Aristotle stated that philosophy began with “wonder” and that men continue to philosophize because and in so far as they continue to “wonder.” Philosophy, in other words, is rooted in the desire to understand the world, in the desire to find an intelligible pattern in events and to answer problems which occur to the mind in connection with the world. By using the phrase “the world” I do not mean to imply that the world is something finished and complete at any given moment: I use the phrase in the sense of the data of outer and inner experience with which any mind is confronted. One might say just as well that philosophy arises out of the desire to understand the “historical situation,” meaning by the last phrase the external material environment in which a man finds himself, his physiological and psychological make-up and that of other people, and the historic past. One might discuss the question whether the desire to understand ought to be interpreted or analysed in terms of another drive or other drives. Nietzsche, for example, suggested in the notes which have been published under the title “The Will to Power” that the desire to understand is one of the forms taken by the will to power.

The subject you have set me is a vast and daunting one, but I have my consolation that if I must inevitably trench a little-though as little as possible-on the issues my distinguished successors are to speak upon, they must equally come back on the ground assigned to me, and will be able to supplement for you my deficiencies and correct my mistakes.

Sir David Ross, Ladies And Gentlemen: I Have chosen as the topic of this inaugural lecture that of “having in mind,” the manner or manners in which things come before us in consciousness, are present to our thoughts, or are in some way “there for us.” Alternatively, I might say that I want to consider whatever may be involved in saying that we can turn our thoughts in this or that direction, that we can let them dwell on this or that actuality or possibility, whether what we thus concern ourselves with be picked out from our present environment, or reached for beyond it. I like this second “active” way of describing my subject-matter much less than my first, impersonal way of speaking, for reasons that I shall try to make plain in the course of this lecture. I wish, in short, to give you a tentative anatomy of our conscious life, and to sketch the fundamental dimensions into which it may be differentiated. This task is important, since the puzzles which concern the presence of objects to our minds are of a peculiarly deep-seated and refractory sort: they are also puzzles which infect our treatment of practically all other philosophical questions. It is not that certain arbitrarily chosen ways of speaking confuse us, which could be readily bettered by keeping our eyes on the facts: it is rather as if our subject-matter itself confused us, and tempted us to describe it in ways which only serve to deepen mystery and perplexity, and which ultimately plunge us into nonsense.

When man emerged from the millions of years of evolution in the Early and Late Stone-ages he had shed his ape-like characters; he was erect, large-brained, and he had become an agriculturist and a craftsman. He must have wondered—as we wonder still—at the sun, the moon and the stars, the land and the sea, the thunder and lightning, at his own birth, and growth and death. Endowed with intuition and reason, and with curiosity, he must have concluded— as we conclude—that all this did not explain itself. There must have existed, and still exist, Something Else, that he could not perceive and did not understand. Endowed also with imagination, he peopled the earth and the sky with spirits—gods and demigods, ghosts and fairies, demons and angels. There followed beliefs in direct communication from this other world, through dream or trance, ecstasy or intuition; sometimes an individual assurance of personal contact and inspiration. So religion came to be: in the form, first of animism, then of mythology, finally of monotheism.

In asking me to talk about Hegel in your series on synoptic philosophies, I take it that you were anxious to discover whether there are any positive merits in Hegel's ideas. I need hardly remind you that such an approach to this particular philosopher is not a very common one in this country to-day. Indeed, of all those who have been thought, at one time or another, to have produced ideas of lasting philosophical importance, Hegel is at present easily the least in repute. Nor is it the case with him as with certain other writers (Spinoza, for instance, or some of the Scholastics) that his ideas are uninteresting or unintelligible to the present generation but are thought all the same to be likely to have an appeal and an importance at some future date when the general intellectual climate has changed; the common verdict on him is far less friendly than that. If opinions on the subject were canvassed among students of philosophy in Great Pritain to-day, there can be little doubt that the majority would write Hegel off as the supreme example of a philosopher who tried to construct an elaborate metaphysical system in the most blatantly a priori manner, and who succeeded in getting himself taken seriously only because of his adroitness in verbal tricks.

Philosophical theories of perception are generally admitted to be responses to certain problems or puzzles allied to the ancient dichotomy between Appearance and Reality. For they have been mainly provoked by the incompatibility of the common–sense assumption that an external, physical world exists and is revealed to the senses with the well–known facts of perceptual variation and error. If only what is real were perceived just as if only what is right were done it is possible that many of those questions would never have been asked which lead to moral philosophy and a metaphysics of the external world. But sense perceptions of the same object vary so that it appears to have contradictory qualities and are sometimes completely deceptive. Nor do illusory differ internally from veridical perceptions. Moreover, perceptual variation and error can be unmasked only by such procedures as looking more carefully, listening harder, trying to touch, asking others, in short by more sense experience. So the senses are, as it were, both accused and judge in these disputes and why should a venal judge be trusted more than the criminal he tries? Such “correction” of one experience by another of the same kind seems no more reliable than the original “error.” Philosophers have found all this very puzzling.

In this paper I shall use terms such as “intrinsically good” which may be deemed old fashioned by many readers and which certainly to my own mind presuppose an objective non-naturalistic theory of ethics. I still hold such a theory and I have not mastered the new jargon by which a sort of higher synthesis between that and other theories is supposed to have been effected, but I do not think that such a view as mine of ethics in general is necessarily presupposed if one is to understand or even agree with the contentions of my article. These relate to a specific problem as to certain ethical actions, which will arise on any view that admits the possibility of giving any sort of legitimate reasons for ethical judgments, as we all do in practice. After all a naturalist can easily translate “intrinsically good” into his own terms, say, valued for its own sake by most people who experience it, and there will still be a question as to what is intrinsically and what is merely instrumentally good and other questions as to what is the logical nature of certain arguments in ethics.

I propose to consider in this paper some points concerning the part played by reason in non-moral conduct. The place of reason in ethics is a separate issue with which I shall not be directly concerned.

There are so many logical systems that it is difficult to find any criteria to which they must all conform. It is, however, generally agreed that all logical systems, however diverse in character, must avoid falling into contradiction. Internal consistency would, indeed, inevitably form part of any definition of what is meant by a logical system.

We are all waiting eagerly for the last three volumes of Toynbee's great Study of History, which has brought a new honour to British scholarship. For no English and perhaps no German writer has amassed such a wealth of information on human affairs in every age and every continent. We hope, rather anxiously, that his final diagnosis will not be to expect a “knock-out blow” from the strongest Power, which must be Russia. He is no disciple of Spengler, but the downfall of the West looms before his eyes.

If one takes a course in philosophy to-day at a British university, a discreet silence is usually observed about existentialism. Often the professors understand little of its methods or its doctrine. If their excuse in part is the inaccessibility in English of standard existentialist texts, it is true also that philosophers trained in the “critical philosophy” now in vogue feel a certain aversion to existentialism or, at all events, to the notion they have formed of it. If Christianity was a scandal to the Greeks and remains a scandal, as Dr. Brunner has recently told us, to contemporary humanists, existentialism is a scandal to the positivists. The latter are aware that the existentialists habitually trespass in the fields of religion, ethics, aesthetics and psychology, fields which, on the positivist view, should be reserved to other disciplines than philosophy, which has its own distinctive subject-matter and approach. They know that certain existentialists, notably Heidegger, provide a happy hunting ground for examples of “metaphysics.” They have heard that existentialism has sought to turn the tables on positivism by accusing it, if not of metaphysics, at all events of a barrenness of significant content, of a preoccupation with mere logistics which removes philosophy completely from men's business and bosoms. If the positivist accuses the existentialist of perpetrating “nonsense” in a technical sense, the latter retorts by accusing the positivist of reducing philosophy to nonsense in a pragmatic sense.

The question I shall deal with is often put in the form “What is the meaning of life?” I shall consider this form later on, but I do not want to begin with it, partly because it assumes that life has a meaning which can be called “the” meaning, an assumption which will have to be looked into, and partly because I want to start with something which looks very much more vague.

The many comments on good and evil found in the writings of A. N. Whitehead are exhibited in his mind against the two categories of positive and negative value. His concern in value-considerations is with the “trinity” of truth, beauty and goodness on the one hand, and with falsehood, ugliness and evil on the other. For him, “value” is a word employed for “the intrinsic reality of an event” and very frequently in his treatment of the value-theme he uses the term “importance” as having equivalence to “value.”

There has been for some years a feeling in the philosophical world in this country that we have had enough of the unproductive working of the treadmill of linguistics and of the new logic and that Metaphysics is at least not criminal, and even justifiable; notable justifications of Metaphysics are Professor Emmet's The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking and Professor Barnes” The Philosophical Predicament. But what is Metaphysics about? That, it seems to me, is a question which has to be looked into far more carefully than it has been, before we can think of justifying Metaphysics (or, for that matter, of attacking it). “About the Whole” would appear to be the answer which no would-be metaphysician can avoid, however frightened he may be of being sent into a concentration camp by his Ayerian colleagues for giving it. What is this Whole and how is it to be got? Judging at least by most nineteenth-century metaphysics, it would seem that the Whole is some kind of totality (of all that is known or to be known), comparable, save in respect of comprehensiveness, to the totality say which Physics deals with, and that it is got by reflecting on the nature of any knowing (epistemology) and/or on all the branches of knowledge and their relations to each other; Metaphysics, we should conclude, is a synthesis or construct both crowning, and confirmed by, knowledge.

I propose in this article to reconsider, in the light of some recent developments in the theory of knowledge, certain general questions about the nature of duty. In particular, I propose to consider the question of the relation between our moral duties on the one hand, and our knowledge or ignorance of facts and of moral principles on the other.

“A society is more than a set of entities to which the same class-name applies” (Process and Reality, Pt. II, Chap. 3, Sect. II). Taking this obiter dictum of Whitehead's seriously, the present paper seeks to elucidate some of the more abstract properties of a society. By “society” I understand primarily human society in the sense in which it is an object of study for social theory, though part of what is said may admit of application to societies in some wider sense. An apology should perhaps be offered for the terminology introduced. The writer's only excuse is that there seemed no other way of expressing the ideas in question.

In this paper I shall do three things. Firstly, I shall distinguish between three senses of “imagine”: one in which (the context makes clear that) the word is used to report the occurrence of mental imagery; a second in which “imagined” is used as substantially equivalent to “thought”; and a third in which “imagine” is used as substantially equivalent to “suppose.” (And I shall argue that in neither of the two latter senses does imagining necessarily involve imagery.) Secondly, I shall discuss Hume's thesis about imagination: both because, although this is set out as a plausible (but mistaken) generalization about psychology, it nevertheless seems to me that Hume dealt with a central philosophical problem concerning imagination—the relation of descriptions to imagery—in a way that is suggestive and fruitful; and—the main reason for mentioning Hume—because a study of the relation between imagining (when this is imaging) and imagining (when this is supposing) will help us to reinterpret his thesis from a mistaken one about psychology into a correct one about logic and language. Thirdly, I shall give the central arguments and the conclusion of the chapter on Imagination in The Concept of Mind, and comment on them.

This paper is divided into two sections. The first aims at showing in a general way that the programme and methods of Berkeley and Professor Ryle are to a large extent similar. The second deals with one problem only. It is an attempt to provide interpretation and commentary on Berkeley's attack on “absolute existence” and on Ryle's attack (which comes to the same thing) on the view that there can be different “kinds of existence,” “kinds of status,” or a number of different “worlds.”