There is a short answer to the question, whether scientific method can be applied to the study of the social relations of men, or, whether social sciences are possible; it is that these sciences exist and are in fact among the most ancient. Their success has perhaps been less startling than that of the physical sciences and they have perhaps been pursued with less enthusiasm. But there are reasons for this inherent in the nature of the social sciences, as I shall try to show.

Further, we come here to what for the purpose of our present argument is the most important consideration of all, viz. that if we could show that there were two kinds of neural or physiological processess, occurring respectively on all occasions of pleasure and pain, the fact would be valueless for proving that life must be predominantly pleasant. It is perhaps intelligible that to succeed or fail in purposive activity should bring respectively contentment and discontent rather than vice-versa; but that of two kinds of neural or physiological process, one should be accompanied by pleasure and the other by pain, is no more intelligible than if the connection were reversed. If the behaviour of any creature is affected by desires and aversions, by judgments, by feelings: if its desires and aversions or its judgments are connected with or affected by its pleasures and pains, then indeed the question with what bodily conditions its pleasures and pains are connected is part of the problem that interests the biologist—viz. what the conditions are under which the species can continue. But in that case the biologist must not claim that all the conditons of life and reproduction can be found in what happens in the body. Pleasures and pains, desires and aversions, purposes are not events that happen in the body. If they are the mere “apparence or sense” of what happens there, and alone determines survival or extinction, then what happens there to determine survival might, for all we can see, equally appear as pain or pleasure.

Theology, or the science of God, has to be distinguished from religion which might be godless, may contain very tittle of science, dogma, or creed, and sometimes consists very largely of the habit, attitude, or even the mode of public or private devotion or ritual.

Reading and re-reading the difficult and important small book I and Thou, by Professor Martin Buber, which Mr. Ronald Gregor Smith has translated with so much care and skill, and trying to make it clearer to myself in words of my own, I find myself at odds on the threshold with the translator's Introduction. He is explaining the title and the general theme of the book:—

“There is, Buber shows, a radical difference between a man's attitude to other men and his attitude to things. The attitude to other men is a relation between persons, to things it is a connexion with objects. In the personal relation one subject—I—confronts another subject—Thou; in the connexion with things the subject contemplates and experiences an object. These two attitudes represent the basic twofold situation of human life, the former constituting the ‘world of Thou,’ and the latter the ‘world of It’” (p. vi).

All men desire their own happiness: which is not to say that they desire nothing else, or regulate all their actions with a view to it. But very many men are also puzzled and perhaps distressed by the fact of unhappiness, whosever it may be. For it seems evil, and evil is a problem, whether seen in animal pain, or in human unhappiness, or in wrong-doing, or in what, though not the work of man, yet seems unjust: as, for example, that one who does his duty should perish miserably. True, we should most of us say that our own interest has nothing to do with our duty; and the Psalmist blesses him that sweareth unto his neighbour and disappointeth him not, “though it were to his own hindrance.” Yet almost in the same breath he declares that such a man shall never fall, that he shall dwell in the tabernacle of the Lord, and rest upon his holy hill. Clearly he thought that, unless this were so, something would be very much amiss, though even so he might have maintained that a man ought to keep the promise which he has sworn to his neighbour. It has been impressively contended by Professor Prichard that there is no sense of “advantage” in which the question whether to keep his promise is advantageous to me is relevant to the question whether I ought to keep it, not even if I identify my own advantage with what advantages society: “our conviction that we ought to do certain actions does not in fact arise from our thought that our action will conduce to the good of society which is also our own good.” Yet the contemplation of a world in which, though men did their duty, they were always involved in misery by doing it, would be gravely disconcerting. Kant himself could not believe such a world possible, though more almost than any other moralist he insisted that our consciousness of obligation had no connection with any thought of how discharging it bore upon our happiness, nor the obligation itself with how discharging it actually did so. Rather than admit that there could in the last resort be even a partial maladjustment between virtue and happiness, he was prepared to accept what he claimed to have shown that the speculative reason could never establish, the existence of an all-powerful and all-righteous God.

This paper is an attempt to clarify our talk about minds and thoughts—our own minds and the thoughts which run through them and which we know directly, as well as the minds of other people and the thoughts with which we credit them. We do so in order to be able to characterize satisfactorily our whole performance in talking about minds and thoughts, the rules according to which such talk operates and the goals it purports to reach. We also hope to evaluate, in the light of such a characterization, a number of more elaborate ways of speaking about minds and thoughts, so as to become clear as to their advantages or disadvantages in comparison with more ordinary ways of speaking. The whole investigation is well worth undertaking, since it has long been evident that our talk about mind and thought is, to a peculiar extent, liable to become the seat of certain deep perplexities, which do not arise when we deal with unusual material on the borderlines of knowledge, but which tend, rather, to obtrude themselves in commonplace situations, and to trouble our grasp of the most obvious notions and the most evident truths. Such perplexities, broadly covered by the word “philosophical,” are rendered very stubborn by their objects and their origin. For when we are dealing with things remote, strange and intricate, we have at least a firm foothold in the well-known, simple and near, and a clear set of terms to talk with; but we hardly seem to have a perch to hop to, or any intelligible language left to talk in, when the obvious itself begins to present difficulties. And it is also characteristic of most of the difficulties we are considering that in them the burning zone of perplexity seems to shift erratically from issue to issue, that each expedient adopted to meet them involves us in new problems, that men cannot ever agree as to the best expedient or the least serious difficulty, and that, in the outcome, they resemble nothing so much as a set of sleepers under inadequate coverings, some of whom prefer exposure in one place, while others prefer it in another.

In the idealistic movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British philosophy under Hegelian influence endeavoured to demonstrate the rationality of the universe as based on logical construction. The keynote of the Hegelian dialectic, as interpreted by both F. H. Bradley and J. E. McTaggart is that the mind is there from the first. In the advance from the bare abstraction of Being to the fully concrete whole—“Before the mind there is a single conception, but the whole mind itself which does not appear, engages in the process, operates on the datum, and produces the result.” The idea expressed by poetry in Tennyson's “Flower in the crannied wall,” which as the mind is fixed upon it reveals in an expansion to the universe the nature of God and Man, illustrates in a simple way the central philosophic conception of the British metaphysical idealists. Poetry could overlook the hard struggle of the little plant to keep its foothold against crowding competitors. Philosophy was perhaps too oblivious of this in its compelling postulate of the all pervading unity in which every difference and seeming contradiction would be reconciled.

Butler observes in the Preface to the Sermons that the subject of morals can be approached in two different ways: “One begins from enquiring into the abstract relations of things: the other from a matter of fact, namely what the particular nature of man is, its several parts, their economy or constitution; from whence it proceeds to determine what course of life it is, which is correspondent to his whole nature. In the former method the conclusion is expressed thus, that vice is contrary to the nature and reason of things: in the latter, that it is a violation or breaking in upon our own nature. Thus they both lead us to the same thing, our obligations to the practice of virtue; and thus they exceedingly strengthen and enforce each other.” In making this observation Butler raises the problem of the nature of moral obligation, and of the criteria by which the existence of a moral obligation can be known. He does so by calling attention to the divisions of opinion which existed on this issue in his own days. Samuel Clarke, the fashionable moralist of the period, sought the roots of moral obligation in the “nature and reason of things”: for an agent to know that an act is his duty is to know that it is fitting or suitable to the circumstances in which it occurs. Shaftesbury, on the other hand, and many of the adherents to the doctrine of Natural Law, like Grotius and Pufendorf, sought the roots of moral obligation in the nature of agents: for an agent, to know that an act is his duty is for him to experience a special motive to do it. Butler recognized the fundamental difference between these two approaches.

Prima facie knowledge is an ineradicable monster. Conceived as a relation of a mind to objects extrinsic to it, it is chimerical: for knowledge, as such, is of the real, i.e. of things as they are in se; but the prima facie form of knowledge precludes this. Its object is a thing apprehended ab extra, i.e. as referred to a subject to which it is extrinsic. To seek to escape this impasse either by making the object intrinsic to the subject, or the subject a function of the object, is to reject the prima facie character of knowledge as a relation of compresent terms. The incoherence of prima facie knowledge is that its object must be both extrinsic and intrinsic to mind—extrinsic as independently real, intrinsic as known—yet can be neither: not extrinsic since thus its inseitas is occulted, not intrinsic since thus truth is mere appearance. And this chimaera becomes a monster because knowledge is also ineradicable. We cannot know that knowledge is impossible; and, though we may be in doubt about its extancy, that very doubt is epistemic in form. It is our acceptance of the demands of knowledge that lies at the basis of our doubt; and this applies not only to legitimate doubt about the extancy of knowledge, but also to chimerical doubt about its possibility. Doubt is an inchoation of knowledge, which is thus ineradicable.

A young boy found one of Beck's best stereoscopes, but he did not understand its use. When he looked through the two eye-pieces at the two adjacent duplicates (nearly) of each picture on each card he got a single flat picture, and he expected nothing more. Then the moment of revelation came. As he fumbled the focus onto a flat picture of Hamlet, the grave-diggers and Hamlet himself bulged out, the skull on Hamlet's palm looked like a museum piece, and the grave yawned like a real pit. The stereoscopic world of the Beck instrument had been suddenly established in the boy's experience.

Philosophy is very largely concerned with speculation upon problems of a highly abstract character, but some of the questions with which it deals have important practical aspects; and I think that social philosophy occupies—and rightly occupies—a dominant place in contemporary thought. If post-war policies are to render more secure the lives, the liberties and the happiness of mankind, they must be based upon sound principles; and it is with the intention of throwing certain of these principles into bold relief that I have ventured to choose the realm of politics and culture as the subject of these reflections.

The intention of this article is to examine the concept of the Divine persuasion as presented within the system of Dr. A. N. Whitehead. An attempt will be made to indicate the distinctive value of the concept in relation to certain relevant aspects of the religious thought of our time.

There are two ways in which Symbol and Myth are related to each other. Firstly, a certain class of symbols represents the remnant of myths. Such figures as, e.g. the Dragon, Leviathan, etc., which we find in Biblical literature, are not used in the full sense of the underlying mythological conception, but in a metaphorical sense. They are chosen by the author because of their mythical associations, but not in their mythical meaning. Ametaphor of this kind is, as H. J. D. Astley put it, “broken-down mythology.” There are a great many symbols both in poetry and mysticism which must be understood as the relics of mythical thought. We owe a great deal to ethnology for having thrown light on this relation. The microcosm-macrocosm symbolism, for instance, becomes more intelligible if we consider that in primitive mythology the world emerged from the body of primordial man. The gifts to the dead appear in later forms of sacrificial cults as purely symbolical, but there is no doubt that originally they were intended for the real use of the dead. In these and in numerous other cases the symbol has only a reduced value as compared with the original-myth from which it is borrowed. It is not self-evident, but relies on the mythical conception, without, however, taking it seriously. It is “merely” a symbol, and has no truth of its own.

In earlier articles I explained the fundamental entities in the Organic Philosophy, namely: actual entities or actual occasions, and eternal objects. But there is also a third type of entity called “propositions,” very important for the introduction of novelty into our world, and indispensable for “consciousness” and the higher phases of experience. Before discussing Consciousness and these higher phases, it is necessary, therefore, to give an account of propositions.