One of the most deeply engrained habits of the modern world is the habit of thinking in terms of a contrast, and indeed of an opposition, between something we call Mind and something we call Matter. This habit is obviously not confined to philosophy. It is built into the structure of our languages and of our ways of behaviour. It conditions our religious and moral attitudes, as well as our reflective thought in science and philosophy. It is not surprising, therefore, that much of modern European Philosophy has consisted in an effort to overcome the dualism to which this habit gives rise when we try to clarify and systematize our knowledge of Reality. This essay on the subject is an essay in scepticism.

From the third century we pass to the thirteenth, from a century in which Europe is still pagan to a century in which Christianity has been so long established there that its paganism is wellnigh forgotten, from a century in which it is ruled by a Roman emperor to one in which ecclesiastically it is still ruled by Rome, but the empire has passed from the Roman to the Teuton.

“Nation” and “nationalism” are not easily defined; mainly, perhaps, because these words, as popularly used, do not have precise meanings. A nation may mean: (1) A people living under a common government,—as when we speak of British or French “nationals"; or (2) A people with a common racial inheritance—the Jews; or (3) A people, inhabiting a certain tract of the earth's surface, with generally common sentiments and habits of thinking, though possibly of mixed race, and part of a wider political society—the English, as distinguished from the Scottish, or Irish, nation.

The title I first chose for my remarks was “The Socialization of the Hedonic Impulse,” but I concluded that I had better indicate my real objective rather than the process of getting to it.

The subject of this paper is the relation of Logical Positivism to Theology. By “Logical Positivism” I mean the doctrine originated by Dr. Wittgenstein and expounded more at length by Professors Carnap, Schlick, and other members of the Viennese Circle (Wiener Kreis) in the periodical called Erkenntnis. The clearest account of it in English is that given by Mr. R. B. Braithwaite in the volume called Cambridge University Studies.

There is no subject to which the writers of ethical textbooks have devoted more attention than that of the relations between pleasure and desire, and yet it is surprising how little agreement their efforts have produced in philosophical circles. This failure seems to me to be chiefly due to the fact that the question is only one among the many problems of conation, and can only be discussed in that context. In consequence, there remains a very wide gap between what psychologists have to say about the analysis of conation and what ethical writers have to say about the problems of moral psychology.1 My object in writing this article is to help to bring this deplorable state of affairs to an end by expounding a theory of the relations between pleasure and desire, which is based upon a careful analysis of the facts of conation.

It is precision, M. Bergson suggests in his last book,1 that has most been lacking in philosophy. Imprecision declares itself in two respects: philosophical systems of the past apply indifferently to many imaginary worlds, and so allows this actual world to slip through their meshes; and they ignore the sense or direction evinced in the order and process of this actual world. Such systems “do not fit the reality in which we live, but are too large for it. Any of them would apply equally well to a world in which plants, animals, and men did not exist, or one in which men went without food and drink and did not sleep or dream or rave, to a world in which men were born decrepit and suckled in old age … Such systems of conceptions are so abstract, consequently so vast, that they can be made to hold everything possible alongside the real”. That we should interpret them always with an eye on this actual world and so regard them as being literal transcriptions of the actual is a witness to the practical bias of our thinking and a quite arbitrary reading of them. Contrasted with these highly abstract systems, M. Bergson claims that his own explanation “adheres to its object” and leaves no gap in which an alternative one could find foothold.