In Plutarch’s Quæstiones Conviviales there is a discussion on the topic—π (“What did Plato mean when he used to say that God always geometrizes?”).

I Shall begin by a distinction which will limit my subject. I propose to speak only of beautiful poetry and beautiful prose, or if the phrase be preferred, artistic poetry and prose. The distinction I wish to draw is between art and craft, between making a competent and useful thing which exactly fits its purpose and making it beautifully, between technical skill and artistry, between good workmanship and design and that touch of rareness which makes not merely good but fine and lovely. The boundaries are difficult to draw. For much craft is also beautiful, and the craftsman is always in doing his best, striving to be an artist and often succeeding. But they are not the same things. Mere technical skill will not make a work beautiful but only correct, and on the other hand art may possess beauty, even if not of the highest order; though it fails in skill, the conception in some degree makes up for the defect of skill, as for instance much primitive Italian painting or Greek sculpture, which is defective in drawing or modelling and yet beautiful. Now a large part, perhaps the greater part, of what is called art is not art at all, but craft, good correct painting or drawing or sculpture; pleasing, but not pleasing with the pleasure or even rapture which beauty gives. It is so with prose and poetry. Many poems are not poetry, though written in impeccable verse, and long poems are always apt to drop in places into what is only not called prose because it is metrical. By far the greatest part of prose is merely good workmanlike writing, and in no sense art. I am not intending to depreciate craft, and still less the value and difficulty of attaining it.

The study of Plato has become involved in so many entanglements of higher criticism that it is difficult even to approach the interpretation of any particular dialogue without bias or preconceptions. A swarm of problems starts up for settlement as a preliminary consideration to the correct understanding of Plato’s aims in writing the dialogue, and there is a danger lest its precise issue and philosophical value may be obscured by discussions about its place in the chronological order of the dialogues, as to whether it expresses the views of Socrates or of Plato, or represents a particular stage in the development of Plato's own thought, and so on. That this danger is real is forcibly suggested by a remark of Professor Taylor: “To understand a great thinker is, of course, impossible, unless we know something of the relative order of his works and of the actual period of his life to which they belong....We cannot, then, even make a beginning with the study of Plato until we have found some trustworthy indication of the order in which his works, or at least the most significant of them, were written.”

In Charles Renouvier we have one of the lone, stern, and indefatigable workers in philosophy in the nineteenth century. His powerful mind, moral earnestness, and intellectual vigour command respect and attention and place him high in the ranks of the philosophical thinkers of his century. He differed profoundly from his English contemporary Spencer and his German contemporary Lotze, both of whom have received more attention than Renouvier. His long and immensely active life fell into periods which coincide with, and partly reflect, the political and intellectual fortunes of his country from the Battle of Waterloo, through the Revolution of 1830, the Second Republic of 1848, the Second Empire, the War and the Commune of 1871, into the Third Republic, with its Dreyfus struggles and its Educational and Disestablishment problems in the early years of the present century.

Recent developments both in science and philosophy are tending to converge upon an outlook on things that constitutes or at least foreshadows a great new synthesis. The advances made more especially in astronomical and physical knowledge—the one concerning the indefinitely vast and the other the indefinitely minute—and the similarities disclosed in the two spheres, recalling Pascal’s insistent relating of the two infinites (the infinitely great and the infinitely small), and also Bacon’s contention that such similarities are not mere analogies but “the same footsteps of nature treading or printing upon several subjects or matters,” 1 have both widened and unified our conceptions of reality. Along with this has gone the influence alike on philosophy and on the sciences generally of the development of mathematical and biological ideas. Under the combined influence, especially, of Bergson and Einstein a restatement of fundamental principles is proceeding apace.

One of the chief grounds of objection to the view that value is a function of interest is afforded by the recognized distinction between what really is valuable and what merely seems to be valuable. This objection was urged against hedonism at the very dawn of European ethics, when it was contended that pleasure is an illusory experience of value (or seeming good) which reason corrects, or a merely provisional experience of value which reason confirms. The same objection is embodied in the assumption of common sense that present inclination, instead of constituting unimpeachable evidence of value, is often false and misleading.

Much has been said on the importance of the individual: the individual is to be respected; there is value in his self-assertiveness; his desires merit fulfilment. Yet it has been remarked not less that the individual is not independent; for his sustenance and his satisfaction he needs to have commerce with nature and society; and the term “tradition,” which makes us mindful of the prolonged, apparently interminable succession of the generations, reminds us also that in the universal procession of events the life of the individual is but as nothing, that it is very fragile and inevitably ephemeral; and that torn from the fabric of his community, deprived