Mr.Ayer, in Language, Truth and Logic (p. 161), says: “Sentences which simply express moral judgments do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood.... Aesthetic terms are used in exactly the same way as ethical terms."

A recent letter to the Press counselled caution on the return of the German colonies on the grounds that Germany was a notoriously ungrateful nation. A few years after we presented Heligoland to her, the Kruger telegram showed her ready to encourage our enemies. Why should we now make her further gifts which would merely render more effective similar treachery? Clearly behaviour like this by an individual would warrant such an attitude. If I give a man a present on Monday and on Tuesday he stabs me in the back,

WilliamJames's famous book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, appeared in 1902. Ever since that date studies of the psychology of mysticism have poured from the press. In our own country we may name Evelyn Underhill, Mrs. Herman, and von Hügel. In France, Bastide, Murisier, Récéjac, Boutroux, Delacroix, Janet, Poulain, Bremond, Bergson, Bréhier. In America, besides William James, Starbuck, Leuba, Coe, Hocking, Rufus Jones, P. E. More, Pratt, Royce, Bennett. These lists are far from complete. In Germany the subject seems to have aroused less interest; but Otto, not long before his death, published a book dealing with it.

In what, after all, does civilization consist? If Japanese aggression in China were successful, would it bring to the Chinese a higher civilization or subject them to a lower? Sidney and Beatrice Webb entitled their spacious survey of present-day Russia Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? with a query at the end. In a postscript to that book they give reasons why they think that query might be omitted. But Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco assert that Communism is not a civilization at all, but an embodiment of the forces of destruction, to be resisted at all costs and to the death. History has accorded the title of “the Great” only as a rule to the

The moral doctrine of Hobbes, in many ways the most interesting of our major British philosophers, is, I think, commonly seen in a false perspective which has seriously obscured its real affinities. This is, no doubt, largely due to the fact that most modern readers begin and end their study of Hobbes's ethics with the Leviathan, a rhetorical and, in many ways, a popular Streitschrift published in the very culmination of what looked at the time to be a permanent revolution, and do not pay such attention to the more calmly argued statements of the same doctrine contained in the Elements of Law, circulated before the outbreak of the Civil War, or the De Cive,

There may in general be said to be two ways in which progress may be made in the understanding and towards the solution of a problem. The one is that of the continual development of it in the form originally given to it, by confirming this and rejecting that point in the light of fresh evidence, by clarification of concepts, and by detecting and resolving ambiguities and inconsistencies. Here it is assumed that the standpoint from which the problem has been approached is relevant and adequate. The other is entered upon when an “impasse” has been reached which can only be avoided by the realization that the original question was asked in a way which was either partially or wholly false or misleading. This is the more radical way of partial or total reformulation of the problem to be solved.

The close proximity of the nineteenth century to our own age is an impediment in the way of tracing with confidence the lines of its intellectual development, and more especially of estimating the significance of its philosophical speculation. Certain characteristics of the latter are, however, already sufficiently obvious. It is clear, at any rate, that the chief attempts at philosophical construction in the nineteenth century were the outcome of German reflexion; it is clear also that the great thinker who died in 1804 set the current of speculative activity upon a course markedly distinguishable from any that had been followed in preceding centuries. As a philosophical

It is a platitude that thought implies a subject and an object: the subject is the thinker, or the thinking mind, and the object is that which is thought about. This is probably the most elementary fact of consciousness, comprehensible alike to the child, the unreflecting man of affairs, and the philosopher, and it forms the natural startingpoint for philosophy. And indeed, one of the great divisions between philosophical systems is that which separates subjectivism on one hand from objectivism (more often called by the indefinite and overburdened name, realism) on the other. Subjectivism professes to interpret the object in terms of the subject, and objectivism professes to interpret the subject in terms of the object.

Ethics or Moral Philosophy investigates the application of the terms good and bad. We constantly use these predicates, and Ethics is an inquiry into our use of them. But this pair of terms is used over a very wide field and no one inquiry could cover it all. A ship or a tea or a house may be called good; and the investigation of such judgments would require a knowledge of ships, teas, or houses. Moral philosophy does not pretend to cover the whole field or to investigate every use of the terms: it is concerned only with the. moral use, or more explicitly with the use of the terms in reference to human conduct. And even this limitation may not be sufficient.

Like all my generation at Oxford, in the far-away years of the turn of the century, I received my first introduction to the Philosophical Theory of the State through the reading of Plato’s Republic. There followed Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Bosanquet— with a disapproving glance at Mill and Spencer. Alongside this survey of widely varying theories there ran a lively interest in the politics of the day under a “democratic,” i.e. parliamentary, system of government, with much experience of “democratic” methods in the running of various college and university societies, the officials of which were elected by the members, and the actions of which were determined, after discussion, by majority vote.

In ordinary life everyone assumes that he has a great deal of knowledge about other minds or persons. This assumption has naturally aroused the curiosity of philosophers; though perhaps they have not been as curious about it as they ought to have been, for they have devoted many volumes to our consciousness of the material world, but very few to our consciousness of one another. It was thought at one time that each of us derives his knowledge of other minds from the observation of other human organisms. I observe (it was said) that there are a number of bodies which resemble my own fairly closely in their shape, size, and manner of movement; I conclude by analogy that each of these bodies is animated by a

Nobody interested in philosophy need be deterred by Kant's reputation for difficulty from familiarizing himself with his ethics. While the Critique of Pure Reason and his other non-ethical works are very hard to follow, the first two chapters of the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals at least are clear and straightforward and presuppose little previous acquaintance with philosophy. The third chapter is not about ethics as such but about the metaphysical problem of freedom and should be omitted by anyone who is not familiar with Kant's general philosophy, but the first two

In Germany the claim is sometimes made that National Socialism incorporates the best of Plato’s political theory. In this country, too, Bertrand Russell and Mr. R. H. Crossman have emphasized, but with a different intention, the fascist elements in Plato's thought. It has to be admitted that whereas it would be merely laughable to claim that Jesus or Kant were exponents of the fascist philosophy, there is no such glaring incongruity with regard to Plato. It may be of some interest, therefore, to examine anew the alleged likeness between the basic principles of fascism and the thought of Plato. No one would deny a strong likeness between some details of Plato’s

To preach morals is easy, to ground them difficult. I think this saying of Schopenhauer is quite true. In the writings of the moral theorists we meet with ample enthusiasm for the beauty and the loftiness of moral principles. But even the best moral sermons are certainly no substitute for philosophical reasoning. To-day more than ever before we need the soundest foundation for a truly fixed ethics. For, to-day there is not a single affirmation in morals, which is not contradicted by its opposite. Eduard von Hartmann, for instance, could in the beginning of the twentieth century still maintain that the differences of opinion in ethics are concerned

We may look at the relation of will and motive from another side as follows: Will, we have said, is an individual response to an individual situation. Like the situation itself, it is not a fixed thing persisting through change, but involved in a continuous flow of change, re-adapting itself constantly in one respect or another to recognized changes of circumstance. It can have no more immutability than circumstance, and if it is not to be left behind in the march of events and become old-fashioned, it should have the capacity for the same rapidity of change. Now motives also change, but in a different way. First one motive operates, then another, as circum-

In the course of his discussion of the work of the Disarmament Commission, in his book on the League of Nations, Sir Alfred Zimmern asks why the British people were so active in sponsoring disarmament. The question arises because, as he points out, the project must evoke proposals in regard to security which they were in no mood to consider. “The explanation,” he proceeds, “no doubt is that the eventuality, however obvious it may seem in retrospect, was overlooked in the enthusiasm for what had become for a certain type of British opinion a moral crusade, rather than a realistic

Is there any important distinction between a law and a theory? Some usages suggest that there is. Thus, everyone speaks of Boyle's Law (not theory) and of the dynamical theory (not law or laws) of gases. But the most summary inquiry will show that the distinction is not maintained consistently by individual authors, still less as between different authors; the terms “Newtonian law” and “theory of gravitation” seem to be used indifferently to denote the same proposition(s).

In a recent article in Philosophy (April, 1936) Professor Knox makes a plea for a philosophic treatment of economic activity by way of contrast to either the specialized study of economic history or of economic science. The conclusion which was reached was embodied in the statement that “the historical and scientific methods of the study of economic activity leave incompletely satisfied the curiosity of students, and reach results which need special interpretation before they can be useful to politicians, let alone to business men” (p. 159). Each of these methods is said to involve unreal abstractions which detract from the usefulness of the study. A philosophic

Throughout the history of philosophy the concept of unity has presented a problem. What does it mean to say that the cosmos is one, that a thing is one, that an organism is one, that a nation is one, that mind and body are one, that knower and known are one? Exactly what is it that is denoted when unity is postulated of anything? And when two or more entities are conceived as subsisting in unity, exactly what is the relation between that unity on the one hand, and its correlative duality or plurality on the other?