Is it possible to say anything on the well-worn theme of human freedom or unfreedom which has not been ahready better said by someone else before us? It may be doubted; yet it is always worth while to see whether we cannot at least set what is perhaps already familiar to us in a fresh light and so come to a clearer comprehension of our own meaning. This, at any rate, is all that will be attempted in these pages; I have spoken in an earlier essay of the “practical situation” in which we find ourselves whenever we have to make a decision as involving indetermination, and my purpose is simply to make it plainer to myself, and so incidentally perhaps to a reader, what I mean by such an expression. I shall start, then, by adopting what we may perhaps agree to call a phenomenological attitude to the subject; that is, I will try to describe the facts in a way which anyone who recalls occasions when he has been driven to take a decision will recognize as faithful to his experience, without imparting into the description any element of explanatory speculative hypothesis. The description is meant to be one which will be admitted to be true to the “appearances,” independently of any theory about the “freedom of the will”—to describe correctly that which it is the object of all such theories to explain.

There are many difficulties connected with the notion of punishment, but perhaps it is not disputed that it is at least a deliberate infliction of pain of one kind or another. Of course, that is not an adequate description of its nature, but so far as it goes it seems to be a true one.1 And the idea that it could be morally right deliberately tp inflict pain on another, unlike, for example, the idea that it is morally right to tell the truth, is so manifestly intolerable unless we look beyond the infliction of pain itself that we are tempted to leap forward to the question, “What is the justification of such action?” before making quite explicit to ourselves what it is, over and above its being the deliberate infliction of pain, that constitutes the action punishment at all. The questions “Why hurt?” and “Why punish?” are confused with one another. No doubt some distinction between them is present vaguely in everyone's mind and the confusion may not be in fact serious: but anyhow it is a defect and should be remedied.

In my book, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, in connection with Cook Wilson and his Oxford followers I briefly mentioned a new line of ethical research that has made its mark within the last decade. Its representatives are differently labelled, as “Oxford Moralists,” “Intuitionists,” “Neo-Intuitionists,” “Objectivists,” and with other names as well. But I could not give more than a few very insufficient hints about the new school: a fuller treatment would have exceeded the compass of my book, and, further, at the time the book was written, things were not settled enough to be made the subject of a historical review. Even now the time has hardly come for a final appreciation. Nevertheless, the discussion is so far advanced that it may be worth while to take stock of it in order to exhibit not only the new tendency itself, but also the various cross-currents which have been called forth by its appearance. Such an attempt is greatly furthered by the fact that some preliminary work has already been done in this direction by writers who have taken part in the discussion.

What is the Critique of Pure Reason about? The terminology of the work is so perplexing, its argument so obscurely expressed, that the ordinary reader may be forgiven if he puts it down at the end very much in the dark as to what it all means. He will have seen that in it Kant has attempted to establish certain conclusions: the subjectivity of space and time, the existence and objective validity of a number of a priori concepts or categories, the falsity of the arguments used to defend the metaphysical system most widely favoured in German learned circles in the eighteenth century; but though he has grasped all this he may yet have failed to make sense of the work as a whole. It is the old story of not seeing the wood for trees; and in this case the fault is more excusable than in most, for the individual trees each demand so much attention and are so difficult to get round that it is all too easy to forget the very existence of the wood. At the worst, one may think that there is no wood at all; only a miscellaneous aggregate of individual trees which have nothing to do with each other.

It has been said that in Plato the intuitive mode of receiving knowledge is accepted implicitly, and that it is left to Aristotle to make a clear-cut distinction between Intuition and Reason.