them. What is not seen to be penetrated by the life of the whole seems to lose its meaning and be emptied of reality for us. There is thus a very real need to try, while doing our best to become specialists in one branch of reality, to keep ourselves in touch with the whole to which it belongs. As Goethe said: "Sich dem Halben zu entwöhnen,

Und im Ganzen Guten Schönen

Resolut zu leben."

To do this on easy terms, and superficially, is what is commonly known as culture; to do it seriously, systematically, deeply and effectively, is what we mean by philosophy. I have distinguished between these two; but, of course, there are all degrees of culture. And culture which takes itself seriously tends to become philosophy. This was so with Goethe himself, of whom Heine used to say that he wished that he would read something else besides Spinoza; and I suppose the greatest poets-Shakespeare perhaps excepted, who had philosophy in himself-have been also philosophers in a more than general sense.

Of course, it is very easy to mistake what I have been saying, and to ask me if I seriously mean that, in order to keep ourselves alive, in order to keep the world fresh and vivid before us, we have got to study philosophy in the technical sense. I need hardly say I do not mean that. Just as it is not necessary, in order to do public service, to do service in publicbut what is essential is to do whatever service we undertake in a public spirit-so it is not necessary, in order that a life may be philosophical, to read and talk philosophy.

What I wish to press upon you is the necessity of living one's own particular life in the light of the

whole, of trying to see it from the point of view of its significance its significance for life in general. I should be sorry to think that for this purpose it is necessary to have a technical knowledge of philosophy. What is necessary is to try to live as deeply and to think as broadly and as truly of our special walk in life as possible.

This is the first point. The discontinuity, the disconnectedness, the fragmentariness of modern life make philosophy, in the sense I have been trying to explain, more or less of a necessity. The parts of life, as it were, which previously, in a more simple age, were held instinctively together, tend in the stress of modern life to fall apart; and, in order to keep them together, we have to make something of an effort. And what we propose to do in this school, as far as I understand it, is to call upon you, in connection with particular subjects, to make this effort to keep the whole before your minds.

of

But, secondly, and coming nearer, perhaps, to some us, there is another feature of our time which has unfortunate results-namely, that we have all got more or less to talk and to write. This is an age of talking, and it is an age of writing; and those of us who have to bear the burden of the age in this respect, perhaps to live by talking and writing, have to get something to talk and write about. We have to get it by hook or crook, and often have not much time to get it in. The consequence is that we are apt to take up with hasty, one-sided views of things. One reason is that they are easier to get hold of. Another is that they "go down" better. But, take it as you like, there is this fatal tendency in our ideas to be one-sided and partial. This is amply illustrated in the fields of

moral philosophy itself. Justice and charity, for instance, are opposed to one another by some ethical writers. Happiness and duty is a common antithesis; the individual and the state-"Man versus the State," as Mr. Spencer puts it-freedom and government, are others. You understand what I am driving at-the ordinary antitheses we meet with in everyday literature tend to cause a certain one-sidedness in our views of things, and to keep us out of sight of the whole truth. Nor, of course, is this altogether an intellectual matter. You cannot keep ideas out of life, you cannot have one-sided thoughts, which are mere thoughts. They enter into life, and they tend to make life one-sided and disorderly.

We hear a great deal, for instance, of political corruption in America; but if we look a little closer, we see, and people who have been there tell us, that, after all, the Americans are a very honest, straightforward people. And if we ask, "How is it they let their politics get into such a mess?" we shall probably find that it is greatly the result of false theory. As a friend of mine who came back from America recently put it, "The American people are not a bad sort of people. What is wrong is not their morals, but their philosophy. They are suffering from bad metaphysics." They have got it into their heads that liberty means letting things alone; and they only get on at all because, after they have done this for a long time, and the mess that results becomes very bad, they bestir themselves, and get things put a little right.

But we do not require to go to America for the attempt to make half-truths pass current for whole truths. I noticed the other day that a duke, who was making a speech in connection with the recent County

Council elections, told us what was wanted in London was practical men who did not suffer from that form of cerebral derangement which people call ideals. It appeared that we have got to break with ideals before we can get our cities managed to our hearts' content. And a bishop, I notice, has been exhorting his diocese to remember that politics is not piety, as though there was any piety worth a halfpenny which was not political, which had not an eye to the good of fellow-citizens, and vice-versa.

You see these half-truths are not as harmless as people commonly suppose. They have an edge upon them, and what we have to do is to try to turn that edge by making them into whole truths. I suppose this is what Jowett had in view when he told us that a little metaphysics was a very good thing, because it enabled us to get rid of metaphysics. Only I should be inclined to lay more emphasis on the quality of the metaphysics. It must be good metaphysics, and the value of good metaphysics is that it helps us to get rid of bad. Moreover, it may be useful to remind you that good metaphysics cannot be got by a smattering at the University. It is a serious matter; as Socrates said, our whole lives are not sufficient for these discussions. Indeed, I should define philosophy as a lifelong conflict with one-sided ideas. It is the effort to see things in their connection, to see things as a whole, to get rid of what Hegel called "soulless abstractions," to get at the concrete thing; and the concrete thing, as we have seen, is the thing, not in its crude form, nor in the form in which it first presents itself to us, but in the form in which it has been penetrated by our thought-made our own, by our having thought it through.

The answer to speakers like those I have quoted is really to be found in the saying of Bishop Berkeley. Unlike the bishop I have just referred to, Berkeley was a philosopher as well as a bishop, and he says somewhere that, "whatever people may think, the man who hath not deeply meditated on the human mind and on the summum bonum may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will indubitably make a sorry politician and statesman."

There is one science which is very near ethics and political philosophy, from which I should like, if time permit, to illustrate for a moment what I have been trying to say. I mean the science of political economy. I have often been asked what is the relation of ethics to economic problems, which are pressing upon us more than ever at the present time. Last winter I happened to give a course of lectures in Birmingham upon "Work and Wages," and I set myself, with a view to defining the relation of ethics to economics, definitely to notice whether, and at what point, the subject I was dealing with for the moment broke away from political economy and became an ethical problem. I was surprised to find, with every question I took up, that I had at a certain point to say: "Here the question is one of ethics, and, as I am lecturing upon political economy, I cannot go into that now, and must leave the matter inadequately treated."

Suppose the subject was the age of children beginning to work in factories. Some economists tell us that production is increased by employing boys and girls in factories. It is an extremely difficult thing to say whether production really is increased by this, whether economically it is a good thing. But the moment we turn to the ethical side and ask, Is it good