292 PHILOSOPHY 



The most brilliant general account of the principles and methods of the mathematical 

 logicians is, perhaps, that of Couturat (Principes des Mathtmatiques, 1905). 



Messrs. Moore and Russell have also made some application of their doctrine to 

 Ethics (see G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, 1903; Ethics, in Home University Library, 

 1912; and Russell, Philosophical Essays, 1910), but without any very satisfactory results. 

 From their point of view the principal business of Ethics is to discover true propositions 

 about the relative intrinsic worth of different " goods." As both writers assume that 

 there are a plurality of such propositions, and that each of them is known a priori inde- 

 pendently of the others, the impression they leave upon a reader not previously com- 

 mitted to their theory is that they have really no better standard for determining the 

 worth of various goods than their own personal preferences. It is characteristic of both 

 writers that they assume without serious enquiry that conduct can only be good in a 

 derivative sense as leading to the production of some good other than itself. Hence, 

 though both reject the older forms of Utilitarianism as ascribing a fictitious worth to 

 pleasure, their own doctrine is itself utilitarian in its general character. Beyond dis- 

 covering true propositions concerning the relative worth of goods, Ethics seeks to furnish 

 rules of right conduct, i.e. conduct which produces good results, but these rules are 

 always of the most rough-and-ready sort and constantly require modification to suit 

 special cases. Hence the ground is left open in practice for an enormous development 

 of reflective casuistry. Messrs. Moore and Russell have furnished us with some 

 acute observations on the relative goodness of various objects, but because of their 

 refusal to look at human life as a whole they cannot be said to have advanced the study 

 of Ethics as an interpretation of life. In their ethical writings, slender as they are in 

 bulk, one cannot see the wood for the trees; they are too much occupied with the search 

 for true propositions about " goods " to develop a satisfactory theory of "the good." 



Besides the Irrationalism of Bergson and the atomistic intellectualism of the new 

 realists, one may mention as characteristic of the present day a third tendency, which 

 is powerfully represented in contemporary philosophy, and holds in some 

 ' respects a middle place between the former two. This is the revival of 



philosophical Theism, in connection with which important work has been 

 done, especially by Prof. James Ward, Dr. Rashdall and Prof. Bernardino Varisco. 

 Ward and Varisco agree in refusing to accept the unfavourable verdict of Pragmatism 

 and Bergson on the worth of the intellect in philosophy, and are so far pronounced 

 rationalists as to require of any philosophical theory of the world that it should be able 

 to justify itself before the bar of reason; neither is, however, an " intellectualist," since 

 neither ascribes to cognition a primacy in importance for the philosophical interpreta- 

 tion of the world over feeling and conation, and both admit, like Kant, our right to 

 believe what we cannot demonstrate, provided that such belief, if accepted, would 

 form the natural completion of the conceptions to which Istrictly logical analysis of the 

 contents of science points. Both hold in common with Bergson and the Pragmatists 

 the reality of contingency and the production of the genuinely " new," but both deny 

 that there is anything irrational or repugnant to the intellect in these conceptions. 

 Ward's views find their latest development in his Realm of Ends (1911), Varisco's are 

 expounded in / Massimi Problemi (1910) and Conosci te stesso (1912). Both thinkers 

 show very markedly the influence of Lotze, whose final results in the main agree with 

 theirs; Ward is, on the whole, Kantian, Varisco Leibnitzian in manner. 



Ward's starting point is afforded by the contrast between the unity which thought 

 demands of its world and the apparent plurality which meets us in the world of sense 

 James perception. The problem which Philosophy has to solve is, according 



Ward. to him, on what lines the world of experience can be thought of as'one 



without our ceasing to recognise that it is also truly many. The history of the post- 

 Kantian " idealist " schools has demonstrated that the problem is insoluble if we 

 attack it from the side of the " one." Since the world of perception is not primarily 

 given to us as one but as many, we have to start from its given multiplicity and work 

 toward such a final conception of its unity of plan as our data will permit. Ward 



