I must begin by apologizing for taking a somewhat well-worn subject for my theme. My reason is that I have not yet found a recent treatment of it which is altogether to my satisfaction. Most of them seem to me too often to approach the subject from a point of view which, in a way, expects too much from the study of Plato or any other ancient author, and consequently either makes exaggerated claims for it or fails to do justice to what we really can learn.

At this splendid moment my august Master has commissioned me, together with my colleague Modo, to make an authoritative statement on the meaning and value of War and, if possible, to clear up the long misunderstanding which has existed between us and mankind. When I speak of an authoritative statement I cannot, of course, claim absolute authority. Shakespeare was quite wrong in identifying Modo and me with our sublime Prince. We may indeed be gentlemen. The word has several different senses. We are at any rate very subordinate gentlemen among his innumerable attendants. If we are commissioned to speak at this moment, it is because just now, through a chain of events in which our Master played a supreme part, the world seems to have been handed over to us to do what we like with. It is up to us to explain what we like, why we like it, and why we confidently expect the general sympathy of mankind.

In this paper I shall explain what I take to be the nature of justice; and the method which I shall follow is that of attempting to infer the essential nature of justice from an examination of its actual practical operation. Perhaps the reader will be able to follow the drift of the argument more easily, and be more on his guard against possible misstatements of fact or erroneous inferences, if I mention at the outset the main conclusions to which I hope to lead him.

1. Aim and Scope of this Paper.—In this paper I shall try to show that “duty” derives its significance from its relation to “interest,” and that the former concept cannot be understood when taken apart from its relation to the latter. Such a doctrine is, I am aware, rejected by some contemporary philosophers; and I shall, I trust, make it sufficiently clear in the sequel why I am unable to accept their view.

I am not, however, concerned primarily with criticism of other theories. This paper represents an attempt to interpret a particular province of “the common moral consciousness” and to elicit the principles there implied. I begin by accepting the view that, like natural science, ethics has its data, and that it is the business of ethics to interpret these data which are the contents of the “moral consciousness.” In Section A I discuss various methods which may be used for the discovery of the relevant data, and suggest that initial enquiries can most fruitfully be pursued in the field of law and custom. In Section B I undertake an analysis of the principles of the law relating to promise-keeping. As a result of what is there found, it becomes necessary, in Section C, to discuss the nature of rights and their relation to interests, and, in Section D, the nature of duties and their relation to rights.

Recent results in kinematics, obtained by myself and those working with me, have convinced me that the philosophical status of physics, as it has come down to us from Renaissance days, requires reconsideration. The reason can be stated in a couple of sentences: it has been found possible to establish certain laws of physics—laws of motion, the law of gravitation, the laws known under the name of the Lorentz transformation, and some others—purely deductively, without specific assumptions, and without empirical appeals save only to the empirical awareness of something we call “the passage of time.” Yet physicists have claimed ad nauseam that the ultimate sanction for “laws of nature” is observation and experiment, that this is what distinguishes physics from other branches of exact inquiry. The contrast in these two conceptions of natural law needs no emphasis. It is the purpose of this article to attempt to clarify this confused situation.

Rogery Fry in Last Lectures threw out the suggestion that the inferiority of neolithic to palaeolithic painting might be due to the birth or growth of language and the consequent temptation to dull the vivid sensibility for individual life by the practically useful habit of abstract or generalized thinking. Whether or no the birth and growth of language involved a set-back for graphic and plastic art, it certainly first made poetry possible. And the question which puzzles me is this: Would any art analogous to poetry have been possible without speech? What if a tongue-tied race had invented a system of ideograms or purely conventional gestures?

We are familiar with the statement that the present world-conflagration is, or involves, a struggle between two different philosophies. Obviously the statement is very vague, and it is exceedingly difficult to say exactly what it means. But if it has any meaning at all, a professional philosopher ought to be supremely interested in it. Philosophers are too apt to sit in their ivory towers, weaving curious distinctions and debating strange intellectual puzzles, without any consideration of their implications for humanity. For even the most abstract questions invariably have, in the end, important practical bearings. And we are apt to forget that, in the last analysis, philosophers are the uncrowned rulers of the world. For their ideas, secretly infiltrating among the masses, are among the forces which drive civilizations. Plato has had more influence on the destiny of man than the inventor of the steam engine. And so I make no apology for attempting to discuss here the question whether the two great nations now engaged in war, Germany and Britain, represent any philosophical ideas, what the philosophical issues of the war are, and where, in those issues, the truth, or the greater degree of truth, lies. And the paper will have two parts. In the first I shall try briefly to state what I believe the issues to be. In the second I shall attempt to discover whether there is any rational ground for preferring the philosophy of the one side to that of the other.

I must explain at once that these few pages do not attempt or pretend to be anything like a formal review of the recently published posthumous volume of Professor Bowman with the same title. I am precluded from writing such a review partly by the wide range of problems attacked by the author, partly by my own insufficient familiarity with many of the positions of the most recent physical and natural science which are brought under review. I will therefore confine myself, so far as the strict business of the reviewer is concerned, to the single remark that the editor, Professor J. W. Scott, has discharged his difficult task of preparing the book for publication—no easy matter, as will be seen from his Preface—with equal skill and devotion, and has laid himself open to no worse criticism than that there are less than a dozen obvious slight misprints which have escaped detection, but will readily be detected by a careful reader. What I propose to do in the remarks which follow is simply to indicate the very real importance of the book by saying something as to its main purpose and thesis, and the points where I still feel that there is some difficulty or ambiguity about the writer's position which would, no doubt, have been largely cleared up if he had lived to reconstruct the whole six of his Vanuxem Lectures for publication as he has done the first three.

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 various discussions on morals which have recently appeared in the pages of this journal, like most modern discussions of the subject, have had to concern themselves with two antitheses, between the good and the right, and between duty and interest. As to the first, is the good what it is because it is right, or is right what it is because it is good? Or may the two be distinct, so that what is right is not necessarily good? And if it is not good, is it bad? Or do the right and the good overlap? For the second, the antithesis between duty and interest—“of course,” says one, “the two have nothing to do with one another; the more carefully we keep them apart, the better.” In rare instances, indeed, it will be allowed that my duty may coincide with my interest; but when it does so, it is felt to be shorn of half its worth. If it pays me to tell the truth, what thank have I for all my veracity?

It is a wise child who knows his own father; and the climate of thought of a generation may be subtly changed without conscious recognition of the formative minds which have been, if not the parents, at least the godparents of that change. That is to say, they have sponsored the baptism of ideas which would only be safe so long as they renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil; but, as is so often the case, when the offspring grow up they form a pact with those very powers. To make Søren Kierkegaard spiritually responsible for the present war would have as little, and perhaps as much, truth in it as the facile explanations which made Hegel responsible for the last one. But it is part of the demonism of policies of power and ambition to be able to pervert to their own ends religious ideas which in their intention are a protest against those very ambitions; and, by so doing, to win a response from people who, in a dim, unconscious way, are feeling after the ideas themselves, but have neither the powers of self-criticism nor of radical thinking to resist travesties of them which appear to justify their own self-assertion. When Hitler informed Sir Nevile Henderson that he was a man of “ad infinitum decisions” we may question the extent of his knowledge either of the Latin language or of the existential philosophy; but the phrase awakes an echo of the religious philosophy of circles far removed from National-Socialism. Both Nazi apologists and their Confessional or independent opponents are consciously or unconsciously moved by a way of thinking which puts the decision of the individual, made in the concrete moment, above any objective or universal norm of ethics or of reason by which it can be either justified or criticized.

Nobody who reads this article is likely to need convincing that there are bad political arguments. But, however many of them are bad, unless there are also some good ones, we can do nothing by reason in politics, there is no possibility of settling disputes rationally or in any other way except by fighting and there could be no ground either why we fight for any one cause rather than any other or why we should fight rather than make peace or vice versa. But surprisingly little has been said by philosophers about this important type of argument. However, this omission is less surprising and less harmful than it might appear at first sight because all thoroughgoing political arguments are, I think, at bottom arguments as to what ought to be done and therefore ethical arguments in a wide sense of the word, and philosophers have certainly said a good deal about ethical arguments. However, it is well worth while treating political arguments separately, especially in these very political days, and considering their particular character. By political arguments I mean, not the abstract arguments of books on political philosophy, but the everyday concrete political arguments of the platform, the press and the meal-time conversation. What is their logical nature in so far as they are not mere fallacies or unsupported assertions, and can the philosopher qua philosopher say anything that will help in such discussions and contribute towards the replacement of bad arguments by good, a most desirable consummation and one the achievement of which in all countries would certainly have prevented the present war?

The opinion that I want to discuss in this essay is fairly commonly although not universally held among moralists. It is the opinion that there is never a moral duty to try to promote one's own pleasure for the sake of that pleasure although, contrariwise, there is often a moral duty to try to promote the pleasure of others for the sake of that pleasure. I cannot myself assent to the view, and I want to explain why I cannot; but I allow that the opposition I have to face is formidable. Indeed there are authors like Meinong who would make degree of self-sacrifice the standard of morality.

In an illusion, if what has been said in the earlier part of this section is right, the essential thing is the presence to the mind of some false proposition, which may be affirmed or denied according as we are or are not deceived. But what precisely is this false proposition in each case? And, a second question, on what grounds do we entertain it?

The final persistence of democracy depends upon whether its right decisions outweigh the wrong ones in number and value, though conceivably one really bad decision might ruin the structure built on all the right ones. It is passing from the stage where a few reasoning leaders govern the masses through their emotions, to the next perilous stage in which every man's thoughts matter. Right decisions depend upon access to relevant facts and doing the right thinking about them. It is of the essence of Nazi philosophy that general liberty of thought is self-destructive, the common man not being rational; it is of the essence of Nazi practice to flatter the many by the pretence that their thinking does matter, but to control and modify the whole supply of factual material upon which they must reason. One declared to me once that he favoured freedom of thought and was not afraid of it, for if he was allowed to supply the “facts” any ordinary rational mind could come to only one conclusion, viz. the one he intended. And in the process the ordinary man might remain proud of his reasoning power, so long as he could be sheltered from seeing the falsity of his conclusions. Control of facts must be perpetual, and cats must never be allowed to get out of bags. But in a democracy, where facts are all born free (and much too equal), it is the thinking about them that really matters.

Few philosophical controversies have been waged with greater acrimony than the controversy between the libertarians and the determinists; the vigour with which both sides of the question have been espoused is due not only to the metaphysical importance of the issue—which is indeed considerable—but more especially to its moral and religious implications. No other philosophical issues, with the exception of those pertaining to God and the immortality of the soul, are of greater ethical and theological moment. So thoroughly has the question been debated that further consideration of it may seem futile. Has not the evidence been so completely canvassed on both sides of the controversy that further discussion will be a fruitless reiteration of long familiar arguments? The free-will problem is considered by many contemporary thinkers an admittedly unsolved but completely outmoded problem to which they respond with impatience or complete indifference. This attitude toward the problem is quite indefensible since the question of the freedom of the will is one of those perennially significant philosophical issues which takes on new meaning in every age and is particularly significant in the context of contemporary science and philosophy. Recent psychology, in large measure through the influence of Freud, has achieved a more penetrating analysis of human motivation by bringing to the fore certain hitherto obscure factors which are operative in volition. The psychology of the subconscious by filling in apparent gaps in the psychological causation of volition has furthered the case for determinism.

According to tranditional philosophical terminology and to most interpretations of Cartesianism, Descartes is a dualist. This dualism is expressed in his fundamental distinction between two substances—mind and matter—and, though admitted to be full of difficulties and by many to be untenable, it has very generally been regarded as at least a clearly intelligible doctrine, consistently held by Descartes. That this is not so has been shown by Professor Boyce Gibson in his able and careful analysis of Cartesianism. The aim of the present essay is to draw attention to another difficulty that has not been sufficiently noticed; whether it is an actual one or only an apparent one due to a misunderstanding of Descartes is a question that may be left to those who read him differently and who may be able to remove one more charge of inconsistency. The general contention is that Descartes—and this point is conceded in expositions of Descartes—seeks to prove that there are material bodies, that material bodies are necessary for his own account of the physical universe, and that yet his own theory of matter as extension, even combined with motion, makes the existence of bodies (in the plural) impossible and hence any proof of such existence impossible. In fact, the employment of the idea of motion only serves to emphasize the difficulty and inconsistency of the theory.

Philosophy is commonly referred to as a “spirit” of inquiry, a general attitude toward things, rather than a body of conclusions; but as every spirit in this world must have a body, so philosophy must have a method. The expression, “philosophical method,” is used with somewhat varying meanings, but it is the question of how philosophical conclusions are attained that we have in mind in the present article.

I have tried to expound Whitehead's doctrine of Creativity and of actual entities. Nothing remains but to give a brief summary of what has been said in the foregoing notes.

Creativity is the ultimate activity and principle of novelty in the Universe.

The world is said to consist of “actual entities,” not substances. An actual entity is also called an “actual occasion.” It is essentially a genetic process, having two sides, (I) the process of “becoming,” and (2) the outcome of the process named the “satisfaction.” The satisfaction is the fully determined achievement abstracted from the process. On attaining satisfaction the actual entity viewed as a self-creating subject loses its “final” causation, and as a subject perishes, but the “satisfaction” remains as a potential constituent for the emergence of a new actual entity. This is its “efficient” causation. The potentiality of the satisfaction for a new creation is called its “objective immortality”: in this capacity it functions as an “object” for the self-creation of another actual entity.

The following discussion arises out of reflection upon a number of related topics. One of these is the problem of perception, and in particular of perceptual illusion. Another is the use which has been made, e.g. by Bradley, of the distinction between appearance and reality as a guiding principle of metaphysical inquiry. But the immediate occasion of the present inquiry is the attempt to discover what Kant in particular has to say upon these and similar problems. It is for this reason that I have given the paper its title, and not because I wish to pose as an expert in Kantian scholarship. What contribution I can make to Kantian studies is only that of the outsider whose questions may perhaps suggest to the experts lines of inquiry which their very familiarity with Kant's ways of expressing himself may have led them to overlook. But the aim of the paper is not so much to discover what Kant meant as to formulate a particular view which may have been Kant's in such a way that we can judge whether it is true or not. The decision on that point, however, falls outside the scope of the present discussion.