Two rival passions are at work in men's hearts to-day, the cult of individuality and the cult of society. They give rise all too often to extravagant praise of liberty and to a no less extravagant insistence on discipline for society's sake.

It is impossible to form a balanced idea of the functions of liberty and discipline, or of the right relation between the individual and his social environment, without having a clear view of the nature of personality and community. I offer a brief and dogmatic sketch of this subject.

A personality is the product of the impact of the objective universe, past and present, on a particular experiencing subject.

I do not wish to imply that a “subject” is necessarily a substance (in the philosophical sense) or a metaphysical ego, or an immortal soul. Whether such eternal individual spirits exist or not, I do not pretend to know. I do not even, by the word “subject,” pledge myself to what Professor Broad has called a “centred theory” of the nature of mind, I do not know whether a mind is a system of experiences united in an enduring centre, as the spokes of a wheel are united in the hub; or whether it is a centreless “net” of experiences all related together in a special way. By “subject” I mean only “that which experiences,” whatever the true philosophical account of it. I mean the seeming focus or centre of experience and action. This focus is in some sense located in time and space, in fact it is located within the organism. For my purpose the subject is simply that to which experience happens, and that which responds with conscious behaviour. I do not wish to raise the epistemological problem. I merely assume the rejection of solipsism, and the reality of an objective universe which the individual experiences, however imperfectly.

I begin with some remarks on Christian Atheism and the Death of God Theology. These are not, as might be thought, identical movements. Rather, as I shall try to make clear, Christian Atheism is one form that the Death of God theology has assumed.

At the beginning of Book II of the Republic, Glaucon and Adeimantus ask Socrates to tell them what it is to be just or unjust, and why a man should be the former. Socrates suggests in reply that they consider first what it is for a polis to be just or unjust—a polis is bigger than an individual, he says, so its justice should be more readily visible. Now if we were to view in imagination (logōi) a polis coming into existence, he goes on, we should see also its justice and injustice coming into existence, and this might help us to discover what these qualities are.

Do I ever directly raise my arm? Before dealing with this question we must make clear that the corresponding affirmation is to be taken as a way of rejecting one interpretation of the question, ‘In doing or by doing what do I raise my arm?’ On the interpretation of the question I have in mind the appropriate reply, if the question were not rejected, would be, ‘I raise my arm in or by doing something internal’. The way we are employing the phrase ‘doing something internal’ will, I think, become clear when we consider candidates for the description ‘doing something internal’. But it is important to remember that to affirm that I directly raise my arm is to reject the question, ‘In doing or by doing what do I raise my arm?’ on our interpretation of the question.

Today the questions most commonly asked by philosophical critics of religion, at least in this country, relate not to the truth or falsity of religious assertions but to their meaning. To be fair to the philosophers, however, we must of course realize that very few, if any, of those who have denied “meaningfulness” to religious statements were using “meaning” in other than a technical sense. They did not mean that the sentence “God loves us” conveys nothing at all, that it is like “schwarzibarshinee.”