the " subject " is equally relevant to the whole of Nature. To the present writer, at least, it seems that none of the " realists " of the moment has so clear an insight into the real significance of the " subject " and the real character of " Nature " as was shown long ago by John Grote in his remarkable, but unfortu- nately not very readable, work Exploratio Philosophka.
(3) The third tendency which calls for note is what one may call " Spiritualist Pluralism." According to this view the uni- verse consists in the end of a vast plurality of minds, but there is no one central and supreme mind controlling its destiny. Anti-materialism and atheism are thus conjoined. The view itself is, indeed, not a new one. It has been long upheld, as an interpretation of Hegelianism, by J. M. E. McTaggart, and is, of course, not so very different from the " theism " of those " personal idealists " who make a point of objecting to the traditional doctrine of the Divine Omnipotence. But the plu- ralistic universe of spirits, as conceived by these thinkers, is, of course, an orderly one. The believers in a " finite God " have always stipulated that the limits of their Deity's knowledge or power shall be so widely drawn as to leave Him in a position to act as an overruling Providence to the rest of us. McTaggart's scheme does not include a God at all, but, for reasons which he has, perhaps, not made fully apparent, he is persuaded that it is in the nature of spirits to fall into line with one another and even to advance inevitably by a natural law to complete fruition of perfection and happiness. His world, to use an illustration of his own, is like the senior common room of a college without a master. (Have we here a last vestige of the old, comfortable Godwinian dogma of the "perfectibility of human nature"? There is a distinct flavour of the 18th-century optimism, against which Candide was a protest, about this metaphysic. The times of violence, it is taken for granted, lie behind us in the dim past ; " culture " and " enlightenment " are a sufficient guarantee against their return, exactly as was thought by those repre- sentatives of the French noblesse who came up to Paris for the meeting of the States-General in 1789.) Naturally enough, the events of the recent years of world-wide war (1914-8), which made even the most optimistic feel how very insecure the foundations of our " moral civilization " are, were not favour- able to spiritualistic pluralism of this easy-going and cheerful kind. Aerial bombardments and poison gases brought it home to all of us that the world is as " dangerous " as Nietzsche could have wished it to be. But an anarchic version of spirit- ualistic pluralism was enunciated with great vigour at the end of the war by the brilliant Italian philosopher, A. Aliotta, who had formerly professed a theistic " personal idealism," in his small but striking manifesto La guerra eterna ed U dramma dell' existenza. According to Aliotta, what the "real world " of spirits resembles is not a college in the long vacation but one of the fronts of the recent war. Spirits are ingenerable and indestructible, and their life is an unending warfare for incompatible ideals. The issue of the conflict is unknown and unknowable, and, indeed, it is just the fact that it is unknowable which makes the fight worth while. It seems even to be held that good would not really be good unless there was some one to hate and resist it. Arma amens capio nee sat rationis inarmis. Aliotta, in his later phase, rejects Theism with disdain. His reasons appear to be primarily ethical. If there is a " God above," it is argued, we know already that the issue of the secular warfare of good with evil is decided. Good is going to win and we know it; the battle is thus as good as over already, and there is no more heroism in playing a man's part in the world than there is in charging an unloaded battery on a day of field manoeuvres. Aliotta's zeal and energy have created, apparently, a whole band of enthusiasts for a pluralism of this kind among the younger Italian philosophers. The weak points in the intellectual con- struction are, however, obvious. The alleged ethical objections to Theism only hold good on the assumption that Divine Provi- dence is absolutely incompatible with human freedom, and no serious attempt is made to justify this assumption that Theism means hyper-Calvinism. That in a theistic universe good will be triumphant " in God's good time " may be certain, but it does
not follow that it will triumph without our efforts or that it does not depend largely on us when that " good time " shall be. Again, it must not be forgotten that the Theist does not com- monly profess to be able to demonstrate his creed with mathe- matical certainty. He lives by faith and hope and usually pro- fesses to prove no more than that the scheme of things leaves him room to hope. It is probably impossible to reason an in- tellectually alert but morally frivolous man into belief in God. Still more unreasonable does it seem to hold, as Aliotta and his followers sometimes appear to hold, that the very meaning of " good " is " something which one has to fight for." If this were so, evil would clearly become very good if it were so generally hated by most men that its partisans were compelled to fight very hard on its behalf. It must always be more than a meaning- less form of words to ask the question: " Is what you propose to fight about worth fighting for?" To put it differently, the proposition " that for which I am fighting is good " is always a synthetic proposition in Kant's sense of that phrase.
The years from 1918 to 1921, at all events in Great Britain, seem to have been rather barren in works of practical philosophy of outstanding importance. There were, of course, many reasons for this: the disturbance, by the war, of the ordinary avocations of the class by whom such works are chiefly produced, the rise in the cost of living which lowered the demand for books, and above all the great increase in the cost of paper and labour. Mention should, however, be made of one admirable work, L. T. Hobhouse's, The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918). Hobhouse's work is a hostile criticism of the Hegelian tendency to deify the State as a sort of " super-person," which he takes as exemplified by B. Bosanquet's Philosophical Theory of the State, and a reassertion of the traditional " liberal " conception of the State as a system of machinery for the promotion of the welfare of individuals. The criticism of the Hegelian adoption of Rous- seau's conception of the " general will " is severe but illuminating. It may be that Hegelianism tends to make men conservatives (though our own Hegelians have as often been socialists), and that Hobhouse's personal political inclinations at times run away with him. He seems so convinced of the antecedent prob- ability that any governmental enactment will be a bad one as almost to hold that any " rebel " (a Marat or an Hebert?) may be presumed to be in the right until it is proved that he is in the wrong. But in view of the dangerous tendency of present society to " look to Government " for everything, and of the serious moral abuses to which the metaphor of the " personality " of the State may lead when it is taken to be more than a metaphor, the book must be regarded as a singularly timely contribution to philosophical politics.
In pure logic perhaps the most important English publication of very recent years has been the issue in 1921 of the first volume of W. E. Johnston's long-expected Logic. Mention should also be made of B. Bosanquet's Implication and Linear Inference, a welcome appendix to the more voluminous logical work of the veteran philosopher which throws a good deal of fresh light on his fundamental position.
The years of war and uneasy reconstruction have not been barren of useful work in the history of philosophy. In N. Kemp Smith's Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1918), we have at last in English an adequate historical and exegetical companion to the most famous of all German works on meta- physics and the theory of knowledge which will be indispensable to all serious students and may take rank with anything which the Germans themselves have done for their illustrious philoso- pher. If Smith's work is not quite on the gigantic scale of Vaihinger's great German commentary, it has the advantage of covering the whole of the Critique, whereas Vaihinger breaks off at the end of the Transcendental Aesthetic. In all other respects the British commentator may fairly sustain comparison with his Continental predecessor. Another very welcome contribution to the history of modern thought is J. Gibson's Locke's Theory of Knowledge (1917), which should do a great deal towards mak- ing the real greatness of Locke as a rationalist philosopher clear to his countrymen and dispelling the strange conception of him as
