A study of moral values is a study of the values relevant to character and conduct. Since conduct consists of actions (including refusals to act) and character is exhibited in and inferred from actions, the phrase “values relevant to actions” would perhaps suffice. The term “values” needs little amplification. But it is necessary to observe that there are on the face of it two sets of values relevant to actions, namely (1) those which actions themselves possess, so that we differentiate them as good and bad actions—a differentiation which may be made by a spectator in regard to a process in which he himself takes no part; (2) those asserted implicitly by an agent in his action considered as an interference with the course of events. In the most obvious and typical cases this second set of values attach themselves, not to actions, but to the environment of action as modifiable by it; in particular, to states or events which action may help to maintain or bring about. Thus the act of tidying a room implies a preference under the given circumstances for a tidy rather than an untidy room.

It is much more certain that the artist can help the philosopher than that the philosopher can help the artist. The purpose of this paper is to indicate the kind of questions about art which the philosopher asks, in order that those whose concern is with art, artists themselves in the first instance, and critics of art, may judge if these questions are interesting to them, and if so may co-operate with the philosophers in seeking to answer them. Now that the sciences and the other occupations of man become so sharply separated from each other, philosophy has come to have a peculiar position. It deals with the questions which are left over from the sciences, and this gives it a specific and important office to perform.

Gentile's philosophy merits the attention of every serious thinker, for it presents the doctrine that reality is spiritual in a more uncompromising form than is to be found elsewhere, and claims to solve on this principle all the great problems that have beset the history of metaphysic. His own name for it is Absolute or Actual Idealism (Idealismo assoluto or attuale). For Gentile, nothing is real but the Spirit, and by the Spirit he means the pure act of self-conscious thinking. “The subject that conceives itself in conceiving All is the reality itself.” In the act of conscious thinking, the Spirit is present in its entirety as subject (Io universale, transcendentale, assoluto); generating therein by its own creative spontaneity a world of objects, and resolving the products of this act of objectification into the womb that gave them birth. In this immanent dialectic–pure subject (thesis), pure object (antithesis), subject-object (synthesis)–lies the rhythmic life-history of the Spirit. “Our doctrine,” writes Gentile, “is the theory of the Spirit as act which posits its object in a multiplicity of objects, resolving their multiplicity and objectivity in the unity of the subject itself.” For such a doctrine, transcendence is the enemy, the Goliath whom Gentile has gone forth to slay. He confronts us, on almost every page of his writings, with an ineluctable dilemma. Either a philosophy of sheer immanence, or reality is unknowable.

Of all the sciences, philosophy is the most concrete and comprehensive. The sense of cold, remote spaces which it is apt to generate in us is the result of this very width and concreteness. The philosopher has to condense the many-sided variety of human life and express it through the symbols of a common language. The symbols are at best only semi-transparent. Abstractness descends upon him the moment they become opaque. Philosophy, in fact, is useless to us unless we can see through it. If we cannot, the fault may be ours. If it is the philosopher's, then his failure is a failure to be wide enough or concrete enough. He needs above all to be sympathetically sensitive to the wide range of human interests, because it is this as a whole that he is bidden to systematize. He must give a single answer, and for that he must formulate a single question. Therefore his first problem is to discover the unity of problems.

The word “emergent” was suggested by George Henry Lewes for specialized use in contradistinction to “resultant.” Little came of the suggestion, so far as I know, for some forty years.

All that Lewes had to say on the matter is comprised within half a dozen, or at most eleven, pages, at the close of a long-winded, but at that time not negligible, discussion of Force and Cause, and is preceded by a section on Hume's Theory of Causation. This leads up to the statement: ‘There are two classes of effects markedly distinguishable as resultants and enter gents.’ Even here there was nothing new save in the adoption and adaptation of the word ‘emergent’ in place, let us say, of John Stuart Mill's ‘heteropathic effects.’

Simplicius, writing in the sixth century, distinguishes physical science from astronomy on the ground that, whereas it is the function of the physicist to “inquire into the nature of the heavens and the stars, into their potentialities, their quality, their becoming and passing away,” astronomy has no competence in questions of this primary character. Its function is “to determine the order of the heavenly bodies, their figures, magnitudes, distances from the earth, sun and moon, their eclipses, conjunctions, the quantitative and qualitative properties of their motions,” etc. For this purpose it requires arithmetic and geometry, but cares not how the heavenly motions be described, whether in terms of excentrics or epicycles, so long as the appearances can thus be accounted for.

The sudden death of Professor Hobhouse on June 21, at the age of sixty-four years, at Alençon, Normandy, is a heavy loss to science and philosophy. He combined in a rare degree great powers of metaphysical speculation and synthesis with capacity for painstaking and detailed research in many fields of empirical science. He was one of the pioneers of comparative psychology; he developed a technique of the greatest value in the handling of the vast and chaotic data of anthropology; he laid the foundations of a scientific sociology; and he has attempted a synthesis of the results of his scientific and philosophical studies on a scale which must win for him a high place among the systematic thinkers of the world. As a teacher and a social leader he inspired love and reverence by the nobility of his thought and utterance, his passion for justice, his wise and tender humanity. Members of the Philosophical Institute have special cause to mourn his loss. When the Institute was founded in 1925, it was the unanimous wish of all connected with its foundation that Professor Hobhouse should be its chairman; and it has been a great piece of good fortune for the Institute to have had the benefit of his ripe wisdom and extensive experience during the first five years of its life.

Some modern thinkers have supposed that “cause” is an outworn notion, or at least that it is one of which modern science has no need. This is due mainly to the discovery that, while the scientist can give us general laws as to what in fact happens, he cannot help us to discern the reason for the laws or the inward nature of the forces on which they depend. He can tell us the “that” but not the “why”; he cannot show us in a single case that the effect follows necessarily a priori from the nature of the cause, that any other effect than the one which actually takes place would be logically impossible. He has studied the law of gravitation, but this law does not enable him to see why material bodies should attract each other in this fashion; it is only a generalized statement of the fact that they do. He knows that certain substances, if absorbed by eating, will nourish and others destroy our tissues; but he cannot say why they should do so. He can no doubt analyse them further and discover that, for example, meat is nourishing because it contains a large proportion of nitrogenous matter, but he could not tell a priori whether this nitrogenous matter would be likely to nourish or to poison us. Only where mathematics can be applied do we see necessity in such a way that any alternative becomes inconceivable to us; but mathematics alone can never establish from a quantity present here and now what quantity there will be at a later time or in another part of space. Mathematics can show, e.g., that, if there is 2 + 2 here and now, there must be 4 here and now, not that, if there is 2 + 2 here and now, there will be 4 in an hour's time or a mile away; and therefore it cannot be made the sole basis of any causal law whatever.

I was led to philosophy by politics. There can be no foundation for political action except in ethics; and there can be no foundation for ethics except in some form of metaphysics, whether religious or other. And one cannot travel very far along the philosophic road— particularly if one has in mind the need of arriving at some definite destination—without finding as an obstacle the perennial problem of Free Will. It is an obstacle which has somehow to be crossed. It cannot be evaded or ignored. The man who is dealing with public affairs—with the principles of Criminal Law, for example, or with the factors that make for peace or war, and indeed with any of the major questions that confront our society—if he tries to think things out, is faced constantly by the problem of individual human responsibility; just as the man of religion is faced by it constantly.

The problem of Time is one of the most fascinating and yet most difficult of those questions to which the human mind applies itself in philosophical thought. Dean Inge, in his Philosophy of Plotinus, has referred to this problem as ‘the hardest in metaphysics,’ and we know that “from the time of Parmenides and Zeno to that of Mr. Bradley and M. Bergson, there has been no other problem that has seemed so baffling as that of Time.”

In considering this perennial question of the relationship between science and religion it is important to avoid any appearance—or reality—of burking the facts. When one speaks of science one speaks of science as it is understood, and as research is carried out in it, by specialists in the various fields; and it is the most honest and the wisest course to consider in each separate science what exactly the results amount to and what the theories represent.

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.

Even the best of artists are human, and therefore capable of turning out bad work. The father of poets has set his children the example of nodding, and small blame to his children if in this, as in other matters, they have followed where Homer led. Critics, that hardy and self-sacrificing race of beings who voluntarily incur the enmity of artists for the sake of the common welfare, have to classify the various manners and causes of nodding in poets. I do not claim to be a critic, but I want to call your attention to a particular kind of nodding which presents a curious problem in the theory of art. I will call it the nod of the uncongenial subject.

An ethic is rational if it can justify itself rationally—that is to say, if there is a “why” and a “wherefore” in it amenable to reflection, and underivative. An ethic, on the other hand, is irrational if reason and reflection are irrelevant to it, or if, being relevant, they are fundamentally subordinate, and are only the lackeys of a governing consideration which is either irrational or non-rational. The intention of this lecture is to explore the possibilities of rationalism in ethics, supposing that the meaning of rationalism is, broadly speaking, what has just been stated.

THE question which I am to raise for discussion is one which has long been debated by philosophers, and consequently I consider it doubtful whether anything very new can be said on the matter. But it may be profitable to review once more the present position of the controversy and to have in mind the reasons which at present make the question of interest and of importance.

The metaphysical doctrine of the Stoics is a remarkable instance of a theory that appears to be materialism, but is in truth a form of unconscious ideal-realism. It is worth while to give an exposition of it in order to show that this is really the case, and, incidentally, to explain why a materialistic philosophy seems so attractive to many minds. I will refer chiefly to the teaching of the ancient Stoics, i.e. of Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, and also to the later doctrine of Posidonius.

Common sense holds that a physical object is confined to a definite region of space, and that it endures through a definite period of time. It scatters effects through other regions and periods, but it is the cause of those effects, and is just where it is and not everywhere. Physically its existence may entail other objects, but logically it entails nothing whatever beyond the limits of a certain volume.

The question of punishment is one which has always interested and usually puzzled moralists, and which forms a crucial example for the testing of moral theories. A utilitarian theory, whether of the hedonistic or of the ‘ ideal ’ kind, if it justifies punishment at all, is bound to justify it solely on the ground of the effects it produces. The suffering of pain by the person who is punished is thought to be in itself a bad thing, and the bringing of this bad thing into the world is held to need justification, and to receive it only from the fact that the effects are likely to be so much better than those that would follow from his non-punishment as to outweigh the evil of the pain.

Nothing is more surprising to the ordinary reflective man than the concept of a finite universe, yet it is to such a concept that the latest development of mathematical science, so admirably expounded in Jeans's Astronomy and Cosmogony, requires us to adapt ourselves. A finite universe is one in which anything moving outwards in a straight line, and maintaining its direction, must after an interval return to its starting-point. This seems a self-contradiction. A straight line, we think, must go on for ever.