If there is any unity in the movement of history, if there is any intimate relation between what goes before and what comes later, it is necessary, for setting this forth, that earlier and later periods should be synthesized in a single mind.

Philosophers are both effects and causes: effects of their social circumstances and of the politics and institutions of their time; causes (if they are fortunate) of beliefs which mould the politics and institutions of later ages.

Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge—so I should contend—belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man’s Land is philosophy.

The Bacchic ritual produced what was called ‘enthusiasm’, which means, etymologically, having the god enter into the worshipper, who believed that he became one with the god.

It was the combination of passion and intellect that made them great, while they were great. Neither alone would have transformed the world for all future time as they transformed it.

The statement that everything is made of water is to be regarded as a scientific hypothesis, and by no means a foolish one. Twenty years ago, the received view was that everything is made of hydrogen, which is two thirds of water. … The Greeks were rash in their hypotheses, but the Milesian school, at least, was prepared to test them empirically.

The thought which Anaximander is expressing seems to be this: there should be a certain proportion of fire, of earth, and of water in the world, but each element (conceived as a god) is perpetually attempting to enlarge its empire. But there is a kind of necessity or natural law which perpetually redresses the balance; where there has been fire, for example, there are ashes, which are earth.

The fundamental substance, he said, is air. The soul is air; fire is rarefied air; when condensed, air becomes first water, then, if further condensed, earth, and finally stone. This theory has the merit of making all the differences between different substances quantitative, depending entirely upon the degree of condensation.

Mathematics, in the sense of demonstrative deductive argument, begins with him, and in him is intimately connected with a peculiar form of mysticism.

It was supposed, on the basis of mathematics, that thought is superior to sense, intuition to observation. If the world of sense does not fit mathematics, so much the worse for the world of sense.

The form of Newton’s Principia, in spite of its admittedly empirical material, is entirely dominated by Euclid. Theology, in its exact scholastic forms, takes its style from the same source.

In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held.

This view prevailed until the discovery of radio-activity, when it was found that atoms could disintegrate.

Energy had to replace matter as what is permanent. But energy, unlike matter, is not a refinement of the common-sense notion of a ‘thing’; it is merely a characteristic of physical processes.

What makes Parmenides historically important is that he invented a form of metaphysical argument that, in one form or another, is to be found in most subsequent metaphysicians down to and including Hegel. He is often said to have invented logic, but what he really invented was metaphysics based on logic.

When you think, you think of something; when you use a name, it must be the name of something. Therefore both thought and language require objects outside themselves. And since you can think of a thing or speak of it at one time as well as at another, whatever can be thought of or spoken of must exist at all times.

I have put the argument here to remind the reader that philosophical theories, if they are important, can generally be revived in a new form after being refuted as originally stated. Refutations are seldom final; in most cases, they are only a prelude to further refinements.

It was he, as already mentioned, who established earth, air, fire, and water as the four elements (though the word ‘element’ was not used by him). Each of these was everlasting, but they could be mixed in different proportions and thus produce the changing complex substances that we find in the world.

Athens at its maximum, about 430 B.C., is estimated to have numbered about 230,000 (including slaves), and the surrounding territory of rural Attica probably contained a rather smaller population.

Anaxagoras held that everything is infinitely divisible, and that even the smallest portion of matter contains some of each element. Things appear to be that of which they contain most.

Man’s apparent superiority is due to the fact that he has hands; all seeming differences of intelligence are really due to bodily differences.

The ‘final cause’ of an occurrence is an event in the future for the sake of which the occurrence takes place. … The answer to the former question is a teleological explanation, or an explanation by final causes; the answer to the latter question is a mechanistic explanation.

But experience has shown that the mechanistic question leads to scientific knowledge, while the teleological question does not.

What is amiss, even in the best philosophy after Democritus, is an undue emphasis on man as compared with the universe. First comes scepticism, with the Sophists, leading to a study of how we know rather than to the attempt to acquire fresh knowledge. Then comes, with Socrates, the emphasis on ethics; with Plato, the rejection of the world of sense in favour of the self-created world of pure thought; with Aristotle, the belief in purpose as the fundamental concept in science.

This was, I think, because Plato, in the Theaetetus, suggests, as an interpretation of Protagoras, that one opinion can be better than another, though it cannot be truer.

Plato is always concerned to advocate views that will make people what he thinks virtuous; he is hardly ever intellectually honest, because he allows himself to judge doctrines by their social consequences.

It is clear that he had no wish to avoid the death penalty by concessions which might seem to acknowledge his guilt.

The Platonic Socrates anticipates both the Stoics and the Cynics.

All that is needed is knowledge of how the words in question are used. But when our inquiry is concluded, we have made only a linguistic discovery, not a discovery in ethics.

The myth, fully developed, is to be found in Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus; the ideals that it favours have had a great part in framing the doctrines of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and National Socialism.

The problem of finding a collection of ‘wise’ men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.

What Plato does not seem to realize is that the compulsory acceptance of such myths is incompatible with philosophy, and involves a kind of education which stunts intelligence.

When we ask: what will Plato’s Republic achieve? the answer is rather humdrum. It will achieve success in wars against roughly equal populations, and it will secure a livelihood for a certain small number of people. It will almost certainly produce no art or science, because of its rigidity; in this respect, as in others, it will be like Sparta.

If you do, it is good for you; if you do not, it is bad for you. If many do and many do not, the decision cannot be made by reason, but only by force, actual or concealed.

Many of its provisions, including some that we should have thought quite impracticable, were actually realized at Sparta.

The absolute minimum of what remains, even in the view of those most hostile to Plato, is this: that we cannot express ourselves in a language composed wholly of proper names, but must have also general words such as ‘man’, ‘dog’, ‘cat’; or, if not these, then relational words such as ‘similar’, ‘before’, and so on. Such words are not meaningless noises, and it is difficult to see how they can have meaning if the world consists entirely of particular things, such as are designated by proper names.

An ascetic morality was the natural consequence of this dualism. Christianity adopted this doctrine in part, but never wholly.

In so far as the division of mind and body can be accepted, the worst pleasures, as well as the best, are mental—for example, envy, and many forms of cruelty and love of power.

The theory expressed must, I think, have arisen from reflection on geometry, which appeared to be a matter of pure reason, like arithmetic, and yet had to do with space, which was an aspect of the sensible world.

There is however in Plato and among philosophers of certain other schools a very different doctrine, to the effect that there is nothing worthy to be called ‘knowledge’ to be derived from the senses, and that the only real knowledge has to do with concepts. … In this view, ‘2 + 2 = 4’ is genuine knowledge, but such a statement as ‘snow is white’ is so full of ambiguity and uncertainty that it cannot find a place in the philosopher’s corpus of truths.

The mind contemplates some things through its own instrumentality, others through the bodily faculties. … It follows that we cannot know things through the senses alone, since through the senses alone we cannot know that things exist. Therefore knowledge consists in reflection, not in impressions, and perception is not knowledge, because it ‘has no part in apprehending truth, since it has none in apprehending existence’.

Plato, under the influence of the Pythagoreans, assimilated other knowledge too much to mathematics. He shared this mistake with many of the greatest philosophers, but it was a mistake none the less.

The true ground of the distinction is, in fact, linguistic; it is derived from syntax. There are proper names, adjectives, and relation-words; we may say ‘John is wise, James is foolish, John is taller than James.’ Here ‘John’ and ‘James’ are proper names, ‘wise’ and ‘foolish’ are adjectives, and ‘taller’ is a relation-word. Metaphysicians, ever since Aristotle, have interpreted these syntactical differences metaphysically: John and James are substances, wisdom and folly are universals.

The main argument for God is the First Cause: there must be something which originates motion, and this something must itself be unmoved, and must be eternal, substance, and actuality. The object of desire and the object of thought, Aristotle says, cause movement in this way, without themselves being in motion. So God produces motion by being loved, whereas every other cause of motion works by being itself in motion (like a billiard ball).

God does not have the attributes of a Christian Providence, for it would derogate from His perfection to think about anything except what is perfect, i.e. Himself. ‘It must be of itself that the divine thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking’ (1074b). We must infer that God does not know of the existence of our sublunary world. Aristotle, like Spinoza, holds that, while men must love God, it is impossible that God should love men.

It seems, from these passages, that individuality—what distinguishes one man from another—is connected with the body and the irrational soul, while the rational soul or mind is divine and impersonal. One man likes oysters, and another likes pineapples; this distinguishes between them. But when they think about the multiplication table, provided they think correctly, there is no difference between them. The irrational separates us, the rational unites us. Thus the immortality of mind or reason is not a personal immortality of separate men, but a share in God’s immortality.

The State, though later in time than the family, is prior to it, and even to the individual, by nature; for ‘what each thing is when fully developed we call its nature’, and human society, fully developed, is a State, and the whole is prior to the part. … In like manner an individual cannot fulfil his purpose unless he is part of a State.

A government is good when it aims at the good of the whole community, bad when it cares only for itself. There are three kinds of government that are good: monarchy, aristocracy, and constitutional government (or polity); there are three that are bad: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. There are also many mixed intermediate forms. It will be observed that the good and bad governments are defined by the ethical qualities of the holders of power, not by the form of the constitution.

All social inequality, in the long run, is inequality of income. That is part of the argument for democracy: that the attempt to have a ‘proportionate justice’ based on any merit other than wealth is sure to break down.

A substance is supposed to be the subject of properties, and to be something distinct from all its properties. But when we take away the properties, and try to imagine the substance by itself, we find that there is nothing left.

To the Greek, attempting to give a scientific account of motion, the purely mechanical view hardly suggested itself, except in the case of a few men of genius such as Democritus and Archimedes. Two sets of phenomena seemed important: the movements of animals, and the movements of the heavenly bodies. … To the Greek, it seemed more natural to assimilate apparently lifeless motions to those of animals. A child still distinguishes live animals from other things by the fact that they can move of themselves; to many Greeks, and especially to Aristotle, this peculiarity suggested itself as the basis of a general theory of physics.

To come to a more general matter: Aristotelian physics is incompatible with Newton’s ‘First Law of Motion’, originally enunciated by Galileo. This law states that every body, left to itself, will, if already in motion, continue to move in a straight line with uniform velocity.

To conceive of the earth, not as the centre of the universe, but as one among the planets, not as eternally fixed, but as wandering through space, showed an extraordinary emancipation from anthropocentric thinking. When once this jolt had been given to men’s natural picture of the universe, it was not so very difficult to be led by scientific arguments to a more accurate theory.

The result of this policy was to bring into the minds of thoughtful men the conception of mankind as a whole; the old loyalty to the City State and (in a lesser degree) to the Greek race seemed no longer adequate.

‘Metaphysics sink into the background, and ethics, now individual, become of the first importance. Philosophy is no longer the pillar of fire going before a few intrepid seekers after truth: it is rather an ambulance following in the wake of the struggle for existence and picking up the weak and wounded.’

The psychological preparation for the other-worldliness of Christianity begins in the Hellenistic period, and is connected with the eclipse of the City State. … When political power passed into the hands of the Macedonians, Greek philosophers, as was natural, turned aside from politics and devoted themselves more to the problem of individual virtue or salvation.

The first of these schools is derived, through its founder Diogenes, from Antisthenes, a disciple of Socrates, about twenty years older than Plato. Antisthenes was a remarkable character, in some ways rather like Tolstoy.

Aristotle is the last Greek philosopher who faces the world cheerfully; after him, all have, in one form or another, a philosophy of retreat.

In practice, this meant that one conformed to the customs of whatever country one inhabited. A modern disciple would go to church on Sundays and perform the correct genuflexions, but without any of the religious beliefs that are supposed to inspire these actions. Ancient Sceptics went through the whole pagan ritual, and were even sometimes priests; their Scepticism assured them that this behaviour could not be proved wrong, and their common sense (which survived their philosophy) assured them that it was convenient.

The only logic admitted by the Greeks was deductive, and all deduction had to start, like Euclid, from general principles regarded as self-evident. Timon denied the possibility of finding such principles. Everything, therefore, will have to be proved by means of something else, and all argument will be either circular or an endless chain hanging from nothing. In either case nothing can be proved.

Scepticism had enough force to make educated men dissatisfied with the State religions, but it had nothing positive, even in the purely intellectual sphere, to offer in their place.

‘The beginning and the root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach; even wisdom and culture must be referred to this.’

From the beginning of Plato’s Republic it is clear that the fear of punishment after death was common in fifth-century Athens, and it is not likely that it grew less in the interval between Socrates and Epicurus.

If the world is completely deterministic, natural laws will decide whether I shall be virtuous or not. If I am wicked, Nature compels me to be wicked, and the freedom which virtue is supposed to give is not possible for me.

The Stoic ethic suited the times of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, because its gospel was one of endurance rather than hope.

It has become clear, not only that sufficient torture will break down almost any man’s fortitude, but also that morphia or cocaine can reduce a man to docility. The will, in fact, is only independent of the tyrant so long as the tyrant is unscientific.

There is, in fact, an element of sour grapes in Stoicism. We can’t be happy, but we can be good; let us therefore pretend that, so long as we are good, it doesn’t matter being unhappy.

The long dominion of Rome accustomed men to the idea of a single civilization under a single government. … The conception of one human family, one Catholic religion, one universal culture, and one worldwide State, has haunted men’s thoughts ever since its approximate realization by Rome.

It is, therefore, not those who enjoy instinctive happiness who invent the kinds of metaphysical optimism that depend upon belief in the reality of a super-sensible world.

The mood of thoughtful men, throughout the whole period, was one of deep unhappiness in regard to the affairs of this world, only rendered endurable by the hope of a better world hereafter. This unhappiness was a reflection of what was happening throughout Western Europe. The third century was a period of disaster, when the general level of well-being was sharply lowered. … In later times, until the Renaissance, men had no such simple happiness in the visible world, but turned their hopes to the unseen. Acragas is replaced in their love by Jerusalem the Golden. When earthly happiness at last returned, the intensity of longing for the other world grew gradually less.

The historical books of the Old Testament, which were mostly compiled after the captivity, give a misleading impression, since they suggest that the idolatrous practices against which the prophets protested were a falling-off from earlier strictness, whereas in fact the earlier strictness had never existed. The prophets were innovators to a much greater extent than appears in the Bible when read unhistorically.

Their ritual peculiarities held them together as a nation, but emphasis on the Law gradually destroyed originality and made them intensely conservative.

Gnosticism afforded a half-way house between philosophic paganism and Christianity, for, while it honoured Christ, it thought ill of the Jews.

Ultimately all spirits will become wholly submissive to Christ, and will then be bodiless. Even the devil will be saved at the last.

Throughout the dark ages and the medieval period, their authority was revered; they, more than any other men, fixed the mould into which the Church was shaped.

It is strange that, with all Jerome’s deep feeling about the fall of the ancient world, he thinks the preservation of virginity more important than victory over the Huns and Vandals and Goths. Never once do his thoughts turn to any possible measure of practical statesmanship; never once does he point out the evils of the fiscal system, or of reliance on an army composed of barbarians.

The only way Augustine can find to avoid these contradictions is to say that past and future can only be thought of as present: ‘past’ must be identified with memory, and ‘future’ with expectation, memory and expectation being both present facts.

Subjectivism led him to anticipate not only Kant’s theory of time, but Descartes’ cogito.

All through the Middle Ages, during the gradual rise of the papal power, and throughout the conflict between Pope and Emperor, St Augustine supplied the Western Church with the theoretical justification of its policy.

It is strange that the last men of intellectual eminence before the dark ages were concerned, not with saving civilization or expelling the barbarians or reforming the abuses of the administration, but with preaching the merit of virginity and the damnation of unbaptized infants.

Throughout the Middle Ages he was read and admired, regarded always as a devout Christian and treated almost as if he had been one of the Fathers. Yet his Consolations of Philosophy, written in 524 while he was awaiting execution, is purely Platonic; it does not prove that he was not a Christian, but it does show that pagan philosophy had a much stronger hold on him than Christian theology.

This is followed by a great deal of purely Platonic metaphysics. Imperfection, we are told, is a lack, implying the existence of a perfect pattern. He adopted the privative theory of evil.

Theodoric employed Boethius to reform the coinage, and to astonish less sophisticated barbarian kings with such devices as sun-dials and water-clocks.

Before his pontificate, the bishop of Rome, though acknowledged to be the greatest man in the hierarchy, was not regarded as having any jurisdiction outside his own diocese. St Ambrose, for example, who was on the best of terms with the Pope of his day, obviously never regarded himself as in any degree subject to his authority. Gregory, owing partly to his personal qualities and partly to the prevailing anarchy, was able to assert successfully an authority which was admitted by ecclesiastics throughout the West, and even, to a lesser degree, in the East.

This hostility to pagan learning survived in the Church for at least four centuries, till the time of Gerbert (Sylvester II). It was only from the eleventh century onward that the Church became friendly to learning.

After him, for many ages, the city of Rome ceased to produce great men. But in its downfall it succeeded in fettering the souls of its conquerors: the reverence which they felt for the Chair of Peter was an outcome of the awe which they felt for the throne of the Caesars.

In the West, but not in the East, the laity were mostly illiterate for many centuries, and this gave the Church an advantage in the West which it did not possess in the East. The prestige of Rome surpassed that of any Eastern city, for it combined the imperial tradition with legends of the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, and of Peter as first Pope. The Emperor’s prestige might have sufficed to cope with that of the Pope, but no Western monarch’s could. … For all these reasons, the emancipation of the Pope from Byzantine domination was essential both to the independence of the Church in relation to secular monarchs, and to the ultimate establishment of the papal monarchy in the government of the Western Church.

In order to give an air of antique legality to Pepin’s gift, churchmen forged a document, purporting to be a decree issued by the Emperor Constantine, by which, when he founded the New Rome, he bestowed upon the Pope the old Rome and all its Western territories. This bequest, which was the basis of the Pope’s temporal power, was accepted as genuine by the whole of the subsequent Middle Ages. It was first rejected as a forgery, in the time of the Renaissance, by Lorenzo Valla in 1439.

There was thus, from the first, a curious interdependence of pope and emperor. No one could be emperor unless crowned by the Pope in Rome; on the other hand, for some centuries, every strong emperor claimed the right to appoint or depose popes. The medieval theory of legitimate power depended upon both emperor and pope; their mutual dependence was galling to both, but for centuries inescapable.

Our use of the phrase ‘the Dark Ages’ to cover the period from 600 to 1000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe. In China, this period includes the time of the Tang dynasty, the greatest age of Chinese poetry, and in many other ways a most remarkable epoch. From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished. What was lost to Christendom at this time was not lost to civilization, but quite the contrary.

As he put it, the argument is as follows: We define ‘God’ as the greatest possible object of thought. Now if an object of thought does not exist, another, exactly like it, which does exist, is greater. Therefore the greatest of all objects of thought must exist, since, otherwise, another, still greater, would be possible. Therefore God exists.

This argument has never been accepted, by theologians. It was adversely criticized at the time; then it was forgotten till the latter half of the thirteenth century. Thomas Aquinas rejected it, and among theologians his authority has prevailed ever since. But among philosophers it has had a better fate. Descartes revived it in a somewhat amended form; Leibniz thought that it could be made valid by the addition of a supplement to prove that God is possible. Kant considered that he had demolished it once for all. Nevertheless, in some sense, it underlies the system of Hegel and his followers, and reappears in Bradley’s principle: ‘What may be and must be, is.’

Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be under-rated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization—education, books, and learned leisure. Both stimulated the West when it emerged from barbarism—the Mohammedans chiefly in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines chiefly in the fifteenth.

As a philosophic school, it has certain definite characteristics. First, it is confined within the limits of what appears to the writer to be orthodoxy; if his views are condemned by a council, he is usually willing to retract. … Third, there is a great belief in ‘dialectic’ and in syllogistic reasoning; the general temper of the scholastics is minute and disputatious rather than mystical.

Frederick, in spite of his abilities, could not have succeeded, because the antipapal forces that existed in his time were pious and democratic, whereas his aim was something like a restoration of the pagan Roman Empire.

The net result of St Francis’s life was to create yet one more wealthy and corrupt order, to strengthen the hierarchy, and to facilitate the persecution of all who excelled in moral earnestness or freedom of thought. In view of his own aims and character, it is impossible to imagine any more bitterly ironical outcome.

The appeal to reason is, in a sense, insincere, since the conclusion to be reached is fixed in advance.

This maxim says: ‘Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.’ Although he did not say this, he said something which has much the same effect, namely: ‘It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.’

A universal is merely a sign of many things. As to this, Occam agrees with Aquinas, as against Averroes, Avicenna, and the Augustinians. Both hold that there are only individual things, individual minds, and acts of understanding.

The Old Testament, the mystery religions, Greek philosophy, and Roman methods of administration were all blended in the Catholic Church, and combined to give it a strength which no earlier social organization had equalled.

The Renaissance was not a period of great achievement in philosophy, but it did certain things which were essential preliminaries to the greatness of the seventeenth century. In the first place, it broke down the rigid scholastic system, which had become an intellectual strait jacket. It revived the study of Plato, and thereby demanded at least so much independent thought as was required for choosing between him and Aristotle. In regard to both, it promoted a genuine and first-hand knowledge, free from the glosses of Neoplatonists and Arabic commentators. More important still, it encouraged the habit of regarding intellectual activity as a delightful social adventure, not a cloistered meditation aiming at the preservation of a predetermined orthodoxy.

His political philosophy is scientific and empirical, based upon his own experience of affairs, concerned to set forth the means to assigned ends, regardless of the question whether the ends are to be considered good or bad.

His criticisms of the Church in his day are two: that by its evil conduct it has undermined religious belief, and that the temporal power of the popes, with the policy that it inspires, prevents the unification of Italy.

The growth of City States in Italy synchronized with the revival of learning, and made it possible for humanists to profit by the political theories of republican Greeks and Romans.

It is the first appearance in literature, so far as I know, of the view set forth in Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar, according to which true religion comes from the heart, not the head, and all elaborate theology is superfluous. … It is, essentially, a rejection of Hellenic intellectualism by the sentimentalism of the North.

It must be admitted, however, that life in More’s Utopia, as in most others, would be intolerably dull. Diversity is essential to happiness, and in Utopia there is hardly any. This is a defect of all planned social systems, actual as well as imaginary.

The Reformation and Counter-Reformation, alike, represent the rebellion of less civilized nations against the intellectual domination of Italy.

Their theology was such as to diminish the power of the Church. They abolished purgatory, from which the souls of the dead could be delivered by masses. They rejected the doctrine of Indulgences, upon which a large part of the papal revenue depended. By the doctrine of predestination, the fate of the soul after death was made wholly independent of the actions of priests.

Gradually weariness resulting from the wars of religion led to the growth of belief in religious toleration, which was one of the sources of the movement which developed into eighteenth-and nineteenth-century liberalism.

Disgust with theological warfare turned the attention of able men increasingly to secular learning, especially mathematics and science. These are among the reasons for the fact that, while the sixteenth century, after the rise of Luther is philosophically barren, the seventeenth contains the greatest names and makes the most notable advance since Greek times.

Galileo held, as against this view, that every body, if left alone, will continue to move in a straight line with uniform velocity; any change, either in the rapidity or the direction of motion, requires to be explained as due to the action of some ‘force’. This principle was enunciated by Newton as the ‘first law of motion’.

The solar system, at any rate, was kept going by its own momentum and its own laws; no outside interference was needed. There might still seem to be need of God to set the mechanism working; the planets, according to Newton, were originally hurled by the hand of God. But when He had done this, and decreed the law of gravitation, everything went on by itself without further need of divine intervention.

Moreover purpose, which had since Aristotle formed an intimate part of the conception of science, was now thrust out of scientific procedure. Anyone might still believe that the heavens exist to declare the glory of God, but no one could let this belief intervene in an astronomical calculation. The world might have a purpose, but purposes could no longer enter into scientific explanations.

The whole basis of his philosophy was practical: to give mankind mastery over the forces of nature by means of scientific discoveries and inventions.

One of the most famous parts of Bacon’s philosophy is his enumeration of what he calls ‘idols’, by which he means bad habits of mind that cause people to fall into error. Of these he enumerates four kinds. ‘Idols of the tribe’ are those that are inherent in human nature; he mentions in particular the habit of expecting more order in natural phenomena than is actually to be found. ‘Idols of the cave’ are personal prejudices, characteristic of the particular investigator. ‘Idols of the market-place’ are those that have to do with the tyranny of words. ‘Idols of the theatre’ are those that have to do with received systems of thought; of these, naturally, Aristotle and the scholastics afforded him the most noteworthy instances.

Bacon’s inductive method is faulty through insufficient emphasis on hypothesis. He hoped that mere orderly arrangement of data would make the right hypothesis obvious, but this is seldom the case. As a rule, the framing of hypotheses is the most difficult part of scientific work, and the part where great ability is indispensable.

The covenant is not, as afterwards in Locke and Rousseau, between the citizens and the ruling power; it is a covenant made by the citizens with each other to obey such ruling power as the majority shall choose. … When the government has been chosen, the citizens lose all rights except such as the government may find it expedient to grant. There is no right of rebellion, because the ruler is not bound by any contract, whereas the subjects are.

This doctrine, or something like it, had grown up in Western Europe during the Renaissance and the Reformation. First, the feudal nobility were cowed by Louis XI, Edward IV, Ferdinand and Isabella, and their successors.

Every argument that he adduces in favour of government, in so far as it is valid at all, is valid in favour of international government. So long as national States exist and fight each other, only inefficiency can preserve the human race.

‘I think, therefore I am’ makes mind more certain than matter, and my mind (for me) more certain than the minds of others. There is thus, in all philosophy derived from Descartes, a tendency to subjectivism, and to regarding matter as something only knowable, if at all, by inference from what is known of mind.

‘I think’ is his ultimate premiss. Here the word ‘I’ is really illegitimate; he ought to state his ultimate premiss in the form ‘there are thoughts’. The word ‘I’ is grammatically convenient, but does not describe a datum. When he goes on to say ‘I am a thing which thinks’, he is already using uncritically the apparatus of categories handed down by scholasticism. He nowhere proves that thoughts need a thinker, nor is there reason to believe this except in a grammatical sense.

There is in Descartes an unresolved dualism between what he learnt from contemporary science and the scholasticism that he had been taught at La Flèche. This led him into inconsistencies, but it also made him more rich in fruitful ideas than any completely logical philosopher could have been.

The metaphysical system of Spinoza is of the type inaugurated by Parmenides. There is only one substance, ‘God or Nature’; nothing finite is self-subsistent.

Facts have to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning; when we successfully infer the future, we do so by means of principles which are not logically necessary, but are suggested by empirical data.

Spinoza’s metaphysic is the best example of what may be called ‘logical monism’—the doctrine, namely, that the world as a whole is a single substance, none of whose parts are logically capable of existing alone. The ultimate basis for this view is the belief that every proposition has a single subject and a single predicate, which leads us to the conclusion that relations and plurality must be illusory.

Take, for instance, death: nothing that a man can do will make him immortal, and it is therefore futile to spend time in fears and lamentations over the fact that we must die. To be obsessed by the fear of death is a kind of slavery; Spinoza is right in saying that ‘the free man thinks of nothing less than of death’.

Leibniz held that extension cannot be an attribute of a substance. His reason was that extension involves plurality, and can therefore only belong to an aggregate of substances; each single substance must be unextended. He believed, consequently, in an infinite number of substances, which he called ‘monads’. Each of these would have some of the properties of a physical point, but only when viewed abstractly; in fact, each monad is a soul.

No two monads, he held, can ever have any causal relation to each other; when it seems as if they had, appearances are deceptive. Monads, as he expressed it, are ‘windowless’. This led to two difficulties: one in dynamics, where bodies seem to affect each other, especially in impact; the other in relation to perception, which seems to be an effect of the perceived object upon the percipient. We will ignore the dynamical difficulty for the present, and consider only the question of perception. Leibniz held that every monad mirrors the universe, not because the universe affects it, but because God has given it a nature which spontaneously produces this result. There is a ‘pre-established harmony’ between the changes in one monad and those in another, which produces the semblance of interaction.

There are an infinite number of possible worlds, all of which God contemplated before creating the actual world. Being good, God decided to create the best of the possible worlds, and He considered that one to be the best which had the greatest excess of good over evil.

Leibniz was a firm believer in the importance of logic, not only in its own sphere, but as the basis of metaphysics. He did work on mathematical logic which would have been enormously important if he had published it; he would, in that case, have been the founder of mathematical logic, which would have become known a century and a half sooner than it did in fact. He abstained from publishing, because he kept on finding evidence that Aristotle’s doctrine of the syllogism was wrong on some points; respect for Aristotle made it impossible for him to believe this, so he mistakenly supposed that the errors must be his own.

Between ideas and practical life, as everywhere else, there is reciprocal interaction; to ask which is cause and which effect is as futile as the problem of the hen and the egg.

This is an example of a general principle: a philosophy developed in a politically and economically advanced country, which is, in its birthplace, little more than a clarification and systemization of prevalent opinion, may become elsewhere a source of revolutionary ardour, and ultimately of actual revolution. … In the advanced countries, practice inspires theory; in the others, theory inspires practice.

A philosophy which is not self-consistent cannot be wholly true, but a philosophy which is self-consistent can very well be wholly false. The most fruitful philosophies have contained glaring inconsistencies, but for that very reason have been partially true. There is no reason to suppose that a self-consistent system contains more truth than one which, like Locke’s, is obviously more or less wrong.

Whatever I may happen to desire, I shall feel pleasure in obtaining it; but as a rule the pleasure is due to the desire, not the desire to the pleasure.

We still think it natural that a man should leave his property to his children; that is to say, we accept the hereditary principle as regards economic power while rejecting it as regards political power. Political dynasties have disappeared, but economic dynasties survive.

Locke’s political philosophy was, on the whole, adequate and useful until the industrial revolution. Since then, it has been increasingly unable to tackle the important problems.

Since Rousseau and Kant, there have been two schools of Liberalism, which may be distinguished as the hard-headed and the soft-hearted. The hard-headed developed, through Bentham, Ricardo, and Marx, by logical stages into Stalin; the soft-hearted, by other logical stages, through Fichte, Byron, Carlyle, and Nietzsche, into Hitler. That statement, of course, is too schematic to be quite true, but it may serve as a map and a mnemonic. The stages in the evolution of ideas have had almost the quality of the Hegelian dialectic: doctrines have developed, by steps that each seem natural, into their opposites. But the developments have not been due solely to the inherent movement of ideas; they have been governed, throughout, by external circumstances and the reflection of these circumstances in human emotions. … That this is the case may be made evident by one outstanding fact: that the ideas of liberalism have undergone no part of this development in America, where they remain to this day as in Locke.

The sort of ethic that is called ‘noble’ is less associated with attempts to improve the world than is the more mundane view that we should seek to make men happier. This is not surprising. Contempt for happiness is easier when the happiness is other people’s than when it is our own. Usually the substitute for happiness is some form of heroism. This affords unconscious outlets for the impulse to power, and abundant excuses for cruelty.

Locke, as we saw, is tentative in his beliefs, not at all authoritarian, and willing to leave every question to be decided by free discussion. The result, both in his case and in that of his followers, was a belief in reform, but of a gradual sort. Since their systems of thought were piecemeal, and the result of separate investigations of many different questions, their political views tended naturally to have the same character. They fought shy of large programmes all cut out of one block, and preferred to consider each question on its merits. In politics, as in philosophy, they were tentative and experimental.

My own definition of ‘matter’ may seem unsatisfactory; I should define it as what satisfies the equations of physics.

As for ‘mind’, when substance has been rejected a mind must be some group or structure of events. … We might—though this would be rather unduly simple—define a ‘mental’ event as one which remembers or is remembered. Then the ‘mind’ to which a given mental event belongs is the group of events connected with the given event by memory-chains, backwards or forwards.

German philosophers, from Kant to Hegel, had not assimilated Hume’s arguments. I say this deliberately, in spite of the belief which many philosophers share with Kant, that his Critique of Pure Reason answered Hume. In fact, these philosophers—at least Kant and Hegel—represent a pre-Humian type of rationalism, and can be refuted by Humian arguments.

If this principle is not true, every attempt to arrive at general scientific laws from particular observations is fallacious, and Hume’s scepticism is inescapable for an empiricist. The principle itself cannot, of course, without circularity, be inferred from observed uniformities, since it is required to justify any such inference. It must therefore be, or be deduced from, an independent principle not based upon experience. To this extent, Hume has proved that pure empiricism is not a sufficient basis for science.

By self-interest Man has become gregarious, but in instinct he has remained to a great extent solitary; hence the need of religion and morality to reinforce self-interest.

By encouraging a new lawless Ego it made social co-operation impossible, and left its disciples faced with the alternative of anarchy or despotism.

This way of defending religious belief was invented by Rousseau. It has become so familiar that his originality may easily not be appreciated by a modern reader, unless he will take the trouble to compare Rousseau with (say) Descartes or Leibniz.

The State would have to prohibit churches (except a State Church), political parties, tradeunions, and all other organizations of men with similar economic interests. The result is obviously the Corporate or Totalitarian State, in which the individual citizen is powerless.

It reintroduced the habit of metaphysical abstractions among the theorists of democracy, and by its doctrine of the general will it made possible the mystic identification of a leader with his people, which has no need of confirmation by so mundane an apparatus as the ballot-box.

An ‘analytic’ proposition is one in which the predicate is part of the subject; for instance, ‘a tall man is a man’, or ‘an equilateral triangle is a triangle’.

It tends to emphasize the will at the expense of the intellect, to be impatient of chains of reasoning, and to glorify violence of certain kinds. In practical politics it is important as an ally of nationalism. In tendency, if not always in fact, it is definitely hostile to what is commonly called reason, and tends to be anti-scientific.

The doctrine that all men are born equal, and that the differences between adults are due wholly to education, was incompatible with his emphasis on congenital differences between members of the same species.

This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.

The aristocratic philosophy of rebellion, growing, developing, and changing as it approached maturity, has inspired a long series of revolutionary movements, from the Carbonari after the fall of Napoleon to Hitler’s coup in 1933; and at each stage it has inspired a corresponding manner of thought and feeling among intellectuals and artists.

Calvinism, which he never shook off—to Shelley, in 1816, he described himself as ‘Methodist, Calvinist, Augustinian’—made him feel that his manner of life was wicked; but wickedness, he told himself, was a hereditary curse in his blood, an evil fate to which he was predestined by the Almighty. … Through her simplicity and her obliging good-nature, she became the means of providing him with the most delicious self-congratulatory remorse. He could feel himself the equal of the greatest sinners—the peer of Manfred, of Cain, almost of Satan himself.

Byron, though he felt himself the equal of Satan, never quite ventured to put himself in the place of God. This next step in the growth of pride was taken by Nietzsche, who says: ‘If there were Gods, how could I endure it to be not God! Therefore there are no Gods.’

And in this way nationalism, Satanism, and hero-worship, the legacy of Byron, became part of the complex soul of Germany.

The world insisted on simplifying him, and omitting the element of pose in his cosmic despair and professed contempt for mankind. Like many other prominent men, he was more important as a myth than as he really was.

It follows that, for Kant, volitions must belong to the real world, not to the world of phenomena. The phenomenon corresponding to a volition is a bodily movement; that is why, according to Schopenhauer, the body is the appearance of which will is the reality.

The cosmic will is wicked; will, altogether, is wicked, or at any rate is the source of all our endless suffering. Suffering is essential to all life, and is increased by every increase of knowledge. Will has no fixed end, which if achieved would bring contentment.

It was prepared by Rousseau and Kant, but was first proclaimed in its purity by Schopenhauer. For this reason, in spite of inconsistency and a certain shallowness, his philosophy has considerable importance as a stage in historical development.

More important than pessimism was the doctrine of the primacy of the will. It is obvious that this doctrine has no necessary logical connection with pessimism, and those who held it after Schopenhauer frequently found in it a basis for optimism. In one form or another, the doctrine that will is paramount has been held by many modern philosophers, notably Nietzsche, Bergson, James, and Dewey. It has, moreover, acquired a vogue outside the circles of professional philosophers. And in proportion as will has gone up in the scale, knowledge has gone down. This is, I think, the most notable change that has come over the temper of philosophy in our age. It was prepared by Rousseau and Kant, but was first proclaimed in its purity by Schopenhauer.

The politics, religion, philosophy, and art of any epoch in human history are, according to Marx, an outcome of its methods of production, and, to a lesser extent, of distribution. … The doctrine is called the ‘materialist conception of history’.

I think, however, that Marx is wrong in two respects. First, the social circumstances of which account must be taken are quite as much political as economic; they have to do with power, of which wealth is only one form. Second, social causation largely ceases to apply as soon as a problem becomes detailed and technical.

We may say, in a broad way, that Greek philosophy down to Aristotle expresses the mentality appropriate to the City State; that Stoicism is appropriate to a cosmopolitan despotism; that scholastic philosophy is an intellectual expression of the Church as an organization; that philosophy since Descartes, or at any rate since Locke, tends to embody the prejudices of the commercial middle class; and that Marxism and Fascism are philosophies appropriate to the modern industrial State.

What is conventionally called ‘philosophy’ consists of two very different elements. On the one hand, there are questions which are scientific or logical; these are amenable to methods as to which there is general agreement. On the other hand, there are questions of passionate interest to large numbers of people, as to which there is no solid evidence either way. … A ‘philosophy’, in a very usual sense of the word, is an organic whole of such extrarational decisions. It is in regard to ‘philosophy’ in this sense that Marx’s contention is largely true.

Perhaps the philosophic dress that Marx gave to his Socialism had really not much to do with the basis of his opinions. It is easy to restate the most important part of what he had to say without any reference to the dialectic. He was impressed by the appalling cruelty of the industrial system as it existed in England a hundred years ago, which he came to know thoroughly through Engels and the reports of Royal Commissions. He saw that the system was likely to develop from free competition towards monopoly, and that its injustice must produce a movement of revolt in the proletariat. He held that, in a thoroughly industrialized community, the only alternative to private capitalism is State ownership of land and capital. … The Hegelian trappings might therefore be dropped with advantage.

This passage makes it quite clear that, when Bergson speaks of the past, he does not mean the past, but our present memory of the past. … The real past does not mingle with the present, since it is not part of it; but that is a very different thing.

Consciousness, he says, ‘is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumour left behind by the disappearing “soul” upon the air of philosophy’. … He holds that there is ‘only one primal stuff or material’, out of which everything in the world is composed. This stuff he calls ‘pure experience’. Knowing, he says, is a particular sort of relation between two portions of pure experience. The subject-object relation is derivative: ‘experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity’.

I think we may say that an event is ‘experienced’ when it sets up a habit. (Memory is one kind of habit.) Broadly speaking, habits are only set up in living organisms. A burnt poker does not fear the fire, however often it is made red-hot. On commonsense grounds, therefore, we shall say that ‘experience’ is not coextensive with the ‘stuff’ of the world. I do not myself see any valid reason for departing from common sense on this point.

From the strictly philosophical point of view, the chief importance of Dewey’s work lies in his criticism of the traditional notion of ‘truth’, which is embodied in the theory that he calls ‘instrumentalism’. … Truth, as conceived by most professional philosophers, is static and final, perfect and eternal

Dewey does not aim at judgments that shall be absolutely ‘true’, or condemn their contradictories as absolutely ‘false’. In his opinion there is a process called ‘inquiry’, which is one form of mutual adjustment between an organism and its environment.

Broadly: a sentence S ‘means’ an event E if it promotes behaviour which E would have promoted. If there has in fact been no such occurrence, the sentence is false. Just the same applies to a belief which is not expressed in words.

Whether a belief is good or bad depends upon whether the activities which it inspires in the organism entertaining the belief have consequences which are satisfactory or unsatisfactory to it. Thus a belief about some event in the past is to be classified as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, not according to whether the event really took place, but according to the future effects of the belief.

The past cannot be affected by what we do, and therefore, if truth is determined by what has happened, it is independent of present or future volitions; it represents, in logical form, the limitations on human power. But if truth, or rather ‘warranted assertability’, depends upon the future, then, in so far as it is in our power to alter the future, it is in our power to alter what should be asserted.

The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness—the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone.