II. Some After-War Problems By Lord Parker of Waddington Aircraft in the War IV. The Forests of Finland, and European Timber Supplies V. The Co-operative Movement in India By E. P. Stebbing By R. B. Ewbank, I.C.S. VI. German Business Methods in France Before the War By Raphael-Georges Levy VII. The Boy Scout Movement By Ernest Young By Prof. F. J. C. Hearnshaw IX. Thoughts on the Parliament of Scotland By A. V. Dicey XV. The Course of the War (With maps) By Colonel Blood, p.s.c. XVI. The Political Situation THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. No. 447.-APRIL, 1916. Art. 1.-PHILOSOPHY AND THEISM. 1. Naturalism and Agnosticism. By James Ward. Two vols. Second Edition. Black, 1903. 2. The Realm of Ends, or Pluralism and Theism. By James Ward. Cambridge: University Press, 1911. 3. The Principle of Individuality and Value. By Bernard Bosanquet. Macmillan, 1912. 4. The Value and Destiny of the Individual. By Bernard Bosanquet. Macmillan, 1913. 5. Theism and Humanism. By the Rt Hon. Arthur James Balfour. Hodder and Stoughton, 1915. A SURVEY of the philosophical literature of Europe during the last twenty-five or even fifty years descries perhaps no stars of the first magnitude. Here as elsewhere it is perilous to anticipate the verdict of posterity yet it is difficult to believe that any one of those who have taught or written during that period will ultimately be ranked as equal with Descartes or Spinoza or Kant or Hegel. It may be that the day of the great systembuilders is for ever over, that even the hope of that great synthesis of human knowledge which philosophy once aspired to realise is extinct, and that the philosophic mind, recognising that to conquer it is necessary to divide, has accepted the condition of that specialisation which has proved so fruitful in the advance of science. The task of co-ordinating and summing up results so won is deferred to a distant and receding future. Lipservice is done to its necessity as the consummation of many convergent enquiries, but we now look almost in vain for thinkers courageous enough to claim that they Vol. 225.-No. 447. X themselves possess the clue to the future unification. The majority of workers within the philosophic field regard the fulfilment of the task as Utopian, or reject it as a pseudo-ideal of thought. Much of this feeling is doubtless due to a genuine modesty becoming Epigoni, conscious that they are successors to an age of daring and original speculation, the results of which are far from being even now appropriated and assimilated, and still require testing, verification, correction. But this respect for the past is not perhaps very widespread. Indeed there seems to be prevalent in philosophic writers a spirit not modest but rather contemptuous and negligent of their predecessors, and a claim, resting on some real or supposed change in subsequent experience, to set them aside as antiquated or mistaken. The impression of this dispersion of philosophic effort must not be exaggerated. It has, indeed, led many into devious paths. The goal towards which these divided paths converge is obscured, forgotten or occasionally despaired of. But the instinct towards unity, which is the soul of philosophy, exercises still a powerful charm upon minds eager in the pursuit of truth; and the deeper if hidden currents of speculative thought still set in the direction of synthesis and system. Individuals and even schools no longer, indeed, expressly aim at a deliberately encyclopædic treatment or profess to expound a complete view or conception of the world. Yet, if there is a weakened faith in the possibility of attaining system, there is, on the other hand, no satisfaction felt in eclecticism, no contented acquiescence in a premature agnosticism. The search for first principles continues, and the old fundamental issues are still raised and canvassed. The perennial problems of philosophy concerning the nature of Man and his environment, of God and the relations of Man to Him, of Immortality, still excite that curiosity and wonder from which philosophy springs, and by recurrence to which it continually regains fresh interest and life. The fact appears to be that in civilised Europe such interest and concern is more widely spread than ever before. With this widening has come for the time a certain dilution of that interest, and a consequent lowering or weakening of the powers engaged in satisfying it. From Diffusion carries with it a loss of concentration. the wider audience more and more voices break in upon the academic debate, and in the endeavour of the specialist to adapt himself to this situation he has been driven to adopt a more popular and less professional mode of speech; he is reluctant to push a claim to be regarded as a leader or even as a teacher, and is more and more content to be accepted as a fellow-enquirer with no peculiar title beyond others less erudite or specialised to be heard. More rarely than of old does he aim at communicating results or attempt to form a school. It has become for him almost a point of good manners to avoid technicalities and to disdain the classification and labelling of his views. To this general rule there are, of course, still exceptions, and we can descry in the contemporary world of philosophy both would-be leaders and wellmarked groups of disciples; yet a careful diagnosis of the philosophical situation would perhaps prefer to ignore personalities and schools, and speak rather of tendencies and movements where influences affected almost all contemporary thinkers and schools without being limited to or exclusively concentrated in any. It is this diffusion rather than any deliberate abandonment of the former ideal of system and unity which produces the appearance, among the innumerable contributors to the secular and 'collegiate' work of building up the fabric of philosophy, of amateurishness, capriciousness, or even eccentricity. The operation of these influences crosses, and indeed ignores, all familiar frontiers, national, social, ecclesiastical, personal. The themes of philosophical discussion are by their very nature of general, or rather universal, human interest and concern; and in the discussion of them the usual divisions which separate man from man are forgotten or recede deep into the background. No doubt, the individual thinker continues to be influenced by them even while he labours to counteract and discount them; nor is it otherwise than well that this should be so, for these factors enter into the very substance of his experience. But he is not, or ought not to be, ruled by them, and he uses them without being controlled by them. They colour and individualise his thought, entering into it as the special qualities of his material enter |