of value as an illusion, and even more sure that it is ruinous to any practical rule of living, and I cannot believe in the ‘philosophy’ of any man who is satisfied to base his practice on what he regards as detected illusion.  Hence I find myself strongly in sympathy with my eminent Italian colleague Professor Varisco, who has devoted his two chief works (I Massimi Problemi and Conosci Te Stesso) to an exceedingly subtle attempt to show that ’what ought to be’, in Platonic phrase ‘the Good’, is in the end the single principle from which all things derive their existence as well as their value.  Mr. Russell’s philosophy saves us half Plato, and that is much, but I am convinced that it is whole and entire Plato whom a profounder philosophy would preserve for us.  I believe personally that such a philosophy will be led, as Plato was in the end led, to a theistic interpretation of life, that it is in the living God Who is over all, blessed for ever, that it will find the common source of fact and value.  And again I believe that it will be led to its result very largely by what is, after all, perhaps the profoundest thought of Kant, the conviction that the most illuminating fact of all is the fact of the absolute and unconditional obligatoriness of the law of right.  It is precisely here that fact and value most obviously meet.  For when we ask ourselves what in fact we are, we shall assuredly find no true answer to this question about what is if we forget that we are first and foremost beings who ought to follow a certain way of life, and to follow it for no other reason than that it is good.  But I cannot, of course, offer reasons here for this conviction, though I am sure that adequate reasons can be given.  Here I must be content to state this ultimate conviction as a ‘theological superstition’, or, as I should prefer to put it with a little more certainty, as a matter of faith.  The alternative is to treat the world as a stupid, and possibly malicious, bad joke.

Note.—­It may be thought that something should have been said about the revolt against authority and tradition which has styled itself variously ‘Pragmatism’ and ‘Humanism’, and also about the recent vogue of Bergsonianism.  I may in part excuse my silence by the plea that both movements are, in my judgement, already spent forces.  If I must say more than this, I would only remark about Pragmatism that I could speak of it with more confidence if its representatives themselves were more agreed as to its precise principles.  At present I can discern little agreement among them about anything except that they all show a great impatience with the business of thinking things quietly and steadily out, and that none of them seems to appreciate the importance of the ‘critical’ problem.  ‘Pragmatism’ thus seems to me less a definite way of thinking than a collective name for a series of ‘guesses at truth’.  Some of the guesses may be very lucky ones, but I, at least, can hardly take the claims