Home · Book Reports · 2018 · The History of Western Philosophy

---

---

---

---

designates my notes. / designates important.

---

Thoughts

This book covers a lot of ground, but, while it is over 800 pages, it couldn’t possible go into any great detail. It is divided into three main sections: Ancient, Catholic, and Modern.

My main reason for reading this was to get a look into Bertrand Russell’s mind, to see how he sees. I was not let down, for there are numerous occasions where Russell puts forth his personal thoughts and feelings toward a particular subject.

Overall I’d say it was very approachable and possibly a nice primer for one interested in pursuing a more detailed examination of philosophy.

I read, on the internet, that there are a lot of errors within this book. Not being intimately familiar with most of what is covered the errors, if there are any, were unclear to me.

Most interesting to me was the Catholic portion of the book. The ancient view is often placed on a pedestal today, a pining for the good old days when Aristotle had figured everything out - from the gait of animals to the celestial spheres. Likewise, the modern is also lauded. How many people today praise Nietzsche and Kant, Hobbes or Rousseau? But the Catholic contributions are often excluded from the accolades. This is probably due to the anti-religious climate we live in, but it is, none-the-less, extremely interesting and important in linking the ancient and modern eras.

I am not going to attempt any great synopsis of this book, though, if you are interested in philosophy or Bertrand Russell, I can suggest it as worthwhile. Instead I will offer up a few “hmmm” passages that stuck out to me.

The first “illustrates the connections of the Sophists with the law-courts”:

There is a story about Protagoras, no doubt apocryphal, which illustrates the connection of the Sophists with the law-courts in the popular mind. It is said that he taught a young man on the terms that he should be paid his fee if the young man won his first law-suit, but not otherwise, and that the young man’s first law-suit was one brought by Protagoras for recovery of his fee.

There is no further examination of the sophist philosophy being one of victory, no mention of clever, but not necessarily factual, arguments, which should be better called fallacies, being employed to win the case. Exactly what we see in the modern court system, which has no use for truth in lieu of a compelling argument. Crudely, it reminds me of the old Edgar Snyder advertisement (how effective was it I still remember it after a decade since last seeing it?) where he states, “there’s no fee unless we get money for you!”

Next is nothing but pure speculation on my part. Interesting to consider, but it proves nothing.

Athens had lagged behind many other Greek cities; neither in art nor in literature had it produced any great man (except Solon, who was primarily a lawgiver).

I was immediately reminded of Fomenko’s work and drawn to compare Solon to Solomon, both lawgivers.

Lastly, I found it extremely interesting, and quite a bit telling, that the Piltdown man is used as an example. This hoax was used for such a long time that, even if it is fake, the damage it caused, the belief in it so solid, that generations of people have been misled. While the hoax is no longer fooling anyone (if they even know what it is), the foundation it laid in support of the Darwinian evolution theory is most certainly gospel among many still today. One wonders what would have come of the theory had hoaxes like this not lent it credibility.

Further, is it a coincidence that Bertrand Russell ran in the same circles as Aldous Huxley, who’s Brave New World is based off of Russell’s Scientific Outlook. Is it coincidence that Teilhard de Chardin’s hoax was promoted by Darwin’s bulldog, none other than T.H. Huxley, grandfather to Aldous? The oligarchical fingerprints act like breadcrumbs, back to the same self-proclaimed elite over and over again.

The book concludes with a succinct consideration:

Philosophy, throughout its history, has consisted of two parts inharmoniously blended: on the one hand a theory as to the nature of the world, on the other an ethical or political doctrine as to the best way of living. The failure to separate these two with sufficient clarity has been a source of much confused thinking.

Further Reading

• Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles

• Machiavelli’s the Discourses and The Prince (Those who do not read also the Discourses are likely to get a very one-sided view of his doctrine.)

• More’s Utopia (1518). (Utopia is an island in the southern hemisphere, where everything is done in the best possible way.)

• Hobbe’s Leviathan

• Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) and the Meditations (1642)

• Spinoza’s Ethics

• Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding and Patriarcha: or The Natural Power of Kings

• Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature

• Rousseau’s The Social Contract and Emile

• Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason and Metaphysic of Morals (1785)

• Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spake Zarathustra, and Will to Power

• John Dewey’s The School and Society (1899)

---

Exceptional Excerpts

Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible. In general, important civilizations start with a rigid and superstitious system, gradually relaxed, and leading, at a certain stage, to a period of brilliant genius, while the good of the old tradition remains and the evil inherent in its dissolution has not yet developed

It might seem that the empirical philosopher is the slave of his material, but that the pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

Geometry, as established by the Greeks, starts with axioms which are (or are deemed to be) self-evident, and proceeds, by deductive reasoning, to arrive at theorems that are very far from self-evident. The axioms and theorems are held to be true of actual space, which is something given in experience. It thus appeared to be possible to discover things about the actual world by first noticing what is self-evident and then using deduction. This view influenced Plato and Kant, and most of the intermediate philosophers. When the Declaration of Independence says “we hold these truths to be self evident,” it is modelling itself on Euclid. The eighteenth-century doctrine of natural rights is a search for Euclidean axioms in politics.

“Self-evident” was substituted by Franklin for Jefferson’s “sacred and undeniable."

Personal religion is derived from ecstasy, theology from mathematics; and both are to be found in Pythagoras.

In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held. Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second. Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true.

The doctrine that everything is in a state of flux is the most famous of the opinions of Heraclitus, and the one most emphasised by his disciples, as described in Plato Theaetetus.

The doctrine of Parmenides was set forth in a poem On Nature. He considered the senses deceptive, and condemned the multitude of sensible things as mere illusion. The only true being is “the One,” which is infinite and indivisible.

Athenian democracy, though it had the grave limitation of not including slaves or women, was in some respects more democratic than any modern system. Judges and most executive officers were chosen by lot, and served for short periods; they were thus average citizens, like our jurymen, with the prejudices and lack of professionalism characteristic of average citizens. In general, there were a large number of judges to hear each case. The plaintiff and defendant, or prosecutor and accused, appeared in person, not through professional lawyers. Naturally, success or failure depended largely on oratorical skill in appealing to popular prejudices. Although a man had to deliver his own speech, he could hire an expert to write the speech for him, or, as many preferred, he could pay for instruction in the arts required for success in the law courts. These arts the Sophists were supposed to teach.

The disbelief in objective truth makes the majority, for practical purposes, the arbiters as to what to believe.

He [Socrates] would ask such questions as: “If I wanted a shoe mended, whom should I employ?” To which some ingenuous youth would answer: “A shoemaker, O Socrates.” He would go on to carpenters, coppersmiths, etc., and finally ask some such question as “who should mend the Ship of State?"

The close connection between virtue and knowledge is characteristic of Socrates and Plato. To some degree, it exists in all Greek thought, as opposed to that of Christianity. In Christian ethics, a pure heart is the essential, and is at least as likely to be found among the ignorant as among the learned.

As for economics: Plato proposes a thoroughgoing communism for the guardians … The guardians are to have small houses and simple food; they are to live as in a camp, dining together in companies; they are to have no private property beyond what is absolutely necessary. Gold and silver are to be forbidden. Though not rich, there is no reason why they should not be happy; but the purpose of the city is the good of the whole, not the happiness of one class. Both wealth and poverty are harmful, and in Plato’s city neither will exist.

With feigned unwillingness, the Platonic Socrates proceeds to apply his communism to the family. Friends, he says, should have all things in common, including women and children. He admits that this presents difficulties, but thinks them not insuperable. First of all, girls are to have exactly the same education as boys, learning music, gymnastics, and the art of war along with the boys. Women are to have complete equality with men in all respects.

“These women shall be, without exception, the common wives of these men, and no one shall have a wife of his own."

At certain festivals, brides and bridegrooms, in such numbers as are required to keep the population constant, will be brought together, by lot, as they will be taught to believe; but in fact the rulers of the city will manipulate the lots on eugenic principles.

All children will be taken away from their parents at birth, and great care will be taken that no parents shall know who are their children, and no children shall know who are their parents.

intercourse is to be free, but abortion or infanticide is to be compulsory.

Lying, Plato says explicitly, is to be a prerogative of the government, just as giving medicine is of physicians.

On questions of fact, we can appeal to science and scientific methods of observation; but on ultimate questions of ethics there seems to be nothing analogous. Yet, if this is really the case, ethical disputes resolve themselves into contests for power– including propaganda power.

Thrasymachus proclaims emphatically that “justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger."

We saw that God made only one bed, and it would be natural to suppose that he made only one straight line. But if there is a heavenly triangle, he must have made at least three straight lines. The objects of geometry, though ideal, must exist in many examples; we need the possibility of two intersecting circles, and so on.

Plato proceeds to an interesting sketch of the education proper to a young man who is to be a guardian. We saw that the young man is selected for this honour on the ground of a combination of intellectual and moral qualities: he must be just and gentle, fond of learning, with a good memory and a harmonious mind. The young man who has been chosen for these merits will spend the years from twenty to thirty on the four Pythagorean studies: arithmetic, geometry (plane and solid), astronomy, and harmony.

What the above argument amounts to is that, whatever else may be in perpetual flux, the meanings of words must be fixed, at least for a time, since otherwise no assertion is definite, and no assertion is true rather than false. There must be something more or less constant, if discourse and knowledge are to be possible.

unless words, to some extent, had fixed meanings, discourse would be impossible. Here again, however, it is easy to be too absolute. Words do change their meanings; take, for example, the word “idea.” It is only by a considerable process of education that we learn to give to this word something like the meaning which Plato gave to it. It is necessary that the changes in the meanings of words should be slower than the changes that the words describe; but it is not necessary that there should be no changes in the meanings of words

It will be seen that this doctrine is optimistic and teleological: the universe and everything in it is developing towards something continually better than what went before.

The world is continually evolving towards a greater degree of form, and thus becoming progressively more like God. But the process cannot be completed, because matter cannot be wholly eliminated. This is a religion of progress and evolution…

The natural way to get wealth is by skilful management of house and land. To the wealth that can be made in this way there is a limit, but to what can be made by trade there is none. Trade has to do with money, but wealth is not the acquisition of coin. Wealth derived from trade is justly hated, because it is unnatural. “The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. . . . Of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural”

I wrote an essay once, called “Architecture and the Social System,” in which I pointed out that all who combine communism with abolition of the family also advocate communal houses for large numbers, with communal kitchens, dining-rooms, and nurseries. This system may be described as monasteries without celibacy.

There are three kinds of government that are good: monarchy, aristocracy, and constitutional government (or polity); there are three that are bad: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.

The three things needed to prevent revolution are government propaganda in education, respect for law, even in small things, and justice in law and administration

pan class=“important”>All social inequality, in the long run, is inequality of income.

Aristotle’s most important work in logic is the doctrine of the syllogism. A syllogism is an argument consisting of three parts, a major premiss, a minor premiss, and a conclusion.

The temples, in the Hellenistic world, were the bankers; they owned the gold reserve, and controlled credit. In the early third century, the temple of Apollo at Delos made loans at ten per cent; formerly, the rate of interest had been higher.

Why trouble about the future? It is wholly uncertain. You may as well enjoy the present; “What’s to come is still unsure.” For these reasons, Scepticism enjoyed a considerable popular success.

It is no wonder that the Epicureans contributed practically nothing to natural knowledge. They served a useful purpose by their protest against the increasing devotion of the later pagans to magic, astrology, and divination; but they remained, like their founder, dogmatic, limited, and without genuine interest in anything outside individual happiness.

Socrates was the chief saint of the Stoics throughout their history; his attitude at the time of his trial, his refusal to escape, his calmness in the face of death, and his contention that the perpetrator of injustice injures himself more than his victim, all fitted in perfectly with Stoic teaching. So did his indifference to heat and cold, his plainness in matters of food and dress, and his complete independence of all bodily comforts.

suitable drugs forcibly administered, willpower can be destroyed. Take Epictetus’s favorite case, the man unjustly imprisoned by a tyrant, of which there have been more examples in recent years than at any other period in human history. Some of these men have acted with Stoic heroism; some, rather mysteriously, have not. It has become clear, not only that sufficient torture will break down almost any man’s fortitude, but also that morphia or cocaine can reduce a man to docility. The will, in fact, is only independent of the tyrant so long as the tyrant is unscientific.

Third: the importance of the long Roman peace in diffusing culture and in accustoming men to the idea of a single civilization associated with a single government.

To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary:

Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah = Marx
The Elect = The Proletariat
The Church = The Communist Party
The Second Coming = The Revolution
Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists
The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth

What follows is an abstract of the Summa contra Gentiles: Let us first consider what is meant by “wisdom.” A man may be wise in some particular pursuit, such as making houses; this implies that he knows the means to some particular end. But all particular ends are subordinate to the end of the universe, and wisdom per se is concerned with the end of the universe. Now the end of the universe is the good of the intellect, i.e., truth. The pursuit of wisdom in this sense is the most perfect, sublime, profitable, and delightful of pursuits. All this is proved by appeal to the authority of “The Philosopher,” i.e., Aristotle.

God is truth. (This is to be understood literally.)

Matrimony should be indissoluble, because the father is needed in the education of the children,

Boniface VIII, in the Bull Unam Sanctam, made more extreme claims than had ever been made by any previous Pope. He instituted, in 1300, the year of Jubilee, when plenary indulgence is granted to all Catholics who visit Rome and perform certain ceremonies while there. This brought immense sums of money to the coffers of the Curia and the pockets of the Roman people. There was to be a Jubilee every hundredth year, but the profits were so great that the period was shortened to fifty years, and then to twenty-five, at which it remains to the present day.

This form of government, however, if it spreads, must obviously bring with it a new form of culture; the culture with which we shall be concerned is in the main “liberal," that is to say, of the kind most naturally associated with commerce. To this there are important exceptions, especially in Germany; Fichte and Hegel, to take two examples, have an outlook which is totally unconnected with commerce. But such exceptions are not typical of their age.

Modern philosophy, however, has retained, for the most part, an individualistic and subjective character. This is very marked in Descartes, who builds up all knowledge from the certainty of his own existence, and accepts clearness and distinctness (both subjective) as criteria of truth. It is not prominent in Spinoza, but reappears in Leibniz’s windowless monads. Locke, whose temperament is thoroughly objective, is forced reluctantly into the subjective doctrine that knowledge is of the agreement or disagreement of ideas–a view so repulsive to him that he escapes from it by violent inconsistencies. Berkeley, after abolishing matter, is only saved from complete subjectivism by a use of God which most subsequent philosophers have regarded as illegitimate. In Hume, the empiricist philosophy culminated in a scepticism which none could refute and none could accept. Kant and Fichte were subjective in temperament as well as in doctrine; Hegel saved himself by means of the influence of Spinoza. Rousseau and the romantic movement extended subjectivity from theory of knowledge to ethics and politics, and ended, logically, in complete anarchism such as that of Bakunin. This extreme of subjectivism is a form of madness.

The Renaissance was not a popular movement; it was a movement of a small number of scholars and artists, encouraged by liberal patrons, especially the Medici and the humanist popes.

It is true that power, often, depends upon opinion, and opinion upon propaganda; it is true, also, that it is an advantage in propaganda to seem more virtuous than your adversary, and that one way of seeming virtuous is to be virtuous.

Raphael Hythloday [the protagonist of Utopia] relates that he preached Christianity to the Utopians, and that many were converted when they learnt that Christ was opposed to private property. The importance of communism is constantly stressed; almost at the end we are told that in all other nations “I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the common wealth."

Diversity is essential to happiness, and in Utopia there is hardly any. This is a defect of all planned social systems, actual as well as imaginary.

Protestant success, at first amazingly rapid, was checked mainly as a resultant of Loyola’s creation of the Jesuit order. Loyola had been a soldier, and his order was founded on military models; there must be unquestioning obedience to the General, and every Jesuit was to consider himself engaged in warfare against heresy. As early as the Council of Trent, the Jesuits began to be influential. They were disciplined, able, completely devoted to the cause, and skilful propagandists. Their theology was the opposite of that of the Protestants; they rejected those elements of Saint Augustine’s teaching which the Protestants emphasized. They believed in free will, and opposed predestination. Salvation was not by faith alone, but by both faith and works.

They concentrated on education, and thus acquired a firm hold on the minds of the young. Whenever theology did not interfere, the education they gave was the best obtainable; we shall see that they taught Descartes more mathematics than he would have learnt elsewhere.

Hobbes considers the question why men cannot co-operate like ants and bees. Bees in the same hive, he says, do not compete; they have no desire for honour; and they do not use reason to criticize the government. Their agreement is natural, but that of men can only be artificial, by covenant. The covenant must confer power on one man or one assembly, since otherwise it cannot be enforced. “Covenants, without the sword, are but words." ( President Wilson unfortunately forgot this.) The covenant is not, as afterwards in Locke and Rousseau, between the citizens and the ruling power; it is a covenant made by the citizens with each other to obey such ruling power as the majority shall choose. When they have chosen, their political power is at an end. The minority is as much bound as the majority, since the covenant was to obey the government chosen by the majority. When the government has been chosen, the citizens lose all rights except such as the government may find it expedient to grant. There is no right of rebellion, because the ruler is not bound by any contract, whereas the subjects are.

He regarded the bodies of men and animals as machines; animals he regarded as automata, governed entirely by the laws of physics, and devoid of feeling or consciousness. Men are different: they have a soul, which resides in the pineal gland. There the soul comes in contact with the “vital spirits,” and through this contact there is interaction between soul and body. The total quantity of motion in the universe is constant, and therefore the soul cannot affect it; but it can alter the direction of motion of the animal spirits, and hence, indirectly, of other parts of the body.

Spinoza does not, like the Stoics, object to all emotions; he objects only to those that are “passions,” i.e., those in which we appear to ourselves to be passive in the power of outside forces. “An emotion which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.” Understanding that all things are necessary helps the mind to acquire power over the emotions. “He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his emotions, loves God, and so much the more as he more understands himself and his emotions." This proposition introduces us to the “intellectual love of God,” in which wisdom consists. The intellectual love of God is a union of thought and emotion: it consists, I think one may say, in true thought combined with joy in the apprehension of truth.

Every increase in the understanding of what happens to us consists in referring events to the idea of God, since, in truth, everything is part of God. This understanding of everything as part of God is love of God. When all objects are referred to God, the idea of God will fully occupy the mind.

The hereditary principle has almost vanished from politics.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the law of nature was held to condemn “usury,” i.e., lending money at interest. Church property was almost entirely in land, and landowners have always been borrowers rather than lenders. But when Protestantism arose, its support–especially the support of Calvinism–came chiefly from the rich middle class, who were lenders rather than borrowers. Accordingly first Calvin, then other Protestants, and finally the Catholic Church, sanctioned “usury.”

As a rule, the man who first thinks of a new idea is so much ahead of his time that every one thinks him silly, so that he remains obscure and is soon forgotten. Then, gradually, the world becomes ready for the idea, and the man who proclaims it at the fortunate moment gets all the credit.

A new international Social Contract is necessary before we can enjoy the promised benefits of government. When once an international government has been created, much of Locke’s political philosophy will again become applicable, though not the part of it that deals with private property.

both in England and in America, big business on the whole dislikes war.

• WHAT?! The military industrial complex. War profiteering. This is an outlandish statement. There is no excuse for this nonsense, even in the day when it was written, circa WW2.

”…the truth of my hypothesis, that all our reasonings concerning causes and effects are derived from nothing but custom; and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures."

To this extent, Hume has proved that pure empiricism is not a sufficient basis for science. But if this one principle is admitted, everything else can proceed in accordance with the theory that all our knowledge is based on experience.

Revolt of solitary instincts against social bonds is the key to the philosophy, the politics, and the sentiments, not only of what is commonly called the romantic movement, but of its progeny down to the present day.

The old arguments at least were honest: if valid, they proved their point; if invalid, it was open to any critic to prove them so. But the new theology of the heart dispenses with argument; it cannot be refuted, because it does not profess to prove its points.

What we call democracy he calls elective aristocracy; this, he says, is the best of all governments, but it is not suitable to all countries.

The Social Contract became the Bible of most of the leaders in the French Revolution, but no doubt, as is the fate of Bibles, it was not carefully read and was still less understood by many of its disciples.

Kant’s vigour and freshness of mind in old age are shown by his treatise on Perpetual Peace (1795). In this work he advocates a federation of free States, bound together by a covenant forbidding war. Reason, he says, utterly condemns war, which only an international government can prevent.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

He [Condorcet] was a believer in the equality of women. He was also the inventor of Malthus’s theory of population, which, however, had not for him the gloomy consequences that it had for Malthus, because he coupled it with the necessity of birth control. Malthus’s father was a disciple of Condorcet, and it was in this way that Malthus came to know of the theory.

Marx himself, though his. doctrines are in some respects pre- Darwinian, wished to dedicate his book to Darwin.

first, the power of man in his conflicts with nature, and then the power of rulers as against the human beings whose beliefs and aspirations they seek to control by scientific propaganda, especially education. The result is a diminution of fixity; no change seems impossible. Nature is raw material; so is that part of the human race which does not effectively participate in government.

Truth and falsehood are not sharply defined opposites, as is commonly supposed; nothing is wholly false, and nothing that we can know is wholly true.

Hegel does not mean only that, in some situations, a nation cannot rightly avoid going to war. He means much more than this. He is opposed to the creation of institutions–such as a world government –which would prevent such situations from arising, because he thinks it a good thing that there should be wars from time to time. War, he says, is the condition in which we take seriously the vanity of temporal goods and things. (This view is to be contrasted with the opposite theory, that all wars have economic causes.) War has a positive moral value: “War has the higher significance that through it the moral health of peoples is preserved in their indifference towards the stabilizing of finite determinations.” Peace is ossification; the Holy Alliance, and Kant’s League for Peace, are mistaken, because a family of States needs an enemy. Conflicts of States can only be decided by war

Nietzsche’s ethic is not one of self-indulgence in any ordinary sense; he believes in Spartan discipline and the capacity to endure as well as inflict pain for important ends. He admires strength of will above all things. “I test the power of a will,” he says, “according to the amount of resistance it can offer and the amount of pain and torture it can endure and know how to turn to its own advantage; I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been.” He regards compassion as a weakness to be combated. “The object is to attain that enormous energy of greatness which can model the man of the future by means of discipline and also by means of the annihilation of millions of the bungled and botched, and which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight of the suffering created thereby, the like of which has never been seen before."

Nietzsche is not a nationalist, and shows no excessive admiration for Germany. He wants an international ruling race, who are to be the lords of the earth: “a new vast aristocracy based upon the most severe self-discipline, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be stamped upon thousands of years."

Dr. Dewey’s world, it seems to me, is one in which human beings occupy the imagination…

---

Table of Contents

• Preface
  
• Introduction
  

  Book One: ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

  Part I. The Pre-Socratics

• 01: The Rise of Greek Civilization
• 02: The Milesian School
• 03: Pythagoras
• 04: Heraclitus
• 05: Parmenides
• 06: Empedocles
• 07: Athens in Relation to Culture
• 08: Anaxagoras
• 09: The Atomists
• 10: Protagoras

Part II. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

• 11: Socrates
• 12: The Influence of Sparta
• 13: The Sources of Plato's Opinions
• 14: Plato's Utopia
• 15: The Theory of Ideas
• 16: Plato's Theory of Immortality
• 17: Plato's Cosmogony
• 18: Knowledge and Perception in Plato
• 19: Aristotle's Metaphysics
• 20: Aristotle's Ethics
• 21: Aristotle's Politics
• 22: Aristotle's Logic
• 23: Aristotle's Physics
• 24: Early Greek Mathematics and Astronomy

Part III. Ancient Philosophy after Aristotle

• 25: The Hellenistic World
• 26: Cynics and Sceptics
• 27: The Epicureans
• 28: Stoicism
• 29: The Roman Empire in Relation to Culture
• 30: Plotinus

Book Two: CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY

• Introduction

Part I. The Fathers

• 01: The Religious Development of the Jews
• 02: Christianity During the First Four Centuries
• 03: Three Doctors of the Church
• 04: Saint Augustine's Philosophy and Theology
• 05: The Fifth and Sixth Centuries
• 06: Saint Benedict and Gregory the Grea

Part II. The Schoolmen

• 07: The Papacy in the Dark Ages
• 08: John the Scot
• 09: Ecclesiastical Reform in the Eleventh Century
• 10: Mohammedan Culture and Philosophy
• 11: The Twelfth Century
• 12: The Thirteenth Century
• 13: Saint Thomas Aquinas
• 14: Franciscan Schoolmen
• 15: The Eclipse of the Papacy

Book Three: MODERN PHILOSOPHY

Part I. From the Renaissance to Hume

• 01: General Characteristic
• 02: The Italian Renaissance
• 03: Machiavelli
• 04: Erasmus and More
• 05: The Reformation and CounterReformation
• 06: The Rise of Science
• 07: Francis Bacon
• 08: Hobbes's Leviathan
• 09: Descartes
• 10: Spinoza
• 11: Leibniz
• 12: Philosophical Liberalism
• 13: Locke's Theory of Knowledge
• 14: Locke's Political Philosophy
• 15: Locke's Influence
• 16: Berkeley
• 17: Hume

Part II. From Rousseau to the Present Day

• 18: The Romantic Movement
• 19: Rousseau
• 20: Kant
• 21: Currents of Thought in the Nineteenth Century
• 22: Hegel
• 23: Byron
• 24: Schopenhauer
• 25: Nietzsche
• 26: The Utilitarians
• 27: Karl Marx
• 28: Bergson
• 29: William James
• 30: John Dewey
• 31: The Philosophy of Logical Analysis

---

• Pages numbers from the pdf.

· Preface

· Introduction

page 11:

• Is there such a thing as wisdom, or is what seems such merely the ultimate refinement of folly?

page 16:

• What had happened in the great age of Greece happened again in Renaissance Italy: traditional moral restraints disappeared, because they were seen to be associated with superstition; the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare florescence of genius; but the anarchy and treachery which inevitably resulted from the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, under the domination of nations less civilized than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion.

page 17:

• In Protestant theory, there should be no earthly intermediary between the soul and God.

page 20:

• Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible. In general, important civilizations start with a rigid and superstitious system, gradually relaxed, and leading, at a certain stage, to a period of brilliant genius, while the good of the old tradition remains and the evil inherent in its dissolution has not yet developed

Book One: ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

Part I. The Pre-Socratics

· 01: The Rise of Greek Civilization

page 28:

• Everything about Homer is conjectural,

• Guided by anthropology, modern writers have come to the conclusion that Homer, so far from being primitive, was an expurgator, a kind of eighteenth-century rationalizer of ancient myths,

page 32:

• Dionysus, or Bacchus, whom we think of most naturally as the somewhat disreputable god of wine and drunkenness. The way in which, out of his worship, there arose a profound mysticism, which greatly influenced many of the philosophers, and even had a part in shaping Christian theology, is very remarkable, and must be understood by anyone who wishes to study the development of Greek thought.

page 33:

• The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant.

page 34:

• Prudence versus passion is a conflict that runs through history. It is not a conflict in which we ought to side wholly with either party.

page 37:

• At Eleusis, where the Eleusinian mysteries formed the most sacred part of Athenian State religion, a hymn was sung, saying: With Thy wine-cup waving high, With Thy maddening revelry, To Eleusis’ flowery vale, Comest Thou–Bacchus, Paean, hail!

page 41:

• the worship of Dionysus, which came from Thrace, and is barely mentioned in Homer, contained in germ a wholly new way of looking at man’s relation to the world. It would certainly be wrong to credit the Thracians themselves with any very exalted views; but there can be no doubt that, to the Greeks, the phenomenon of ecstasy suggested that the soul was something more than a feeble double of the self, and that it was only when ‘out of the body’ that it could show its true nature….

· 02: The Milesian School

page 42:

• Thales, who said that everything is made of water.

page 44:

• told by Aristotle in his Politics (1259a): “He [Thales] was reproached for his poverty, which was supposed to show that philosophy is of no use. According to the story, he knew by his skill in the stars while it was yet winter that there would be a great harvest of olives in the coming year; so, having a little money, he gave deposits for the use of all the olive-presses in Chios and Miletus, which he hired at a low price because no one bid against him. When the harvest time came, and many were wanted all at once and of a sudden, he let them out at any rate which he pleased, and made a quantity of money. Thus he showed the world that philosophers can easily be rich if they like, but that their ambition is of another sort.”

page 46:

• The Milesian school is important, not for what it achieved, but for what it attempted. It was brought into existence by the contact of the Greek mind with Babylonia and Egypt. Miletus was a rich commercial city, in which primitive prejudices and superstitions were softened by intercourse with many nations. Ionia, until its subjugation by Darius at the beginning of the fifth century, was culturally the most important part of the Hellenic world. It was almost untouched by the religious movement connected with Bacchus and Orpheus; its religion was Olympic, but seems to have been not taken very seriously. The speculations of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes are to be regarded as scientific hypotheses, and seldom show any undue intrusion of anthropomorphic desires and moral ideas.

· 03: Pythagoras

page 50:

• Pythagoreanism, he [Plato] says, was a movement of reform in Orphism, and Orphism was a movement of reform in the worship of Dionysus.

page 51:

• It might seem that the empirical philosopher is the slave of his material, but that the pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

page 53:

• Pythagoras, as everyone knows, said that “all things are numbers." This statement, interpreted in a modern way, is logically nonsense, but what he meant was not exactly nonsense. He discovered the importance of numbers in music, and the connection which he established between music and arithmetic survives in the mathematical terms “harmonic mean” and “harmonic progression.” He thought of numbers as shapes, as they appear on dice or playing cards. We still speak of squares and cubes of numbers, which are terms that we owe to him. He also spoke of oblong numbers, triangular numbers, pyramidal numbers, and so on. These were the numbers of pebbles (or, as we should more naturally say, shot) required to make the shapes in question. He presumably thought of the world as atomic, and of bodies as built up of molecules composed of atoms arranged in various shapes. In this way he hoped to make arithmetic the fundamental study in physics as in aesthetics.

page 54:

• Geometry, as established by the Greeks, starts with axioms which are (or are deemed to be) self-evident, and proceeds, by deductive reasoning, to arrive at theorems that are very far from self-evident. The axioms and theorems are held to be true of actual space, which is something given in experience. It thus appeared to be possible to discover things about the actual world by first noticing what is self-evident and then using deduction. This view influenced Plato and Kant, and most of the intermediate philosophers. When the Declaration of Independence says “we hold these truths to be self evident,” it is modelling itself on Euclid. The eighteenth-century doctrine of natural rights is a search for Euclidean axioms in politics.

• “Self-evident” was substituted by Franklin for Jefferson’s “sacred and undeniable.”

page 55:

• Personal religion is derived from ecstasy, theology from mathematics; and both are to be found in Pythagoras.

· 04: Heraclitus

page 57:

• In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held. Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second. Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true.

page 61:

• Quotes by Heraclitus:

• Night-walkers, magicians, priests of Bacchus and priestesses of the wine-vat, mystery-mongers.

• The mysteries practised among men are unholy mysteries.

• For if it were not to Dionysus that they made a procession and sang the shameful phallic hymn, they would be acting most shamelessly. But Hades is the same as Dionysus in whose honour they go mad and keep the feast of the wine-vat.

page 62:

• The doctrine that everything is in a state of flux is the most famous of the opinions of Heraclitus, and the one most emphasised by his disciples, as described in Plato Theaetetus.

• “You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you."

• “The sun is new every day.”

page 63:

• His [Heraclitus] works, like those of all the philosophers before Plato, are only known through quotations, largely made by Plato or Aristotle for the sake of refutation. When one thinks what would become of any modern philosopher if he were only known through the polemics of his rivals, one can see how admirable the pre-Socratics must have been, since even through the mist of malice spread by their enemies they still appear great. However this may be, Plato and Aristotle agree that Heraclitus taught that “nothing ever is, everything is becoming” ( Plato), and that “nothing steadfastly is” ( Aristotle).

· 05: Parmenides

page 66:

• The doctrine of Parmenides was set forth in a poem On Nature. He considered the senses deceptive, and condemned the multitude of sensible things as mere illusion. The only true being is “the One,” which is infinite and indivisible.

page 68:

• Parmenides assumes that words have a constant meaning; this is really the basis of his argument, which he supposes unquestionable. But although the dictionary or the encyclopaedia gives what may be called the official and socially sanctioned meaning of a word, no two people who use the same word have just the same thought in their minds.

· 06: Empedocles

· 07: Athens in Relation to Culture

page 77:

• Athens had lagged behind many other Greek cities; neither in art nor in literature had it produced any great man (except Solon, who was primarily a lawgiver).

• Solomon and Fomenko come to mind immediatly.

· 08: Anaxagoras

page 81:

• Aristotle points out that he only introduces mind as a cause when he knows no other. Whenever he can, he gives a mechanical explanation.

· 09: The Atomists

page 84:

• It was common in antiquity to reproach the atomists with attributing everything to chance. They were, on the contrary, strict determinists, who believed that everything happens in accordance with natural laws. Democritus explicitly denied that anything can happen by chance.

• In ethics he [Democritus] considered cheerfulness the goal of life, and regarded moderation and culture as the best means to it. He disliked everything violent and passionate; he disapproved of sex, because, he said, it involved the overwhelming of consciousness by pleasure. He valued friendship, but thought ill of women, and did not desire children, because their education interferes with philosophy.

• “Poverty in a democracy is as much to be preferred to what is called prosperity under despots as freedom is to slavery,” he [Democritus] says.

· 10: Protagoras

page 92:

• There is, however, one important and highly intellectual class which is concerned with the fence of the plutocracy, namely the class of corporation lawyers. In some respects, their functions are similar to those that were performed in Athens by the Sophists.

• Athenian democracy, though it had the grave limitation of not including slaves or women, was in some respects more democratic than any modern system. Judges and most executive officers were chosen by lot, and served for short periods; they were thus average citizens, like our jurymen, with the prejudices and lack of professionalism characteristic of average citizens. In general, there were a large number of judges to hear each case. The plaintiff and defendant, or prosecutor and accused, appeared in person, not through professional lawyers. Naturally, success or failure depended largely on oratorical skill in appealing to popular prejudices. Although a man had to deliver his own speech, he could hire an expert to write the speech for him, or, as many preferred, he could pay for instruction in the arts required for success in the law courts. These arts the Sophists were supposed to teach.

page 94:

• There is a story about Protagoras, no doubt apocryphal, which illustrates the connection of the Sophists with the law-courts in the popular mind. It is said that he taught a young man on the terms that he should be paid his fee if the young man won his first law-suit, but not otherwise, and that the young man’s first law-suit was one brought by Protagoras for recovery of his fee.

page 95:

• The disbelief in objective truth makes the majority, for practical purposes, the arbiters as to what to believe.

page 96:

• Those to whom philosophy was a way of life, closely bound up with religion, were naturally shocked; to them, the Sophists appeared frivolous and immoral.

• Plato is always concerned to advocate views that will make people what he thinks virtuous; he is hardly ever intellectually honest, because he allows himself to judge doctrines by their social consequences. Even about this, he is not honest; he pretends to follow the argument and to be judging by purely theoretical standards, when in fact he is twisting the discussion so as to lead to a virtuous result. He introduced this vice into philosophy, where it has persisted ever since.

Part II. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

· 11: Socrates

page 100:

• He [Socrates] would ask such questions as: “If I wanted a shoe mended, whom should I employ?” To which some ingenuous youth would answer: “A shoemaker, O Socrates.” He would go on to carpenters, coppersmiths, etc., and finally ask some such question as “who should mend the Ship of State?"

page 106:

• The “Apology” gives a clear picture of a man [Socrates] of a certain type: a man very sure of himself, high- minded, indifferent to worldly success, believing that he is guided by a divine voice, and persuaded that clear thinking is the most important requisite for right living. Except in this last point, he resembles a Christian martyr or a Puritan.

page 109:

• The close connection between virtue and knowledge is characteristic of Socrates and Plato. To some degree, it exists in all Greek thought, as opposed to that of Christianity. In Christian ethics, a pure heart is the essential, and is at least as likely to be found among the ignorant as among the learned.

page 110:

• Logical errors are, I think, of greater practical importance than many people believe; they enable their perpetrators to hold the comfortable opinion on every subject in turn. Any logically coherent body of doctrine is sure to be in part painful and contrary to current prejudices.

· 12: The Influence of Sparta

page 118:

• Of these, Plato was the most important in early Christianity, Aristotle in the medieval Church; but when, after the Renaissance, men began to value political freedom, it was above all to Plutarch that they turned. He influenced profoundly the English and French liberals of the eighteenth century, and the founders of the United States; he influenced the romantic movement in Germany, and has continued, mainly by indirect channels, to influence German thought down to the present day.

· 13: The Sources of Plato’s Opinions

page 123:

• In the third place: much education is needed to make a good ruler on Plato’s principles. … He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible. This view implies an oligarchy.

• In the fourth place: Plato, in common with most Greek philosophers, took the view that leisure is essential to wisdom, which will therefore not be found among those who have to work for their living, but only among those who have independent means, or who are relieved by the state from anxieties as to their subsistence. This point of view is essentially aristocratic.

· 14: Plato’s Utopia

page 128:

• As for economics: Plato proposes a thoroughgoing communism for the guardians … The guardians are to have small houses and simple food; they are to live as in a camp, dining together in companies; they are to have no private property beyond what is absolutely necessary. Gold and silver are to be forbidden. Though not rich, there is no reason why they should not be happy; but the purpose of the city is the good of the whole, not the happiness of one class. Both wealth and poverty are harmful, and in Plato’s city neither will exist.

• With feigned unwillingness, the Platonic Socrates proceeds to apply his communism to the family. Friends, he says, should have all things in common, including women and children. He admits that this presents difficulties, but thinks them not insuperable. First of all, girls are to have exactly the same education as boys, learning music, gymnastics, and the art of war along with the boys. Women are to have complete equality with men in all respects.

• “These women shall be, without exception, the common wives of these men, and no one shall have a wife of his own."

• At certain festivals, brides and bridegrooms, in such numbers as are required to keep the population constant, will be brought together, by lot, as they will be taught to believe; but in fact the rulers of the city will manipulate the lots on eugenic principles.

page 129:

• All children will be taken away from their parents at birth, and great care will be taken that no parents shall know who are their children, and no children shall know who are their parents.

• intercourse is to be free, but abortion or infanticide is to be compulsory.

page 130:

• Lying, Plato says explicitly, is to be a prerogative of the government, just as giving medicine is of physicians.

page 131:

• The first suggested definition of “justice,” at the beginning of the Republic, is that it consists in paying debts. This definition is soon abandoned as inadequate, but something of it remains at the end.

page 133:

• On questions of fact, we can appeal to science and scientific methods of observation; but on ultimate questions of ethics there seems to be nothing analogous. Yet, if this is really the case, ethical disputes resolve themselves into contests for power– including propaganda power.

page 134:

• Thrasymachus proclaims emphatically that “justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger."

• Is there any standard of “good” and “bad,” except what the man using these words desires? If there is not, many of the consequences drawn by Thrasymachus seem inescapable.

· 15: The Theory of Ideas

page 137:

• Why did the Puritans object to the music and painting and gorgeous ritual of the Catholic Church? You will find the answer in the tenth book of the Republic. Why are children in school compelled to learn arithmetic? The reasons are given in the seventh book.

page 139:

• But whatever Socrates may say, it remains the case, as any one can see, that people who stick to philosophy become strange monsters, not to say utter rogues; even the best of them are made useless by philosophy.

• Socrates admits that this is true in the world as it is, but maintains that it is the other people who are to blame, not the philosophers; in a wise community the philosophers would not seem foolish; it is only among fools that the wise are judged to be destitute of wisdom.

page 141:

• We saw that God made only one bed, and it would be natural to suppose that he made only one straight line. But if there is a heavenly triangle, he must have made at least three straight lines. The objects of geometry, though ideal, must exist in many examples; we need the possibility of two intersecting circles, and so on.

page 148:

• Plato proceeds to an interesting sketch of the education proper to a young man who is to be a guardian. We saw that the young man is selected for this honour on the ground of a combination of intellectual and moral qualities: he must be just and gentle, fond of learning, with a good memory and a harmonious mind. The young man who has been chosen for these merits will spend the years from twenty to thirty on the four Pythagorean studies: arithmetic, geometry (plane and solid), astronomy, and harmony.

• Essentially the quadrivium (harmony = music).

• Aristarchus of Samos found such a hypothesis: that all the planets, including the earth, go round the sun in circles. This view was rejected for two thousand years, partly on the authority of Aristotle,

• This piece of scientific history illustrates a general maxim: that any hypothesis, however absurd, may be useful in science, if it enables a discoverer to conceive things in a new way; but that, when it has served this purpose by luck, it is likely to become an obstacle to further advance.

page 149:

• It is noteworthy that modern Platonists, almost without exception, are ignorant of mathematics, in spite of the immense importance that Plato attached to arithmetic and geometry, and the immense influence that they had on his philosophy. This is an example of the evils of specialization: a man must not write on Plato unless he has spent so much of his youth on Greek as to have had no time for the things that Plato thought important.

· 16: Plato’s Theory of Immortality

page 155:

• There is one true coin for which all things ought to be exchanged, and that is wisdom.

· 17: Plato’s Cosmogony

page 161:

• “God desired that all things should be good, and nothing bad, as far as possible.” “Finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order.” (Thus it appears that Plato’s God, unlike the Jewish and Christian God, did not create the world out of nothing, but rearranged pre-existing material.)

· 18: Knowledge and Perception in Plato

page 166:

• Most modern men take it for granted that empirical knowledge is dependent upon, or derived from, perception. There is, however, in Plato and among philosophers of certain other schools, a very different doctrine, to the effect that there is nothing worthy to be called “knowledge” to be derived from the senses, and that the only real knowledge has to do with concepts. In this view, “2 + 2 = 4” is genuine knowledge, but such a statement as “snow is white” is so full of ambiguity and uncertainty that it cannot find a place in the philosopher’s corpus of truths.

page 169:

• What the above argument amounts to is that, whatever else may be in perpetual flux, the meanings of words must be fixed, at least for a time, since otherwise no assertion is definite, and no assertion is true rather than false. There must be something more or less constant, if discourse and knowledge are to be possible.

page 176:

• unless words, to some extent, had fixed meanings, discourse would be impossible. Here again, however, it is easy to be too absolute. Words do change their meanings; take, for example, the word “idea.” It is only by a considerable process of education that we learn to give to this word something like the meaning which Plato gave to it. It is necessary that the changes in the meanings of words should be slower than the changes that the words describe; but it is not necessary that there should be no changes in the meanings of words

· 19: Aristotle’s Metaphysics

page 184:

• It will be seen that this doctrine is optimistic and teleological: the universe and everything in it is developing towards something continually better than what went before.

• There are, he says, three kinds of substances: those that are sensible and perishable, those that are sensible but not perishable, and those that are neither sensible nor perishable. The first class includes plants and animals, the second includes the heavenly bodies (which Aristotle believed to undergo no change except motion), the third includes the rational soul in man, and also God.

page 186:

• The world is continually evolving towards a greater degree of form, and thus becoming progressively more like God. But the process cannot be completed, because matter cannot be wholly eliminated. This is a religion of progress and evolution…

• Is this the foundation of Teilhard’s Omega-Point?

· 20: Aristotle’s Ethics

· 21: Aristotle’s Politics

page 202:

• In order of time, the family comes first; it is built on the two fundamental relations of man and woman, master and slave, both of which are natural.

page 203:

• A State being composed of households, each of which consists of one family, the discussion of politics should begin with the family.

page 204:

• The natural way to get wealth is by skilful management of house and land. To the wealth that can be made in this way there is a limit, but to what can be made by trade there is none. Trade has to do with money, but wealth is not the acquisition of coin. Wealth derived from trade is justly hated, because it is unnatural. “The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. . . . Of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural”

page 205:

• Next comes the kind of argument against the proposed abolition of the family that naturally occurs to every reader.

• I wrote an essay once, called “Architecture and the Social System,” in which I pointed out that all who combine communism with abolition of the family also advocate communal houses for large numbers, with communal kitchens, dining-rooms, and nurseries. This system may be described as monasteries without celibacy.

page 206:

• There are three kinds of government that are good: monarchy, aristocracy, and constitutional government (or polity); there are three that are bad: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.

page 207:

• Monarchy is better than aristocracy, aristocracy is better than polity. But the corruption of the best is worst; therefore tyranny is worse than oligarchy, and oligarchy than democracy.

page 208:

• The three things needed to prevent revolution are government propaganda in education, respect for law, even in small things, and justice in law and administration

All social inequality, in the long run, is inequality of income.

• A tyrant desires riches, whereas a king desires honour. The tyrant has guards who are mercenaries, whereas the king has guards who are citizens.

· 22: Aristotle’s Logic

page 212:

• Aristotle, on the contrary, is still, especially in logic, a battle-ground, and cannot be treated in a purely historical spirit.

page 213:

• Aristotle’s most important work in logic is the doctrine of the syllogism. A syllogism is an argument consisting of three parts, a major premiss, a minor premiss, and a conclusion.

• All men are mortal (Major premiss). Socrates is a man (Minor premiss). Therefore: Socrates is mortal (Conclusion). Or: All men are mortal. All Greeks are men. Therefore: All Greeks are mortal.

page 216:

• All the important inferences outside logic and pure mathematics are inductive, not deductive; the only exceptions are law and theology, each of which derives its first principles from an unquestionable text, viz. the statute books or the scriptures.

page 219:

• I conclude that the Aristotelian doctrines with which we have been concerned in this chapter are wholly false, with the exception of the formal theory of the syllogism, which is unimportant. Any person in the present day who wishes to learn logic will be wasting his time if he reads Aristotle or any of his disciples.

· 23: Aristotle’s Physics

· 24: Early Greek Mathematics and Astronomy

Part III. Ancient Philosophy after Aristotle

· 25: The Hellenistic World

page 236:

• Plato and Aristotle thought it wrong to make slaves of Greeks, but not of barbarians. Alexander, who was not quite a Greek, tried to break down this attitude of superiority. He himself married two barbarian princesses, and he compelled his leading Macedonians to marry Persian women of noble birth.

page 241:

• The temples, in the Hellenistic world, were the bankers; they owned the gold reserve, and controlled credit. In the early third century, the temple of Apollo at Delos made loans at ten per cent; formerly, the rate of interest had been higher.

· 26: Cynics and Sceptics

page 248:

• Diogenes personally was a man full of vigour, but his doctrine, like all those of the Hellenistic age, was one to appeal to weary men, in whom disappointment had destroyed natural zest. And it was certainly not a doctrine calculated to promote at or science or statesmanship, or any useful activity except one of protest against powerful evil.

page 249:

• The Sophists, notably Protagoras and Gorgias, had been led by the ambiguities and. apparent contradictions of sense-perception to a subjectivism not unlike Hume’s.

• Why trouble about the future? It is wholly uncertain. You may as well enjoy the present; “What’s to come is still unsure.” For these reasons, Scepticism enjoyed a considerable popular success.

page 251:

• In some respects, the doctrine of Timon was very similar to that of Hume.

page 252:

• in fact, none seem to have learnt anything except cleverness and indifference to truth. So great was the influence of Arcesilaus that the Academy remained sceptical for about two hundred years.

page 253:

• Cato, who represented the stern, stiff, stupid, and brutal moral code by means of which Rome had defeated Carthage. From youth to old age, he lived simply, rose early, practised severe manual labour, ate only coarse food, and never wore a gown that cost over a hundred pence. Towards the State he was scrupulously honest, avoiding all bribery and plunder. He exacted of other Romans all the virtues that he practised himself, and asserted that to accuse and pursue the wicked was the best thing an honest man could do. He enforced, as far as he could, the old Roman severity of manners:

• “Cato put out of the Senate also, one Manilius, who was in great towardness to have been made Consul the next year following, only because he kissed his wife too lovingly in the day time, and before his daughter: and reproving him for it, he told him, his wife never kissed him, but when it thundered.”*

• When he was in power, he put down luxury and feasting. He made his wife suckle not only her own children, but also those of his slaves, in order that, having been nourished by the same milk, they might love his children. When his slaves were too old to work, he sold them remorselessly. He insisted that his slaves should always be either working or sleeping. He encouraged his slaves to quarrel with each other, for “he could not abide that they should be friends.” When a slave had committed a grave fault, he would call in his other slaves, and induce them to condemn the delinquent to death; he would then carry out the sentence with his own hands in the presence of the survivors.

• The Athenians, in Cato’s view, were a lesser breed without the law; it did not matter if they were degraded by the shallow sophistics of intellectuals, but the Roman youth must be kept puritanical, imperialistic, ruthless, and stupid.

· 27: The Epicureans

page 259:

• He is thus led, in practice, to regarding absence of pain, rather than presence of pleasure, as the wise man’s goal. * The stomach may be at the root of things, but the pains of stomach ache outweigh the pleasures of gluttony; accordingly Epicurus lived on bread, with a little cheese on feast days.

• “The greatest good of all is prudence: it is a more precious thing even than philosophy.” -Epicurus

page 260:

• The wise man will try to live unnoticed, so as to have no enemies.

page 261:

• Epicurus was a materialist, but not a determinist.

• It is no wonder that the Epicureans contributed practically nothing to natural knowledge. They served a useful purpose by their protest against the increasing devotion of the later pagans to magic, astrology, and divination; but they remained, like their founder, dogmatic, limited, and without genuine interest in anything outside individual happiness.

· 28: Stoicism

page 267:

• Zeno was a materialist

page 268:

• Socrates was the chief saint of the Stoics throughout their history; his attitude at the time of his trial, his refusal to escape, his calmness in the face of death, and his contention that the perpetrator of injustice injures himself more than his victim, all fitted in perfectly with Stoic teaching. So did his indifference to heat and cold, his plainness in matters of food and dress, and his complete independence of all bodily comforts.

page 269:

• All things are parts of one single system, which is called Nature

page 282:

• suitable drugs forcibly administered, willpower can be destroyed. Take Epictetus’s favorite case, the man unjustly imprisoned by a tyrant, of which there have been more examples in recent years than at any other period in human history. Some of these men have acted with Stoic heroism; some, rather mysteriously, have not. It has become clear, not only that sufficient torture will break down almost any man’s fortitude, but also that morphia or cocaine can reduce a man to docility. The will, in fact, is only independent of the tyrant so long as the tyrant is unscientific.

page 283:

• Kant, whose ethical system is very similar to that of the Stoics.

page 285:

• The doctrine of natural right, as it appears in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, is a revival of a Stoic doctrine, though with important modifications.

· 29: The Roman Empire in Relation to Culture

page 285:

• Third: the importance of the long Roman peace in diffusing culture and in accustoming men to the idea of a single civilization associated with a single government.

page 296:

• Constantine’s adoption of Christianity was politically successful, whereas earlier attempts to introduce a new religion failed

· 30: Plotinus

page 304:

We now come to the Second Person, whom Plotinus calls nous. It is always difficult to find an English word to represent nous. The standard dictionary translation is “mind,” but this does not have the correct connotations, particularly when the word is used in a religious philosophy. If we were to say that Plotinus put mind above soul, we should give a completely wrong impression. McKenna, the translator of Plotinus, uses “Intellectual-Principle,” but this is awkward, and does not suggest an object suitable for religious veneration. Dean Inge uses “Spirit,” which is perhaps the best word available. But it leaves out the intellectual element which was important in all Greek religious philosophy after Pythagoras. Mathematics, the world of ideas, and all thought about what is not sensible, have, for Pythagoras, Plato, and Plotinus, something divine; they constitute the activity of nous, or at least the nearest approach to its activity that we can conceive. It was this intellectual element in Plato’s religion that led Christians–notably the author of Saint John’s Gospel–to identify Christ with the Logos. Logos should be translated “reason” in this connection; this prevents us from using “reason” as the translation of nous. I shall follow Dean Inge in using “Spirit,” but with the proviso that nous has an intellectual connotation which is absent from “Spirit” as usually understood. But often I shall use the word nous untranslated.

page 312:

• Plotinus is both an end and a beginning–an end as regards the Greeks, a beginning as regards Christendom.

Book Two: CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY

· Introduction

Part I. The Fathers

· 01: The Religious Development of the Jews

page 319:

• The early history of the Israelites cannot be confirmed from any source outside the Old Testament, and it is impossible to know at what point it ceases to be purely legendary.

page 321:

• The prophets, on the whole, were fiercely nationalistic, and looked forward to the day when the Lord would utterly destroy the gentiles.

page 322:

• When Ezra and Nehemiah came back to Jerusalem after the captivity, they were shocked to find that mixed marriages had been common, and they dissolved all such marriages.

· 02: Christianity During the First Four Centuries

· 03: Three Doctors of the Church

page 342:

• Four men are called the Doctors of the Western Church: SaintAmbrose, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, and Pope Gregory the Great.

· 04: Saint Augustine’s Philosophy and Theology

page 362:

• “What, then, is time?” he asks. “If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.” Various difficulties perplex him. Neither past nor future, he says, but only the present, really is; the present is only a moment, and time can only be measured while it is passing. Nevertheless, there really is time past and future. We seem here to be led into contradictions. The only way Augustine can find to avoid these contradictions is to say that past and future can only be thought of as present: “past” must be identified with memory, and “future” with expectation, memory and expectation being both present facts. There are, he says, three times: “a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.” “The present of things past is memory; the present of things present is sight; and the present of things future is expectation." To say that there are three times, past, present, and future, is a loose way of speaking.

page 364:

• there are many, the Saint says, who, during the sack,[of Rome] sought sanctuary in the churches, which the Goths, because they were Christians, respected.

page 371:

• To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary:

Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah = Marx
The Elect = The Proletariat
The Church = The Communist Party
The Second Coming = The Revolution
Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists
The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth

page 372:

• The terms on the left give the emotional content of the terms on the right, and it is this emotional content, familiar to those who have had a Christian or a Jewish upbringing, that makes Marx’s eschatology credible. A similar dictionary could be made for the Nazis, but their conceptions are more purely Old Testament and less Christian than those of Marx, and their Messiah is more analogous to the Maccabees than to Christ.

· 05: The Fifth and Sixth Centuries

page 377:

• During the sixth century, there were four men of great importance in the history of culture: Boethius, Justinian, Benedict, and Gregory the Great.

· 06: Saint Benedict and Gregory the Great

page 383:

• At first, monasticism was a spontaneous movement, quite outside Church organization. It was Saint Athanasius who reconciled ecclesiastics to it. Partly as a result of his influence, it came to be the rule that monks should be priests.

page 388:

• All three, certainly, had a profound effect on future ages: Justinian by his Laws (not by his conquests, which were ephemeral); Benedict by his monastic order; and Gregory by the increase of papal power which he brought about.

page 394:

• Roman law, monasticism, and the papacy owe their long and profound influence very largely to Justinian, Benedict, and Gregory.

Part II. The Schoolmen

· 07: The Papacy in the Dark Ages

page 404:

• The year 1000 may be conveniently taken as marking the end of the lowest depth to which the civilization of Western Europe sank. From this point the upward movement began which continued till 1914. In the beginning, progress was mainly due to monastic reform. Outside the monastic orders, the clergy had become, for the most part, violent, immoral, and worldly; they were corrupted by the wealth and power that they owed to the benefactions of the pious. The same thing happened, over and over again, even to the monastic orders; but reformers, with new zeal, revived their moral force as often as it had decayed.

page 405:

• Our use of the phrase the “Dark Ages” to cover the period from 600 to 1000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe. In China, this period includes the time of the Tang dynasty, the greatest age of Chinese poetry, and in many other ways a most remarkable epoch. From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished. What was lost to Christendom at this time was not lost to civilization, but quite the contrary.

page 406:

• It seems not unlikely that, during the next few centuries, civilization, if it survives, will have greater diversity than it has had since the Renaissance. There is an imperialism of culture which is harder to overcome than the imperialism of power.

· 08: John the Scot

page 411:

• God is the beginning, middle, and end of things. God’s essence is unknowable to men, and even to angels. Even to Himself He is, in a sense, unknowable: “God does not know Himself, what He is, because He is not a what; in a certain respect He is incomprehensible to Himself and to every intellect.”

• Evil does not have its ground in God, for in God there is no idea of evil. Evil is not-being and has no ground, for if it had a ground it would be necessary. Evil is a privation of good.

· 09: Ecclesiastical Reform in the Eleventh Century

page 416:

• In the 11th century, the reforms led to celibacy of priests, who, until then, were free to marry.

page 423:

• Saint Anselm was, like Lanfranc, an Italian, a monk at Bec, and archbishop of Canterbury ( 1093- 1109), in which capacity he followed the principles of Gregory VII and quarrelled with the king. He is chiefly known to fame as the inventor of the “ontological argument” for the existence of God. As he put it, the argument is as follows: We define “God” as the greatest possible object of thought. Now if an object of thought does not exist, another, exactly like it, which does exist, is greater. Therefore the greatest of all objects of thought must exist, since, otherwise, another, still greater, would be possible. Therefore God exists.

• This argument has never been accepted by theologians. It was adversely criticized at the time; then it was forgotten till the latter half of the thirteenth century. Thomas Aquinas rejected it, and among theologians his authority has prevailed ever since. But among philosophers it has had a better fate. Descartes revived it in a somewhat amended form; Leibniz thought that it could be made valid by the addition of a supplement to prove that God is possible. Kant considered that he had demolished it once for all. Nevertheless, in some sense, it underlies the system of Hegel and his followers, and reappears in Bradley’s principle: “What may be and must be, is.”

· 10: Mohammedan Culture and Philosophy

page 429:

• Omar Khayyám, the only man known to me who was both a poet and a mathematician

· 11: The Twelfth Century

page 445:

• In matters outside the faith, he [John of Salisbury] was a man of sceptical temper; he called himself an Academic (in the sense in which Saint Augustine uses this term). His respect for kings was limited: “an illiterate king is a crowned ass." He revered Saint Bernard, but was well aware that his attempt to reconcile Plato and Aristotle must be a failure. He admired Abeélard, but laughed at his theory of universals, and at Roscelin’s equally. He thought logic a good introduction to learning, but in itself bloodless and sterile. Aristotle, he says, can be improved on, even in logic; respect for ancient authors should not hamper the critical exercise of reason. Plato is still to him the “prince of all philosophers.”

· 12: The Thirteenth Century

page 454:

• in 1233 Gregory IX founded the Inquisition, to take over this part of the work of the episcopate. After 1254, those accused by the Inquisition were not allowed counsel. If condemned, their property was confiscated–in France, to the crown. When an accused person was found guilty, he was handed over to the secular arm with a prayer that his life might be spared; but if the secular authorities failed to burn him, they were liable to be themselves brought before the Inquisition. It dealt not only with heresy in the ordinary sense, but with sorcery and witchcraft. In Spain, it was mainly directed against crypto-Jews.

· 13: Saint Thomas Aquinas

page 458:

• What follows is an abstract of the Summa contra Gentiles: Let us first consider what is meant by “wisdom.” A man may be wise in some particular pursuit, such as making houses; this implies that he knows the means to some particular end. But all particular ends are subordinate to the end of the universe, and wisdom per se is concerned with the end of the universe. Now the end of the universe is the good of the intellect, i.e., truth. The pursuit of wisdom in this sense is the most perfect, sublime, profitable, and delightful of pursuits. All this is proved by appeal to the authority of “The Philosopher,” i.e., Aristotle.

• In the Summa Theologiae, five proofs of God’s existence are given. First, the argument of the unmoved mover, as above. Second, the argument of the. First Cause, which again depends upon the impossibility of an infinite regress. Third, that there must be an ultimate source of all necessity; this is much the same as the second argument. Fourth, that we find various perfections in the world, and that these must have their source in something completely perfect. Fifth, that we find even lifeless things serving a purpose, which must be that of some being outside them, since only living things can have an internal purpose.

page 460:

• God is truth. (This is to be understood literally.)

page 461:

• He [God] knows trivial things, because nothing is wholly trivial, and everything has some nobility; otherwise God would know only Himself. Moreover the order of the universe is very noble, and this cannot be known without knowing even the trivial parts. Finally, God knows evil things, because knowing anything good involves knowing the opposite evil.

page 462:

• (There is a grave objection, which troubled Saint Augustine, and that is as to the transmission of original sin. It is the soul that sins, and if the soul is not transmitted, but created afresh, how can it inherit the sin of Adam? This is not discussed.)

page 463:

• Matrimony should be indissoluble, because the father is needed in the education of the children,

page 464:

• There is a most lively and interesting discussion of voluntary poverty, which, as one might expect, arrives ultimately at a conclusion in harmony with the principles of the mendicant orders, but states the objections with a force and realism which shows them to be such as he had actually heard urged by the secular clergy.

page 465:

• What is to happen, asks the Saint, to a man who never, throughout his life, ate anything but human flesh, and whose parents did likewise? It would seem unfair to his victims that they should be deprived of their bodies at the last day as a consequence of his greed; yet, if not, what will be left to make up his body; I am happy to say that this difficulty, which might at first sight seem insuperable, is triumphantly met. The identity of the body, Saint Thomas points out, is not dependent on the persistence of the same material particles; during life, by the processes of eating and digesting, the matter composing the body undergoes perpetual change. The cannibal may, therefore, receive the same body at the resurrection, even if it is not composed of the same matter as was in his body when he died. With this comforting thought we may end our abstract of the Summa contra Gentiles.

page 467:

• There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times.

· 14: Franciscan Schoolmen

page 473:

• Dante (1265-1321), though as a poet he was a great innovator, was, as a thinker, somewhat behind the times. His book De Monarchia is Ghibelline in outlook, and would have been more timely a hundred years earlier. He regards Emperor and Pope as independent, and both divinely appointed. In the Divine Comedy, his Satan has three mouths, in which he eternally chews Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius, who are all three equally traitors, the first against Christ, the other two against Caesar. Dante’s thought is interesting, not only in itself, but as that of a layman; but it was not influential, and was hopelessly out of date.

page 476:

• Occam is best known for a maxim which is not to be found in his works, but has acquired the name of “Occam’s razor." This maxim says: “Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.” Although he did not say this, he said something which has much the same effect, namely: “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.” That is to say, if everything in some science can be interpreted without assuming this or that hypothetical entity, there is no ground for assuming it. I have myself found this a most fruitful principle in logical analysis.

page 479:

• By insisting on the possibility of studying logic and human knowledge without reference to metaphysics and theology, Occam’s work encouraged scientific research.

· 15: The Eclipse of the Papacy

page 483:

• Boniface VIII, in the Bull Unam Sanctam, made more extreme claims than had ever been made by any previous Pope. He instituted, in 1300, the year of Jubilee, when plenary indulgence is granted to all Catholics who visit Rome and perform certain ceremonies while there. This brought immense sums of money to the coffers of the Curia and the pockets of the Roman people. There was to be a Jubilee every hundredth year, but the profits were so great that the period was shortened to fifty years, and then to twenty-five, at which it remains to the present day.

page 489:

• The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler, made matters more difficult for Wycliffe. There is no evidence that he actively encouraged it, but, unlike Luther in similar circumstances, he refrained from condemning it.

Book Three: MODERN PHILOSOPHY

Part I. From the Renaissance to Hume

· 01: General Characteristic

page 491:

• States increasingly replace the Church as the governmental authority that controls culture.

page 492:

• This form of government, however, if it spreads, must obviously bring with it a new form of culture; the culture with which we shall be concerned is in the main “liberal," that is to say, of the kind most naturally associated with commerce. To this there are important exceptions, especially in Germany; Fichte and Hegel, to take two examples, have an outlook which is totally unconnected with commerce. But such exceptions are not typical of their age.

page 493:

• Modern philosophy, however, has retained, for the most part, an individualistic and subjective character. This is very marked in Descartes, who builds up all knowledge from the certainty of his own existence, and accepts clearness and distinctness (both subjective) as criteria of truth. It is not prominent in Spinoza, but reappears in Leibniz’s windowless monads. Locke, whose temperament is thoroughly objective, is forced reluctantly into the subjective doctrine that knowledge is of the agreement or disagreement of ideas–a view so repulsive to him that he escapes from it by violent inconsistencies. Berkeley, after abolishing matter, is only saved from complete subjectivism by a use of God which most subsequent philosophers have regarded as illegitimate. In Hume, the empiricist philosophy culminated in a scepticism which none could refute and none could accept. Kant and Fichte were subjective in temperament as well as in doctrine; Hegel saved himself by means of the influence of Spinoza. Rousseau and the romantic movement extended subjectivity from theory of knowledge to ethics and politics, and ended, logically, in complete anarchism such as that of Bakunin. This extreme of subjectivism is a form of madness.

page 495:

• The modern world, at present, seems to be moving towards a solution like that of antiquity: a social order imposed by force, representing the will of the powerful rather than the hopes of common men.

· 02: The Italian Renaissance

page 501:

• The Renaissance was not a popular movement; it was a movement of a small number of scholars and artists, encouraged by liberal patrons, especially the Medici and the humanist popes.

• “No man is more disgusted than I am with the ambition, the avarice, and the profligacy of the priests, not only because each of these vices is hateful in itself, but because each and all of them are most unbecoming in those who declare themselves to be men in special relations with God, and also because they are vices so opposed to one another, that they can only co-exist in very singular natures. Nevertheless, my position at the Court of several popes forced me to desire their greatness for the sake of my own interest. But, had it not been for this, I should have loved Martin Luther as myself, not in order to free myself from the laws which Christianity, as generally understood and explained, lays upon us, but in order to see this swarm of scoundrels put back into their proper place, so that they may be forced to live either without vices or without power." -Guicciardini the historian in 1529

page 502:

• The first effect of emancipation from the Church was not to make men think rationally, but to open their minds to every sort of antique nonsense. [like astrology]

· 03: Machiavelli

page 504:

• Savonarola dominated Florence; his miserable end evidently made a great impression on Machiavelli, for he remarks that “all armed prophets have conquered and unarmed ones failed," proceeding to give Savonarola as an instance of the latter class.

page 505:

• his [Machiavelli’s] longer work, the Discourses, which he was writing at the same time, is markedly more republican and more liberal. He says at the beginning of The Prince that he will not speak of republics in this book, since he has dealt with them elsewhere. Those who do not read also the Discourses are likely to get a very one-sided view of his doctrine.

page 508:

• chapter (XVIIII) [The Prince] entitled: “In What Way Princes Must Keep Faith.” We learn that they should keep faith when it pays to do so, but not otherwise. A prince must on occasion be faithless. “But it is necessary to be able to disguise this character well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler; and men are so simple and so ready to obey present necessities, that one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived. I will mention only One modern instance. Alexander VI did nothing else but deceive men, he thought of nothing else, and found the occasion for it; no man was ever more able to give assurances, or affirmed things with stronger oaths, and no man observed them less; however, he always succeeded in his deceptions, as he knew well this aspect of things. It is not necessary therefore for a prince to have all the above- named qualities [the conventional virtues], but it is very necessary to seem to have them."

page 510:

• It is true that power, often, depends upon opinion, and opinion upon propaganda; it is true, also, that it is an advantage in propaganda to seem more virtuous than your adversary, and that one way of seeming virtuous is to be virtuous.

· 04: Erasmus and More

page 518:

• More is remembered almost solely on account of his Utopia (1518). Utopia is an island in the southern hemisphere, where everything is done in the best possible way.

• Like Plato, communism, men and women all trained to fight, no property, get other nations into their debt.

page 521:

• Raphael Hythloday [the protagonist of Utopia] relates that he preached Christianity to the Utopians, and that many were converted when they learnt that Christ was opposed to private property. The importance of communism is constantly stressed; almost at the end we are told that in all other nations “I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the common wealth."

page 522:

• Diversity is essential to happiness, and in Utopia there is hardly any. This is a defect of all planned social systems, actual as well as imaginary.

· 05: The Reformation and CounterReformation

page 523:

• The three great men of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation are Luther, Calvin, and Loyola.

• Luther and Calvin reverted to Saint Augustine, retaining, however, only that part of his teaching which deals with the relation of the soul to God, not the part which is concerned with the Church.

• They rejected the doctrine of Indulgences, upon which a large part of the papal revenue depended.

page 524:

• Protestant success, at first amazingly rapid, was checked mainly as a resultant of Loyola’s creation of the Jesuit order. Loyola had been a soldier, and his order was founded on military models; there must be unquestioning obedience to the General, and every Jesuit was to consider himself engaged in warfare against heresy. As early as the Council of Trent, the Jesuits began to be influential. They were disciplined, able, completely devoted to the cause, and skilful propagandists. Their theology was the opposite of that of the Protestants; they rejected those elements of Saint Augustine’s teaching which the Protestants emphasized. They believed in free will, and opposed predestination. Salvation was not by faith alone, but by both faith and works.

• They concentrated on education, and thus acquired a firm hold on the minds of the young. Whenever theology did not interfere, the education they gave was the best obtainable; we shall see that they taught Descartes more mathematics than he would have learnt elsewhere.

page 525:

• Disgust with theological warfare turned the attention of able men increasingly to secular learning, especially mathematics and science.

· 06: The Rise of Science

page 525:

• Descartes, who was in a sense the founder of modern philosophy, was himself one of the creators of seventeenth century science.

• Four great men–Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton–are pre-eminent in the creation of science.

page 531:

• Galileo (1564-1642) is the greatest of the founders of modern science, with the possible exception of Newton. He was born on about the day on which Michelangelo died, and he died in the year in which Newton was born. I commend these facts to those (if any) who still believe in metempsychosis.

page 536:

• In 1700 the mental outlook of educated men was completely modern; in 1600, except among a very few, it was still largely medieval.

page 538:

• To be humble before God was both right and prudent, for God would punish pride. Pestilences, floods, earthquakes, Turks, Tartars, and comets perplexed the gloomy centuries, and it was felt that only greater and greater humility would avert these real or threatened calamities. But it became impossible to remain humble when men were achieving such triumphs: Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night. God said “Let Newton be,” and all was light

• There were of course many other reasons for self-satisfaction. The Tartars had been confined to Asia, and the Turks were ceasing to be a menace. Comets had been humbled by Halley, and as for earthquakes, though they were still formidable, they were so interesting that men of science could hardly regret them. Western Europeans were growing rapidly richer, and were becoming lords of all the world: they had conquered North and South America, they were powerful in Africa and India, respected in China and feared in Japan. When to all this were added the triumphs of science, it is no wonder that the men of the seventeenth century felt themselves to be fine fellows, not the miserable sinners that they still proclaimed themselves on Sundays.

· 07: Francis Bacon

page 542:

• Bacon was the first of the long line of scientifically minded philosophers who have emphasized the importance of induction as opposed to deduction.

· 08: Hobbes’s Leviathan

page 546:

• He proclaims, at the very beginning of the book, his thoroughgoing materialism. Life, he says, is nothing but a motion of the limbs, and therefore automata have an artificial life. The commonwealth, which he calls Leviathan, is a creation of art, and is in fact an artificial man. This is intended as more than an analogy, and is worked out in some detail. The sovereignty is an artificial soul.

page 547:

• Hobbes, as might be expected, is an out-and-out nominalist. There is, he says, nothing universal but names, and without words we could not conceive any general ideas. Without language, there would be no truth or falsehood, for “true” and “false” are attributes of speech.

page 548:

• In a state of nature, there is no property, no justice or injustice; there is only war, and “force and fraud are, in war, the two cardinal virtues."

page 549:

• Hobbes considers the question why men cannot co-operate like ants and bees. Bees in the same hive, he says, do not compete; they have no desire for honour; and they do not use reason to criticize the government. Their agreement is natural, but that of men can only be artificial, by covenant. The covenant must confer power on one man or one assembly, since otherwise it cannot be enforced. “Covenants, without the sword, are but words." ( President Wilson unfortunately forgot this.) The covenant is not, as afterwards in Locke and Rousseau, between the citizens and the ruling power; it is a covenant made by the citizens with each other to obey such ruling power as the majority shall choose. When they have chosen, their political power is at an end. The minority is as much bound as the majority, since the covenant was to obey the government chosen by the majority. When the government has been chosen, the citizens lose all rights except such as the government may find it expedient to grant. There is no right of rebellion, because the ruler is not bound by any contract, whereas the subjects are.

• A multitude so united is called a commonwealth. This “Leviathan” is a mortal God.

• Hobbes prefers monarchy

• The supreme power, whether a man or an assembly, is called the Sovereign. The powers of the sovereign, in Hobbes’s system, are unlimited. He has the right of censorship over all expression of opinion. It is assumed that his main interest is the preservation of internal peace, and that therefore he will not use the power of censorship to suppress truth, for a doctrine repugnant to peace cannot be true. (A singularly pragmatist view!) The laws of property are to be entirely subject to the sovereign; for in a state of nature there is no property, and therefore property is created by government, which may control its creation as it pleases.

page 550:

• It is admitted that the sovereign may be despotic, but even the worst despotism is better than anarchy. Moreover, in many points the interests of the sovereign are identical with those of his subjects. He is richer if they are richer, safer if they are law-abiding, and so on. Rebellion is wrong, both because it usually fails, and because, if it succeeds, it sets a bad example, and teaches others to rebel. The Aristotelian distinction between tyranny and monarchy is rejected; a “tyranny,” according to Hobbes, is merely a monarchy that the speaker happens to dislike.

page 551:

• All teachers are to be ministers of the sovereign, and are to teach only what the sovereign thinks useful.

page 552:

• There should be days set apart for learning the duty of submission.

page 553:

• Every community is faced with two dangers, anarchy and despotism. The Puritans, especially the Independents, were most impressed by the danger of despotism. Hobbes, on the contrary, was obsessed by the fear of anarchy.

· 09: Descartes

page 555:

• usually considered the founder of modern philosophy,

page 556:

• Socrates used to meditate all day in the snow, but Descartes’s mind only worked when he was warm.

page 557:

• (he seldom got up before midday),

• He lived in Holland for twenty years ( 1629-49), except for a few brief visits to France and one to England, all on business. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Holland in the seventeenth century, as the one country where there was freedom of speculation. Hobbes had to have his books printed there; Locke took refuge there during the five worst years of reaction in England before 1688; Bayle (of the Dictionary) found it necessary to live there; and Spinoza would hardly have been allowed to do his work in any other country.

page 558:

• He was not industrious; he worked short hours, and read little. … His work seems to have been done with great concentration during short periods; but perhaps, to keep up the appearance of a gentlemanly amateur, he may have pretended to work less than in fact he did, for otherwise his achievements seem scarcely credible.

page 559:

• He regarded the bodies of men and animals as machines; animals he regarded as automata, governed entirely by the laws of physics, and devoid of feeling or consciousness. Men are different: they have a soul, which resides in the pineal gland. There the soul comes in contact with the “vital spirits,” and through this contact there is interaction between soul and body. The total quantity of motion in the universe is constant, and therefore the soul cannot affect it; but it can alter the direction of motion of the animal spirits, and hence, indirectly, of other parts of the body.

page 562:

• “I think, therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum), is known as Descartes’s cogito, and the process by which it is reached is cared “Cartesian doubt."

· 10: Spinoza

page 568:

• There can be only one Being who is wholly positive, and He must be absolutely infinite. Hence Spinoza is led to a complete and undiluted pantheism.

page 569:

• Spinoza’s complete rejection of free will.

page 570:

• “The mind’s highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind’s highest virtue is to know God.” Emotions are called “passions” when they spring from inadequate ideas; passions in different men may conflict, but men who live in obedience to reason will agree together.

page 572:

• Spinoza does not, like the Stoics, object to all emotions; he objects only to those that are “passions,” i.e., those in which we appear to ourselves to be passive in the power of outside forces. “An emotion which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.” Understanding that all things are necessary helps the mind to acquire power over the emotions. “He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his emotions, loves God, and so much the more as he more understands himself and his emotions." This proposition introduces us to the “intellectual love of God,” in which wisdom consists. The intellectual love of God is a union of thought and emotion: it consists, I think one may say, in true thought combined with joy in the apprehension of truth.

page 573:

• Every increase in the understanding of what happens to us consists in referring events to the idea of God, since, in truth, everything is part of God. This understanding of everything as part of God is love of God. When all objects are referred to God, the idea of God will fully occupy the mind.

page 574:

• Blessedness, which consists of love towards God, is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; we do not rejoice in it because we control our lusts, but we control our lusts because we rejoice in it.

page 577:

• Such reflections may not suffice to constitute a religion, but in a painful world they are a help towards sanity and an antidote to the paralysis of utter despair.

· 11: Leibniz

page 578:

• It was the popular Leibniz who invented the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds (to which F. H. Bradley added the sardonic comment “and everything in it is a necessary evil”); it was this Leibniz whom Voltaire caricatured as Doctor Pangloss. It would be unhistorical to ignore this Leibniz, but the other is of far greater philosophical importance.

page 580:

• He believed, consequently, in an infinite number of substances, which he called “monads.” Each of these would have some of the properties of a physical point, but only when viewed abstractly; in fact, each monad is a soul.

page 588:

• Leibniz was a firm believer in the importance of logic, not only in its own sphere, but as the basis of metaphysics. He did work on mathematical logic which would have been enormously important if he had published it; he would, in that case, have been the founder of mathematical logic, which would have become known a century and a half sooner than it did in fact. He abstained from publishing, because he kept on finding evidence that Aristotle’s doctrine of the syllogism was wrong on some points; respect for Aristotle made it impossible for him to believe this, so he mistakenly supposed that the errors must be his own.

· 12: Philosophical Liberalism

page 597:

• The first comprehensive statement of the liberal philosophy is to be found in Locke

page 600:

• Since there was no constitutional way of getting rid of James, there must be a revolution, but it must be quickly ended, so as to give no opportunity for disruptive forces. The rights of Parliament must be secured once for all. The king must go, but monarchy must be preserved; it should be, however, not a monarchy of Divine Right, but one dependent upon legislative sanction, and so upon Parliament. By a combination of aristocracy and big business, all this was achieved in a moment, without the necessity of firing a shot. Compromise and moderation had succeeded, after every form of intransigeance had been tried and had failed. The new king, being Dutch, brought with him the commercial and theological wisdom for which his country was noted. The Bank of England was created; the national debt was made into a secure investment, no longer liable to repudiation at the caprice of the monarch.

· 13: Locke’s Theory of Knowledge

page 606:

• “For where is the man that has uncontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say, that he has examined to the bottom all his own or other men’s opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay, often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than to restrain others. . . . There is reason to think, that if men were better instructed themselves, they would be less imposing on others.” -Essays Concerning Human Understanding Book 4, Ch 16

• Locke may be regarded as the founder of empiricism, which is the doctrine that all our knowledge (with the possible exception of logic and mathematics) is derived from experience.

· 14: Locke’s Political Philosophy

page 618:

• The hereditary principle has almost vanished from politics.

• Hindsight shows this is not at all the case. Trudeau in Canada, the Bush’s, the Clinton’s, etc. You have such an advantage by being born to a leader that is essentially hereditary in nature. Further, considering the influence of long dead people, through their organizations, still command, it is not hard to see that the people of today are still competing against the likes of the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, and like ilk.

page 619:

• the great corporations in America, which have, or had until Pearl Harbor, powers almost equal to those of the government.

• Why did they lose it after Pearl Harbor? Answer: they didn’t.

• Political dynasties have disappeared, but economic dynasties survive.

page 620:

• Throughout the Middle Ages, the law of nature was held to condemn “usury,” i.e., lending money at interest. Church property was almost entirely in land, and landowners have always been borrowers rather than lenders. But when Protestantism arose, its support–especially the support of Calvinism–came chiefly from the rich middle class, who were lenders rather than borrowers. Accordingly first Calvin, then other Protestants, and finally the Catholic Church, sanctioned “usury.”

page 621:

• As a rule, the man who first thinks of a new idea is so much ahead of his time that every one thinks him silly, so that he remains obscure and is soon forgotten. Then, gradually, the world becomes ready for the idea, and the man who proclaims it at the fortunate moment gets all the credit.

page 631:

• We are told first that every man has private property in the produce of his own labour–or, at least, should have. In pre-industrial days this maxim was not so unrealistic as it has since become. Urban production was mainly by handicraftsmen who owned their tools and sold their produce. As for agricultural production, it was held by the school to which Locke belonged that peasant proprietorship would be the best system. He states that a man may own as much land as he can till, but not more. He seems blandly unaware that, in all the countries of Europe, the realization of this programme would be hardly possible without a bloody revolution.

page 632:

• The labour theory of value–i.e., the doctrine that the value of a product depends upon the labour expended upon it–which some attribute to Karl Marx and others to Ricardo, is to be found in Locke, and was suggested to him by a line of predecessors stretching back to Aquinas. As Tawney says, summarizing scholastic doctrine: “The essence of the argument was that payment may properly be demanded by the craftsmen who make the goods, or by the merchants who transport them, for both labour in their vocation and serve the common need. The unpardonable sin is that of the speculator or middleman, who snatches private gain by the exploitation of public necessities. The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labour theory of value. The last of the schoolmen was Karl Marx.”

page 633:

• The labour theory of value has usually been advocated from hostility to some class regarded as predatory. The Schoolmen, in so far as they held it, did so from opposition to usurers, who were mostly Jews. Ricardo held it in opposition to landowners, Marx to capitalists. But Locke seems to have held it in a vacuum, without hostility to any class. His only hostility is to monarchs, but this is unconnected with his views on value.

page 637:

• A new international Social Contract is necessary before we can enjoy the promised benefits of government. When once an international government has been created, much of Locke’s political philosophy will again become applicable, though not the part of it that deals with private property.

· 15: Locke’s Influence

page 637:

• The heirs of Locke are, first Berkeley and Hume; second, those of the French philosophes who did not belong to the school of Rousseau; third, Bentham and the philosophical Radicals; fourth, with important accretions from Continental philosophy, Marx and his disciples.

page 643:

• both in England and in America, big business on the whole dislikes war.

• WHAT?! The military industrial complex. War profiteering. This is an outlandish statement. There is no excuse for this nonsense, even in the day when it was written, circa WW2.

· 16: Berkeley

page 643:

• GORGE BERKELEY (1685-1753) is important in philosophy through his denial of the existence of matter–a denial which he supported by a number of ingenious arguments. He maintained that material objects only exist through being perceived. To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for instance, would cease to exist if no one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we look at them; but as it is, owing to God’s perceptions, trees and rocks and stones have an existence as continuous as common sense supposes.

· 17: Hume

page 658:

• the “Self,” as defined, can be nothing but a bundle of perceptions, not a new simple “thing.” In this I think that any thoroughgoing empiricist must agree with Hume.

page 661:

• Hume is thus led to the view that, when we say “A causes B,” we mean only that A and B are constantly conjoined in fact, not that there is some necessary connection between them. “We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have been always conjoined together. . . . We cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction.”

• “Objects have no discoverable connexion together; nor is it from any other principle but custom operating upon the imagination, that we can draw any inference from the appearance of one to the experience of another.”

page 667:

• “…the truth of my hypothesis, that all our reasonings concerning causes and effects are derived from nothing but custom; and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures."

page 669:

• To this extent, Hume has proved that pure empiricism is not a sufficient basis for science. But if this one principle is admitted, everything else can proceed in accordance with the theory that all our knowledge is based on experience.

Part II. From Rousseau to the Present Day

· 18: The Romantic Movement

page 670:

• But before we can understand its political and philosophical effects we must consider it in its most essential form, which is as a revolt against received ethical and aesthetic standards.

page 671:

• For long periods of his [Rousseau] life, he was a poor vagabond, receiving kindness from people only slightly less destitute than himself.

page 673:

• The romantics did not aim at peace and quiet, but at vigorous and passionate individual life. They had no sympathy with industrialism, because it was ugly, because money-grubbing seemed to them unworthy of an immortal soul, and because the growth of modern economic organizations interfered with individual liberty. In the post-revolutionary period they were led into politics, gradually, through nationalism: each nation was felt to have a corporate soul, which could not be free so long as the boundaries of States were different from those of nations. In the first half of the nineteenth century, nationalism was the most vigorous of revolutionary principles, and most romantics ardently favoured it.

page 676:

• The mystic becomes one with God, and in the contemplation of the Infinite feels himself absolved from duty to his neighbour. The anarchic rebel does even better: he feels himself not one with God, but God. Truth and duty, which represent our subjection to matter and to our neighbours, exist no longer for the man who has become God; for others, truth is what he posits, duty what he commands. If we could all live solitary and without labour, we could all enjoy this ecstasy of independence; since we cannot, its delights are only available to madmen and dictators.

• Revolt of solitary instincts against social bonds is the key to the philosophy, the politics, and the sentiments, not only of what is commonly called the romantic movement, but of its progeny down to the present day.

page 678:

• Belief in blood and race is naturally associated with anti-Semitism.

• Naturally! Anyone who prefers their blood and race must hate, not all other races, but only the Jews. Makes total sense…

• “Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign O’er conquerors, whether royalist or liberal? Who rouse the shirtless patriots of Spain? (That make old Europe’s journals squeak and gibber all.) Who keep the world, both Old and New, in pain Or pleasure? Who make politics run glibber all? The shade of Buonaparte’s noble daring? Jew Rothschild, and his fellow Christian Baring.” -Byron

• The verse is perhaps not very musical, but the sentiment is quite of our time, and has been re- echoed by all Byron’s followers.

• Does he hate Jews or the Jews that attempt to ‘control the world’? Is the charge levied inaccurate?

• The romantic movement, in its essence, aimed at liberating human personality from the fetters of social convention and social morality.

• Interesting that this is exactly what the (Jew controlled) media is doing to this day.

· 19: Rousseau

page 684:

• When Voltaire tried to get the ban removed, Rousseau entered the lists on the Puritan side. Savages never act plays; Plato disapproves of them; the Catholic Church refuses to marry or bury actors; Bossuet calls the drama a “school of concupiscence.”

page 685:

• The Social Contract was even more dangerous, for it advocated democracy and denied the divine right of kings. The two books, [Emile and The Social Contract] while they greatly increased his fame, brought upon him a storm of official condemnation. He was obliged to fly from France; Geneva would have none of him * ; Bern refused him asylum. At last Frederick the Great took pity on him, and allowed him to live at Motiers, near Neuchatel… [after 3 years the villagers accused him of poisoning and ran him out of town. He went to live with Hume.

page 686:

• But in the end his delusions won [That Hume, whom he was staying with was plotting against him] the day and he fled. His last years were spent in Paris in great poverty, and when he died suicide was suspected.

page 687:

• “I do not deduce these rules,” he says, “from the principles of a high philosophy, but I find them in the depths of my heart, written by Nature in ineffaceable characters.” -Rousseau in Emile

page 688:

• Our natural feelings, he contends, lead us to serve the common interest, while our reason urges selfishness. We have therefore only to follow feeling rather than reason in order to be virtuous.

page 689:

• The old arguments at least were honest: if valid, they proved their point; if invalid, it was open to any critic to prove them so. But the new theology of the heart dispenses with argument; it cannot be refuted, because it does not profess to prove its points.

page 695:

• What we call democracy he calls elective aristocracy; this, he says, is the best of all governments, but it is not suitable to all countries.

• The Social Contract became the Bible of most of the leaders in the French Revolution, but no doubt, as is the fate of Bibles, it was not carefully read and was still less understood by many of its disciples.

· 20: Kant

page 699:

• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers. I cannot myself agree with this estimate, but it would be foolish not to recognize his great importance.

page 701:

• Kant most important book is The Critique of Pure Reason. (1st edition 1781; 2nd edition 1787.) The purpose of this work is to prove that, although none of our knowledge can transcend experience, it is nevertheless in part a priori and not inferred inductively from experience.

page 703:

• The twelve categories are divided into four sets of three: (1) of quantity: unity, plurality, totality; (2) of quality: reality, negation, limitation; (3) of relation: substance-and-accident, cause-and- effect, reciprocity; (4) of modality: possibility, existence, necessity.

page 705:

• Kant ethical system, as set forth in his Metaphysic of Morals (1785), has considerable historical importance. This book contains the “categorical imperative,”

page 706:

• Kant’s vigour and freshness of mind in old age are shown by his treatise on Perpetual Peace (1795). In this work he advocates a federation of free States, bound together by a covenant forbidding war. Reason, he says, utterly condemns war, which only an international government can prevent.

page 712:

• Kant’s immediate successor, Fichte (1762-1814), abandoned “things in themselves,” and carried subjectivism to a point which seems almost to involve a kind of insanity. He holds that the Ego is the only ultimate reality, and that it exists because it posits itself; the non-Ego, which has a subordinate reality, also exists only because the Ego posits it. Fichte is not important as a pure philosopher, but as the theoretical founder of German nationalism, by his Addresses to the German Nation (1807-8), which were intended to rouse the Germans to resistance to Napoleon after the battle of Jena. The Ego as a metaphysical concept easily became confused with the empirical Fichte; since the Ego was German, it followed that the Germans were superior to all other nations. “To have character and to be a German,” says Fichte, “undoubtedly mean the same thing.” On this basis he worked out a whole philosophy of nationalistic totalitarianism, which had great influence in Germany.

• The important development from Kant’s philosophy was that of Hegel.

· 21: Currents of Thought in the Nineteenth Century

page 715:

• Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

page 716:

• He [Condorcet] was a believer in the equality of women. He was also the inventor of Malthus’s theory of population, which, however, had not for him the gloomy consequences that it had for Malthus, because he coupled it with the necessity of birth control. Malthus’s father was a disciple of Condorcet, and it was in this way that Malthus came to know of the theory.

• This was in the mid to late 1700s.

page 717:

• Men who were in revolt against tradition, as already mentioned, were of two kinds, rationalistic and romantic…

• The Benthamites were almost wholly rationalistic, and so were the Socialists who rebelled against them as well as against the existing economic order. This movement does not acquire a complete philosophy until we come to Marx,

page 719:

• at what stage in evolution did men, or their semi- human ancestors, begin to be all equal? Would Pithecanthropus erectus, if he had been properly educated, have done work as good as Newton’s? Would the Piltdown Man have written Shakespeare’s poetry if there had been anybody to convict him of poaching? A resolute egalitarian who answers these questions in the affirmative will find himself forced to regard apes as the equals of human beings. And why stop with apes?

• It is amazing how influential the hoax of the Piltdown man had.

page 720:

• Marx himself, though his. doctrines are in some respects pre- Darwinian, wished to dedicate his book to Darwin.

page 721:

• In old days, peasants lived as their parents and grandparents had lived, and believed as their parents and grandparents had believed; not all the power of the Church could eradicate pagan ceremonies, which had to be given a Christian dress by being connected with local saints. Now the authorities can decree what the children of peasants shall learn in school, and can transform the mentality of agriculturists in a generation…

• first, the power of man in his conflicts with nature, and then the power of rulers as against the human beings whose beliefs and aspirations they seek to control by scientific propaganda, especially education. The result is a diminution of fixity; no change seems impossible. Nature is raw material; so is that part of the human race which does not effectively participate in government.

· 22: Hegel

page 722:

• Marx, as every one knows, was a disciple of Hegel in his youth, and retained in his own finished system some important Hegelian features.

page 726:

• Truth and falsehood are not sharply defined opposites, as is commonly supposed; nothing is wholly false, and nothing that we can know is wholly true.

page 731:

• he says that, as yet, there is no real State in America, because a real State requires a division of classes into rich and poor.

page 732:

• We are told in The Philosophy of History that “the State is the actually existing realized moral life,” and that all the spiritual reality possessed by a human being he possesses only through the State. “For his spiritual reality consists in this, that his own essence–Reason–is objectively present to him, that it possesses objective immediate existence for him. . . . For truth is the unity of the universal and subjective Will, and the universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as its exists on earth." Again: “The State is the embodiment of rational freedom, realizing and recognizing itself in an objective form. . . . The State is the Idea of Spirit in the external manifestation of human Will and its Freedom."

• The Philosophy of Law, in the section on the State, develops the same doctrine somewhat more fully. “The State is the reality of the moral idea–the moral spirit, as the visible substantial will, evident to itself, which thinks and knows itself, and fulfils what it knows in so far as it knows it." The State is the rational in and for itself. If the State existed only for the interests of individuals (as Liberals contend), an individual might or might not be a member of the State. It has, however, a quite different relation to the individual: since it is objective Spirit, the individual only has objectivity, truth, and morality in so far as he is a member of the State, whose true content and purpose is union as such. It is admitted that there may be bad States, but these merely exist, and have no true reality, whereas a rational State is infinite in itself.

page 733:

• He goes on to argue against any sort of League of Nations by which the independence of separate States might be limited.

• Hegel does not mean only that, in some situations, a nation cannot rightly avoid going to war. He means much more than this. He is opposed to the creation of institutions–such as a world government –which would prevent such situations from arising, because he thinks it a good thing that there should be wars from time to time. War, he says, is the condition in which we take seriously the vanity of temporal goods and things. (This view is to be contrasted with the opposite theory, that all wars have economic causes.) War has a positive moral value: “War has the higher significance that through it the moral health of peoples is preserved in their indifference towards the stabilizing of finite determinations.” Peace is ossification; the Holy Alliance, and Kant’s League for Peace, are mistaken, because a family of States needs an enemy. Conflicts of States can only be decided by war

page 734:

• Hegel’s logic led him to believe that there is more reality or excellence (the two for him are synonyms) in wholes than in their parts, and that a whole increases in reality and excellence as it becomes more organized. This justified him in preferring a State to an anarchic collection of individuals, but it should equally have led him to prefer a world State to an anarchic collection of States.

· 23: Byron

page 741:

• Byron, though he felt himself the equal of Satan, never quite ventured to put himself in the place of God.

· 24: Schopenhauer

page 745:

• He dislikes Christianity, preferring the religions of India, both Hinduism and Buddhism. He is a man of wide culture, quite as much interested in art as in ethics. He is unusually free from nationalism

page 751:

• in proportion as will has gone up in the scale, knowledge has gone down. This is, I think, the most notable change that has come over the temper of philosophy in our age. It was prepared by Rousseau and Kant, but was first proclaimed in its purity by Schopenhauer.

· 25: Nietzsche

page 751:

• NIETZSCHE (1844-1900) regarded himself, rightly, as the successor of Schopenhauer, to whom, however, he is superior in many ways, particularly in the consistency and coherence of his doctrine.

• in Nietzsche, the will has ethical as well as metaphysical primacy.

page 754:

• “Everything that pampers, that softens, and that brings the ‘people’ or ‘woman’ to the front, operates in favour of universal suffrage–that is to say, the dominion of ‘inferior’ men.” The seducer was Rousseau, who made woman interesting; then came Harriet Beecher Stowe and the slaves; then the Socialists with their championship of workmen and the poor. All these are to be combated.

• Nietzsche’s ethic is not one of self-indulgence in any ordinary sense; he believes in Spartan discipline and the capacity to endure as well as inflict pain for important ends. He admires strength of will above all things. “I test the power of a will,” he says, “according to the amount of resistance it can offer and the amount of pain and torture it can endure and know how to turn to its own advantage; I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been.” He regards compassion as a weakness to be combated. “The object is to attain that enormous energy of greatness which can model the man of the future by means of discipline and also by means of the annihilation of millions of the bungled and botched, and which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight of the suffering created thereby, the like of which has never been seen before.”

• He is not, however, a worshipper of the State; far from it. He is a passionate individualist, a believer in the hero. The misery of a whole nation, he says, is of less importance than the suffering of a great individual: “The misfortunes of all these small folk do not together constitute a sum-total, except in the feelings of mighty men.”

page 755:

• Nietzsche is not a nationalist, and shows no excessive admiration for Germany. He wants an international ruling race, who are to be the lords of the earth: “a new vast aristocracy based upon the most severe self-discipline, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be stamped upon thousands of years."

· 26: The Utilitarians

page 772:

• Ricardo, who was intimately associated with Bentham, Malthus, and James Mill, taught that the exchange value of a commodity is entirely due to the labour expended in producing it. He published this theory in 1817, and eight years later Thomas Hodgskin, an ex- naval officer, published the first Socialist rejoinder, Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital. He argued that if, as Ricardo taught, all value is conferred by labour, then all the reward ought to go to labour; the share at present obtained by the landowner and the capitalist must be mere extortion. Meanwhile Robert Owen, after much practical experience as a manufacturer, had become convinced of the doctrine which soon came to be called Socialism. (The first use of the word “Socialist” occurs in 1827, when it is applied to the followers of Owen.) Machinery, he said, was displacing labour, and laisser faire gave the working classes no adequate means of combating mechanical power. The method which he proposed for dealing with the evil was the earliest form of modern Socialism.

• In a later letter, James Mill attributes the doctrine to the “mad nonsense” of Hodgskin, and adds: “These opinions, if they were to spread, would be the subversion of civilized society; worse than the overwhelming deluge of Huns and Tartars.”

· 27: Karl Marx

page 775:

• “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, but the real task is to alter it.”

page 776:

• The politics, religion, philosophy, and art of any epoch in human history are, according to Marx, an outcome of its methods of production, and, to a lesser extent, of distribution.

page 779:

• Hegel thought of nations as the vehicles of dialectic movement; Marx substituted classes.

· 28: Bergson

· 29: William James

· 30: John Dewey

page 813:

• Dewey makes inquiry the essence of logic, not truth or knowledge. He defines inquiry as follows: “Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole.” He adds that “inquiry is concerned with objective transformations of objective subject-matter.” This definition is plainly inadequate.

page 817:

• Dr. Dewey’s world, it seems to me, is one in which human beings occupy the imagination…

page 818:

• The concept of “truth” as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness–the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.

· 31: The Philosophy of Logical Analysis

page 823:

• Philosophy, throughout its history, has consisted of two parts inharmoniously blended: on the one hand a theory as to the nature of the world, on the other an ethical or political doctrine as to the best way of living. The failure to separate these two with sufficient clarity has been a source of much confused thinking.