I must begin by apologizing for taking a somewhat well-worn subject for my theme. My reason is that I have not yet found a recent treatment of it which is altogether to my satisfaction. Most of them seem to me too often to approach the subject from a point of view which, in a way, expects too much from the study of Plato or any other ancient author, and consequently either makes exaggerated claims for it or fails to do justice to what we really can learn.

We are familiar with the statement that the present world-conflagration is, or involves, a struggle between two different philosophies. Obviously the statement is very vague, and it is exceedingly difficult to say exactly what it means. But if it has any meaning at all, a professional philosopher ought to be supremely interested in it. Philosophers are too apt to sit in their ivory towers, weaving curious distinctions and debating strange intellectual puzzles, without any consideration of their implications for humanity. For even the most abstract questions invariably have, in the end, important practical bearings. And we are apt to forget that, in the last analysis, philosophers are the uncrowned rulers of the world. For their ideas, secretly infiltrating among the masses, are among the forces which drive civilizations. Plato has had more influence on the destiny of man than the inventor of the steam engine. And so I make no apology for attempting to discuss here the question whether the two great nations now engaged in war, Germany and Britain, represent any philosophical ideas, what the philosophical issues of the war are, and where, in those issues, the truth, or the greater degree of truth, lies. And the paper will have two parts. In the first I shall try briefly to state what I believe the issues to be. In the second I shall attempt to discover whether there is any rational ground for preferring the philosophy of the one side to that of the other.

It is a wise child who knows his own father; and the climate of thought of a generation may be subtly changed without conscious recognition of the formative minds which have been, if not the parents, at least the godparents of that change. That is to say, they have sponsored the baptism of ideas which would only be safe so long as they renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil; but, as is so often the case, when the offspring grow up they form a pact with those very powers. To make Søren Kierkegaard spiritually responsible for the present war would have as little, and perhaps as much, truth in it as the facile explanations which made Hegel responsible for the last one. But it is part of the demonism of policies of power and ambition to be able to pervert to their own ends religious ideas which in their intention are a protest against those very ambitions; and, by so doing, to win a response from people who, in a dim, unconscious way, are feeling after the ideas themselves, but have neither the powers of self-criticism nor of radical thinking to resist travesties of them which appear to justify their own self-assertion. When Hitler informed Sir Nevile Henderson that he was a man of “ad infinitum decisions” we may question the extent of his knowledge either of the Latin language or of the existential philosophy; but the phrase awakes an echo of the religious philosophy of circles far removed from National-Socialism. Both Nazi apologists and their Confessional or independent opponents are consciously or unconsciously moved by a way of thinking which puts the decision of the individual, made in the concrete moment, above any objective or universal norm of ethics or of reason by which it can be either justified or criticized.

In an illusion, if what has been said in the earlier part of this section is right, the essential thing is the presence to the mind of some false proposition, which may be affirmed or denied according as we are or are not deceived. But what precisely is this false proposition in each case? And, a second question, on what grounds do we entertain it?

I have tried to expound Whitehead's doctrine of Creativity and of actual entities. Nothing remains but to give a brief summary of what has been said in the foregoing notes.

Creativity is the ultimate activity and principle of novelty in the Universe.

The world is said to consist of “actual entities,” not substances. An actual entity is also called an “actual occasion.” It is essentially a genetic process, having two sides, (I) the process of “becoming,” and (2) the outcome of the process named the “satisfaction.” The satisfaction is the fully determined achievement abstracted from the process. On attaining satisfaction the actual entity viewed as a self-creating subject loses its “final” causation, and as a subject perishes, but the “satisfaction” remains as a potential constituent for the emergence of a new actual entity. This is its “efficient” causation. The potentiality of the satisfaction for a new creation is called its “objective immortality”: in this capacity it functions as an “object” for the self-creation of another actual entity.