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

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

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

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

§ 21. Until a few years ago the hope of the physicist seems on the whole to have been that he would eventually be able to exhibit a single interconnected system of perfectly deterministic causal laws. He took the relation of cause and effect in all change to be such that from a determinate antecedent state of that which changes there must necessarily follow a different subsequent state of it, and it was assumed by him that complete knowledge of the antecedent state must enable exact prediction of the subsequent state. I do not think it matters here whether that which changes was taken as a limited subject of change or as the whole physical world.

Some time ago I had a shock. I was reading, in the Mathematical Gazette for March 1931, Sir A. S. Eddington's presidential address to the Mathematical Association in 1930. And quite suddenly I came on the statement that the number of protons in the universe is either 7 or 14 with 78 noughts after it. My breath was taken away. Readers of R. L. Stevenson's story, Providence and the Guitar, will remember the maiden lady who, after hearing what the Commissary said when he was woken up in the night, felt her maiden modesty so outraged that she doubted if she ranked any longer as a maiden lady. I felt just like that. I felt that my philosophic modesty had been so outraged that I doubted if I ranked any longer as a humble student of philosophy. Sir Arthur has certainly not counted them. Then how in the world does he know that they are what he says they are?

Platonic studies continue to be cultivated, even in Italy, with undiminished fervour. And in Italy, as in England and Germany, interpretation tends to pass from one extreme to the opposite. At one time the chief concern of the exponents of Plato was to reconstruct his ”system“; and since his thought did not easily lend itself to unification, every effort was made to force it within the limits of a preconceived scheme. The present tendency, however, is to start from the opposite standpoint–that there is no philosophy of Plato, only a variable philosophical activity which is, as it were, consumed in each dialogue in turn, to be rekindled inexplicably in the next. Hence the work of interpretation reduces itself to a summary of the contents of various writings, arranged as far as possible in chronological order, and each examined independently as a complete and self-sufficing entity. The systematic interpreters used to make all the dialogues burn with a single flame, for which is now substituted a series of ignes fatui in which the connection is lost, or only visible at intervals.