The subject you have set me is a vast and daunting one, but I have my consolation that if I must inevitably trench a little-though as little as possible-on the issues my distinguished successors are to speak upon, they must equally come back on the ground assigned to me, and will be able to supplement for you my deficiencies and correct my mistakes.

I propose to consider in this paper some points concerning the part played by reason in non-moral conduct. The place of reason in ethics is a separate issue with which I shall not be directly concerned.

We are all waiting eagerly for the last three volumes of Toynbee's great Study of History, which has brought a new honour to British scholarship. For no English and perhaps no German writer has amassed such a wealth of information on human affairs in every age and every continent. We hope, rather anxiously, that his final diagnosis will not be to expect a “knock-out blow” from the strongest Power, which must be Russia. He is no disciple of Spengler, but the downfall of the West looms before his eyes.

“A society is more than a set of entities to which the same class-name applies” (Process and Reality, Pt. II, Chap. 3, Sect. II). Taking this obiter dictum of Whitehead's seriously, the present paper seeks to elucidate some of the more abstract properties of a society. By “society” I understand primarily human society in the sense in which it is an object of study for social theory, though part of what is said may admit of application to societies in some wider sense. An apology should perhaps be offered for the terminology introduced. The writer's only excuse is that there seemed no other way of expressing the ideas in question.