In order to do anything intelligently a certain degree of reflection is necessary. This is particularly obvious with regard to any practical activity or occupation. Take, for example, the case of a naїve bricklayer. Let us assume that this man never reflects upon the nature of his occupation, but simply looks upon it as a more or less mechanical procedure of laying one brick upon another for a certain period of time during the day. He does not relate his occupation with the occupations of his fellow–workmen, or even with the purpose of erecting buildings. If such a man were left to his own devices on a desert island with a plentiful supply of bricks and mortar, we could imagine him erecting a gigantic pinnacle of bricks, without purpose or meaning, where a more intelligent man would have endeavoured to construct a shelter against the rigours of the climate.

To probe people's motives is almost an occupational malaise amongst psychologists. And it is not one that can be nursed in private. It intrudes constantly into discussion of acquaintances, into moral assessments of people's actions and their responsibility for them, and into pronouncements on the proper operation of law. On this account psychologists are treated with suspicion, often with derision and resentment, by their academic colleagues. Of course, like Jehovah's witnesses, they come to expect, even to relish, the reception they receive. For has it not been written that we all have a strong resistance to such revelations, our real motives being often those which we are ashamed to admit? But there may be good grounds for this resistance as well as psychological explanations of it. My hope in this paper is to set out the sorts of grounds that there may be for our resistance to this scrutiny of our motives and to the theories of motivation which lend some kind of scientific respectability to it.

“We have but faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see.” So Tennyson wrote in the nineteenth century, using the same distinction that in the first of our era Paul the Apostle used, writing to his converts of the walking by faith that looks not to the things seen and temporal, but to the things eternal and unseen. (2 Cor. iv. 18, v. 7.)

When we first begin to reflect about conduct in a philosophical way? whether as philosophers or not, we look for general truths, fundamental principles. Our acceptances and rejections, preferences, commendations and disgusts, seem at the start chaotic and unsystematic, and we hope to reduce them to order—to show that there are general principles by reference to which all our varied acts, admirations and decisions can be understood and justified. The number of such principles should for choice be small. Ideally, we think, it should be possible to present our progress through life not as a thing of fits and starts, of zig–zags, gestures and recoils, but as aimed in a single uniform direction. If we esteem some things above others, praise some men, commend some deeds, admire some paintings this should be (according to the ideal) because in each case the Supreme Value or Ultimate Good finds expression in the esteemed, praised, commended or admired thing, man, deed or picture. We hope to find a single standard by coming up to or falling short of which things of all sorts will earn the prizes or rebukes they deserve.

A retributive theory of punishment must at least say that it is a necessary condition for the justification of a punishment that the person punished should be guilty. But “guilty” here may be taken in two different senses, giving two very different kinds of justification. In the first sense, to be guilty is to have wilfully disobeyed a law or order of some authority, and it is the defiance of this authority which justifies punishment. Mr. Mabbott has put up a good case for a view of this kind. It is clear that we regularly do justify the punishment of offenders on the ground that they have broken rules, and therefore deserve to be punished. And there are some moral situations (those of officials charged with the administration of regulations) in which this is the only fact to be considered in deciding whether or not to punish. As to the view that this constitutes the only valid justification of punishment, I wish to make two comments.

In fact, only one book on or around Marxism has been received for survey during the year that is past, though there are perhaps few British philosophers who would see anything for surprise or regret in that. Among the books not received, however, are two of very considerable interest and intelligence, which it would be wrong not to mention for the sake of anyone who may be unaware of their existence; Merleau Ponty's Les aventures de la dialectique and Raymond Aron's L’opium des intellectuels. Both books appeared at roughly the same time as a British critic was rash enough publicly to lament that political philosophy was dead in France. Quite apart from anything else, this seems an odd complaint of a country in which Marxism, be it for better or for worse, is very much a live intellectual influence. Classical Marxism may indeed be what Professor Acton calls “a philosophical farrago,” but it would be a bad mistake to treat it as no more than a dead doctrinal body, to be dissected and preserved, if at all, as simply an historical curiosity. What the intellectuals of the world’s next generation or two will be saying may be anybody's guess; but that a very large proportion of them will be saying it in Marxist or Marxist–derived terminology seems a safe prediction. When for any reason a certain vocabulary is placed beyond the bounds of critical questioning, all development must take the form of interpretation and application. But to say this is very different from saying that all development is brought to a halt.