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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
The need for objective standards of judgement is acutely felt in the bewilderment created by the world situation of our time, a bewilderment that is partly the result of the rapid advance of the natural sciences, with its profound effects upon metaphysical doctrines, religious beliefs and moral attitudes, and partly due to the intractable problems which have arisen in social and political fields. The progress of the sciences, while it seems to have given us secure knowledge of the world about us, has, at the same time, undermined confidence in the criteria of belief and judgement in the conduct of affairs which hitherto had served to guide mankind. Bereft of these the majority of men are unable to see a clear way through the complexities of modern political and economic life and are overwhelmed by the major problems that confront them. As examples of the major perplexities with which mankind is faced today, I shall mention only three:—
page 57 note 1 Vide Werkmeister, W. H., A Philosophy of Science (New York 1949), p. 11.Google Scholar
page 58 note 1 Vide: The Range of Reason (London 1953), PP. 6 and 87 ff.Google Scholar
page 59 note 1 d'Entrèves, A. P., Natural Law (London, 1951).Google Scholar
page 59 note 2 Ibid., p. 11.
page 60 note 1 The Expanding Universe (Cambridge, 1933) p. 17.Google Scholar
page 60 note 2 Vide The Mind and the Eye (Cambridge, 1954) p. 13 and cf. pp. 115 ff.Google Scholar
page 61 note 1 The truth of this view has recently been confirmed by the experience of the congenitally blind whose sight has been restored in adult life by modern surgery. This is described by Professor J. Z. Young: “The patient on opening his eyes for the first time gets little or no enjoyment; indeed, he finds the experience painful. He reports only a spinning mass of lights and colours. He proves to be quite unable to pick out objects by sight, to recognize what they are, or to name them. He has no conception of a space with objects in it, although he knows all about objects and their names by touch. ‘Of course,’ you will say, ‘he must take a little time to learn to recognize them by sight.’ Not a little time, but a very, very long time, in fact years. His brain has not been trained in the rules of seeing. We are not conscious that there are any such rules; we think we see, as we say ‘naturally.’ But we have in fact learned a whole set of rules during childhood.” Doubt and Certainty in Science. Young, J. Z. (Oxford, 1951) p. 62. There can be no doubt that a similar process is involved in learning to perceive through the other senses besides vision, if we had but the means of discovering it.Google Scholar
page 62 note 1 The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford, 1950) p. 13.Google Scholar
page 63 note 1 Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (London, 1952) pp. 39–42.Google Scholar
page 64 note 1 In Defence of Reason (London, 1951) p. 214.Google Scholar
page 67 note 1 Vide: Richard Robinson “The Emotive Theory of Ethics,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Sup. Vol. XXII, 1948, and A. J. Ayer “On the Analysis of Moral Judgement,” Horizon, Vol. XX, No. 117, reprinted in Philosophical Essays (London, 1954).
page 68 note 1 The Eclipse of Reason (O.U.P., New York, 1947)Google Scholar
page 68 note 2 Ibid., p. 128.
page 69 note 1 The Eclipse of Reason, p. 175.
page 69 note 2 Ibid., p. 174.
page 70 note 1 E.g. by Weldon, T. D., The Vocabulary of Politics (Harmondsworth, 1953), p. 30 ff.Google Scholar
page 70 note 2 Planck, Max, Where is Science Going? (London, 1933), Epilogue, pp. 203–4.Google Scholar
page 70 note 3 Cf. The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics (London, 1931) pp. 23–6.Google Scholar
page 70 note 4 Cf. The Philosophy of Physics (London, 1936), p. 33.Google Scholar
page 71 note 1 Cf. Where is Science Going? Ch. Ill, esp. pp. 85–6, 88, 92–5.
page 71 note 2 The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge, 1933), pp. 284–5.Google Scholar
page 71 note 3 A similar account of biological knowledge is given by Dr. Agnes Arber, op. cit., pp. 28–9.
page 71 note 4 Vide The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), p. 238 ff.Google Scholar
page 72 note 1 The Idea of History, p. 245.
page 73 note 1 Experiments in Living (London, 1952), p. 49.Google Scholar
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