Some years ago Max Planck published a small book with the title Where is Science Going? in vigorous protest against the idea that the doctrine of relativity in general and the new quanta physics in particular mean that “the quest of the absolute becomes eliminated from scientific progress.” That it seems to be time to raise a similar question with regard to philosophy was suggested to me at a recent conference held at Farnham Castle on the relation between science and philosophy, at which the new school of logical positivism was strongly represented by some of the ablest of the younger men.

DavidHume, a member of the well-known Border family of Home, was born on April 26, 1711. After a period of preparatory training he matriculated at Edinburgh College in 1723, although he may have entered earlier. His course during this period is obscure; according to his own statement the curriculum was mainly literary; on leaving College he records that his interests lay predominantly in this direction, and, being left to his own choice, he was able to indulge his inclinations. An attempt to train him for a legal career ended in failure; and he continued to live at his ancestral home of Ninewells, to the west of Berwick, for some years, devoting himself

The great philosophers have generally held that there was some kind of interdependence between philosophy and practice. An unexamined life, they have maintained, is not worth living; and if there is to be anything to examine, life must first be lived, i.e. a practical experience is a propaedeutic to philosophy. But although Plato, for instance, thought that the task of government could be well performed only by the philosopher, he does not seem to have thought that fifteen years’ practical experience had any beneficial influence on the philosopher’s subsequent work of philosophic contemplation. Aristotle explicitly prefers the theoretical to the practical life, and the resultant divorce of theory and practice leads to quietism and so to ethical scepticism.

In his greatest work (The Republic) the greatest thinker of his era, if not of all time, Plato, writing in one of the greatest, if not even the greatest epoch in the intellectual, artistic, and literary history of mankind, held up a mirror not only to his own age but to every age, not least our own, in the glowing radiance of his unsurpassed genius. This essay is an attempt to look on the world around us with his searchlight. Addressing on this subject a select company of educated and intelligent men and women, I discovered that several of them had attempted but had failed to read through The Republic. They could not see the wood for the trees, lost their way, and gave up the guest.

The first part of this article deals with two questions1 raised by Professor Muirhead in his interesting review of the volume What Can Philosophy Determine?

Whenever we read any philosophical work dealing with the nature of qualities, the status of universals, or similar problems, we find continual references to colour; redness and blueness meet us on every page. Even Whitehead, whose obscurity is, at least in part, due to his avoidance of particular instances, condescends to cite colours as examples of “eternal objects” and other cases will occur at once to every reader.

Perhaps it is unfortunate that, no matter what problems a psychological investigator elects to attempt to discuss, he is almost always confronted by a number of different and often conflicting points of view. The twisting paths revealed by these may one day be found to unite into a broad road, but most of them have as yet been insufficiently explored. Certainly problems in the psychology of temporal perception seem to lie in many different directions, according to the ways in which they are approached. It would be possible, for instance, to take the mass of experimental work, always patient, sometimes brilliant, which has had a fairly continuous history since Czermak, in 1857, building upon Weber's researches into space perception, planned and began to carry out a programme for an investigation of the estimation of short time intervals.

I Feel sure that I am expressing the unanimous feelings of all the foreign members and associates of the Congress when I offer our warm thanks for the most kind welcome that has been extended to us. The great Exhibition has brought a succession of representatives of all the nations to the city which has been for many centuries a metropolis of the world's civilization. It is right that they should dwell, not only on the material manifestations of that civilization, but also on its achievements and its strivings in the realm of intellect. At this International Congress of Philosophy your foreign guests are happy to offer their tribute to the resplendent culture of France.

A re-publication of the whole of the work of Marsilio Ficino, being an impossibility, Kristeller1 has presented students with a monumental Supplementum Ficinianum, in which he brings together everything that was not included in the Basle edition, which he takes for his basis, everything, that is to say, that he has been able to trace in the course of a very thorough search made in numerous Italian and foreign libraries. In a learned introduction there are prefixed to the edition three indexes, of the codices, editions, and works of Ficino, and with each work is given a concise account of its origin, purpose, and fortune in the world. There follows the collection of Ficino's writings, some unpublished, and some having already been published sporadically, but omitted from the Basle edition. The final items are two indexes of proper names quoted in the Basle edition and in the Supplementum respectively.