NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1933
Published under the auspices of
THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
| page | |
|---|---|
| I. Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense Paper read before the Royal Society of Literatureon the occasion of the Tercentenary of thebirth of John Locke. With some SupplementaryNotes | 1 |
| II. Fifty Years of British Idealism Reflections on the republication of Bradley'sEthical Studies | 48 |
| III. Revolutions in Science Some Comments on the Theory of Relativityand the new Physics | 71 |
| IV. A Long Way Round to Nirvana Development of a suggestion found in Freud'sBeyond the Pleasure Principle | 87 |
| V. The Prestige of the Infinite A review of Julien Benda's Sketch of a consistenttheory of the relations between God and the World | 102 |
The Author's acknowledgments are due to the Editors of The New Adelphi,The Dial, and the Journal of Philosophy, in which one or more of theseEssays originally appeared.
A good portrait of Locke would require an elaborate background. His is nota figure to stand statuesquely in a void: the pose might not seem grandenough for bronze or marble. Rather he should be painted in the manner ofthe Dutch masters, in a sunny interior, scrupulously furnished with allthe implements of domestic comfort and philosophic enquiry: the Holy Bibleopen majestically before him, and beside it that other revelation—theterrestrial globe. His hand might be pointing to a microscope set forexamining the internal constitution of a beetle: but for the moment hiseye should be seen wandering through the open window, to admire theblessings of thrift and liberty manifest in the people so worthily busy inthe market-place, wrong as many [2]a monkish notion might be that stilltroubled their poor heads. From them his enlarged thoughts would easilypass to the stout carved ships in the river beyond, intrepidly settingsail for the Indies, or for savage America. Yes, he too had travelled, andnot only in thought. He knew how many strange nations and false religionslodged in this round earth, itself but a speck in the universe. There werefew ingenious authors that he had not perused, or philosophicalinstruments that he had not, as far as possible, examined and tested; andno man better than he could understand and prize the recent discoveries of"the incomparable Mr Newton". Nevertheless, a certain uneasiness in thatspare frame, a certain knitting of the brows in that aquiline countenance,would suggest that in the midst of their earnest eloquence thephilosopher's thoughts might sometimes come to a stand. Indeed, thevisible scene did not exhaust the complexity of his problem; for there w