"That Dear Delight"

A Noble Company Issues from Deserted Ratruns The Story* of Philosophy is ultimately a story of men--men mounding up like anthills or spinning out like spiderwebs systems of thought to make themselves more comfortable, in various places, at various times. Given descriptions of the principal men, and definitions of the parts common to most of their systems of thought, it is possible to discover, not any tangible result of all their efforts, no final residuum of Knowledge fostered by their common love for it, but a fairly consecutive account of how living thinkers arrived at their present positions.

The parts common to most philosophers are five: Logic--study of the method of thought.

Esthetics--study of form (art). Ethics--stady of conduct.

Politics--study of social organization. Metaphysics--study of "reality."

The dramatis personae of the story, as here told, are 16, counting the author and beginning with a handsome, athletic Greek aristocrat who, because of his broad shoulders was called Plato (427-347 B. C.). During populist chaos in Athens, Plato joined the "thinking games" of a homely old idler, Socrates. After the latter had been obliged to swallow hemlock, the pupil proposed exchanging mob government for a Republic ruled by its best intellects. He conceived absolute values for Good, Justice and similar abstractions, a realm of ideals of which ordinary life was but the dim shadow. Aristotle (384-322 B. C.), son of a physician at the court of King Amyntas in rugged Macedon, attended the academy conducted by Plato, then went home to tutor Amyntas' fiery grandson. This lad, Alexander, after conquering the world, endowed Aristotle, gave him an heiress to wife and put men at his disposal to collect flora and fauna in all directions. Aristotle studied specimens, made inferences, founded "science." He was tough-minded. None of Plato's mystical generalizations for him. He worked out the first "organon," or manual of logical thought. His fault was "excessive moderation." He corrected errors in earlier nature students, but missed their sense of life's flux and change. Where Plato gave the Catholic Church a political form which lasts today, Aristotle's "organon" lasted only through the unphilosophical pomp and glory of Rome and through the dusty scholasticism of the Middle Ages to Francis Bacon (1561-1626). This energetic Elizabethan went to Cambridge at 12, to Paris as a diplomat at 16. He became a lawyer at 18, went into Parliament at 22. He could not decide between a public and speculative life, so combined the two. In 1618 he was Lord Chancellor. In 1592 he had written, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province," and had proceeded to map all the marches of that province, indicating the advances that should be made at once in every science; inventing new sciences and mapping their courses in a few terse words. Utility and power were to be the ends for the new knowledge that he described. Like Aristotle he believed in man's ability to conquer nature. But he corrected Aristotle's method of examining nature, instituting a "new organon" of inductive logic--accumulating facts, theorizing later. He destroyed a great number of scholastic "Idols" by his penetrating inquiries and was hailed even by Frenchmen, who dedicated their great Encyclopedia to him just as Englishmen founded the Royal Society (1660) in his name when he was long dead. His suggestions were carried out broadly by his secretary, Hobbes; in inductive psychology by Locke; in utilitarian economics by Bentham. Baruch Spinoza (1632-77). No sooner had Bacon fathered a school of objective scientists in England than Descartes of France, a mathematician, started a subjective school whose first point was: "I think, therefore I am." This metaphysical statement caused much activity later on in Germany. It did not trap Spinoza, brilliant young Jew of Amsterdam, who, after being excommunicated by his synagogue, filled his solitude with polishing lenses and writing four bocks to unify God and the processes of nature. Spinoza pitched on another proposition of Descartes--that underlying all matter is one substance, while another substance underlies all ideas. From that proposition Spinoza evolved the metaphysics of modern science: the laws of nature are "Reality.' His ethics were interesting, too: in the presence of eternal nature, human affairs are trifling and only that is virtuous which manifests power. Voltaire (1694-1778). "In the 18th Century, Italy had a Renaissance, Germany a Reformation and France had Voltaire." He detested superstition and regarded solemnity as a disease. His education under a dissolute Jesuit abbe prepared him to combat theology in its own terms; his Olympian impartiality toward all men and times, including himself, was fortified by an astounding breadth of reading in history and science. Besides his plays and satirical romances he wrote the first modern history of philosophy, enthroning Reason after severe skirmishes with the Church and two emperors. The end of his anti-theology was not atheism, however. "If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him." The end of his anti-monarchism came to pass when, a decade after his death, 700,000 citizens saw that his remains were deposited in the Pantheon. The enthronement of Reason excited revolt. In France, neurotic Jean Jacques Rousseau declared that reason was a condition of depravity in natural man. In England, an Irishman, Bishop Berkeley, demonstrated the nonexistence of matter, and a Scotsman, David Hume, robbed scientists of their most trusted instruments, their Minds, by showing that they were mere sums of sensory stimuli. "No matter," said a wit, "never mind."

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). It was to unite and reinterpret these objections, to save religion from reason and at the same time preserve science from skepticism, that Kant paraded methodically under the lindens at Konigsberg. He accomplished his task and inaugurated the era of critical philosophy by showing: that not all knowledge is sensory, Space and Time being a priori; that while matter its.elf cannot be known, its existence can be known, its laws known as fixed; that we are born with mental categories from which there is no escape, categories implying an imperative morality and a necessity for religion. There followed the massive metaphysical webs of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in Germany. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was the first German to assume Kant's metaphysics and proceed to something new. A sex-starved bachelor, he opened men's eyes to the importance of instinct, despite his pessimism, which argued: there is a life-force (Will) which makes us reproduce, then leaves us to struggle on; only intellect can save us, by objectifying self and studying life detachedly until the "wisdom of death" comes. He also saved Genius from being eliminated as a factor in human history by the less discriminating foes of Intellectualism. France and England did not really need Kant's assurance that matter existed, nor his categorical imperative. Science was advancing. Industry grew. The bourgeoisie were busy and comfortable. Then biology came upon the scene, the idea of evolution. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), by profession an engineer, a lynx-eyed observer with little "book learning" but a wonderfully retentive, orderly mind, was just the man to synthesize the welter of facts pouring in on all sides. He undertook to demonstrate the principle of evolution working through all the forms of thought in Francis Bacon's "province." His theory often outran his data but in the main he preserved for philosophy its touch with things practical. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was "the child of Darwin and the brother of Bismarck." He sought to "correct" his pious, feminine nature by glorifying ruthless masculinity, the survival of the strongest. He ascended the Engadine and sent down his poetic prophet, "Zarathustra," to announce the death of the gods, the birth of supermen and the doctrine, "live dangerously." He was last of the Romantics. And so to contemporary Europeans, who, while not Romantics, are expressing a fresh revolt against materialism as left by Spencer and his French equivalents, the Positivists. Henri Bergson (1859--) has lectured at the College de France since 1900. He is the exponent of "creative evolution," having tried to show that consciousness is (in principle) coextensive with life. He has argued that intellection is not the highest form of consciousness, since it is but a nebula surrounded by dim intuitions, awareness. He predicted rare discoveries in the subconscious. He has substituted for Darwin's "natural" selection a "creative" selection by which, he thinks, man will ultimately surpass his own nature. The stream of life (elan vital), having entered blind alleys in the vegetable kingdom and insect world, has achieved man in the vertebrate phylum, and will not be stopped there. Benedetto Croce (1866--), idol of Italy--although, lately, victim of II Duce's disfavor--has almost the German genius for obscurity in his metaphysical philosophy of the spirit. He is at his best in esthetics, urging on the world the worship of beauty.

Bertrand Russell (1872--) is a courageous English mathematician who, though disillusioned about communism after visiting Russia, retains a tender mysticism even in his most tough-minded logic. His faith in mankind extends to all races. His concern lately has been with elementary pedagogy* but he may be watched for something serene in the next decade. Four U. S. philosophers remain:

George Santayana (1863--), who, though born in Spain and now living in England, long studied and taught at Harvard. He has been called an "immaculate materialist." He accepts universal mechanism as he accepts his friends' names, but finds it capable of such infinite variation, color, beauty, that it satisfies his poet's soul, just as the Catholic Church moves him esthetically without for an instant compelling his belief. He expresses the vestiges of Classicism in the U. S., modernizing Aristotle.

William James (1842-1910) met the needs of his countrymen by assessing metaphysics at its "cash value" for the man in the street and by supplying a philosophic sanction for meetinghouse theology. His "pragmatism" turned the face of thought from considering the quiddities of scholasticism and the post-mortems of Evolution to the future, to "practical results." He talked about the "multiverse" instead of the universe, as being more flattering to individuals, who might then consider themselves important, active parts. John Dewey (1859--) of Columbia University has had a broader acquaintance with his countrymen than James and is freer of European influences. He is one of the few scientific philosophers with faith in democracy. Pedagogy is his prime interest and he seeks to introduce the experimental methods of the laboratory to social and political science. He is a Darwinian evolutionist, stressing growth as the hopeful fact of life, utility as the guiding fact. He is greatly admired by Author Durant (1885--), director of the Labor Temple School, Manhattan. Dr. Durant gives the impression of valuing philosophy, "that dear delight" of Plato, not primarily for the intellectual ecstasies to be experienced in examining noble works of the human mind (though these ecstasies are well known to him), but for the immediate benefits to society that might follow, if all men took thought or honored the wise men of their time. A realist, he does not despair of the Golden Age in a time of crass opulence, but sees this country as an adolescent that has really done extraordinarily well to produce a Dewey so soon. The country might well take unto itself another compliment for having produced a Will Durant. The Significance of his book is its extraordinary humanization of lives and literature which, for most people, lie moldering in the rat-runs of deserted lecture halls. Its 575 pages are more simple, vivid and downright readable than the average run of best-seller fiction, not excepting the direct quotations from philosophic works, which are invariably well chosen to promote clarity and to demonstrate flavors. As a textbook for classrooms it has obvious shortcomings -- the jump from Aristotle to Bacon; the skimming of Descartes and Hume. But it is something of a service to the unphilosophical public to have published such a book just prior to the convening [in September, at Harvard (TIME, April 5)] of the first International Philosophical Congress ever to be held in the New World.

*THE STORY OF PHILOSPHY--Will Durant--Simon & Shuster ($5). *Cf. EDUCATION AND THE GOOD LIFE-- Bertrand Russell--Boni & Liveright ($2.50) -- (TIME, June 14).