Aristotle stated that philosophy began with “wonder” and that men continue to philosophize because and in so far as they continue to “wonder.” Philosophy, in other words, is rooted in the desire to understand the world, in the desire to find an intelligible pattern in events and to answer problems which occur to the mind in connection with the world. By using the phrase “the world” I do not mean to imply that the world is something finished and complete at any given moment: I use the phrase in the sense of the data of outer and inner experience with which any mind is confronted. One might say just as well that philosophy arises out of the desire to understand the “historical situation,” meaning by the last phrase the external material environment in which a man finds himself, his physiological and psychological make-up and that of other people, and the historic past. One might discuss the question whether the desire to understand ought to be interpreted or analysed in terms of another drive or other drives. Nietzsche, for example, suggested in the notes which have been published under the title “The Will to Power” that the desire to understand is one of the forms taken by the will to power.

In this paper I shall use terms such as “intrinsically good” which may be deemed old fashioned by many readers and which certainly to my own mind presuppose an objective non-naturalistic theory of ethics. I still hold such a theory and I have not mastered the new jargon by which a sort of higher synthesis between that and other theories is supposed to have been effected, but I do not think that such a view as mine of ethics in general is necessarily presupposed if one is to understand or even agree with the contentions of my article. These relate to a specific problem as to certain ethical actions, which will arise on any view that admits the possibility of giving any sort of legitimate reasons for ethical judgments, as we all do in practice. After all a naturalist can easily translate “intrinsically good” into his own terms, say, valued for its own sake by most people who experience it, and there will still be a question as to what is intrinsically and what is merely instrumentally good and other questions as to what is the logical nature of certain arguments in ethics.

The question I shall deal with is often put in the form “What is the meaning of life?” I shall consider this form later on, but I do not want to begin with it, partly because it assumes that life has a meaning which can be called “the” meaning, an assumption which will have to be looked into, and partly because I want to start with something which looks very much more vague.

I propose in this article to reconsider, in the light of some recent developments in the theory of knowledge, certain general questions about the nature of duty. In particular, I propose to consider the question of the relation between our moral duties on the one hand, and our knowledge or ignorance of facts and of moral principles on the other.

This paper is divided into two sections. The first aims at showing in a general way that the programme and methods of Berkeley and Professor Ryle are to a large extent similar. The second deals with one problem only. It is an attempt to provide interpretation and commentary on Berkeley's attack on “absolute existence” and on Ryle's attack (which comes to the same thing) on the view that there can be different “kinds of existence,” “kinds of status,” or a number of different “worlds.”