I believe the time is come for a re-estimation of the status of minds in the universe. I use the word mind quite naïvely at first, in the belief that it has a nucleus of meaning that is sufficiently clear. I do not wish its meaning to be restricted to the phenomena of clear consciousness, still less of self-consciousness.

The concepts of pleasure and good, both separately and in their relation to one another, have for centuries been a favourite and fruitful subject of philosophical discussion. The contrasting concepts of pain and evil, however, though by no means entirely neglected, have been, and still are, less popular among philosophers. The reason for this disparity is not altogether clear. The title of a recent autobiography, “Philosophers lead sheltered lives,” might support the explanation that philosophers are (no doubt very properly) reluctant to write on matters of which they have little or no first-hand knowledge. Pleasure and good, it may be said, form part of their own personal experience: but their academic seclusion has little place for either pain or evil. A more serious reason is the assumption, often made but rarely defended, that, since pain and pleasure, evil and good, are in some sense pairs of “opposites,” a full discussion of all four concepts is unnecessary. The nature of pain, it is thought, can easily be inferred from the nature of pleasure, and that of evil from that of good. But even if this were true, it ought not to be taken for granted; the belief (it is more often implicit than explicit) that these concepts are symmetrically disposed opposites ought to be held (if at all) only after an investigation into all of them. And in fact the belief is not true. It does not need profound insight or observation to see that we cannot (as some of the utilitarians once thought) construct a simple hedonic scale on which pleasure appears as a plus, and pain as a minus quantity. Contemporary hedonists have often paid more attention to the psychological complexities involved in this problem than did their classical predecessors. A. L. Hilliard, for example, distinguishes carefully between pain and unpleasantness. Pain he describes as a sensitivity, “correlated with the excitation of specific receptors in the nervous system”: unpleasantness is an affectivity (i.e. roughly, an emotion) to which physiological correlates, though they must be assumed to exist, have not yet been discovered.

(I) Whenever we speak with someone in everyday life, when we write a letter or read a novel, we are said to use natural language. We have a historically given language like English or French; we consider familiar things and events; and we use the language more or less as most members of the same community use it.

THE cult of “art for art's sake,” which had a great vogue at the end of the last century, was, in pictorial art, set aside, or rather absorbed between the two wars by other cults of a similar nature, such as the cult of pure form, of plastic form, of cubism, and these in their turn have been pushed into the background by the sinister spectre of the unconscious. There are genuine problems behind these cults, and they are by no means easy problems. The cult of art for art's sake fell into disrepute; but this was not so much because of its artistic products as because of the kind of life which the devotees of this cult thought they were entitled to lead.

Professor Lewis's paper, which appeared in a recent issue of this journal, raised many interesting problems. I propose, however, to deal only with the principal question which Mr. Lewis himself stated as follows: Just what is theology, what does it do? Mr. Lewis's own answer as to what it does—or rather what it should do to-day—an answer which came rightly enough at the end of his paper, was, briefly, that theology should become creative as opposed to static. That is to say, it should, on the analogy of art criticism, “‘render’ the religious experiences of the past by performing upon them as a whole, and with all the help which careful scholarship can provide, an operation not dissimilar to that performed in the complete symbolism of the original experience upon the elements of more overt meaning within it.”