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.

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.

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 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.

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.

In his analysis of the concept of causality, Hume finds that all events accounted causes and effects are contiguous and successive. No object can act efficaciously upon another so long as the objects are at a distance from each other. It may sometimes appear that “distant objects are productive of one another,” but on examination it is discovered that they are linked together by a series of intermediate causes which are contiguous among themselves; and even where examination does not directly disclose the intermediate causal chain, it is still presumed that it exists. Also the cause is temporally prior to the effect. If I throw a stone through a window, the smashing of the glass follows the act of throwing the stone. It is only after the realization of the cause that the effect appears. Thus a cause is an object that is precedent to and contiguous with another object that is called the effect.