Much has recently been written on the subject of “belief,” but since the mental attitude indicated by this term is so pervasive and important it may be useful again to reflect upon its nature and significance.

CAN actions be right irrespective of the motives from which they come? Can an action be right though coming from a bad or an ‘indifferent’ motive?

The vitalizing effect, spoken of somewhere by Graham Wallas, which one University “subject” may have upon another if the traditional division of compartments can be broken down, has nowhere been better illustrated of late years than by the life brought into the English school at Cambridge through the teaching of Dr. I. A. Richards, who came out of the school of Mental and Moral Science. Not only his students, but contemporaries and elders as remote as myself, are grateful for the stimulus he has given; and not least grateful for the necessity imposed upon them of making clearer to their own minds the grounds upon which at various points they find themselves in disagreement with him, and the positive suggestions which they would wish to substitute for his. Their final task must be to try to make those suggestions in some language which both sides may agree to use; barring out, therefore, a good many terms which Dr. Richards regards as standing for “evident fictions”—“fictions such as universals, essences, concepts, causes.”

Ralph Cudworth, Doctor of Divinity, Master of Christ’s College at Cambridge, and philosophical chieftain of the Cambridge Platonists, published The True Intellectual System of the Universe in 1678 to disprove “the fatal necessity of all actions and events.” This disproof would destroy the various atheisms founded upon such “fatal necessity”; it would also correct those Christians who mistakenly honoured God by subjecting men to a divinely administered fate. Cudworth, with a constant eye on Hobbes, whom he did not name, struck at atheism by establishing a “true intellectual system” and by arguing away its principle of fate. His design swelled as he worked to meet the various versions of “fatal necessity” with the various atheisms founded upon them, to establish the true doctrine, and to accommodate his own copious learning, and it swelled too much for the published work to be more than a first instalment of his whole design.

The following is an attempt at an analysis of some of the difficulties of a certain religious or metaphysical attitude which, common as it has been to many ages, and familiar as we are with it in what we know of the early Greek thinkers and the Sophists, may yet, in the status of settled and almost universally accepted dogma which it has assumed, be said to be the peculiar inheritance of our own generation. We meet it in formal philosophic garb in Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity and in Croce's idealism; with scientific claims it confronts us in Smuts’s Holism; with more emphasis but less exactness it speaks in J. S. Huxley’s Religion without Revelation and in Middleton Murry's God, Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology; in imaginative literature it has found its ample "iconography" in Shaw's Back to Methuselah; best of all, strong and silent, unquestioned and unexplaining, like any master secure of his position, we may find it enthroned each in his own mind. Though here referred to as a religious attitude, we may also call it antireligionor the religion of the professedly anti-religious, and its God the God of the "Godless."

Until the very recent days of the Turkish Republic, when every effort is being made to adopt the ways of Western civilization, it has been the picturesque and wellnigh universal custom for shops to carry on their walls small placards, usually framed, and these placards have contained in beautiful Arabic writing verses from the Quran, traditions of Muhammed, rhymed and unrhymed sayings which have for generations been passed down from father to son. Coffee-houses, barber shops, booksellers, grocery stores, pharmacies, candy stores, fruit-stands, private houses even, all have decorated their walls with more or less artistically copied bits of wisdom from the past. In general there is no record of the authors or sources from which the sayings have come. They reflect in some measure also the thought of Turkish society as that thought has been passed on through the centuries. In order to get a picture of social relationships in the old Ottoman state it will perhaps be of value to study these texts and learn what we can from them of the social life and ideals of everyday folk in Constantinople from the earliest days down to the period which is just passing. There was a close relationship between these mottoes and their owners. The mottoes reflected in the first place the life philosophy of those who wrote them, and they served to mould the attitude toward life of successive generations. Not only religious belief, but attitudes toward the world and its problems, toward methods and standards of business dealing, are all touched upon in these texts.

N. Abbagnano has made a wide and exhaustive study of the philosophy of William of Ockham. He has tried to withstand the tendency, generally prevalent in the history of philosophy, to consider Ockham's personality as balanced between the old scholastic and the modern philosophy, and his works as a strange medley of formal subtleties and of profound intuitions born of genius. He has tried to represent him as a thinker with decided leanings towards the modern era, the initiator not so much of nominalism as of English empiricism, and therefore the precursor of Locke and Hume. To carry out his task he was necessarily obliged to dwell on the more positive and reconstructive part of Ockham's writings, neglecting those parts where the Franciscan doctor hesitates and gropes among the old discussions of scholastic formalism. This tends to spoil the balance of the historical reconstruction; but at the same time it must be granted that the newer and more positive parts revealed by Abbagnano's shrewd analysis have an impressive modern trend, not composed of sporadic ideas and vague anticipations, but forming a coherent and organic whole.

There has lately been published a posthumous work on “pure realism” by an Italian philosopher who died a little while ago at an early age. He had been working on the book for some time with great concentration of energy, but did not live to finish it. In the form in which it has been edited for publication some parts of it have been developed almost to completion, while others are mere sketches and notes—though not wanting in interest, for they reveal the author's method of working, and expose doubts and difficulties in the immediate form in which they presented themselves to his mind and found the way to a solution. The most complete section is one dealing with the critique of idealism, a critique which, while it is not devoid of ingenuity, is in the main stringent and vigorous, and deserves particularly the consideration of idealists. The principal thesis is that there are two possible solutions of the problem of consciousness. It admits the possibility either that consciousness itself creates its own world, endowing it, thanks to the action of the mind on its own images, with those physical attributes that make it appear external to the subject or independent of the activity by virtue of which it is formed (idealism); or that consciousness is the immediate revelation of the world itself to itself, a revelation that can only consist in a unique act whereby the world establishes itself as identical with itself and as different from itself, as internal and external knowing and known, spirit and nature (realism). At the basis of idealism, according to Ranzoli, is the implied presupposition (of the philosophy of Empedocles) that like is conscious only of like, and at the basis of realism is the Anaxagorean presupposition that opposite is conscious of opposite.

Since ‘dialectical’ materialism was proclaimed in Soviet Russia to be the only true conception of reality, the red philosophers found themselves in a worse plight than ever. They have now to guard against the pitfalls of ‘mechanistic’ materialism on the one hand, and of idealism on the other; and as by ‘idealism’ Soviet writers mean almost anything opposed to their own views, it is easy enough to detect traces of it hi any thinker. The wide field thus opened for mutual recriminations, accusations of deviating from ‘the general line of the Party,’ etc., makes any genuine philosophical work even more difficult than it was two or three years ago. There is a marked decrease in the number of philosophical publications. According to the Knizhnaya Letopis (a U.S.S.R. weekly bibliographical survey), all that has appeared in the philosophical line during the last six months of 1932 is a new translation of Spinoza's Letters, a reprint of an old translation of his Ethics, and a few dozen small textbooks on dialectical materialism, published by various schools, such as the Leningrad School of Engineering, the Leningrad Electro-Mechanical School Combine, and so on. The editorial board of the journal Psychology, which has existed for some years, announces that their programme “is entirely determined by Lenin's principle of observing party considerations in scientific work”; they are resolved “to champion the heritage of Marx and Lenin and to assign psychology a practical part in the building up of a socialist state.”