There is a profound difference between the intellectual activity of the primitive man inclined to myth-making, superstition, and visualizing mystical powers and that of the educated European of our own day with his search for exact scientific knowledge. Modern culture tends to educate the mind in the direction of sober scientific thought, and it is very important that this tendency should be subjected to a critical examination. Before beginning the pursuit of the educational ideal it is essential to see wherein the difference between the savage and the civilized mind really consists and to determine the relative value of primitive and scientific thought.

Even those who have not yet read Dr. Broad’s recent book on The Mind and its Place in Nature have not improbably had their attention drawn to his carefully considered pronouncement on Behaviourism. At the close of ten pages of critical discussion he says: “ It seems to me that Reductive Materialism in general, and strict Behaviourism in particular, may be rejected. They are instances of the numerous class of theories which are so preposterously silly that only very learned men could have thought of them. I may be accused of breaking a butterfly on a wheel in this discussion of Behaviourism. But it is important to remember that a theory which is in fact absurd may be accepted by the simple-minded because it is put forward in highly technical terms by learned persons who are themselves too confused to know exactly what they mean. When this happens, as it has happened with Behaviourism, the philosopher is not altogether wasting time by analysing the theory and pointing out its implications” (pp. 623–4). I quote the passage at length so that those of us who dally with Behaviourism may realize just how they stand.

In the history of English Idealism in the nineteenth century a great place must be given to the work of two men who held the chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow for two periods of twenty-eight years, from 1866 to 1922, Edward Caird and Henry Jones.

Consider two fairly simple, natural occurrences: a storm at sea and an earthquake. Many descriptions of these things have been made, but what interests us here are their scientific descriptions. In the first case, then, we have to deal with changes in the pressure and temperature of the atmosphere, with violent motions of the air and with waves in the sea. In the second case we deal with stratified rocks that are in a state of severe strain. When this strain exceeds a certain limit the rocks are fractured and waves are set up in the elastic materials of the earth's crust. In most cases storms and earthquakes happen when we do not expect them, and so there is usually little time to investigate them in an adequate manner. But there is no doubt whatever that if we could make all the researches that are practicable we could “ explain” individual storms and earthquakes. “Explanation” means re-describing the phenomena in the simplest manner possible, that is, in terms of space, time, gravitation, energy-transformations, chemical constitution of the materials concerned, etc. Such explanations can be (and indeed have been) made of the occurrences mentioned above, and the physical ideas we have noted are all that are included in the explanations.

Discussions on the distinction between philosophy and science are apt to seem rather futile and academic. They would quickly lose that character if they were thought to have any bearing on the question of social survival or decay. That they have such a bearing follows if the following considerations are true, and I think that they are: first, that amongst the conditions of a society’s survival an indispensable one is the prevalence within it of a certain vision of it; secondly, that in its type this vision is akin to philosophy and not to science; and thirdly, that the due cultivation of it necessitates our being careful not to mistake its affiliations.

The purpose of the following article is to suggest certain problems, rather than to offer philosophical solutions of problems. I propose to state certain questions which are sometimes asked and to try to say both (a) why it is important that they should be asked, and (b) why, if we do ask them, we should endeavour to answer them as accurately as we can. A full discussion of what the true answers to the questions are will be beyond the province of this paper, and, if certain answers are suggested in passing, it will only be because it is difficult to make anything which consists of a mere sequence of questions at all interesting or readable.

The subject of discussion this evening is “ The Problem of Colour in Relation to the Idea of Equality,” and though the last seven words would seem to indicate some special limitation, it is in fact difficult to divide this question into watertight compartments. For the basis of all philosophical study is accuracy of definition, and we must therefore begin by forming a precise conception of what the phrase “ Colour problem ” connotes before we proceed to discuss its bearing from a physiological, political, or sociological “ equality ” point of view. Thus at the outset we find ourselves in the very heart of a controversy, for it is difficult to find two people who will agree as to the definition of the Colour problem. Physiologically there is no line of demarcation, for of the inhabitants of North Central Asia many are as light—and indeed lighter—in the colour of their skin, their hair and their eyes than the Southern races of Europe, and the same may be true of Creoles, Quadroons, and Octaroons.