It is a mark of realism that any inquiry should start from where one is and an inquiry into law should start from our everyday understanding of it. Such an inquiry would most likely register a variety of reactions, each in its own way instructive. Law may suggest ‘law and order’ of the sort that is usually associated with right-wing or repressive sections of the political spectrum. Law may suggest the police carrying out their duties; think of the colloquial expression, ‘I’ll get the law on you’. Law may suggest a judge or magistrate sentencing. Law may suggest Parliament at work. On the whole each of these spontaneous images builds on a central picture of law as a command to be enforced in case of disobedience. On longer reflection law would seem to exist to keep order, public peace and stability so that civic life can flourish and law does in some general way embody the predominant views of the community as a whole most of the time. Moreover our reflections would show that there is virtually nothing which could not be demanded or forbidden by law and in turn that there is no law which could not be changed. We have very little, except perhaps the fact that a Parliamentary majority, if not always right, can at least be changed to shield us from the possible content of law and the severity of its application.

A novel about Russia written by an English novelist is something of a rarity, particularly when it is written by an English novelist who spoke Russian fluently and lived in Russia for many years. Maurice Baring’s reputation as a writer is in fact based largely on a knowledge of Russian life and literature which he exploited with considerable skill and shrewdness for at least the early part of his literary career. He was one of the first English writers to introduce Russian life and literature to the general reading public of Edwardian England. From 1904 until 1914, he spent much of his time in Russia writing the series of articles and books, which began with a review of the original production of The Cherry Orchard and detailed reports on the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 revolution, and culminated years later with the first edition of The Oxford Book of Russian Verse.

In a recent article in New Blackfriars, Mr William Frerking took me to task for some comments which I made on the famous question which Glaucon poses to Socrates in The Republic. He said a number of wise and sensible things. But none of these had any bearing on my argument. I must first assure Mr Frerking that I do not have the strange conception of happiness which he seems to attribute to me; and then try to show that such a view of happiness is by no means implied by what I wrote in my article.

Mr Frerking expresses surprise that nowhere in my article do I offer a definition of happiness. There are two reasons for this: first, that I do not think that the term ‘happiness’ is susceptible of exact definition; and second, that my conception of happiness, unlike that attributable (at least on one interpretation, as we shall see) to Mr Frerking, is just the same as that which is ordinarily current. Still, misunderstanding has evidently arisen; so it may be as well for me to try to spell out roughly what I, and I believe most other people, mean by happiness. Happiness, as Aristotle rightly suggests, is a state one seeks for its own sake, and not as a means to some other state.

‘The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author, and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion’.

Thus might conclude almost any exposition of the traditional Argument from Design. In fact, this testimonial to teleology comes from the philosopher David Hume (1711 to 1776), usually thought of —correctly—as a foe of religion, and whose painstaking criticisms of natural theology still form the sine qua non of all rejections of that enterprise.

‘A purpose, an intention, a design is evident in every thing’, he declares, and ‘we must adopt with the strongest conviction, the idea of some intelligent cause or author’ since monotheism may justly boast of ‘these invincible reasons on which it is undoubtedly founded’.