The Swedish philosopher Hägerström, who was professor in Uppsala during the first quarter of the present century, devoted much attention to the philosophical and psychological analysis of moral and legal phenomena. Hägersträm is a difficult writer. He had steeped himself in the works of German philosophers and philosophical jurists, and his professional prose-style both in German and in Swedish had been infected by them so that it resembles glue thickened with sawdust. But he enjoys a very high reputation in his own and adjacent countries, and it seems to me that this is well deserved. I think, therefore, that it may be interesting and useful to try to provide English philosophers with an outline in my own words of Hägerström's doctrines, as I understand them, about the topic named in the title of this paper.

Poets, like other men, have their speculative moods. Some poets have been widely read in the literature of philosophy and have wrestled continuously with the intellectual problems of their times. From Euripides to Mr. Eliot large expanses of dialectical argument have appeared in verse, and in our own tongue Spenser, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth and many other supreme writers have questioned the semblance of nature and mind, and have sought to trace the ideal forms of reality. Men of letters in every generation have naturally discussed the problems of knowledge and existence and have offered emphatic opinions on them. The views of poets have been accorded particular honour and attention. Illustrious poets have declared that poetry opens a more penetrating road to truth than that which is provided by science or academic philosophy. Certain modern critics repeat these claims. “The mind of man,” writes one, “has a knowledge of truth beyond the near-truths of science and society. Poetry tells us this truth.” I will not pause here to inquire whether anything of value can be observed of poetry in general any more than can be stated of prose in general. Nor do I wish to enter into the subject of poetic truth. The questions I desire to raise concern assumptions about the philosophical ideas of poets. Recent criticism has shown a notable tendency to fasten on these ideas. The tendency revives the practice of the nineteenth century when theologians, philosophers and literary thinkers were fond of expounding the rational systems of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning. The present vogue of this prosaic treatment of poetry may be due to a strong recoil from the literary fashion prevalent a generation ago which minimized the intellectual feature in the art of poetry.

Particular attention has been paid in the present century (notably by Mr. E. F. Carritt, the late Professor Pritchard, and Sir David Ross) to the question as to whether a man's duty is to do what is actually right, i.e. what his situation actually demands of him, or what he thinks is right. Mr. Carritt has pointed out that the former possibility bifurcates—a man's duty may be to do what is actually demanded by his actual situation, or what is (or would be) actually demanded by what he believes to be his situation. (The latter possibility also bifurcates—a man's duty may be to do what he thinks is demanded by what he believes to be his situation, or what he would think was demanded by his actual situation, if he knew it; but only the first of these alternatives has been or needs to be seriously considered.) I do not propose in the present paper to carry this discussion any further, but rather to consider how it has been carried on in the past, as there seems to be a little confusion on this point.

In my previous paper I endeavoured to illustrate the different ways in which Plato used poetry for philosophical purposes, and it now remains to attempt a final appraisal of the success or failure of Plato considered specifically as a poetic philosopher. But before I embark on what will prove a somewhat complicated task it is necessary for me to refer briefly to certain theories concerning Plato's use of myth, since they vitally affect (though in different ways) the philosophical significance of his poetic method—and it is this philosophical significance which is our principal problem in any final evaluation.

Almost all the original philosophers, from Socrates to the verificationists of the present day, have tried to provide some universally applicable method of eliminating confusion and error from our discourse: this provision of a method of ‘correcting the understanding’ is at least one, and perhaps the principal, of the continuous threads which can be traced in Western philosophy. There was the Socratic method, which requires us to look for real definitions of our fundamental abstract terms: the Cartesian methods of rejecting as possible candidates for knowledge any propositions which do not consist of clear and distinct ideas: the Humean or Empiricist method of dismissing as nonsense any non-tautologous statement which cannot be justified as referring to the order of our sensations: Kant's transcendental method of critical philosophy, whichit would certainly be imprudent to characterize in a phrase, but which was equally intended to be a safe protection against empty metaphysics and meaningless questions: lastly, the verification principle, which provides a general method of determining which of our statements conform to some scientific standard of intelligibility, and which are to classed as tautologies or as playing with words. New movements in philosophy have in general been new methods of correcting the understanding, methods which are further generalized and applied in the interval before another great philosopher appears with another general method of showing that all previous metaphysics is nonsense.