The late Archbishop Temple regarded Berdyaeff as one of the most important writers of the present time, and several good judges have said the same. He is a lonely, original, combative thinker, nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri, whose philosophy is based solely on his own spiritual experience. Contradictions and ambiguities may certainly be found in his writings, but the same may be said of every philosopher who recognizes what Heraclitus calls the fathomless depths of human personality, the clash of Yes and No in which Boehme says that all things consist. For him omnia exeunt in mysterium. He does not attempt an ambitious and coherent system, or disguise his transient obligations to the various currents of thought which he has followed and in part rejected. As he says himself, “the contradictions which may be found in my thought are expressions of spiritual conflict, of contradictions which lie at the very heart of existence itself.”

Ethics, in the sense in which that word is used by philosophers, may be described as the theoretical treatment of moral phenomena. I use the phrase “moral phenomena” to cover all those facts and only those in describing which we have to use such words as “ought,” “right and wrong,” “good and evil,” or any others which are merely verbal translations of these.

The three hundred and fiftieth birthday of René Descartes and the three hundredth of G. W. Leibniz, both being commemorated this year, recall to mind an epoch which, in many respects, resembled our own more than any other period of modern history. The Thirty Years' War during which Descartes served four years in the armies of the Dukes of Nassau and Bavaria and the aftermath of which determined many circumstances of Leibniz's life and work, was largely an ideological war leaving Europe in a state of tension, which the Peace of Westphalia did little to allay. As a matter of fact, the strife continued in many changing forms up to the time of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, if it can be said at all to have been terminated by these events.

The history of Natural Philosophy is dominated by a paradox; broadly speaking, a vast increase in its range of application to the external world has been accompanied by a sweeping simplification in its basic assumptions. From the standpoint of Empiricism this dual development appears utterly mysterious. On the other hand, Rationalism, which seeks to demonstrate the metaphysical necessity of natural law, and hence might throw light on this development, has been generally discredited, particularly by men of science. It is not surprising, therefore, that philosophical discussion of scientific method has become a Babel of confusing tongues.

In some sense every man has a moral right, or more properly a moral claim, to equality with other men. In what sense will, I hope, become apparent in the course of this paper. That there is such a claim in some sense is clear enough. “Equality before the law,” for example, is something which we all recognize to be right.

I much appreciate the honour of being invited to deliver the first Manson lecture, which, its founder has laid down, is to be devoted to the consideration of some subject of common interest to philosophy and medicine. I cannot think of anything which better fulfils that condition than the neurological approach to the problem of perception. The neurologist holds the bridge between body and mind. Every day he meets with examples of disordered perception and he learns from observing the effects of lesions produced by disease, or by the physiologist's experiments, something of how the neural basis of perception is organized. It is possible to study perception as though this was largely irrelevant. How far that view is right will be for you to judge when I have finished.

The idea of Importance has received scanty treatment in philosophical literature, yet it is always turning up. Whitehead has, indeed, spoken of “the sense of importance” as “nerving all civilized effort”; and elsewhere he names “importance” and “matter of fact” as “two ultimate notions.” But the passage where he considers these is all too short and elusive, and I know of no other direct discussion of the meaning of importance. Plenty of attention has, of course, been paid to the notion of interest. But “interest” does not cover the whole notion of importance; it covers at most that aspect which I shall call “relational importance.” “Importance” I shall suggest is a bridge notion, used to refer both to what matters in relation to some interest, and to what, as we say, “really matters.” It might therefore be worth considering its merits as a candidate for the position of generic term for value, since it can be subdivided so as to express both its relational and its absolutist aspects.

The editor suggested my writing an article on the question whether it was possible to provide an ethics based upon principles which would be agreed to by all enlightened men, and he further suggested that I should begin the article by stating clearly what morality is. That is a somewhat difficult task, because while “morality” might be defined as “living as one ought,” it is a very disputable question whether and how this “ought” is itself to be defined, and I could not undertake to deal with this question by the way as an introduction to an article on something else. It is, however, clear that there is another sense of “ought” besides the strictly moral sense. We do use the term in cases where it does not entail that a man is neglecting his moral duty if he does not do what he “ought.” For instance we say: “You ought to have seen that film,” “You ought not to have made that move,” “You ought to have seen through that argument,” even “Hitler ought to have invaded England after Dunkirk” where we should have regarded it as the reverse of a good thing if he had done what we say he ought. In none of these cases are we asserting a moral obligation. For we do not ordinarily regard people as under a moral obligation to seek their own pleasure, nor to make certain moves in a game, and while we should say that in matters of serious concern a person is morally obliged to do his best to form a true view as to the merits of a relevant argument, we should not say that he was morally obliged actually to form a true view, for this does not depend solely on his will. And in the fourth instance the action is one which we should think morally wrong rather than morally obligatory. What is there in common between “ought” as used in these cases and the moral “ought”? It is that in each case the action fits the situation, either wholly, or with certain limitations, as in the last instance where we presumably mean that to invade England would have fitted in better with Hitler's ends in the given environment than did the policy Hitler actually adopted.

In an essay on pantheism Schopenhauer observes that his chief objection against it is that it says nothing, that it simply enriches language with a superfluous synonym of the word “world.” It can hardly be denied that by this remark the great pessimist, who was himself an atheist, scored a real point. For if a philosopher starts off with the physical world and proceeds to call it God, he has not added anything to the world except a label, a label which, if we take into account the ordinary significance of the word “God,” might well appear unnecessary and superfluous: one might just as pertinently say that the world is the world as that the world is God. Neither the Jew nor the Christian nor the Moslem understand by “God” the physical world, so that, if someone calls the physical world God, he cannot be taken to mean that the world is God according to the Jewish or Christian or Moslem understanding of God. Does he mean any more than that the physical world is ultimately self-explanatory, that no Cause external to the world, no transcendent Being is requisite or admissible, i.e. that there is no God? If that were all there is in pantheism, the latter would indeed be indistinguishable from atheism, and those who called Spinoza an atheist would be fully justified.

Poetry has to do with reality in its most individual aspect. It is thus at the opposite pole to science, and out of its reach. Studies like The Road to Xanadu, highly valuable though they may be in one way, do not help us in any measure to understand what poetry in itself is; nor do they heighten substantially our appreciation of poetry. This may seem rather obvious, but it is not in fact idle to say it. For our thought is apt to be unduly coloured to-day by the progress of science, and some of the votaries of science are prone to regard it, in the Biblical phrase, as ‘profitable unto all things.’ These are less naïve to-day than their prototypes a century ago, and they have a subtler psychology at their disposal when they turn to art. But their view is no less pernicious for that reason. Science has very certain limits, and we only bring it into contempt by forcing upon it a forlorn and unnatural enterprise beyond its own terrain. Some scientists, and they include eminent persons like Julian Huxley, have made that mistake in regard to our ideas of right and wrong, and have endeavoured to develop a science of ethics. It is not to the purpose here to expose the confusions involved in this particular act of aggression on the part of science. Science has nothing to do, in the final analysis, with our ideas of right and wrong. And it is also true, quite apart from ultimate questions about the meaning of value, that we cannot give a scientific analysis of art. Science may indeed help us to understand matters incidental to the pursuit of artistic activities.

History has become a real and urgent problem. It harasses us in a double form, theoretical and practical, corresponding to the double meaning of the term “history” as either “a sequence of events in time” or “our knowledge of past events”. The first concerns our attitude to human history. We somehow suffer from “historical indigestion”. We may have mastered Nature, but we have certainly not yet mastered History. Therefore it threatens to dominate us. The mass of past events is too much for us and for our memory, too many dates, too many facts, too many interesting or indifferent happenings. We cannot even keep pace with, or realize, all the important events which fill our own times, like world-wars, revolutions, counter-revolutions, inflation and deflation, with all the misery they imply. Consciously or unconsciously we feel ashamed of the human record, of the amount of cruelty, destruction, murder, and martyrdom inflicted on innocent beings. In spite of all this we cannot escape History. All the great events affect every human being. Moreover, historical knowledge permeates our education and is disturbingly growing from year to year, more in detail and in specialization than as a co-ordinated whole. We may react to this situation in one of three ways: (1) by filling our brain with this unco-ordinated mass of historical knowledge, and submerging our personality in it, (2) by becoming specialists and disregarding problems other than our own, (3) by ignoring the past altogether, and falling back into the state of nature and barbarism. We have witnessed all these solutions and their disquieting results.

Our memories are private and particular; when you and I share an experience our experience is yet in the very moment of sharing different for you and for me, and our two memories of an event in the past are still more disparate. For memories are shaped and constrained by the deep-lying organic stress of what we have lived through, of our actual living, in the interval between then and now. A memory follows the solitary track of our individual experience, and, like the particle in modern Physical theory, is changed in and by the route it has traced.

In my last article I described fully the important type of entity in Whitehead's philosophy called “propositions,” and explained the part they played in conscious experience. We learnt that “consciousness” was a certain kind of emergent quality associated with the late phase of concrescence of some high-grade actual entities. It was pointed out that whenever consciousness was present in experience, this proved to be the subjective form of an integral synthetic feeling composed of (1) a physical feeling and (2) a pro-positional feeling. This integral feeling was said to be a feeling of contrast between “actuality” and “ideality,” between a fact and a possibility. That is to say consciousness is the subjective form of the feeling of a contrast between what actuality is, and might not be, or what actuality is not, and yet might be. We can now proceed to deal with a number of higher phases of experience such as “belief,” “conscious perception,” “judgment,” together with experiences termed by Whitehead “physical purposes.”