It is much more certain that the artist can help the philosopher than that the philosopher can help the artist. The purpose of this paper is to indicate the kind of questions about art which the philosopher asks, in order that those whose concern is with art, artists themselves in the first instance, and critics of art, may judge if these questions are interesting to them, and if so may co-operate with the philosophers in seeking to answer them. Now that the sciences and the other occupations of man become so sharply separated from each other, philosophy has come to have a peculiar position. It deals with the questions which are left over from the sciences, and this gives it a specific and important office to perform.

Of all the sciences, philosophy is the most concrete and comprehensive. The sense of cold, remote spaces which it is apt to generate in us is the result of this very width and concreteness. The philosopher has to condense the many-sided variety of human life and express it through the symbols of a common language. The symbols are at best only semi-transparent. Abstractness descends upon him the moment they become opaque. Philosophy, in fact, is useless to us unless we can see through it. If we cannot, the fault may be ours. If it is the philosopher's, then his failure is a failure to be wide enough or concrete enough. He needs above all to be sympathetically sensitive to the wide range of human interests, because it is this as a whole that he is bidden to systematize. He must give a single answer, and for that he must formulate a single question. Therefore his first problem is to discover the unity of problems.

The problem of Time is one of the most fascinating and yet most difficult of those questions to which the human mind applies itself in philosophical thought. Dean Inge, in his Philosophy of Plotinus, has referred to this problem as ‘the hardest in metaphysics,’ and we know that “from the time of Parmenides and Zeno to that of Mr. Bradley and M. Bergson, there has been no other problem that has seemed so baffling as that of Time.”

I do not propose to attempt in this article to make any exact or exhaustive definition of religion, but rather to call attention to one of its outstanding psychological characteristics. At the outset, then, I take it for granted that religion is primarily a feeling experience. We make use of the term ‘religion,’ it is true, for many things in addition to immediate feeling experiences, and it is inevitable that we should do so. But it will be well to bear in mind that when we describe Buddhism or Christianity (as a system of beliefs and practices) as ‘a religion’ we are using the term in a secondary fashion. A man may accept the tenets, and to some extent practise the commandments, of a religion in this sense without being religious.

The question of punishment is one which has always interested and usually puzzled moralists, and which forms a crucial example for the testing of moral theories. A utilitarian theory, whether of the hedonistic or of the ‘ ideal ’ kind, if it justifies punishment at all, is bound to justify it solely on the ground of the effects it produces. The suffering of pain by the person who is punished is thought to be in itself a bad thing, and the bringing of this bad thing into the world is held to need justification, and to receive it only from the fact that the effects are likely to be so much better than those that would follow from his non-punishment as to outweigh the evil of the pain.

Poppies in a field of corn may annoy a farmer and rejoice an artist. Clearly they are not in their right place, if the standard of judgment be immediate utility; but it is better that they should be accidentally there than nowhere at all to be found. The political organization of social life and, still more obviously, the economic, does not promote devotion to other purposes than those which appear to be practical in the eyes of men who cannot see very well. To suppose, for example, that beauty or truth is not useful is the result of philosophical nearsightedness. But there are some men, women, and children who are moved deeply by beauty and the divine whose emotion is not easily understood in political terms and is altogether unintelligible in terms of exchange-value.

I propose in this article to consider the question of the relation between mind and body. This question raises some of the most difficult issues in philosophy and constitutes the main problem of psychology.

In the problem of Meaning and Error, Epistemology, Logic, Psychology, and Etymology, all find an inevitable point of contact. It is necessary to go back little more than half a century to see something of the changes which have resulted in the present epoch of disintegration.