Burke's Enquiry is one of those books that hovers, importantly but ineffectively, at the fringes of the attention of most modern readers of philosophy. It is something that they have always meant to read some time but yet which they all too seldom get around to actually reading. Its neglect, no doubt, is mainly to be accounted for as part of the generally rather forlorn position of aesthetics in our intellectual landscape. Students of literature disregard aesthetics as at once too schematic and abstract for their purposes and as too often the work of people inadequately equipped for and experienced in the direct criticism of literature and the arts. Although the dominant style of modern criticism had as one of its principal sources a fairly consciously philosophical inquiry into the nature of literature, namely Richard's Principles of Literary Criticism, in its prevailing form, as manifested in the writings of Dr. Leavis and his fol-lowers, it is hostile to any pretensions to critical relevance on the part of academic philosophy. If it rejects impressionism for determinedly intellectual analysis of the detail of literature, it still relies on philosophy only in the loosest and most colloquial sense of the word in so far as it embodies a definitely articulated point of view on questions of morality. (This is not true, it should be added, of the corresponding American New Criticism.) On the other hand, aesthetics has only figured in the most fitful and peripheral manner on the agenda of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.

Some years ago, it was fashionable for philosophers not to take sceptica arguments seriously. Now, it seems no longer so.

I do not propose to attempt in this article to make any exact or exhaustive definition of religion, but rather to call attention to one of its outstanding psychological characteristics. At the outset, then, I take it for granted that religion is primarily a feeling experience. We make use of the term ‘religion,’ it is true, for many things in addition to immediate feeling experiences, and it is inevitable that we should do so. But it will be well to bear in mind that when we describe Buddhism or Christianity (as a system of beliefs and practices) as ‘a religion’ we are using the term in a secondary fashion. A man may accept the tenets, and to some extent practise the commandments, of a religion in this sense without being religious.

It is commonly believed that there are, in the world, large numbers of objects which occupy three-dimensional space. It is also commonly believed that at least a large part of people's experience is of the surfaces of these material objects. Nevertheless, arguments have been adduced in favour of the view that we are never aware of such surfaces but only of distinct items called ‘sense-data’. It has also been suggested that if we couple the view that experience is limited to sense-data with an empiricist thesis to the effect that knowledge is limited by experience then we are forced to the conclusion that we cannot have any knowledge of material objects. There have been many attempts to reconcile the sense-data thesis with common beliefs about material objects. Among them have been representative realism and phenomenalism. However, a view which may have found favour recently is the Quinean one that ‘the myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience’.1

It is the purpose of the following pages to reconsider the basic problem of induction. According to Hume the concomitance of A with B on one or more occasions gives no valid presumption that A will be accompanied by B on any other occasion. The data of experience may give rise to an association of ideas or set up mental habits, but they provide no reasonable grounds for expecting similar concomitances or sequences in future. If this is correct, we have no starting point for the formation of any valid opinions about matters of fact; we remain ice-bound in a region of total scepticism.

Philosophers, accounted wise in their generation and even beyond their generation, have enthroned the unchanging and sung the praises of fatality and acquiescence. But there is a voice even more authoritative than that of the sages—the voice of the LifeShaper himself. Perched on the height of the human soul, he has set two watchmen, more sagacious and knowing than the Metaphysicians who weave words “About it and about” in the taverns beneath; their names are Wonder and Surprise. Wonder spies out novelty, and Surprise discerns change. Wonder arises at that which is beyond expectation; Surprise at that which is contrary to expec tation. What could completely surpass expectation save the completely novel? What could so drastically dismantle expectation save the hurricane onset of change?

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

Philosophy, October 1974, contains an article entitled ‘Aristotle's Four Becauses’, by Professor Max Hocutt, who contends that Aristotle's aitia (or aition) means ‘a because’ or ‘an explanation’ rather than ‘a cause’ and should be translated accordingly. He argues (a) that only Aristotle's efficient ‘cause’ is a cause in the English sense of the word, and (b) that ‘Aristotle's theory of “causes” is simply an application of his theory of syllogistic to the analysis of scientific knowledge’ (p. 389). Both contentions deserve a word.

Though we should probably find it easier to detect immorality in its instances than to determine morality in its essence, we generally take it for granted that to be moral is to be good. On the assumption, I suppose, that morality and goodness are actually equivalent, some have even said that it is goodness alone that is good. And yet in the name of morality men have suppressed their vitality, stifled their generosity, surrendered their reason, and gone like sheep to the slaughter. In the name of morality men have distorted the truth and tormented the innocent. They have cut off heads in the past and they cut off heads in the present. It seems to me that alike with morality and without it, alike without it and with it, human behaviour may display brutality and insanity. Our human society may disintegrate and wither because of moral vacillation and paralysis. But it may be blighted the world over because struck by the lightning of moral frenzy.

The traditional business of Aesthetics has been the study of the aesthetic experience and activity of mankind, in order to show what it is and how it can be distinguished from other experiences and activities. The assumption commonly made is that we ourselves, like others before us, have had a specifically aesthetic experience in the enjoyment of art or the beauty of nature, or have been engaged in the making of something unquestionably artistic. This basic assumption has been challenged recently by I. A. Richards, who calls aesthetic experience “a phantom.” His view is shared by other contemporary philosophers, who also maintain that there is no appreciable difference between an aesthetic reaction and any other frame of mind, or between artistic behaviour and other forms of creative work. We can certainly appeal to experience for the support of a postulate usually taken for granted and say that most artists, authors, and ordinary people in fact regard their aesthetic experience as something entirely distinct from what they do or feel at other times. Analysis will show whether this common-sense opinion is illusory.

The subject on which I am to address you this evening is one which, though it is of fundamental importance both for philosophy and for practice, cannot but present the gravest difficulties for such treatment as falls within the limits of this occasion. Philosophical problems are always difficult, but those of ultimate metaphysics are in this respect egregious. For the simplifications that are open to the scientific phenomenologist who can rest content with a spatiotemporal world, or to the analyst who concentrates on the objective content with which the human understanding most conspicuously concerns itself, are not open to the metaphysician. He must meet the full complexity of things: not limiting himself to their appearances as objects within human experience, nor to a reflective analysis of their objective content, but taking them as they must be in themselves in order that they may appear as they empirically and reflectively do appear for the special cognitive faculties of man. I ask, therefore, for your patience and attention as I try first of all to lead you into, and then, as I hope, out of, the metaphysical labyrinth. For what I have to describe is something of a metaphysical adventure, or, if you like, a metaphysical ghoststory, in which the ghosts assume such reality as to make the solid things “give up the ghost”—which is just as it should be in a good ghost-story!

There can be little doubt, I think, that the quality and texture of recent scientific and philosophical thought mark a greater break with the past than any innovations such as were introduced by a Gallileo or a Newton, a Descartes or a Kant. The switch over from the logicality and essential rationality of these men to the irrationalisms, the anti-intellectualisms, and the new logics of the moderns, is not at all on the same footing as that deepening of our concepts of knowledge and reality which we associate with the masters of thought, more particularly with the critical philosophy of Kant. Strong and significant as these earlier changes were, they marked but the onward strides of an art of thinking which remained in its essence the same in spite of them. But the thinkers in the public eye to-day are exploring in unknown regions, and it may turn out that they have got beyond their depth. Whatever their fate, it seems undeniable that the experiments that they have made and are making constitute, at points at least, and for the time being, a veritable revolution.