Sir Herbert Samuel gave his Presidential Address to the Members of the Institute at University College on January 22nd. There was a large attendance. He took as his subject “Philosophy, Religion, and Present World Conditions.”

There are many possible ways of approach to philosophy, and there is also an impossible one, though one that has often been tried. That the philosopher can somehow spin his philosophy out of what he finds inside himself; that he has some private internal source of information in virtue of which he can decide what the Universe must be, without needing to take the trouble to look at it, is a belief that dies hard. But it is now dying, if not dead, so that it is hardly necessary to refute it in detail. It should suffice to say that anybody who cherishes the belief will not find anything to interest him in what follows. I shall simply assume that the philosopher is, what we all are to some extent, a spectator of the world and of man's life in it and a commentator on what he sees. Where the philosopher differs from others is in the kind of interest he takes in the facts, not in the kind of facts that are there to be interested in.

In this paper I ask whether in Aristotle's metaphysical system the form of a non-living sensible substance, such as the form of this house, is or is not universal. I argue that his position as it stands is self-contradictory, and then try to give some account of the pressures that led to this central contradiction in Aristotle's metaphysical thought.

Positivists have excelled at destructive criticism. This criticism has been useful for pruning away absurd and superfluous theories but it is liable to be used to prune away everything else. The latest exponents, the Logical Positivists, are no less adept at criticism than their predecessors. The doctrines of this school have been surrounded with an air of mystery and inquirers have been frightened off by alarming technical apparatus. We all know that the Logical Positivists had proved that everybody else talked nonsense, but we did not know what they themselves talked. Mr. A. J. Ayer's exposition of the doctrine, Language, Truth and Logic, is therefore welcome as it is simple,

I am reluctant to add to the many definitionsof modernity, or to encourage the belief that definitions matter. Nevertheless, a changecameintothe worldwhenpeoplebegantodefinethemselves as modern—as in some way 'apart from'their predecessors, standing to them in some new and self-conscious relationship. And this couldserve as a definitionof modernity:as the conditionin which people provide definitions of modernity. For there is a great differencebetween living in history—which, for rational beings, is unavoidable—andlivingaccordingtoan idea ofhistory, and of one's own place within it.

Hume is not a philosopher who has been viewed, on the whole, with excessive sympathy. Slips and inadequacies of argument, which are the inevitable consequence of human fallibility, are treated by his critics not with charity but with delight; and there are few who think it necessary to state his argument at its strongest before proceeding to refute it. A striking example of this procedure may be found in Antony Flew's paper ‘Another Idea of Necessary Connection’. The example is striking because Flew is normally one of the most sympathetic of Hume's critics and he might have been expected, in dealing with Humes view of causal necessity, to have proceeded with exceptional fairness, the incidental being identified and discarded and the essential view standing forth at its strongest. This, as I shall show, is not what occurs; but first let us consider what we are to take the essential view to be.

The author argues that faith survives as a rational option, despite science rendering improbable distinctively theological claims about the world and history. After rejecting justifications of faith from natural theology and natural law, he defends a seemingly weaker strategy, a corrected version of Pascal's wager argument. The wager lets one's desires count toward showing one's faith to be rational, and the faith requires that oneÕs desires undergo radical transformation to protect the faith, making the wager argument really quite strong. As Nietzsche insisted, to be an atheist in the face of this challenge, one would have to become superhuman and transform one's values radically in the opposite direction.

The generally accepted interpretation of Kant's formula “act only on that maxim which thou canst at the same time will to be a universal law,” is roughly as follows:—

Our moral experience is fundamentally a consciousness of the difference between Duty and Inclination, between "doing what we ought to whether we like to or not, and doing merely what we like whether we ought to or not."1 When we have open to our choice different acts, there are some which we would like to do, others we would not like to do, and perhaps others towards which we are indifferent; or we like to do any one of them, or we may dislike all, or we may be indifferent to all. But we must ignore our inclinations, our aversions, our attractions, and our indifferences. We must ask ourselves which of the acts open to our choice ought we to do, no matter what our feelings in the matter may be.