The catchwords of our age, evolution and progress, sound very attractive so long as we do not pause to inquire into their significance. They are the delight of the sophist and the despair of the thinker. When we speak of progress we have in mind the human species. It is not easy to define what exactly the goal of human progress is. Even the leaders of the federation of progressive societies will find it difficult to give an adequate answer to the question of the end towards which we are actually progressing. They will find it more difficult to frame an ideal of human evolution which will be equally acceptable to, say, the monks of Mount Athos, Christian

Berkeley belonged to the days when it was possible to write philosophy without being learned, when it was sufficient to have fundamental convictions and to be able to write about them clearly. His contribution to the stock of philosophical possibilities was substantially complete when he was twenty-five, at which age no man can or should be learned. Not until he became a bishop did he pile up the burden of scholarship, and the work in which he expressed it, the Siris, has remained a stumbling-block to his expositors. In his day philosophy was not learning but culture and wisdom. He

I Have often wished that someone would write a History of Oxford Honour Schools. But I want that work written for reasons which the title does not immediately suggest.

I Think there is scarcely any academic subject regarding which there exists so much general misapprehension as philosophy. If I were to introduce myself to the readers of almost any newspaper as a professor of chemistry, or of classics, or of music, most of them would have a fairly good general idea of the nature of my subject. But if I were to introduce myself as a professor of philosophy, I suspect that many of them would vaguely associate my subject with theosophy, or palmistry, or occultism. Very few would have any notion of what philosophy really is. Even in a university, even among the learned themselves, it would be true to say, I think, that

There is a certain emotion of repugnance which I, and I hope a good many would-be philosophers, feel when asked the conventional question, “If you are a philosopher, to what school of thought do you belong? Are you an Idealist or a Realist, a Platonist or a Hobbist, a Monist or a Pluralist?”

Thepurpose of Wissenschaft und Weltanschaunng,1 by Aloys Wenzl, is to provide a rational explanation of the world which shall give us greater insight into its nature than either common sense or the natural sciences can give us. Philosophy, Professor Wenzl says in his introduction, springs from the desire for a weltanschaunng, for insight into the significance of life. But it also springs from a desire for rational explanation, and aims at objective validity. It proposes to give a truer, more complete, and more intelligible account of reality than appearances provide. This idea of a more intelligible explanation underlies the whole of Professor Wenzl's book. We want more than knowledge of empirical facts, we want knowledge of reasons (verstehen aus dem Grund), or, as he often puts it, insight (einsichtig verstehen). We want to see that though things seem to be contingent, they are really necessary.