matter” is a homely common-sensical idea, like a coal-scuttle or a teapot. There is a widespread belief that all’s yet to do (or very nearly all) in the subtler understanding of nature. There are even some grounds for supposing that scientists need not always be the best judges of the concessions that should (or should not) be made, and that if philosophers plod along persistently with the simple, central questions that, trusting their own special training they believe to be profound, they may contribute very effectively towards a clearer situation. (5) It is sometimes said that the most urgent task of the revolutionaries is to replace the old-fashioned mechanical or pictorial models by adequate “epistemological” models. Similarly, Sir A. S. Eddington in his latest book, New Pathways in Science (1935), suggests that what has to be learned is how to deal with a “haze of probabilities.” If so, the suffi ciency of such models and the consistency of this haze are surely philosophical problems. An epistemological model is a very odd sort of entity. It is just a way of dealing with – something; and anyone who can be content with ways of dealing, without the remotest inkling of what he is dealing with, seems to be poised precariously between earth and somewhere else. One might as well suppose that the science of medicine was wholly concerned with treatment and not at all with disease. The scientists, indeed, seem to have fallen into the pit that a few philosophers digged. They are losing sight of everything except a “method,” and are frankly agnostic regarding the method’s goal. Here their new methods of signalling within a haze of probabilities seem also insuffi cient. The theory of probability certainly plays an important part in all our investigations, whether it be of the fashionable “frequentist” sort (i.e. the theory of “scattering” and of “randomness” in large statistical aggregates) or, as Mr. J. M. Keynes argues in his Treatise on Probability, it is an attempt to measure the relevance of logically inconclusive propositions. In either case, however, there are, to say the least, respectable grounds for 172 Natural Knowledge believing that nothing in Nature can be merely probable. Everything actual must be just what it is. The haze of probability would not even yield a science of atmospherics, for the atmospherics would be only epistemological. In short these views, if they are not supplemented, would shut Nature quite out. (6) Certain philosophers, more particularly Whitehead and Russell, fi nd that the newer theories are utterly opposed to the metaphysical conception of “substance.” Consequently they attempt to elaborate a logic of “events” in place of a logic of “things.” Other philosophers maintain, however, that “events” are (ephemeral) substances, so that it is not the notion of substance, but certain narrow interpretations of the notion that are being attacked. Obviously, if “substance” is defi ned by its endurance in simple time, it is ruined when “time” is caught up into complex “space-time.” But need “substance” be so defi ned? Obviously, again, if “substance” is interpreted after the fashion of “billiard ball materialism” it is ruined when the conception of a fi eld of electrical energy, partly focalized in tiny “wavicles,” is preferred. “Substance” is more like the click than the balls; and there may be some hope for the mutual accommodation of “mind” and of “matter.” But why should a “substance” be a hard, massy particle? The fashionable view in these matters seems (in technical language) to be either a monism of the electrical fi eld or something very like a monadism of its sub-atomic centres of infl uence. Both monism and monadism are theories of substance, and if it be said that what is essential is the historical route of the One or of its Many, it would not be impossible to devise a metaphysic of “substance” on these lines. (7) The claim that Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” knocks the bottom out of determinism seems to be a simple-minded mistake. Everything in nature is what it is, that is, cannot be vague. If precision in the measurement of position is unfriendly towards precision in the measurement of momentum, the trouble lies in the measurement, and is in itself a proof that accuracy of measurement is not the same thing as natural reality unless, indeed, particles do not have position and do not have momentum. In any case, it is an elementary confusion to confound this alleged indefi niteness of nature with “free will,” that is, with “indeterminism.” The indeterminist holds, say, that he moves his arm freely, but never dreams of denying that his free movements are perfectly defi nite. What he does deny is that they were inevitably determined by antecedent causes. Accordingly, if there really is sub-atomic “freewill” quite different arguments must be adduced; and it is plausible to argue, as many modern physicists do, that the macroscopic determinism that astronomers and others Recent Philosophy 173 assume regarding eclipses and the like does not necessarily imply microscopic determinism, even granting that the macroscopic is composed of the microscopic. For if the macroscopic is a statistical aggregate, it is illogical to apply aggregate-principles forthwith to the components of the aggregate. In life-insurance the death-rate for large numbers is the important matter, and such statistical aggregates do not yield direct information about the chances of survival of some particular insured person. On the other hand, the difference between aggregates and their components does not even make it plausible to suggest that the former are wholly determined by causes and the latter not at all. There are causes for the death of insured persons (as detectives know) whether or not actuaries concern themselves with any of these particular causes. Again, if the components are determined it is not unreasonable to assume that statistical regularities will continue if no new causes enter, and that they will change if new causes do enter (as the death-rate changes when there is a war). If, however, the components acted quite capriciously, why should there be aggregate constancy? If and so far as our measurements yield statistical aggregates only we cannot argue that because we know the (macroscopic) past and cannot infer the (microscopic) future, therefore we should abandon determinism. For, by hypothesis, we do not know the microscopic past. Moreover “randomness” is irrelevant. It could be induced in a pack of cards by a shuffl ing-machine without the faintest denial of determinism. Again, if “randomness” be the opposite of organization, the human will, being highly organized, ought to be less free than most other natural entities. The above account of the revolution in natural science, and of its general bearings upon large philosophical questions has necessarily been very sketchy. It may, however, support and even explain the contention with which this chapter began, viz. that philosophers might reasonably ask for a little time for considering these matters. In the main the philosophy of such questions has been concerned with the excursions into the subject obligingly made by the scientists themselves. Einstein, Weyl, von Laue, Schrödlnger, Planck, Eddington and others have all contributed to the advantage, and frequently to the delight of philosophers. Among the older writers, the pages of Mach and of Poincaré are very nearly as fresh as when the ink on them fi rst dried, the more especially because both these authors paid very careful attention to the relation between sense- perception and the logic of physical interpretation. Among philosophers E. Meyerson (1859 –1934) in a series of works from 174 Natural Knowledge

1908 onwards endeavoured to show that “reason” was the pursuit of identity in all natural diversity, and that the new as well as the older natural science was, in this sense, “rational”; and Einstein himself said that Meyerson had analysed the “demon of explanation” that possessed him. Russell, in what may be called his “later” period, attempted a synthesis of the newest scientifi c conclusions in his Analysis of Mind (1921), Analysis of Matter and (both 1927), as well as in other works. Again C. D. Broad, in his Scientifi c Thought (1923), and in other writings, made a resolute attempt to explore what he called “critical philosophy,” holding that the “speculative” kind of philosophy could be only a guess and was unlikely to be a good guess if “critical” philosophy did not make a greater advance than had yet been reached. (It may not, however, be entirely plain why critical philosophy would be philosophy if there were not speculation in its eyes, or, in the alternative, why Broad should not have become, like so many others, a champion of pure philosophical analysis.) And there were many others. On the whole, however, the philosophy of A. N. Whitehead is the biggest and the most celebrated among recent efforts to reach a “speculative” philosophy that shall have fully assimilated the natural knowledge of the present age. Whitehead, whose Universal Algebra had appeared in 1898, became irrevocably committed to philosophical authorship after his collaboration with Russell in their massive and splendid Principia Mathematica. He published a series of important monographs upon the philosophy of nature between 1919, the date of his Principles of Natural Knowledge, and 1924, when he became a Research Professor at Harvard. During the succeeding years in America, his pen became still more active, and was busied about the wider cosmological generalities as well as about more special topics such as Reason, Symbolism and Religion. In this period his chief books were Science and the Modern World (1926), Process and Reality (1929) and Adventures of Ideas (1933). Before he went to America Whitehead’s work was most notable for its attempt to defi ne point-instants, and such like entities in such a way that they could do mathematical work, because they had the formal properties of the mathematician’s stock in trade, and yet were so connected with the data of actual perception that they could authenticate their pedigree in undeniable reality. Thus the relation of inclusion or overlapping is perceptible and quite genuine. Therefore, if a “point” can be defi ned, by the method of extensive abstraction, in terms of this genuine inclusion-relation, there is no occasion for disputing its authentic correspondence with something real even if Recent Philosophy 175 mathematical convenience largely determines the language in which “points” play so important a part. In such an undertaking, the general conception, however sound, is of lesser importance than the technical skill and knowledge that are required to determine what mathematical entities should be defended and by what sort of elaborate proof. Again the philosophy of the subject is to be judged, not by a few triumphs upon a promising philosophical front, but (in the instance of natural knowledge) by its general success with respect to all the fundamental conceptions in natural philosophy. Accordingly, Whitehead’s fame, at this stage of his career, was established by the pertinacity, patience and skill with which he developed his philosophy of natural events and of the precise sense in which the fundamental physical conceptions could be interpreted as functions of such events. In him the newer conceptions in physics seemed to be an occasion for making a fresh and sober start instead of an excuse for heady theorizing. In his later writings Whitehead set out to develop his “philosophy of organism.” The time had come, he believed, for a sustained effort of constructive thought after two centuries mainly occupied with the criticism of detached questions. Nothing short of a new philosophical cosmology could suffi ce for the modern world. This was not a change of view. Whitehead was working towards it in his Principles of Natural Knowledge when he said that the essence of a biological organism was that it was “one thing which functions and is spread through space” and that his fundamental principle was “in the place of emphasizing space and time in their capacity of disconnecting, to build up an account of their complex essences as derivative from the ultimate ways in which those things, ultimate in science, are interconnected.” But in Process and Reality the seedling had become a great tree. “Our datum,” said Whitehead, “is the actual world,” and he also said that “the elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justifi cation for any thought.” The goal of such elucidation was coherence, and genuine coherence, that is to say, an inter-relation that explains the properties and functions of the partners to it, has hitherto proved very elusive. Sense-perception is incorrigibly superfi cial. Natural science is positivistic, generalizing connections without being capable of inter-connecting them. Philosophy has to be reminded of its proper functions. It is to be commended, indeed, in so far as it still consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, particularly to Plato’s Timaeus, and the movement from Descartes to Hume is still full of instruction (although Kantianism and 176 Natural Knowledge all that came of it is not instructive). But the “bifurcation” of nature and mind had to be overcome, as well as many other false antitheses. No one could be satisfi ed with a situation in which natural science was “a system of interpretation devoid of any reason for the concurrence of its factors” and in which mind was regarded as “a fi eld of perception devoid of any data for its own interpretation.” There was diversifi cation of the “totalitarian” datum, but there was no invincible dualism, either psycho-physical or any other. The solution was a relational monism in which the constituent partners developed an internal relational pattern that was also a “prehension” of a cosmic pattern, and it was claimed that if we stripped high-grade conscious experience of its more spectacular peculiarities we should fi nd at the core of it something much more fundamental than consciousness, and would possess the clue to an “organic” understanding of the cosmos. In this wide sense of “experience,” “actual entities” or “actual occasions” are “drops of experience.” Each such drop of experience has several subordinate features called “prehensions,” i.e. each of them develops an internal relational pattern that is supposed to grasp or prehend a more general relational pattern, i.e. this internal development on the part of the drop of experience is supposed to be a reference to reality outside itself so that prehension is the basis for conscious apprehension. And each drop of experience is creative. It actualizes itself. Actual occasions are living occasions and replace the lifeless “substance” of earlier philosophies. In Whitehead’s philosophy the “actual occasions” which are “drops of experience” are supposed to feel alive, not necessarily in the way of highgrade sentience, but in the wider, profounder way that may pervade all actuality. In this and other matters Whitehead tends to join forces with Bradley, and he seems to accept the “natural” inference that his philosophy resembles “a transformation of some main doctrines of Absolute Idealism on to a realistic basis.” Those who, like Bosanquet, are anxious to discern the meeting of extremes in contemporary philosophy may here take comfort. On the other hand, the dualists, the intransigent realists and the positivists seem to be ready, although rather reluctant, to turn against much in Whitehead the guns they had formerly trained against much in Bradley. At present the attitude of Whitehead’s critics seems to be hesitating. And many people cannot make up their minds whether Whitehead is an obscure philosopher with frequent amazingly lucid intervals or, on the other hand, a philosopher almost as clear as the profundity of his problems permits. Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism,” despite its name, was not in fact a Recent Philosophy 177 biological metaphysics, that is to say it was not a philosophy that took its cue from the contrast between living bodies and dead ones. This line of approach to metaphysics, however, is also pursued at the present time, although there is less general interest today in the problems of speculative biology than in the times of our fathers, when every path seemed to lead to the theory of the evolution of living species. As we saw, one of the main designs of Bergson’s philosophy was to fi nd a place – indeed a central place – for biology in the metaphysical sunlight. As a result, the philosophical problems of fi nal causes in nature, of guidance (natural or supernatural, conscious, unconscious or conscious-seeming) in the course of events, and of the limits and illusions of evolution underwent a new phase; and these problems were also debated by persons who had no special interest in Bergson. The autonomy of physical life and of its biological principles has been defended by believers in a special vital principle (vitalists), by neo-vitallsts (who are rather more cautious in their descriptions of the soul-like “entelechy” that is the animating principle of biological things), of “holists” who maintain that a living thing is an incontestable instance of the way in which pattern dominates the atom. Attempts have been made (e.g. by L. von Bertalanffy in the fi rst number of Erkenntnis) to give an unmetaphysical and purely positivistic defence of the uniqueness of biology, and to unite that science with the newest physics. And the champions of a universal mechanical explanation, even in the case of living process, have counter-attacked all along the line. In fi ne there has been a brisk and continuous action. H. Driesch of Leipzig is the most prominent contemporary defender of a neo-vitalistic “entelechy.” An experimental biologist, turned metaphysician, he has elaborated an entire “philosophy of order” from the clues afforded by the reproductive behaviour of the sea-urchin. He has been followed, among others, by the Viennese sociologist, O. Spann. The late J. S. Haldane, in the course of his researches into the physiology of respiration, came to the conclusion that the self-regulation of a living body could not be explained by a mechanical, although it was congruous with an idealistic, philosophy. In Russia “mechanism” has been offi cially condemned. General Smuts, among his other services to humanity, has published a philosophy of “.” L. J. Henderson, in The Fitness of the Environment, has argued that the habitat of living things on the earth’s crust cannot be favourable by accident only to their growth and survival. The opponents of such views have also been energetic. According to Mr. Hogben, for example, all necessary modern revisions of the theory 178 Natural Knowledge of evolution make against, not for, a doctrine of fi nal causes, and Pavlov’s discoveries regarding “conditioned refl exes” in dogs may also be applied to men. The “association of ideas” has been shown to be a linkage of refl exes, and the latter theory is mechanically explicable, although the former was not. Distinguished botanists such as F. Knoll remain impenitent mechanists, and the logical positivists (e.g. Frank and Carnap of Prague) insist that the language of physics is capable of describing without remainder all biological behaviour whatsoever. Chapter IX Analysis

It is almost a commonplace that philosophy differs from the sciences and from common sense in the greater ruthlessness, rigour and resolution of its analyses, but there is still something startling in the assertion that analysis either exhausts or is the sole foundation of philosophy, and even in that case it is debatable what precisely should be analysed. Accordingly there is genuine novelty in the new philosophies of “analysis,” “logical-analytical method,” “logical” or “logistical positivism” and the like. There is also a certain novelty in their attitude towards the old empiricism, the old materialism, the older positivism and the newer pragmatism. Here, both in an historical and also in an international sense, the work of Bertrand Russell had quite peculiar infl uence. His book, The External World (1914), was a manifesto in favour of the “logical-analytical method in philosophy” and of its supremacy of this method over all else, including his earlier realism. As he later said (1924), “I do not regard the issue between realists and their opponents as a fundamental one. I could alter my view on this issue without changing my mind upon any of the doctrines upon which I wish to lay stress. I hold that logic is what is fundamental in philosophy, and that schools should be characterized rather by their logic than by their metaphysic.” The main purpose of The External World was to explore a certain fi eld, viz. “the relation between the crude data of sense and the space, time and matter of mathematical physics.” (The author modestly explained that he was anticipating Whitehead’s methods in a projected fourth volume of their joint Principia Mathematica.) The fundamental principle of the new enterprise came to be formulated thus: “Wherever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities.” This formula seems to be ambiguous, but the upshot of it is straightforward enough. Take, for example, the physical conception of a unit of “matter.” It is derived, somehow, from sense-perception and from sense-memory, that is, from a rather untidy and rather superfi cially observed stretch of space-time history, 180 Analysis largely private. In short, according to Russell, units of matter are too neat to be true. They are illegitimately inferred from the “hard” facts of observation, and there is no conceivable way of proving their actual existence. Therefore he says that we should construe the logical relations within historical, untidy sensefi elds, and if we must use artefacts for convenience’ sake, we should always remember that such artefacts are symbols for a perfectly genuine piece of construing. In general, Russell’s view was that we had to deal with common “knowledge” supplemented by scientifi c “knowledge.” These should not be accepted uncritically either apart or together. They need a logical purge. But although corrigible in detail they cannot be rejected in the bulk and there is no peculiar and superfi ne brand of “knowledge” called philosophy. There is only painstaking, step-by-step reasoning. Logic itself leaves an open door. It cannot of itself decide between pluralism and monism, or other large philosophical generalities of that sort. On empirical grounds however, Russell, having entered through the open door, confi dently turned toward logical and relational pluralism. This being understood, he held that philosophy’s main business was the scrutiny of logical structure, and especially the clarifi cation of such pervasive facts as mind, matter, , will and time. As he said, “I believe all these notions to be inexact and approximate, essentially infected with vagueness, incapable of forming part of any exact science. Out of the original manifold of events, logical structures can be built which will have properties suffi ciently like those of the above common notions to account for their prevalence, but suffi ciently unlike to allow a great deal of error to creep in through their acceptance as fundamental.” These statements, if they stood by themselves, would be subject to the general objection we formerly noted in the ideal of “critical philosophy,” viz. that there must be some independent ground for deciding what notions are worth analysing so meticulously; and although Russell himself was also a “speculative” philosopher, being peculiarly fertile in suggesting “the kind of thing that may be true,” it is unlikely that his “logical-analytical method” would have retained its great infl uence over contemporary philosophy if it had not had a borrowed plausibility from some further basis. This further basis had to do with language, and with Wittgenstein’s views on that subject. (A certain alliance between Russell and Wittgenstein was indicated in The External World, and later became appreciably closer.) Anyone, be he plain man, scientist or philosopher, conveys his thought in some language, and every language has a structure or syntax as well as a Recent Philosophy 181 mere vocabulary. The syntax of a language, therefore, should correspond to the logical-analytical construing that epitomized Russell’s method. Russell and Wittgenstein accordingly suggested that logical syntax itself might supply the key to the new , and Russell, in 1924 (i.e. after Wittgenstein’s book had appeared), gave typical examples of the way in which a philosopher might easily be the dupe of mere bad grammar. Let it be allowed that language endeavours to express facts of different logical types, and that language is likely to mislead if it does not itself employ correspondingly different forms. Let it further be allowed that attributes and relations are of different types. Then if we say that attributes either are or are not relations we are saying something that, strictly speaking, is meaningless. All that could be said signifi cantly would be that attribute-words and relation-words have different uses; and that would be a correct statement since words are properly employed both in attribute- forms and in relation-forms. The uninitiated have to collect Mr. Wittgenstein’s views from his only printed book, a series of aphorisms called Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus published in 1922. These aphorisms assert that the world consists of the “totality of existent atomic facts.” Of these we “make to ourselves pictures,” and if the structure of our verbal pictures corresponds to the “world,” reality is depicted. Wittgenstein held, however, that the formal structure of language could only exhibit, but could not depict itself; and he seems also to have held that although propositions could be compared with facts, the structure of facts that corresponded to syntactical structure must always remain ineffable. Hence, if “philosophy” be the logical structure of language we have to deny ourselves a good deal of written or spoken philosophy. According to Wittgenstem, the natural sciences contain the totality of true propositions, and philosophy, being unable to depict (that is, to express) itself, can be nothing but an activity. Its business is to clarify thoughts, not to express any true proposition. Wittgenstein’s fi nal aphorism, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” would seal his lips concerning philosophy itself. He himself, however, philanthropically committed the misdemeanour of allowing philosophy to try to depict what it could only exhibit, and also discriminated between various kinds of non-signifi cant speech, i.e. of “nonsense.” Certain forms of “mysticism,” for example, seem in his view to have been rather highgrade “nonsense,” e.g. some of the talk about God or immortality or ethics (none of which were contained in the natural sciences). He did not, however, draw the inference that the province of what could be shown but not said might in fact be philosophy’s most important business. 182 Analysis

Our logical pictures, he held, had their own “logical space.” This “space” of bare, dumb, logical possibility consisted of the logical equivalences (called “tautologies” by this author) that would be true of anything, and therefore told us nothing. (Thus we know nothing about the weather when we only “know” that it is either raining or not.) A contradiction, similarly, knocked the bottom out of logical space, but revealed nothing about the world. Nevertheless, the systematic exploration of tautology and contradiction (in other words, formal logic) was an enterprise of the utmost moment to which Wittgenstein, with some help from Dr. Sheffer of Harvard, and with Russell’s great achievement behind him, made extensive contributions. Again he tried very hard to warn philosophers of the danger of mistaking “tautologies” for genuine assertions about the constitution of the world. According to him an “object” is not a fact, but is a disguised way of speaking about logical space, and there is no such single fact as “God” or the “universe.” Indeed, according to Wittgenstein, any “fact” had to be evidenced by mere momentary personal sense-experience as the more extreme empiricists, like Hume when he was on his guard, had always maintained. “I am my world,” said Wittgenstein. In other words pure realism coincided with a form of “,” that is, of necessarily personal sense experience. Wittgenstein was an Austrian, and had been infl uenced by tendencies long commingling in central Europe, such as the positivism allied with the liberalism of these countries, the radical empiricism of Mach and of Boltzmann his successor, the athletic logic of Brentano and others. There had also been many attempts to assimilate thought with language. Thus the “gignomenology” of Ziehen of Halle was an attempt to “reduce” Mach’s pan- sensualism to “physical” language. Koppelmann of Milnster tried to develop neo-Kantianism in a similar way. The theologian Runze of Berlin defended a “glottological” philosophy. Stöhr of Vienna published an Algebra of Grammar (1898), and Marty of Prague further elaborated the philosophy of linguistics. Accordingly, the rapid growth of “logical positivism” in recent years took place in ground suitably prepared. The “” is most active in this propagandism. M. Schlick of Vienna, whose murder in the summer of 1936 shocked the whole of Europe, was one of its leaders. Others are Neurath of Vienna, and Carnap and Frank of Prague. But Carnap, like a former British Prime Minister, is prepared to issue coupons to other authors, such as Reichenbach of Berlin, Sheffer of Harvard, Tarski and other members of the “Warsaw circle,” the formalists, fi nitists and logisticians in mathematics, and, chief of them all, Russell and Wittgenstein. The “union rationaliste” in Recent Philosophy 183

France, supported by such writers as Langevin and Boll is also commended and the coupon is extended to writers in Erkenntnis, the journal of the Vienna circle, the international , and the British periodical Analysis. The general trend of argument in Carnap’s “circle” has a refreshing simplicity. We ask of any philosophical volume whether it treats fi rstly of logical syntax and vocabuary, or, secondly, of an empirically verifi able piece of natural science. If not we commit it to the fl ames. On the other hand there are brisk arguments within the school, an absence of complete concentricity in its “circles,” and very rapid readjustments. Wittgenstein’s self-denying ordinances proved irksome and were abandoned. According to Carnap, syntax could depict syntax as readily as it could depict, say, geometry. (In other words Carnap appears to ignore Wittgenstein’s point that if you explain your symbols you are not operating with them.) Consequently logical positivism has a special subject-matter, viz. Wittgenstein’s “tautologies” – a name that Carnap disliked because he thought it unnecessarily provocative. Again, as we saw, Wittgenstein had developed a correspondence theory of knowledge, and had held that personal sense experience alone could verify the correspondence of logic with fact, one of the consequences being that anything resembling a (which was obviously far tidier than any personal sense-history) was wholly unverifi able. Such views were much too severe for Carnap the logician or Neurath the sociologist. These authors believed in what they called “the unity of science,” that is, they believed that all signifi cant assertions (other than the purely formal ones) could be reduced to the speech of physics. Hence “” was very instructive indeed, since it included all the natural sciences. In short, their “physicalism” was public, not private, and was familiar with natural laws. It was possible, they held, to draw physically valid inferences in P-language (i.e. physical language) by making initial stipulations concerning the force and scope of the terms employed, although L-language (i.e. pure logic without any such initial stipulations) would not justify these inferences. Indeed, in their view, the “unity of science” meant the complete competence of the language of physics for all signifi cant purposes. (Psychology, for example, however peculiar its problems, could state all its conclusions in the physical mode of speech.) The trouble was that certain annoying but very familiar philosophical diffi culties refused to be pitchforked out of existence, and that this galling circumstance came to be perceived within the school as well as outside it. Logic, even if it is P-logic, has to infer statements from statements; and 184 Analysis sense-experience is not a statement at all. The question, therefore, is whether sense-experience (for all good positivists proclaim themselves empiricists in the end) is the basis for any utterly certain P-statements (technically called “protocol” statements). In other words is there any justifi cation for substituting P-statements for E-statements (i.e. for statements merely transcribing personal sense-experience)? And is not any statement, even an E-statement, something more than a mere transcription of personal sense-experience? According to Schlick, there was no diffi culty at all. It was quite easy to compare the statement in one’s guidebook that Ulm Cathedral has a tall spire with the fact in question, since one can go to Ulm and see the spire. Obviously, however, this account of the matter would not explain why dreams and hallucinations would not justify the protocol-statement that there is a physical spire in Ulm, or, in general, do anything to disentangle the obvious philosophical problem of the relation between personal sense-glimpses and continuing, public physical “things.” Indeed, as Popper, a critic although also an ally, has shown in his Logic of Discovery (1935), the alleged “protocols” in physical language have to be stipulated and can never be irrefragably ascertained. If everything is to be called “nonsense” that cannot be elicited from such protocols, nonsense is easy to manufacture. Defi ne your protocols, and you defi ne both “sense” and “nonsense.” But your triumph is only a matter of defi nition. Carnap’s favourite, if not his only method of argument, is to say that if a man sticks to the “formal” mode of speech he is safe unless he is frankly careless. Otherwise while he may talk sense, it is unlikely that he will. (Thus he is safe if he says “5 is a number designation,” in peril if he says “5 is a number.”) The objection is that, on this view, any well-ordered set of signs would be as good as any other. What is wanted of “physicalism,” or of any other language, is that it should tell us something about the world. In short, the signs should signify. The protocol, from the nature of its case, has to be “verifi ed,” not logically but meta-logically. Hence Carnap’s device, however useful it may be in many cases, cannot save him in this instance, and his other attempts to defend his “physicalism” seem to be particularly elegant examples of circular reasoning. Thus let anyone say, “I saw a redcoat in my dream.” The reply of the “physicalist” is, “Unless you say something publicly verifi able, you are talking mere nonsense.” – “But I did see that colour in my dream.” – “You must mean, if you mean anything, that your brain was in the condition in which it would have been had the optical centres been stimulated by rays transmitted from a British pillarbox or other red object.” – “But how could I Recent Philosophy 185 or you pretend to verify such a statement about my brain?” – “If we couldn’t we should not be using physical language. Therefore you must mean what I say you mean.” As we have seen, however, there are many differences and very rapid changes of opinion within these friendly “circles,” and the point may be further illustrated by reference to the work of K. Popper of Vienna, H. Reichenbach of Berlin and A. J. Ayer of Oxford. Popper’s aim was not to banish metaphysics in all possible senses but to defi ne the difference between a logic of possible discovery and every other mode of reasoning. Here the critical problems were fi rstly the relations of a logic of discovery to sensible experience, and secondly its capacity for affording genuine proof. On the fi rst point, Popper dissociated himself altogether from the attempt to fi nd irrefragable sensory “protocols” for such a science. Our sensations, he said, do not have the stability, or the public character of even the simplest statement of fact. They are fl eeting, momentary private feelings, and it is mere waste of time even to play with the idea that the general laws of any science could be solidly established upon these vanishing foundations. The man who forgets such elementary considerations impales himself upon one of the prongs of an inevitable trilemma. He has three lethal alternatives before him, to state dogmatically and quite falsely that our senses can supply such protocols, to admit an unending regress between the supposed sensory basis and the fi nished assertions of any natural science, or to take refuge in a sublime but personal scientifi c faith. Regarding the second point, Popper maintained that if scientifi c laws were regarded as probable hypotheses only, and if propositions regarding probability were interpreted as descriptions, inductively reached, of the characteristic behaviour of typical aggregates, a modest but sane and reliable positivism might be established. He further argued that such a theory was an “answer” to the classical diffi culties of Hume regarding the problem of the validity of inductive argument, especially if sense-experience, instead of being regarded as the basis of empirical science, was regarded, negatively, as something that might conceivably refute an empirical hypothesis. (Granting, however, that probable argument can never yield certainty, it is not clear how it could ever yield negative certainty, that is to say a complete logical refutation.) Reichenbach, the joint editor of Erkenntnis along with Carnap, explains that his alliance with the logistical positivists arose from his desire for “a common working programme” rather than for “a common doctrine.” This community 186 Analysis of aim, however, led him like the others to work towards, and fi nally to succeed in, the elimination of the “synthetic a priori” propositions of Kantian philosophy. It also led him, as, despite their differences, it also led Popper, to attempt an answer to Hume, very different from Kant’s, on the general lines of establishing a “probability connection” which might escape the strictures Hume had directed against older-fashioned attempts to fi nd a rational basis for induction. This “probability-connection,” however, was an affair of aggregates observed in the present and past. Consequently (as Reichenbach, like Popper, admitted), it could not be applied by any known logic either to particular cases or to the future. As regards the future therefore the “answer” to Hume was in effect that the whole thing was a gamble, and that natural scientists were students of form. The “answer to Hume,” therefore, was admirably adapted to elicit a vast chuckle from the eminent spirit of that departed mortal. Reichenbach further agreed (in general) with the majority of logistical positivists in holding that every signifi cant proposition must be “verifi able” in sense-experience and in interpreting this statement in a behaviouristic and pragmatic way. “Two propositions,” he said, “for which the same decision always obtains on the basis of observable fact, have the same sense.” He adopted the device of defi ning “sense” by “the same sense” which seems rather like saying that nobody could be known to have been born at all unless, at the least, he is an identical twin. Mr. Ayer did not attempt to answer Hume. On the contrary he tells us that his philosophy is the logical outcome of Hume’s empiricism vastly improved by Russell and Wittgenstein. According to Ayer metaphysics disappears because it tries to say something about what is not matter-of-fact, whereas the only way to avoid senselessness is either to explain the use of symbols or to say something verifi able about matter-of-fact. The former (traditionally called the a priori) is a formal exercise in linguistic equivalence. The latter must be verifi able in principle by some future sense-experience. The great philosophers of the past have deserved that appellation solely because they were great analysts. Hence their lapses into metaphysics may perhaps be condoned. Again moralists and theologians, although gullible, may be offered some crumbs of comfort. The moralists do fi nd something rather special in their experience, viz. “feelings” of approval or disapproval. Their mistake was to regard such feelings as something more than pure lyrical ejaculations. Theologians, when they affi rm the existence of a transcendent God, that is of a deity whose existence is in principle not empirically verifi able, are affi rming what is nonsensical. They have, however, the consolation that if they became Recent Philosophy 187 logical positivists they would neither be agnostics nor atheists. For both these sects assume that there is sense in the proposition that God exists, although the former profess ignorance of and the latter deny His existence. The logical positivists know that the proposition contains no sense whatsoever. I shall not here inquire into the effi cacy of these methods of painless and expeditious capital punishment, but would call attention to the increasing debility of this pragmatic-analytical method regarding matter-of-fact. What Ayer asserts is that unless a proposition is capable in principle of being verifi ed in sense-experience it is either senseless or a formal tautology. The phrase “in principle” is intended to allow for the possibility that actual observations may be physically unobtainable, as, for example, a visual observation of the other side of the moon. But Ayer goes much further. He cannot accept Popper’s suggestion that sense-experience may refute although it cannot establish a hypothesis. Therefore the verifi cation can never be absolute. Indeed, according to Ayer, our observations “are themselves hypotheses which are subject to the test of further sense-experience” (it would seem ad infi nitum). Consequently all we need be able to do is to have the ability to tell in practice “what sort of situations” would verify the propositions expressed. Even the pragmatist’s reference to future verifi cation seems to be watered down. As I understand him, Ayer defi nes his “weak” principle of verifi cation by the possibility of future corroboration, and no doubt it is true that most of our memories of sensible events might be corroborated in the future, say by discovering somebody’s memoranda. Since, however, our reliance on such evidence depends ultimately on memory, i.e. upon past experience of the reliability of records, it is odd to make a collateral circumstance of this kind defi nitive of the entire situation; and if anyone were to say that one’s memory of a past event was not evidence of matter-of-fact, and was devoid of all meaning when so regarded, although some future corroboration would acquire meaning and be such evidence, his view would surely be most remarkable. It should be remarked in conclusion that the possibilities of “analysis” are not exhausted in the particular line of development that is now so fashionable. Among other possibilities there is Professor Moore’s form of the theory. According to Moore (in 1925) we all know for certain that a number of propositions are true “in their ordinary sense,” for example that material bodies have existed long before the birth of any human being now alive; but (a) we may not know the evidence for such propositions even when they plainly require evidence, and (b) may not know the correct analysis of such propositions, even when the evidence for them could not be ascertained without analysis. 188 Analysis

Thus the proposition, “material bodies exist,” has to be evidenced, in part at least, by simpler propositions (as it happens, equally evident) regarding sense-perception. The simplest of these has the form “this is so-and-so” where the predicate signifi es a sense-quality. While the existence of “sense- data” (according to certain interpretations of them) may be disputed, there can be no dispute (Moore said) regarding their existence when we say, for example, “This is green”. On the other hand there may be much dispute about the question whether sense-data could or could not be literally parts of the surface of some physical object. If they are such parts, how are they related to the unsensed parts of the object? If they are not such parts how do we ever reach physical objects by means of them? The conclusion accordingly was, that knowledge was one thing, analysis another. The correct analysis of known propositions presented a set of second- order problems that could neither confi rm nor refute our primary certainties. Philosophy, in the past, had been (as it should have been) concerned, very largely, with these second order inquiries, but had confused itself and other studies by its neglect of the difference between the two orders. A theory of this type presents several interesting features, three of which may be indicated here. (1) According to certain critics there is at least one instance in which the “ordinary sense” of language is unintelligible without philosophical analysis since the phrase, “knowing for certain,” imperatively demands such scrutiny. “Knowledge,” these critics say, is a vague term and very apt to be a fetish. Consequently every gnostic theory of philosophy runs the risk of becoming an austere kind of idolatry. The point is vital to Moore’s philosophy. He denies the suffi ciency of the moderate and very usual opinion that common- sensical assertions of the existence of material things (and the like) are fi rst approximations, presumably containing a nucleus of absolute truth. In his view such assertions must be absolutely true “in their ordinary sense,” and a more moderate type of opinion is an untenable compromise inviting disaster from lack of audacity. (2) While there is likely to be wide approval of the general doctrine that philosophy is not required to establish what should not be seriously doubted and should never raise a metaphysical smoke-screen over the visibilities of common sense, it is very unlikely indeed that the entire sub-structure of philosophy should be infallibly known in this way. What is problematical or even unintelligible to the plain man need not be metaphysically negligible. It may be true, indeed, that the subjects of traditional metaphysics, that is to say, Recent Philosophy 189 the existence of deity and the freedom and eternity of the human soul, are beyond the control of decisive argument, but the mere fact, if fact it be, that these subjects are beyond the horizon of common sense, is not a suffi cient reason for accepting their philosophical nullity. (3) If, as some of Mr. Moore’s followers maintain, the second-order propositions of philosophical analysis can neither confi rm nor refute the fi rst-order philosophical assertions of common sense, the interesting question arises whether there is any positive reason, other than curiosity, for visiting these remote analytical regions. It is easy to understand why in practical affairs a greater degree of accuracy than is commonly expedient should sometimes be absolutely necessary. Anyone can see that it may be very important indeed to weigh arsenic much more scrupulously than sugar. There, however, the increase in accuracy is of the same general order; but philosophical analysis, according to Mr. Moore’s followers, is of a totally different order. Some enlightenment, perhaps, may be obtained by considering the case of the sciences. A tax-collector would neither increase nor diminish his professional effi ciency by pondering the question whether there could or could not in strictness be such a thing as zero-number, but mathematicians need not renounce such inquiries merely on the ground that they do not affect the ordinary operations of simple arithmetic. On the other hand, many mathematicians would maintain that if operative mathematics were wholly unaffected by speculations on such subjects, the speculations themselves would have to be regarded as a piece of busy curiosity. Pushed to its extreme, this argument would seem to condemn everything except in so far as it had practical results. It might therefore be invited to consider highly speculative questions concerning what is and what is not “practical.” Curiosity may be low and mean, but it may also be high and fi ne. Consequently there is no occasion for regarding analysis as a species of frivolity. Chapter X The New Mediævalism

Our survey of recent philosophy has covered vast distances in a rapid transit, and was forced to pursue a rather variable course. Mr. Whitehead, indeed, maintained that he could return to a species of absolutism on a realistic basis strongly supported by the new adventures of theoretical physics. Mr. Alexander, I dare say, would be sympathetic towards this view; and other philosophers, in countries other than England, profess to be able to discern much unity in the majority of current philosophies. On the other hand, absolutism and positivism are extremes that are not easily made to meet, and absolutism and logical positivism are extremes (I should say) that refuse to be joined. On the whole, therefore, I submit that the course of this discussion has corroborated the contention of the Introduction. There is not just one “perennial” or “magnanimous” philosophy showing endless patience towards tiresome rebels, but obviously and always on the winning side. Historians are not at liberty to assume, like Mr. Urban of Yale, that “minute” philosophers and tired radicals are not worth powder and shot, minutiae being unworthy of philosophy and radicalism a proof of intellectual fatigue. They also may not assume with Signor Croce that civilization has made itself fully articulate only recently in Southern Europe, where “The Spirit” has achieved a purer utterance than the guttural and slightly inconsecutive language of Hegel. Such views may indeed be true, just as it may be true that positivism in any form is a shallow philosophy and that every pedestrian and empirical philosophy (as Croce said of Mill’s Logic) is merely “infantile.” But they cannot be assumed to be true, and a hospitable historian has to assume that they may be false. Accordingly, although our discussion began with a description of Absolute Idealism, and proceeded to consider philosophies that, to an appreciable extent, had to be regarded as divergent variants from Absolutism or intentional alternatives to that philosophy, it could not even pretend to discuss its entire theme upon such a plan, and abandoned the attempt rather early. Had it not been so the present chapter should have been introduced very much earlier. For as we saw in the Introduction the Church of Rome claims that it alone has the Recent Philosophy 191 custody of the genuine philosophia perennis. For two millennia, or thereabouts, it has been the guardian of the truth as well as of the way and of the life, and, knowing the truth, has elaborated a philosophy of that truth, so far as the truth can be the child of any philosophy. In other words, the claim is that a return, in essentials, to St. Thomas of Aquino, is the only possible journey for a sane and clear spirit. That is what “perennial philosophy” truly means. In the year 1879 the encyclical Aeterni Patris restored the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas to the place it had occupied at the Council of Trent, prescribing copious draughts from the limpid waters of Thomism and the restitution and wide propagation of the angelical doctor’s wisdom. Later accretions in the way of science might be welcomed, but the structure of Thomism should remain inviolate. This decision was the result of a prolonged controversy within the Church, and may be regarded as a tardy sequel to the encyclical Qui pluribus of 1846 in which the power and the trend of nineteenth-century philosophy was deplored. In the intervening period Thomism was frequently fl outed, as for example by Döllenger in 1863 when he said that the old scholastic dwelling house had collapsed beyond repair. Infl uences from Italy and from Spain, however, proved stronger than such sentiments; and Thomism became the offi cial Catholic philosophy. Among the quicker results were the beginnings of the magnifi cent Leonine edition of Thomas’s works (begun in 1882) and the foundation of Thomistic academics such as the Accademia Romana di San Tommaso (1891). The fi rst of these events was symbolic of the vast improvement in the modern understanding of the mediaeval mind, so marked a feature of present-day scholarship in many regions, not all of them philosophical. The second, on the other hand, lent colour to the prevalent belief among non-Catholics that Leo’s restitution of Thomism was a reactionary decision much more important for ecclesiastical politics than for philosophy proper. The new mediaevalists, however, were aware of such complaints, and some of them deplored the tendency which they found in Spain and even in Louvain (despite Cardinal Mercier’s eminence) to be content, or very nearly so, with a careful exposition of Thomas’s views. In their opinion Thomism was far too big a thing to be incapable of growth. It could and should develop like all else, including the Church itself. In particular it could become stronger by assimilating much in modern science to its own dominant vision of God and the soul; and able pens in the present century have supported this line of argument with so much force that the revival of scholasticism in this spirit is 192 The New Mediaevalism beyond all question a powerful infl uence in the philosophy of the day. Thus in Italy A. Gemelli, the Franciscan rector of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan (founded 1909), through his journal the Rivista di fi losofi a neo-scholastica and with the help of collaborators such as E. Chiochetti and F. Olgiati, has vigorously repudiated a “stationary” interpretation of Thomism. In his view, the union of Christian insight with Aristotelian scientifi c method which was Thomas’s great achievement is capable of becoming stronger and more mature as fresh discoveries are made; and Gemelli himself, a biologist and psychologist by training, was ready, like many others of the same mind, to defend a vitalistic biology on its scientifi c merits and to enrich mediaeval psychology with the latest theories of Gestalt, or “pattern” psychology, with experimental results, and with all that could be extracted from psychological forays into the “jungle” of the supernormal. What he maintained in essentials, was that Croce, Gentile and the “expriest,” Spaventa, had misinterpreted the facts of history. According to them civilization had become “liberal,” that is to say, completely secular. The theocentric standpoint of the middle ages, such people affi rmed, was as much of an anachronism as the birettum of a University doctor. For Gemelli, on the contrary, liberalism of this kind was an affront to rational understanding. The liberal need not devise liberal things godlessly, and is not compelled to stand by these things without divine succour. Again, he maintained that both the scepticism and the anti-realistic bias of post-Cartesian philosophy were opposed to the sane integrity of existence. There was nothing reactionary in proclaiming the fact. In brief, the contention was that mediaevalism had not been retrogressive in its prime, and that the solid rightness of it was as true and as fi rm as the Church itself. In Italy more particularly there was no good reason why the spiritual descendants of Leonardo, Galileo (sic), Cusa, Bruno and Campanella should not be mediævalists, or why there should not be good Catholics who were also good Italians in the country of Dante, Aquinas and Manzoni. In German-speaking countries the academies of Eichstätt, Freiburg i.S, and Lucerne had somewhat similar aims, and in the years that succeeded 1879, the works of Pesch in natural philosophy, Cathrein in ethics, Baur and Hertling in metaphysics were widely known and translated into many languages. Another important author was K. Gutberlet who contributed a synopsis of his views to the recent series of Self-presented Philosophies. This author, perhaps tendentiously, argues that since no philosophy can dispense with presuppositions, there is, so far, no objection to presupposing a good deal. The only important question is whether one can defend one’s attitude. He himself was in no sense Aquinas’s Recent Philosophy 193 slave and indeed came nearer to agreement with Aquinas’s independent commentator the great Spaniard Suarez, but he found that the views of Gauss and of Cantor on the infi nite supplied munitions for theism, that modern thermo-dynamics did the same, and that Darwinism, modern ethnology, psycho-analysis and experimental psychology had a similar message for a discerning mind. In brief, neo-Thomists found progressive corroboration of their general standpoint in the closest examination of modern scientifi c views. J. Geyser, Professor in Münster and later in Freiburg, is one of the most celebrated of contemporary German neo-Thomists. He agreed with Husserl in his attack on “psychologism,” but was less of a Platonic-idealist. In logic he stood for an “eidetic” realism, as many others have done who, in general, were moved by the same philosophical impulse as Meinong and Husserl. He also developed an elaborate psychology. This line of development has been fairly frequent. The noted phenomenologist Scheler followed it, as we saw, in the last phase of his carrer, and A. Pfädnder, a prominent member of the “München circle,” may be regarded as a phenomenological neo-Thomist. Thus in his recent important book The Soul of Man (1933) Pfänder, defending what he (following Dilthey) calls “a psychology that understands,” argues that any thorough-going attempt to interpret the soul is necessarily plunged into theological debates. Our souls are not self-created. They elicit what is in them to become, and therefore must be in abiding contact with an enduring creative ground. In outline, “The soul of man is a unique, incorporeal, spiritual, refl exive, personal living entity, God’s creature and part of His world, freely progressive in the determinate melody of its development, and echoing that melody in itself.” But this conclusion is regarded as the proper testimony of the relevant facts, and not as a hypothesis imported from abroad. In French-speaking countries the new scholasticism has been very active especially (as we have said) at Louvain, but the contentions of two eminent Frenchmen, E. Gilson and J. Maritain (themselves very different men), are specially noteworthy. M. Gilson, formerly professor at the Sorbonne and now at the Collège de France, has done more than any other man of his time to interpret great scholastics like Thomas and Bonaventura, to show their connection with the Fathers (as in his study of Augustine) and to indicate the extent to which Descartes and others who broke with scholasticism were themselves, in large measure, scholastic in their outlook. In a wider fashion, however, his recent Gifford Lectures on The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy have an appeal for the 194 The New Mediaevalism general public, since the lectures call attention to the important question whether there can be such a thing as proper. Obviously philosophy may be written by Christians for Christians just as it may be written by a Frenchman for Frenchmen. In that sense, however, there might be a French algebra as well as a , and nobody would suppose that any such adjective described the nature of the subject studied. Again, it might be argued that anyone who discoursed in a philosophical way upon the subject-matter of the Christian revelation, was, on that account, a Christian philosopher. But that would not make a Christian philosophy. To M. Gilson the latter explanation was wholly repugnant. Being a good scholastic he was also a good rationalist, and therefore maintained that revelation, in itself, could never be philosophy, since philosophy must be based upon reason alone. Revelation might indeed show what was true, but unless these truths could be proved independently by mere reason they would not be philosophical truths. The philosopher, if a believer, would accept them without any question; but they could not be part of his philosophy. Nevertheless M. Gilson held that there could be and that in the strictest sense there was a Christian philosophy. The Hebrew-Christian tradition, he said, had interpreted terms like God, Being, Essence, Created Nature in a sense that had not been seriously contemplated in any other tradition. When Anselm or Descartes argued about God’s existence they thought of God in a sense that Plato and Aristotle had not so much as entertained. The Christian tradition, therefore, set quite new problems to philosophy, not indeed because it released totally new logical possibilities (for these were eternal) but because it emphasized the unique importance of rationalizing a certain highly specifi c set of beliefs. The Christian revelation, in short, set new philosophical questions. If a rational answer to these could be found the result, quite stringently, should be called Christian philosophy. According to M. Gilson (who can speak with authority) this attempted rationalization was the essential aim and spirit of mediaeval philosophy. St. Thomas and others had held that much revealed truth could not be so rationalized. If so, it was not philosophy; but the rest was philosophy; and, in M. Gilson’s view, the part that was philosophy was a genuine science of metaphysics, a science that subsequent ages had lost but might now recover. In other words the rationalization of the scholastics really was rationalization. It was not what that term is sometimes supposed nowadays to mean by loose- lipped psychologists, that is to say the fi nding of bad reasons for beliefs that have alogical causes but no logical grounds. Recent Philosophy 195

M. Maritain is a different type of neo-Thomist. At fi rst an enthusiastic Bergsonian, he came to renounce and to denounce Bergson altogether. Bergson, he declared, was an arch-modernist, because, being a pure phenomenalist he was necessarily opposed to the sanities of human reason. If Bergson had mastered the Aristotelian conception of potentiality, or had grasped what St. Thomas meant by “being” he could never have written his books. The whole modern world had gone astray, either (according to this author’s diagnosis) because (like Luther) it had become bogged in what was really an animal privacy of personal experience, or (like Descartes) had treated the human mind as if it were not embodied but angelic, or (like Rousseau) had become a sort of sentimental Narcissus. What was needed was the healthy Thomism of a body-mind, set in a world of real things, yet God-searching as well as divinely founded. These modernists had been condemned in another encyclical the Pascendi dominici gregis of 1907. By that time Ollé-Laprune was dead, but Loisy continued to write, and so did M. Blondel (continuing the ideas of Ollé-Laprune) and also L. Laberthonnière. These writers did not form a school, but attempted, each in his own way, to give tradition its head without too much restraint from the bearing-reins of hard dogma or of an unalterable past. Thus Loisy maintained that the very substance of the text, “the kingdom of God is within you,” was that the Church might grow in a way that the historical Jesus and his disciples could never have anticipated; and he also believed in a progressive morality, transfi gured and sainted. Blondel similarly argued that the active spirit of Christianity was the master of the scriptural word, and not its mere servant. Among younger writers the Bergsonian, E. Le Roy (b. 1870), held that “to affi rm God was to affi rm moral reality as autonomous, independent, irreducible to all else, indeed, as the fi rst reality,” but that any such affi rmation was inseparably connected, not with any new church but with the (one) historical church, and with the plenitude of self-transcendance that theology alone could describe. As I have hinted, the revival of scholastic philosophy in Spain does not seem to have restored the philosophical glory of that country in late mediæval times when Vives brought vitality into the attack upon Aristotelian scholasticism, and Suarez brought at least equal vitality into its development. It would seem, however, that there has been something of vigour in the recent philosophy of Catalonia where the tradition of the Majorcan Raymond Lully has not been allowed to die. Chapter XI Axiology and Ethics

Although the greater part of the narrative of this book has been concerned, for inescapable reasons, with metaphysics, with metaphysical method and with the implications of metaphysical clarity, occasional references have been made to the moralistic researches of certain notable contemporary authors, and also to their axiology or value-theory. In the present chapter an attempt will be made to supplement these fugitive remarks, especially in the wider domain of axiology. While it cannot be pretended that our age has been either very active or very successful in the narrower fi eld of moralistic speculation, it has not been idle even there, and it seems, by predilection, to be axiologically-minded. Among his other contributions to philosophy, Wundt gave an important discussion of the “heterogony of ends,” that is to say of the way in which a means may come to be prized as an end, and former ends may either be ousted or transformed. It is common knowledge, of course, that such a process occurs, for we have all heard of misers (whose itch for the means obscures the end), of the idolatry of mere occupation, of a perverted gospel of mere drudgery and so forth. Such transformations, however, need not be indefensible in other cases, and the systematic study of them according to a principle, may be more useful than oracular Nietzschean utterances concerning the “transvaluation of all values.” In ethics Wundt attempted to wring “an ethics of fact” out of man’s actual circumstances. Such an ethics, he believed, was in no sense a matter of mere opinion and it became dominant (howevever slowly) on account of its genuine worth. In adopting this attitude lie was opposing a strong contemporary movement in favour of ethical “relativity” and “,” especially among the positivists. Thus F. Jodl (1848–1914), Professor in Prague and in Vienna, followed the three positivists, Feuerbach, Comte and Mill, but in the direction of making a new religion of national culture. Otto Liebmann (1840–1912), who taught in the Universities of Tübingen, Strassburg and Jena, fi rmly asserted that goodness and badness depended on human opinion, that absolute worth was Recent Philosophy 197 a piece of nonsense since our “knowledge” was only and always a relation between two unknowns (mind and thing). Most important of all, G. Simmel (1858–1918), a stoic in his life and something of a pragmatist in his thought, advocated ethical relativism in his Introduction to Moral Science (1890) on the ground that the facts of life compelled this conclusion when such matters as egoism, altruism, freedom, the alleged “categorical imperative” of duty and the like were carefully cross-examined. From 1900 onwards, however, Simmel, despite his relativism, tried to come to terms with the “objective spirit” he believed Hegel had discovered, that is to say with a broad and progressive cultural stream. German writers of today commonly regard Münsterberg, Windelband and Rickert as the advance guard of the present axiological development. The fi rst of these (1863–1916) was a man of varied talents and one of the big four at Harvard from 1892 to the time of his death. He attempted to reconcile Fichte’s ethical idealism with current parallelistic psycho-physics. A pure psychology, in his opinion (as opposed to the natural science of psychology), was a world of values and of wills in which selves, particularly other selves, were recognized rather than described. Pure psychology, in this sense, gave the rudiments of purpose and even of intelligibility to all the sciences, for it alone recognized the value of living in personal, superpersonal and divine existence. Windelband (1848–1915) who succeeded the celebrated Kuno Fischer at Heidelberg, gained a high reputation as a textbook writer of the history of philosophy, and in his own constructive work developed a neo-Kantianism that led him far away from Kant. His leading principle was the unconquerable supremacy of absolute obligation wherever it might be found – in ethics, say, or in logic, or in art. Hence norms or standards were philosophy’s genuine business, and he believed that such norms could assimilate the , whether the culture was general (as in logic) or was individual and unrepeatable (as in “idiographic” history). Along with this went a species of theology and a chastened but persistent sympathy with Hegel. Windelband’s successor at Heidelberg, however, H. Rickert, was the most important of the three. His book, The Object of Knowledge, fi rst published in 1892, attracted international attention very early in its career, and each lustre of the present century saw a new edition of it, largely rewritten. Moreover, Rickert wrote other books. His fundamental contention was that the realm of values is totally distinct from the realm of matter-of-fact existence. Questions of right are never questions of fact, and the word “ought,” when signifi cantly used as in logical 198 Axiology and Ethics inference, ethical obligation or aesthetic worth, must be self-justifying and can never be defended by results. The process of valuation, to be sure, is a mental experience and therefore bound up with psychological matter-of-fact. Again, the goods that men desire are either actual existents or conceived to be possible existents. Nevertheless the authority of genuine “norms” (i.e. of worthy ideals) is not in any way derived from existence, in the human soul or elsewhere. The norms are “beyond existence.” The man who would know them for what they are must rid his mind, fi nally and completely, of the illusion that any fact can do more than illustrate them and evince their imprint. Consequently, Rickert sharply criticized the “Life-philosophy” of Dilthey and others. In his view these authors misinterpreted norms, and tried to regard them either as semi-mental or as half-things that were not really things; and this entire conception was a marshy notion and a sort of frog-philosophy. What had to be acknowledged was pure obligation itself and not an impossible structure compounded half of validity and half of matter-of-fact. Even if this extreme position were rejected, however, it would be plain that a strict analytical inquiry into the meaning of “value” is necessary for any appreciable advance in this subject, and it is generally admitted today that unless “value” has no reasonable meaning and is either bad grammar or a piece of inept phrasing (as some positivists hold) its genuine meaning is very diffi cult to determine with accuracy. We may turn, therefore, to recent attempts of an analytical kind, and here we may resume our study of the work of certain Austrians. According to Brentano love and hate are comparable to judgment in two very signifi cant respects, for they imply fi rstly the attitude of a man towards something of which he is aware, and secondly a certain kind of rightness or wrongness. The second of these characteristics, in the case of judgment, is truth or error, and there is a similar, although different, characteristic of love and hate. When we are aware of anything we may acknowledge its goodness with a right love as well as declare its truth in a correct judgment. Anything that is rightly loved (and similarly anything that is rightly abhorred) in this way has the same absoluteness, the same independence of our whims and private constitution as a true judgment. Neither Meinong nor von Ehrenfels, the other two leaders of this Austrian company, agreed in detail with Brentano, but they both developed the view that approval (or the process of valuation) was not merely evoked by emotion, desire or some such experience in the soul but contained emotion or desire as an essential component which, nevertheless, was different from simple feeling Recent Philosophy 199 or desire. If feeling and desire, as by most psychologists, were held to be psychically blind, the analysis of approval would be stultifi ed from the outset. Approval was a name for the sort of discernment that feeling or desire might attain. Meinong, for various reasons, held that feeling or emotion (and principally pleasure-) was fundamental in approval, von Ehrenfels that the fundamental factor was desire. Each therefore took his stand upon different sides of a very old controversy, the question, namely, whether pleasure is invariably the fulfi lment and therefore the result of precedent impulse, and (if not) whether the exceptions are trivial or profound. Consequently Meinong’s problem, in the main, was the analysis of the function of pleasure-pain in the process of prizing, appreciating, setting store by. He elaborated this question in connection with a doctrine of emotional awareness. As we have seen he also developed a theory of “dignitatives” and of “desideratives” which corresponded, in the domain of feeling and of desire, to the “objectives” already considered in his theory of knowledge. Von Ehrenfels, on the whole, was less of an analyst than Meinong, although he had frequently to turn to analysis in order to distinguish his views from those of his friends. His principal interest, however, was to trace the way in which our motives and desires body forth our values. Thus, for the most part he described the development, the confl ict, the growing hierarchy and the obsolescence of values, with special reference to the general law of relative happiness-getting, that is to say of the difference in happiness that is anticipated from the attainment or non-attainment of some possible state. His outlook, in short, was relativistic and evolutionary, his analytical researches subordinate. Hence he had the opportunity of being much more readable than Meinong, and his talents as a writer enabled him to grasp the opportunity. On the whole, these Austrian authors have had more infl uence than any others upon the modern analytic approach to value theory, partly because they were so careful to distinguish their theory from the economic conception of “value” so effectively pursued by Wieser and other Austrian economists who had been among the instructors of their youth. Other countries, however, had not been idle. France, for example, had the late M. Goblot on the analytical side, M. Bouglé on the sociological. Czecho-Slovakia has Mr. Lossky. In America, again, the subject has had, and seems likely to continue to have, a very lusty existence. Indeed, to judge from a very recent volume (1935) from many pens entitled American Philosophy Today and Tomorrow, it would seem that value-theory is the “live” subject in “post-depression” transatlantic philosophy. 200 Axiology and Ethics

The debate between relativism and absolutism in these matters is still very active in America, and the mails are crowded with plans for one of the most diffi cult feats of modern metaphysical engineering, the construction of a traffi c-bearing bridge between “subjective” and “objective” value theories. In this connection certain authors, particularly Mr. Urban of Yale, have gone to school with the Austrians, although they have not always remained in the school. In a general way, however, the debate has tended to become an affray beneath the disputed banner of pragmatism, that is to say has come to be regarded as one of the more obvious aspects of the theme that human appreciations make as well as suffuse what we call “reality.” Much of the literature in America is sprinter’s work in short articles, but there are cross-country runners also, among them Mr. R. B. Perry whose General Theory of Value (1926) follows a long and rather devious route. Always a liberal moralist, Mr. Perry has recently attempted to emulate the astute little child who knew how to lead the young lion of realism and the fatling of pragmatism in amity together. His value-theory, however, is perhaps beyond both these “isms”; and it is certainly ambitious. “The theory of value,” he says, “is that branch of knowledge in which such sciences as theory of knowledge, ethics, political science and jurisprudence are unifi ed and distinguished.” Its fundamental problem is the conception in the universal principle of value, and Perry’s view is that interest, that is to say the attitude of favour or of disfavour, is “the original source and constant feature of all value . . . Values are forms of certain acts of living mind to which we have given the name of interest.” This general sense of the term, he contends, can be shown by suitably detailed argument to include all the more special senses that are legitimate, and can weather the assaults of criticism that are apt to submerge the cruder forms of relativism and subjectivism. Mr. Perry also believed he could show (on lines rather similar to those of von Ehrenfels) that the historical transmutations of our “values” were dependent upon “the genesis and mutation of interest,” and upon the changing and increasing purpose of human societies. In England, axiology is seldom regarded as one of the main arterial roads of the island’s philosophy, although Bosanquet, Alexander and Whitehead came near to treating it so. Indeed, it seems often to be considered as a byroad debouching from ethics and leading with diffi culty to uninteresting if elevated regions. Obviously, however, the subject has always been a part of “ethics,” for that subject is necessarily an applied axiology in so far as it is a refl ective search for great goods or for The Great Good, an attempt to discover how far and how life is worth living, a resolute effort to discriminate between genuine Recent Philosophy 201 and merely apparent success. Such an interpretation of the subject may indeed enlarge the traditional boundaries of a subject primarily concerned with right and wrong, virtue and sin; but even a narrow moralist dare not neglect it altogether. Early in the present century Mr. G. E. Moore in his Principia Ethica (whose sequel was his Ethics in the present series) vigorously defended a view that has obvious affi nities with the above. A moralist , he held, has to examine (a) the meaning of “good,” (b) what was or could be good, (c) how the best consequences could be obtained by voluntary action. These were the essential ethical questions, and they ought to govern the logically subordinate enquiries of most moralists into rightness and wrongness of “conduct.” If so, it is plain that general axiology is the foundation of ethics. An understanding of the meaning of value or worth, and a critical review of all that is worth having or worth doing, is precisely what is meant by pure and by applied axiology respectively, whether or not it is precisely what most men (or what many men) mean by “ethics.” Mr. Moore, it is true, thought that his fi rst main question had a short and simple answer. “Good,” he held, simply meant good. It was a simple indefi nable predicate. In a later essay in his Philosophical Studies, however, he maintained that “intrinsic value” was in many respects a highly peculiar predicate. In short, in his own aloof way, he, Moore, might be regarded as another of the value-analysts, and although the analysis of approval, a favourite subject of British moralists in the eighteenth century, is not a very prominent part of contemporary inquiry among British philosophers, it is beginning to recover a part of its former importance. As applied to rightness and wrongness of conduct, Moore’s theory (and that of moralists like Rashdall who on the whole must be regarded as his followers) is a species of utilitarianism, since it regards good results as the proper standard for determining right conduct. It is not, however, a hedonistic utilitarianism, since it denies that pleasure alone is good in itself, and holds, on the contrary, that there are many intrinsic goods other than pleasure. Hence it is commonly called “ideal” as opposed to hedonistic utilitarianism. Of late years, however, there has been a strong and keenly argued movement in British (particularly in Oxonian) ethics of a very different tendency. According to this counter-movement, utilitarianism of any kind is not a moral theory at all. It does not tell us what a man or a community onght to do, but only what would profi t such agents if they did it. In short it omits the very thing that alone is authentically moral, viz. moral obligation. If it be contended that a philanthropic regard for other people’s interests 202 Axiology and Ethics and a prudent regard for one’s own interest are obligations, a suffi cient reply (according to this school of thought) is that such duties, admitting them to be duties, are obligatory because we can see that prudence and philanthropy are morally right, not simply because they are advantageous. In other words the utilitarians are said to have neglected the essential step that makes their theory even a part of morals. It is further contended that many moral obligations, such as promise-keeping, do not derive the whole of their obligatory character from their promise of benefi t, and that it may sometimes be a plain moral duty to perform an action that, so far from bringing about the best possible consequences may be actually disadvantageous. If it be said that controversy on these lines has persisted for at least two millennia, since men, during all that long period, have debated, with varying degrees of clear-headedness, whether or not justice was an enlarged and far- sighted expediency (as opposed to an opportunism of temporary expedients) and whether an inexpedient or hurtful justice was ever possible or, if possible, justifi able, it should be replied that the modern age has played its part in clarifying the problems at issue, and in repudiating some mistaken and some too facile solutions. That in itself is not a trivial achievement. On the whole, it seems likely that the contributions of the last thirty years to axiology have been more important than its contributions in the narrower fi eld of a supposedly “pure” ethics – unless, indeed, the logical positivists should prove to be right in rejecting both unless both are changed so profoundly as to be no longer, even colourably, what traditionally they profess to be. By way of supplement to what has been said, however, attention should be called to three other contributions to this subject. One of these is Meinong’s. That author, in addition to his general value- theory, elaborated an interesting and novel ethical system, connected no doubt with his value-theory, but highly original and independent in its special message for ethics. The view in question, to be brief, was an attempt to measure moral worth by the ratio between self-seeking and devotion to the good of others. In Meinong’s opinion a prudent regard for one’s own good had in itself no moral value, positive or negative. There was no righteousness about it even if it were sensible and otherwise commendable. On the other hand philanthropy (love of ourselves being excluded) and misanthropy (self-hatred being also excluded) were respectively morally good and morally bad. For the most part what the bad man does is to seek his own good at the expense of other people. What the good man does, when there is confl ict, is to renounce his own lesser good Recent Philosophy 203 in favour of the greater good of others. According to Meinong it is possible to measure the moral worth of human action by means of this principle with very considerable accuracy, and to employ the marginal methods of the Austrian economists (i.e. the principle of the “just-worth-while” or its opposite) in the calculation. Hence he introduced and defended a novel moral calculus, capable of much greater elaboration than simple arithmetic. L. Nelson (b. 1882), who in general philosophy stands (as Fries and Apelt did) for a psychological Kantianism, has developed elaborate and important theories of ethics and of jurisprudence. In ethics he had the courage to undertake a new Critique of the practical reason (1917) in which, like Kant, he accepted the ultimacy of duty in ethics (or rather of the ultimacy of the readiness to perform specifi c duties). On the other hand he interpreted this moral girding of the loins, not as an eternal clarity self-evident to anyone who could understand his own “real” and supersensible nature by grasping things invisible with that part of himself that was eternal, but as something extorted from the social creature called a man in his endeavour to conform to and (however darkly) to understand his situation among his fellows. Our duties, each in its own specifi c character, are stresses of social life, not angelic patterns. Yet each of them is a limitation of “interest,” that is to say a way of disciplining and binding the play of impulse and of desire, the guiding principle being (as Kant declares) that every human being should be treated as a centre of independent dignity by every other. Nelson’s System of the Philosophy of Right (1920) was a Critique of All Jurisprudence on similar lines; and the neo-Friesian school (with its inevitable journal) has had considerable infl uence on the Continent, e.g. Heymanns and Kranenburg in Holland, Christensen and Starcke in Denmark. N. Hartmann’s elaborate Ethics has deservedly gained a high European reputation. Its general intention is to give a concrete ethics of values in which the wisdom of Aristotle and of Jesus shall be incorporated, and also a humane reinterpretation of Kant’ s , a more solid transvaluation of the discoveries of Nietzsche’s lonely genius, and a certain modifi cation of Scheler’s views. The book is divided into three principal parts, fi rstly an account of the philosophy of its theme and of the sense in which values are ideal and absolute essences, secondly an account of the virtues, thirdly a discussion of the problem of freedom. The second of these has probably the greatest general interest, and is a notable contribution to the phenomenology of ethics. Chapter XII Conclusion

The present century has already run more than a third of its course, and only three centuries have elapsed since “modern” philosophy was inaugurated by Descartes’s Discourse on Method. In other words there has been plenty of time in the twentieth century for a great deal to happen to its philosophy. The question is whether very much has happened. It would be generally agreed that there has been a lot of strenuous bustle. America has attained its philosophical majority. Russia professes to be built on a technical philosophy. In the greater and in the smaller European countries the universities, almost unanimously, put philosophy very near the top. One of the new countries has had a philosopher-president. In many countries, philosophy (as it should) has been powerful outside the universities. There is a heavy crop of new philosophical journals, and an extensive if not a very ready market for any philosophical author who can make himself intelligible to the average educated reader. In short, philosophy is being taken seriously, and the general level of philosophical competence is fairly high. The supply of genius for the subject may be less satisfactory; but genius is an irregular commodity. If genius were all it had to wait for, philosophy could afford to travel hopefully. That, I think, is the common view, and very likely the true one. In most quarters it is held that contemporary philosophy has failed (although perhaps it has just failed) to rise to its present immense opportunities. Greatness has eluded it, but, missing greatness, it has done very well, and has made a good many paths much straighter than they were. The rest should come. And the opportunity seems immense. In the physical sciences, there is appetite and even a mild hunger for philosophy, together with a readiness to entertain and to elaborate theories which, if they can be sustained at all, have a profound bearing on philosophy. In the humanistic and political sciences there are all the problems that came home to everyone when civilization was in jeopardy during the war, and imperilled during the subsequent peace. In matters of ethics and of religion, there are the scars of deep wounds, and the Recent Philosophy 205 lines of affrighted confusion. Along with all these goes a much more accurate understanding of the history of ideas. How could philosophy have a greater opportunity? But, given the opportunity, what have philosophers done? Has philosophy become most elusive just when there was a disposition to give her a public welcome? Have different bands of philosophers deliberately cultivated different “languages” that resemble secret codes rather than the vehicles of general communication? Is there a superfl uity of puerile pedantry? Has there been too intensive cultivation of special areas with slender regard for the general needs of the philosophical community? Have the middle-aged reasonable grounds for fearing that the times are out of joint for them, there being too much to learn, too much to unlearn, too parti-coloured and too glaring a panorama to face with comfort or with keen admiration? If so, are the young more fortunate? Will the terrors of one generation become a jesting matter in the next? Questions of this order are very generally asked, and they seem to be reasonable. As a partial answer to some of them I shall consider what, in a general way, a man may expect from a philosophy, and how far contemporary philosophies are likely to satisfy such expectations. In the main there are three things to hope for. The fi rst and most usual is an exceptional catholicity and stability of outlook. The second is a piercing and most pertinacious clarity. The third is an emancipation, to a degree quite out of the common, from prejudice and taking-for-granted. The three types of expectation cannot be altogether separate and may be very closely connected. The third, for example, goes along with the second, and the second may need the help of the fi rst. Width of view plays a large part in determining what ideas should be cleared up. Provisionally, however, the three types may be distinguished with advantage. Accordingly, let us attempt a summary of the previous evidence, condensing further what was already highly condensed, and let us keep to the three main hopes that have just been outlined. (1) Have there been great philosophical syntheses in our time? (2) Has the process of clarifi cation proceeded apace? (3) Have we become more chary of covert assumptions and of presumptuous takings-for-granted? (1) As regards “synthesis,” a good deal depends on the sort of synthesis that is meant. Thus the logical positivists claim to have effected a wide philosophical synthesis called the “unity of science” by asserting that all signifi cant questions can be put, and all signifi cant answers given, in a single “physical” language. 206 Conclusion

The reason, they say, is the overwhelming importance that should be attached to a scientifi c manner of speaking. Most of us, however, would deny that a uniform way of speaking, even if it suggests more than it says, is of itself a synthesis, just as we should deny that a mere encyclopædia of the sciences, even if it were very well arranged, could be a philosophical synthesis in a fi t and proper sense. In the language of Goldsmith’s Hall it would have to be a “made-up piece.” In the Middle Ages philosophy took its place in a wide theo-centric synthesis. Philosophy, indeed, was the part of that synthesis which natural reason could grasp. The growth of secularism in its two chief forms, viz. the cultural-humanistic semi-Paganism of the Renaissance, and the mechanical or revived Democritean philosophy of the seventeenth century, challenged the older theocentricity either expressly or covertly, but always in a big way – indeed in a way so big that each subsequent philosophical era has to ask how it stands in this matter. The New Mediaevalism. of the Roman Church gives one possible answer, and a theocentric philosophy dominates all Christian theologies. But what of secularism? Here I think it is necessary to distinguish the humanistic-cultural vein of secularism from the physical-scientifi c, notwithstanding the facts that physical science, so far from belonging exclusively to the vegetable garden, is itself a fl ower of “culture,” and that the unity of the two is a better synthesis still. Absolute idealism, in its head and in its heart, is cultural-humanistic; and absolutism is still alive. In England and in America it has still a strong following, although it has often been invited to abdicate. In Italy, again, the new idealism of Absolute Spirit, the Io trassendentale developing from moment to moment, is a trumpeter’s assertion of the power of historical culture to progress creatively from its own resources. In Germany the tendency is rather different. The spirit of culture, according to the “Life” and “Existence” philosophers, is not the whole Time-Space Spirit, and philosophy is the stronger in so far as it separates the tenacious spirit of culture from the natural forces which it uses but never attempts to overwhelm. A cultural-secular absolutism, therefore, adopting several rather different forms, is a defi nite movement of our time. More particularly its alliance with “history” in a sense of that word in which art, literature and the fi ner essence of aspiration is of greater moment than conquest or political intrigue, gives a certain promise of vitality. And other philosophies, renouncing absolutism, come near to the absolutist spirit. The humanistic type of pragmatism, for Recent Philosophy 207 example, has shown itself to be capable of moving sympathetically with the times; and M. Bergson, in a part of his philosophy, is a great humanist on high metaphysical lines. The other main type of philosophical synthesis may be called the “naturalistic,” supposing always that we may obtain a shrewd idea of what “nature” is from the “natural” sciences. Such “naturalism” is a looser term than “positivism” and looser still than “materialism.” Its scope, however, may be gauged fairly accurately by considering the usual modern attitude towards “materialism.” Traditional materialism, for the most part, was either offi cial or obscurantist. A materialist was merely offi cially so, if, like Hobbes, he held that all real events, including thinking, must be physical movements, but also maintained that we discovered our thoughts by a process of self-observation or introspection which could be practised successfully without any conscious reference to matter and motion. But a materialist was an obscurantist if he denied or ignored what we call the mind. Nowadays, however, when “matter” is volatilized and electrifi ed into protons, electrons, neutrons, deuterons and neutrinos, or metamorphosed into puzzling “quanta,” when “mind” is dissected into a half a dozen sets of quite different functions, and when a variety of effort is spent upon the elaboration of some bi-functional theory concerning “mind” and “matter” the whole face of these problems is altered, and naturalism can afford to be as much or as little psychological and as much or as little materialistic as it chooses. It is likely, however, that certain modern theories of this subject, such as “behaviourism” and the views of some of the disciples of the late Professor Pavlov, are rather old-fashioned in their accounts of this matter. Speaking generally, then, our age has been fertile in naturalistic syntheses, and has so far only reaped the early harvest. Even the English who are notoriously averse to large-scale philosophical planning in the grand manner have today their Alexander and their Whitehead, philosophers whose sympathies with “naturalism” are considerable. And the infl uence of Marx’s “dialectical materialism” inside Russia and outside it, has always to be remembered. The French Revolution was the triumph of pure secularism, transforming an ideological fashion into an immense historical fact with momentous consequences, not always entirely logical, upon subsequent ideologies. The Russian Revolution was another event of the same gigantic order, less rigid perhaps, in its type of rationalism but not less secular and, in its own estimation, at least as hard-headed. In the 208 Conclusion political sphere, Nazism and Fascism are alternatives to Communism. In the realm of European ideology, most contemporary philosophical syntheses are designed to yield other alternatives. But dialectical materialism is still a fi ghting army. On the other hand, the work of Whitehead and of many other authors is so intimately connected with the analytical movement of modern science that it can scarcely be assessed except by reference to the second division of our present theme. Relativity-theory and the modern theories of the atom have the peculiarity not only that they challenge scientifi c-philosophical dogmatism at points which philosophers cannot ignore, but also that they shift the emphasis of the whole discussion. A philosophical synthesis is usually regarded as a world-picture, that is to say as a picture of reality. The new scientifi c researches, as we saw, are primarily concerned with a sort of epistemological picture. Their interest is rather in the consistency of symbols than in the actual character of events. Certainly there is a challenge, at least indirect, to philosophical and to commonsense notions of the space, the time, the causes and even the determinateness of things. But “things” are no longer in the foregound. It is equations that are prominent. (2) Let us, then, proceed to consider contemporary analytical philosophy. We should, I think, distinguish four species of philosophical analysis, all of them practised at the present time. These are: (a) crucial analysis, (b) typical ostensive analysis, (c) instrumentalism and (d) formal analysis. The four species are not wholly distinct, but are suffi ciently so to be usefully treated apart. (a) By crucial analysis, I mean the analysis of a philosophical crux, cross- roads or critical situation, nothing in particular being assumed regarding the sort of analysis that is pertinent. This method has certain presuppositions. It must have some preliminary inkling of the whereabouts of the important crossroads. It must also presuppose, at any rate tentatively, that each such crux may be isolated and investigated, as we say, on its merits. At a later stage results may be pooled and perhaps revised; but not in the fi rst instance. Here contemporary philosophy has been very active indeed, and even the enemies of the method admit its occasional services in matters of detail. Such men as Brentano and Meinong in Austria, Russell, Stout, Moore and Broad in Great Britain, Lovejoy, Strong and Mead in America (to mention no others) have done notable service. If no crucial question has been entirely cleared up, our progress in the apprehension of the possible logical alternatives has been little short of prodigious. What do we actually perceive? What do we actually Recent Philosophy 209 remember? What precisely do we judge? Where is there room for error? What is the status of relations? How many things do we mean by a “mind”? Must a cause be something more than a rule of sequence? Is “substance” the denial of historical process? Is process creative? What is “value” and how is it related to the process of valuation? Modern philosophy has taken endless pains with questions such as these, discovering their austerity and their formidable complexity, but raising their analysis (it seems fair to say) to a level that is not likely to be permanently lowered in future. (b) By typical ostensive analysis I mean the attempt to induce typical patterns to exhibit themselves, and so to reveal very general truths. In a large sense – larger than Mr. Husserl’s – this is phenomenology; and the method has become familiar to the modern mind. It might be called catholic as opposed to sensory empiricism, omnivorous empiricism as opposed to sensivorous. No philosophy can avoid the appeal to fact and what is more, to facts that appear; but if facts are to be allowed to tell their own story, they should also be allowed to tell the whole of that story. It may be objected, indeed, that we are all phenomenologists of a sort. The narrower kind of empiricists and the phenomenalists believe that there are no phenomena except sensory ones. Realists of Mr. Alexander’s type cultivate a strenuous naïveté that humbly requests the “object” to “declare” or “reveal” itself. The absolutists do not complain of the method of patterns. Their objection is that one great pattern, The Whole, dominates all subordinate patterns. And certainly the isolability of patterns constitutes a philosophical problem. It would seem, however, that the phenomenologist’s predilection for an intensive scrutiny and lavish description of certain selected patterns is readily defensible as a distinctive philosophical method. Again, the attempt to describe “pure” experience, so characteristic of the earlier years of this century, is in its own way a species of phenomenology. The diffi culty, of course, is to avoid contamination from illicit theory. Here James, Avenarius and even Bergson may have failed. But Bergson’s description of experienced time has been a model for all subsequent philosophers. (c) Instrumentalism, as described by Mr. Dewey and his followers, has a certain affi nity with phenomenology. As Mr. Brightman and others say, it is an “operational” theory; and it may reach great analytical nicety in its endeavours to detect the “particular go” of particular operations. For the most part, however, instrumentalism is built on rather more massive lines, and is an attempt to describe the moving pattern of the knowledge that is power in a semi-refl ective, scientifi c, semi-religious, industrial-agricultural cornmunity. It 210 Conclusion is a blend of phenomenology with a restrained, impressionistic and not very formal analysis. (d) It would frequently be said, however, that all the above forms of “analysis” are feeble and somewhat muddled attempts to reach analysis proper, and that genuine formal analysis is being erected by Carnap and by Neurath upon foundations imperfectly laid by Wittgenstein and imperfectly sketched by Russell. Since this philosophy is in the making and is acutely bellicose, its potentialities, at the moment, can scarcely be gauged with accuracy. It is plain, however, that great advances have been made in the formal dissection of “logical syntax,” in the detection of errors that are due to bad philosophical grammar, in the unmasking of disguised tautologies, and of subtle inconsistencies very easily missed. Philosophy, perhaps, is the study of the greater simplicities. If so, the general statements of these simplicities may itself be simple; but the rigorous pursuit of such simplicities must always be a diffi cult and exacting art. (3) The third big question I propose to consider here is whether the present age compares favourably with others in respect of a salutary cautiousness. Are we, or are we not less prone to taking-for-granted than other eras? The partiality of the present age for fi ne and free analysis should help it in this particular; but some would complain that the fi ercest analysts themselves take a great deal for granted, for example certain adamantine logical “atoms,” or a naive acceptance of “sensory protocols,” or of the future as the sole standard of verifi cation. In the particular case, this censure may be deserved, but in general we must consider with some care what is philosophically reprehensible in “taking-for-granted.” It may be said, quite justly, that hesitation regarding fi rst principles is not a philosophical virtue. On the contrary, it is a philosophical vice. Again it may be said with a good deal of force that the modern practice of deprecating alleged certainties, and of attempting instead to obtain reasonable assurance from the mutual support of probabilities (a) is itself a fi rst principle, and (b) may itself require certainties on which to erect its probabilities. Avoiding one prejudice, it is easy to fall into another; and a fl accid toleration in philosophy is never to be commended. What should be made plain, however, is that prejudging is a philosophical crime, and that there is no objection whatsoever to the fi rm acceptance of fi rst principles after adequate scrutiny. Since Descartes, Hume and Kant, to mention no others, were fully conversant with the importance of this matter, contemporary philosophy has no excuse for neglecting it. In fact, it has had a sensitive conscience Recent Philosophy 211 on the question. Husserl’s conscience is perhaps the most sensitive of all Phenomenology he says needs an initial scepticism more profound than Descartes’s, a less mitigated initial scepticism than Hume’s. It must cultivate the ancient epoche, that is an entire preliminary suspense of judgment. Other philosophers, if less emphatic, are also very scrupulous. The absolutists with their alternative “The Whole or Nothing” may beg more questions, and snatch more answers, than they think they do, but at least they are convinced that their philosophy vindicates itself after inquiry and would otherwise be contemptible. Other synthetic philosophers, like Mr. Alexander, put forward what they regard as an elaborate set of hypotheses. And it is far to claim that contemporary philosophy has explored this whole region pretty thoroughly. It has seriously and systematically examined the plausibility of initial certainties, the possible ways of presupposing, and the possible defects of plausibility itself. Accordingly it seems plain that philosophy has seriously conducted a serious business during the present century. The period has been lively and also assiduous, not one of philosophy’s greatest periods, but, nevertheless, one of its better periods. The narrative of this book, short as it necessarily was, should have justifi ed this conclusion. And now I shall ask some “popular” questions, not in the best sense. Has there been a general advance in contemporary philosophy? That depends on what you mean. There is no unanimity regarding method or system, no single dynasty of philosophia perennis, no agreement even regarding the boundaries of philosophy or the site of its capital. On the other hand, there is a very general tendency towards experimental readjustment, there is a widespread agreement that serious philosophy is needed not by certain select and cloistered spirits only but by anyone who has a general love of ideas. There is immense industry, and, in certain quarters, an exaggerated willingness to renounce and to unlearn. Certainly there is little virtue and less promise in annual confessions that last year’s book was mostly a muddle, but the fault, if conspicuous, is a lesser thing than the sensile disposition to remain for ever in the same philosophical pill-box. Is current philosophy distracted by growing-pains? That, as we have seen, may be a disingenuous question, for it may assume that there must be something quite defi nite into which philosophy should grow. On the other hand it may be said, soberly and patiently, that if fermentation is over-active in contemporary philosophy, the diagnosis has received attention, and the condition may be controlled. 212 Conclusion

What is the relation of contemporary philosophy to contemporary temperaments? This question seems to me to be essentially unfair. It assumes that there should be stock philosophies for stock fi gures when the truth is that a good philosophy should be able to dominate every temperament. Let it be supposed, however, that, where so much is problematical, it is of advantage to humanity that men of different types should be able to fi nd large patterns of ideas, one of which, at least, is specially attractive to each such type. In that case recent philosophy has much to offer. Is clearness your aim? There are many philosophies that attempt nothing else. You can sharpen your wits to a very keen edge. Do you want “atmosphere”? You can look for inspiration from phenomenology. Is your single desire to see things steadily and whole? There are many “holisms” or absolutisms. Are you a Heraclitean responding only to a philosophy of change? Think of Bergson, Gentile and Whitehead. Do you believe that every reputable philosophy must be distilled out of science? There are several new positivisms, some of them wary and tentative, others (although not so many as formerly) robustly confi dent. Do you trust your senses only? There are several new and very resolute empiricisms. Is “value” your major interest? There has been no philosophical era in which that particular problem has been more fully discussed. There is another side to philosophy – its destructive aspect. Has recent philosophy made important discoveries regarding what should be fi nally and completely abandoned? Have we learned, for certain, how to avoid any one of the mistakes of our ancestors? If a theory can be disproved by experiment, it becomes a mistake unless radically revised. In the realm of intellectual experiment, and therefore in philosophy, only a contradiction has the same degree of fi nality, and even there it is usually possible to argue that a little ingenuity would remove the contradiction. Hence there is very great diffi culty in being confi dent that any of the larger historical ways of philosophizing can be condemned for pure block-headedness. It seems always possible to fi nd an ancestor for any philosophical theory one chooses to form. The recent striking rise in the level of historical scholarship has on the whole increased the obvious folly of crying, “Off with his head.” Silliness may indeed have been revealed in high old-fashioned places, but many of the reputed dunces have been relieved of their caps. Ignorance of the ways of nature, and of the possibilities of human invention, may indeed have muddled many philosophical giants in the past, but the larger generalities of logic, the greater simplicities of the universe and in the character of human Recent Philosophy 213 nature are on the whole immune from such objections. And these, after all, are philosophy’s principal theme. Ways of philosophizing are usually forgotten rather than defi nitely refuted. For the time being they are spent and stale, and man’s interest goes elsewhere. A revival of interest, however, is always possible and, indeed, is quite normal. “Back to Kant,” “Back to Hume,” “Back to Locke,” “Back to St. Thomas,” “Back to Plato.” All these things are said today, in all seriousness, by very eminent people, sometimes, indeed, by the same people. There is a refreshing disposition, it is true, to use the opulence of the past instead of simply admiring its frozen riches; and for the most part the tendency to be content with what So-and-so said in such and such a year is as dead as Mr. Gladstone. But the philosophical past has not been buried, and there is no general agreement, I think, to the effect that any of the larger metaphysical ideas of the past should now be regarded as unhappy ghosts. There are outcries, no doubt, against substance; but many competent philosophers are still substantialists. The recent confi dent revolt against a causality that is something more than uniform sequence has already subsided in many quarters. Dualism, representationism and other such theories, discarded by some, have been rescued by others. To-day there are would-be solipsists, would-be pansensualists, would-be neo- Protagoreans, would-be apostles of common sense. What was supposed to be Kant’s greatest discovery, the discovery, namely, of synthetic judgments a priori, is repudiated in set terms by an important philosophical school. In short many things commonly regarded as philosophical crudities or absurdities are still maintained by competent people; and other competent people are eager to take the risk of setting back the clock. With greater resources for illuminating, man should become less afraid of the twilight. Yet his eyes are but human, and time itself will not permanently improve them.