by saying that Ought is an illusion, can we get rid of it, in the only
other possible way, by holding that what ought to be is the lasting and
primary reality and that the 'facts' which are so far from being what
they ought to be are by comparison only half-real, much what shadows are
to the solid things which throw them? This was the doctrine of Plato,
who makes Socrates say in the _Phaedo_ that it is the 'Good' which holds
the Universe together, and that in the end the true reason for each
particular arrangement in the world, whether we can see it or not, is
that it is 'best' that this arrangement, and no other, should exist. It
is also the foundation of Kant's well-known contention that, however
barren speculative theology and psychology may be, the reality of the
moral order and the unconditionality of moral obligation compel us to
make the existence of God, the immortality of our souls, and the moral
government of the world postulates of practical philosophy. More
generally, it is just this conviction that 'what is' has its source and
explanation in what 'ought to be', which is the central thought of all
philosophical Theism. If we can accept such a faith, we shall not, of
course, be enabled to eliminate mystery from things. We shall, for
instance, be still quite in the dark about the way in which evil comes
to be in a world of God's making. We shall neither be able to say _how_
any particular thing comes to be other than it ought to be, nor _how_ in
the end good is 'brought out of evil'. But if we are to have a right to
hold a view of the Platonic or Theistic type, we must be able, not
indeed to say how evil comes about or how it is to be finally got rid
of, but to say, in a general way, what it is 'good for'. Thus, if there
are certain goods of the highest value which could not exist at all
except on the condition of the existence of less important evils, this
consideration will remove, so far as _those_ goods and evils are
concerned, the time-honoured puzzle how evil can exist at all if God is.
To take a specific example. To many of us it appears directly certain
that such qualities of character as fortitude, patience, superiority to
carnal lusts, magnanimity, are goods of the highest value. We think also
that we see that these qualities are not primitive psychological
endowments but require for their development the experience of struggle
and discipline in a world where there is real suffering, real
disappointment, real temptation. To us, therefore, there seems to be no
contradiction between the existence of God and the presence in a world
made by God of the evils needed for the development of these virtues.
And this will include some of the worst of all the evils we know of. Few
things are more ghastly than some of the cruelties which have been
practised in the late War and are still being practised in the
distracted country of Russia. Yet we know how revulsion from these
horrors has made many a man who seemed to be sunk in sloth or greed or
carnality into a Bayard or a Galahad. It may well be that this moral
re-birth would never have been effected if the evils which provoked it
had been less monstrous. Here, then, we seem to discern a principle
which _may_ be adequate to explain what all the ills of human life are
'good for'.
I must not deny that all such explanation, in my judgement, involves the
postulate that the ennoblement of character and deepening of insight
brought about by suffering are permanent--in fact, that it requires the
postulates of the existence of God and the reality of everlasting life.
Mr. Russell, I imagine, would regard this as a confession that I am sunk
in what he airily dismisses as 'theological superstitions'. I should
reply that the 'superstition' is on his side; to dismiss God and the
eternal soul, without serious inquiry, as 'superstitions' is just the
most superficial of all the superstitions. It is, of course, incumbent
on anyone who holds the Platonic view to show that its postulates are
not inconsistent with any known truth, and I would add that he ought
also to show that there are at any rate known facts which seem to demand
just this kind of explanation. Both these points, as I hold, can be
established, but I do not in the least wish to suggest that any
philosopher will ever find it an easy task to 'justify the ways of God
to man'. As Timaeus says in Plato, 'to find the father and fashioner of
the Universe is _not_ easy', and I want rather to lay stress on the
magnitude of the task than to extenuate it. But I am concerned to urge
that the doctrine which accounts for what is by what ought to be is the
_only_ philosophical theory on which it ceases to be an unintelligible
mystery that we should have--as I maintain we certainly have--the same
kind of assurance about values that we have about facts. The chief
complaint I have to make about the mental attitude of Mr. Russell and
some of his friends is that, in their zeal for the unification of
science, they seem inclined to assume that the larger problem of the
co-ordination of Science with Life does not exist, or, at any rate, need
not occupy our minds. This is what I should call mere atheistic
superstition. On this point they might, I believe, learn much which it
imports them to know from the works of some of the notable living
philosophers of Italy, in particular from Professor Varisco of Rome and
Professor Aliotta of Padua, whose labours have been specially directed
to the co-ordination in a consistent system of the principles of the
sciences of fact with those of the sciences of value. Though, after all,
those who have refused to learn the lesson from the noble philosophical
work of Professor James Ward, the illustrious champion of sober thought
in their own University of Cambridge, are perhaps unlikely to master it
in the schools of Rome or Padua.
You will readily see that I am suggesting in effect that if Philosophy
is ever to execute her supreme task, she will need to take into much
more serious account than it has been the fashion to do, not only the
work of the exact sciences but the teachings of the great masters of
life who have founded the religions of the world, and the theologies
which give reasoned expression to what in the great masters is immediate
intuition. For us this means more particularly that it is high time
philosophers ceased to treat the great Christian theologians as
credulous persons whose convictions need not be taken seriously and the
Gospel history as a fable to which the 'enlightened' can no longer pay
any respect. They must be prepared to reckon with the possibility that
the facts recorded in the Gospel happened and that Catholic theology is,
in substance, true. If we are to be philosophers in earnest we cannot
afford to have any path which may lead to the heart of life's mystery
blocked for us by placards bearing the labels 'reactionary', 'unmodern,'
and their likes. That what is most modern must be best is a superstition
which it is strange to find in a really educated man--especially after
the events of the last five years. A philosopher, at any rate, should be
able to endure the charge of being 'unmodern' with fortitude. It is at
least a tenable thesis that many of the qualities which we Western men
have been losing in our craze for industrialism and commercialistic
'Imperialism' are just those which are most necessary to the seeker
after speculative truth. Abelard and St. Thomas would very likely have
failed as advertising agents, company promoters, or editors of
sensational daily papers. But it may well be that both of them were much
better fitted than Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Bottomley, or Mr. A.G. Gardiner
to tell us whether God is and what God is. In fact, one would hardly
suppose habitual and successful composition of effective 'posters' or
alluring prospectuses to be wholly compatible with that candour and
scrupulous veracity which are required of the philosopher. As for
'reaction', no one but a writer in a 'revolutionary' journal would be
fool enough to use the word as, in itself, an epithet of reproach. Most
persons who have a bowing acquaintance with Mechanics know that you
cannot have an engine in which there is all action and no reaction, and
most sane men can see that before you pronounce a given 'reaction' good
or bad you need to know what it is reacting against. If a man who wants
to go east discovers that he is walking west, he is usually reactionary
enough to go back on his steps.
In short, if we mean to be philosophical, our main concern will be that
our beliefs should be true; we shall care very little whether they
happen to be popular or unpopular with the intellectual 'proletarians'
of the moment, and if we can get at a truth, we shall not mind having to
go back a long way for it. Indeed, when one wants to get on the track of
the most ultimate and important truths of all, there is usually a great
positive advantage in going back a very long way for them. The questions
which deal with first principles, being the simplest--though the
hardest--of all, are mostly raised very simply and directly by Plato and
Aristotle, who were the very first writers to raise them. In the
discussions of later times, the great simple questions about principles
have so often been overlaid by mainly irrelevant accretions of secondary
details that it is usually very hard indeed 'to see the wood for the
trees'. This is the chief reason why one who, like myself, finds it his
main business in life to introduce younger men and women to the study of
Philosophy must think indifference to Greek literature about the worst
misfortune which could happen to our intellectual civilization.
I have tried in what I have said so far to explain what I understand by
the philosophical spirit and what I regard as the primary problems with
which Philosophy has to wrestle. If what I have said is not wholly wide
of the mark, it should be clear what is the deadliest enemy of the true
spirit of Philosophy. It is the temper which is too indolent to think
out a question for itself and consequently prefers to accept traditional
ready-made answers to the problems of Science and Life. Traditionalism,
wherever it is found, is the enemy, because Traditionalism is only
another name for indolence. Observe that I say Traditionalism, not
Tradition. Nowhere in life, and least of all in Philosophy, is the
solitary likely to work to much purpose unless he has behind him that
body of organized sound sense which we call Tradition. And I do not mean
that true philosophers are necessarily 'heretics', or that 'orthodoxy'
is less philosophical than 'heterodoxy'. I mean that however true an
'orthodox' proposition may be, it is no living truth for me unless I
have made it my own, as its first discoverer did, by personal labour of
the spirit. The truth is something which each generation must rediscover
for itself. True traditions may be quite as injurious, if they have
become mere traditions, as false ones. It was not so much because the
Aristotelian doctrines were false that the unquestioning acceptance of
Aristotelian formulae all but strangled human thought in the later days
of Scholasticism. Some of these doctrines were false, but many of them
were much truer than anything the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
had to put in their place, and the rediscovery of their real meaning is
perhaps the chief service of the Hegelian school to Philosophy. The
trouble was that mechanical repetition of Aristotle's formulae as
matters of course inevitably led to loss of real insight into the
meaning the formulae had borne for Aristotle.
We may say, generally, that because Traditionalism is the death of sound
thinking, the ages in which the prospects of advance in Philosophy are
brightest are just those in which a powerful historical tradition has
broken down and men feel themselves compelled to go back on their steps
and raise once more the fundamental questions which their fathers had
supposed to be disposed of once for all by a formula. This has happened
twice since the downfall of the degenerate Scholasticism, Protestant and
Roman, of the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century the result
was the great movement in Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics, of which
Descartes and Galileo are the principal figures. Towards the end of the
eighteenth century, when the doctrines of Descartes had themselves been
traditionalized, the same thing happened again, the leading actors in
the drama being David Hume and Immanuel Kant; the result was first the
revival of the 'critical' problem by Kant, and then the great, if
over-hasty, attempt at a positive interpretation of the Universe which
culminated in the philosophical system of Hegel. In our own age, it is
mainly Kant and Hegel who have been traditionalized, and we seem to be
living through the last stages of the discrediting of this third
tradition with every prospect of a great advance if our own time can
only find its Descartes. In what I am going on to say I must naturally
speak of the disintegrating influences chiefly as we have seen them at
work in our own country; but I should like, before I do so, to remark
that on the Continent splendid work has been done in the requickening of
genuine philosophical thought by an influence which has, so far, not
made itself widely felt among ourselves. I mean the revival of Thomism
so earnestly promoted in the academies of the Roman Church by Pope Leo
XIII. Neo-Thomism, I am convinced, if its representatives will only
maintain it at the high level characteristic, for example, of the
Italian _Rivista Neo-Scolastica_, has a very great contribution to make
to the Philosophy of the future, and is much more deserving of the
serious attention of students in our own country than the
much-advertised 'impressionism' of Pragmatists and Bergsonians. Indeed,
I hardly know how much we may not hope from the movement if it should
please Providence to send into the world a Neo-Thomist who is also a
really qualified mathematician.
Of the state of thought in our own country we may fairly say that a
generation ago opinion on the ultimate questions was, in the main,
fairly divided into two camps. There were the professional
metaphysicians, mainly living on a tradition derived from Kant and
Hegel, and there were the men of science whose 'philosophy', such as it
was, is perhaps best represented by two well-known and most instructive
books, Mach's _Science of Mechanics_ and Karl Pearson's _Grammar of
Science_. The men of the Kant-Hegel tradition, whatever their family
dissensions, were generally united by the common view that--as William
James accused them of teaching--the function of sensation in
contributing to knowledge, whatever it is, is something 'contemptible'.
Kant himself, as we have seen, had thought very differently, but he was
supposed to have been 'corrected' on this, as on so many points, by
Hegel. The most distinguished of my own Oxford teachers seemed agreed to
believe that our thought builds up the fabric of knowledge entirely from
within by what Hegel called an 'immanent dialectic'. A rough idea of
what this means may be given in the following way. You take any
experience you please and try to put what you experience into a
proposition. The proposition may, to begin with, be as vague as, e.g. 'I
am now feeling something,' 'I am now aware of something.' On reflection
you find that the statement does not do justice to the experience. You
feel the need to say more precisely _what_ you are feeling or are aware
of, how it is related to what you experience on other occasions, and
what the 'I' is which is said to 'have' the experience. Until you have
done this your thought is a miserable reproduction of your experience,
and if you could ever do it completely, it would turn out that a really
adequate account of the most trivial experience would involve complete
knowledge of the structure and working of everything. Thus, if you once
begin to think about your experience at all, you are irresistibly driven
on to endless further reflection. If you try to stop short anywhere in
the process, the results of your reflection are found to contain
unexplained contradictions, just because you have not yet fitted on the
fact on which you are reflecting to everything else there is to know.
All the assumptions of every-day 'common sense' and all the more
recondite assumptions of the sciences are saturated with these
contradictions, because both 'common sense' and the sciences leave so
much of the whole 'story of everything' untouched. If the whole story
were told, all things would be found to be just one thing, which these
philosophers call the 'Absolute', and the only perfectly true statement
we can make would be a statement about this Absolute in which we
asserted of it all that it is. Since no science ever attempts to say
anything at all about this one sole thing, far less to get all there
might be to be said about it into a single statement, no scientific
proposition can be more than 'partially' true, and unhappily _we_ do not
know what alterations would be required to make our 'partial' truths
quite true. Naturally enough Kant's allegation that mathematical first
principles are so self-contradictory that you can rigidly demonstrate
mathematical propositions which contradict each other was grist to the
Hegelian mill. That our notions of space, time, the infinitely great,
the infinitely little, are all a jumble of contradictions was steadily
repeated by the Hegelian philosophers, and indeed the mathematicians
were accustomed to state their own principles so loosely and confusedly
that there was a great deal of excuse for the suspicion that the fault
lay with Mathematics and not with the mathematicians.
It is clear that such a philosophy ought to end in unqualified
Agnosticism. The Hegelians, to be sure, made merry over the Unknowable
of Mr. Spencer, but their own Absolute is really just the Unknowable in
its 'Sunday best'. Nothing that we can say about anything which is not
the Absolute is really true, because there really _is_ nothing but the
Absolute to speak about, and nothing that we can say about the Absolute
is quite true either, because we can never succeed in saying itself of
it. Mr. Bradley, far the most eminent of the philosophers of the
Absolute, has made persistent and brilliant attempts to show that, in
spite of this, we do know enough to be sure that our own mind is more
like the Absolute than a cray-fish, and a cray-fish more like it than a
crystal. But when all is said, though I owe more to Mr. Bradley than I
can ever acknowledge adequately, I cannot help feeling that there are
two men in Mr. Bradley, a great constructive thinker and a subtle
destructive critic, and that the destructive Hyde is perpetually pulling
to pieces all that the constructive Jekyll has built up. Of course it is
obvious that the truth of mathematics, if mathematics are true, is a
fatal stone of stumbling for this type of philosophy. Mathematics never
attempts to say anything about the 'Absolute'--the only 'Absolute' of
which it knows is only a 'degraded conic'--yet it claims that its
statements, if once they have been correctly expressed, are not
'partial' but complete.
Over against the Hegelianizing philosophers, we had, of course, the men
of science. No one could wish to speak of the scientific men of the
days of Huxley without deep respect for their success in adding to our
positive knowledge of facts. But it may perhaps be said at this distance
of time that it was not precisely the greatest among them who were most
prominent as mystagogues of Science with the big S, and it may certainly
be said that when the mystagogues, the Cliffords, Huxleys, and the rest,
undertook to improvise a theory of first principles, their achievement
was little better than infantile. They took it on trust from Hume that
the whole of knowledge is built up of sensations, actual or 'revived',
and quite missed Kant's point that their empiricism left the formal
constituent in knowledge, the type of order by which data are organized
into an intelligible pattern, wholly out of account. Even when they
deigned to read Kant, they read him without any inkling of the character
of the 'critical' problem. Hence they taught dogmatically as true a
theory of scientific method which Hume himself had elaborately proved
impossible. It was just because Hume had seen so clearly that no
universal scientific truths can be derived from premisses which merely
record particular facts that he professed himself a follower of the
'academic' or 'sceptical' philosophy. He recognized the impossibility of
constructing scientific knowledge out of its material constituent alone,
but did not see where the formal constituent could come from, and so
resigned himself to regarding the actual successes of science as a kind
of standing miracle.
The men of the 'seventies were, after all, in many cases more anxious to
damage theology than to build up Philosophy. They read Hume without any
delicate sense for his urbane ironies, and believed in good faith that
he and John Stuart Mill between them had shown that by a mysterious
process called 'induction' it is possible to prove rigorously universal
conclusions in science without universal premisses. A scientific law,
according to them, is only a convenient short-hand notation in which to
register the 'routine of our perceptions'. Thus we have known of a great
many men who have died, and have never known of any man who lived to
much over a hundred without dying. The universal proposition 'all men
are mortal' is a short expression for this information, and it is
nothing more. It ought to have been obvious that, if this is a true
account of science, all scientific 'generalizations' are infinitely
improbable. The number of men of whom we _know_ that they have died is
insignificant by comparison with the multitude of those who have lived,
are living, or will live, and we have no guarantee that this
insignificant number is a fair average sample. So again, unless there
are true universal propositions which are not 'short-hand' for any
plurality of observed facts whatever, we cannot with any confidence,
however faint, infer that a 'regular sequence' or 'routine' which has
been observed from the dawn of recorded time up to, say, midnight,
August 4, 1919, will continue to be observed on August 5, 1919. How,
except by relying on the truth of some principle which does not depend
itself on the validity of 'generalization', can we tell that it is even
slightly probable that the nature of things will not change suddenly at
the moment of midnight between August 4 and August 5, 1919? What is
called 'inductive' science certainly has 'pulled off' remarkable
successes in the past, but we can have no confidence that these
successes will be repeated unless there are much better reasons for
believing in its methods and initial assumptions than any which the
scientific man who is an amateur 'empiricist' in his philosophy can
offer us. We may note, in particular, that this empiricism, which has
been expounded most carefully by Pearson and Mach, coincides with
Hegelian Absolutism in leading to the denial of the truth of
mathematics. It would be a superfluous task to argue at length that,
e.g., De Moivre's theorem or Taylor's theorem is not a short-hand
formula for recording the 'routine of our perceptions'.
The general state of things at the time of which I am speaking was thus
that relations were decidedly strained between a body of philosophers
and a body of scientific men who ought at least to have met on the
common ground of a complete Agnosticism. The philosophers were, in
general, shy of Science, mainly, no doubt, because they were modest men
who knew their own limitations, but they had a way of being
condescending to Science, which naturally annoyed the scientific men.
These latter professed a theory of the structure of knowledge which the
philosophers could easily show to be grotesque, but the retort was
always ready to hand that at any rate Science seemed somehow to be
getting somewhere while Philosophy appeared to lead nowhere in
particular.