Philosophical Meetings

The Joint Sessions of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society were lively and social occasions. The subjects of the papers were, naturally, philosophical; but this did not mean that only philosophers attended. There were also biologists, physicists, mathematicians, astronomers and mystics. Some of these, and others, were, philosophically speaking, laymen: we usually had a sprinkling of generally intelligent people, not professional philosophers, but with philosophical interests. This was a very good thing.

Psychologists attended on occasion (I remember C.D. BroadFootnote ⁴ in the Men's, remarking to William McDougall,Footnote ⁵ who was saying he couldn't ‘make up his mind’ about something: ‘Be a behaviourist and don't have one’), and I seem to remember several occasions on which the psychologists of the British Psychological Society came together with the philosophers – to the benefit of both. People like Stout,Footnote ⁶ Lloyd Morgan,Footnote ⁷ Cyril Burt,Footnote ⁸ Spearman,Footnote ⁹ and later Alec Mace,Footnote ¹⁰ attended.

The range of subjects discussed was wide. At Reading in 1924 we had a paper on quantum theory chaired by A.N. Whitehead;Footnote ¹¹ the symposiasts were J.W. Nicholson,Footnote ¹² Dorothy Wrinch,Footnote ¹³ and LindemannFootnote ¹⁴ (later Churchill's ‘the Professor’). We had a symposium on the (genetic) transmission of mental characters. J.S. Haldane chaired this: there were James Johnstone,Footnote ¹⁵ Arthur Dendy,Footnote ¹⁶ Lloyd Morgan, and E.W. MacBrideFootnote ¹⁷ (as I remember, a formidable figure). In 1925 we had, under the chairmanship of J.H. Muirhead,Footnote ¹⁸ a session on ‘The Relations between Biology and Psychology’ – Haldane, E.S. RussellFootnote ¹⁹ and Leslie Mackenzie.Footnote ²⁰ On another occasion I remember a fascinating discussion on ‘emergence’ (then being developed by Lloyd Morgan and Samuel Alexander) which turned on contributions by C.D. Broad and DrieschFootnote ²¹ amongst others. There was another interesting session on the Problem of Simultaneity (Wildon Carr,Footnote ²² R.A. SampsonFootnote ²³ (Astronomer-Royal) and A.N. Whitehead). We had one too on a very different theme – whether Idealism can dispense with Mysticism. The main figures were Evelyn Underhill,Footnote ²⁴ R.G. Collingwood,Footnote ²⁵ and W.R. IngeFootnote ²⁶ (the ‘gloomy Dean’ of St Paul's).

Philosophers in Person

It is of course the personalities that one remembers, as much as what they said or thought – and only a novelist or dramatist could convey the quality of very individual personalities. Yet I must record, in caricature form, a few impressions. I do not do it simply for its interest as gossip. I believe that, although what people say is of the greatest importance, the way they say it, and the fact that they (J.A. Smith,Footnote ²⁷ G.E. Moore,Footnote ²⁸ Ludwig WittgensteinFootnote ²⁹ and others, living, embodied, thinking organisms struggling to get clear, speaking excitedly or calmly or intensely) say it: this is of great importance too. Speaking is an expression – sometimes a revelation – of the whole person in the act of thinking. R.G. Collingwood somewhere gives a good exposition of language, as not merely stating propositions, but as a living total act. This is very much in line with my own early and continuing insistence. Through being present with living philosophers making an effort – sometimes, as for example with C.D. Broad, with admirable (almost disdainful) composure, or William TempleFootnote ³⁰ from whom clear thought flowed like a book, or sometimes with desperate contortions of body – one learns not only the final declarations of their thoughts, but something of their mode of active thinking itself.

To begin with some of the older figures. There was J.A. Smith (sometime President of Magdalen), a shaggy figure with hairs sprouting from his ears and nose, greatly revered by his pupils, a portentous speaker (though the manner seemed to me more impressive than the portent, and he wrote very little). He was Chairman at an early Aristotelian paper of mine on aesthetics. He was a Crocean, and therefore didn't think much of my effort. He made a long elegant speech in which he described me elaborately as a seller of goods displaying his wares in a market. He ended his peroration with a magnificent flourish of rhetorical devastation: ‘And I have not been persuaded to buy’.

Then there was Whitehead – a gracious and profoundly respected person. In the early Twenties he was known better outside Cambridge as mathematician and physicist, and had not yet moved from Trinity to Harvard as Professor of Philosophy. Nor had he yet developed his difficult views expounded in Process and Reality. But the potentiality of it all was there. He was the perfect picture of the English scholar-gentleman. On the one hand urbane, gentle, kind, imperturbably courteous always, he radiated, with not a whiff of the odour of sanctity, a kind of holistic spirit. He was hospitable to the good, the beautiful and the true; they were the air he breathed naturally and without strain: his presence was refreshing as sunshine-warmed air is after hectic arguments in an overheated stuffy room. But with it there was an intellect which was not only keen, but tempered by wisdom, so that he could go straight to the essentials of a problem. He was, I think, a great man.

Very different, but highly picturesque in their own ways, were G.F. Stout and Samuel Alexander.Footnote ³¹ Stout was a tiny man, very deaf, with a high voice, a slight lisp – and with no sense of physical orientation. Professor LairdFootnote ³² told me how, in St Andrews, where Stout had lived for many years, he had to guide him to his favourite tobacco shop. And golf on the ‘Royal and Ancient’ at St. Andrews...! He was a great friend of Alexander, a prophetic Jewish figure with a magnificent prophetic beard. He was deaf too, and when in conversation with you he cupped his ear, or turned his enormous elephant-trunk-like ear-trumpet on you. This used to make me nervous, and inclined to stammer. It made the smallest remark seem ridiculous; I always felt it had been foolish and not worth all that volume of sound! Alexander was always very kind to me, though he used to tease with his Mephistophelian wit and sense of humour. (His expressive lifting eyebrows gave him a Mephistophelian look.) Once when he was chairing a meeting at which I was expecting to speak he said, looking straight at me: ‘and now, I am sure we all want to hear...’ and then named some great European figure – Brunschvicg,Footnote ³³ I think. (I was properly subdued.) Another time, when we were discussing teleology and I said something about Vis a tergo Footnote ³⁴ he repeated, with a grin, pointing to his tail: ‘a Tergo?’)

It was entertaining to see Stout and Alexander together, on opposite sides of an argument – and markedly deaf to one another when it was convenient. Alexander, in contrast to Stout, was an elegant speaker with a beautiful rich velvety voice. When, later, his Space, Time and Deity was published, it was all the rage. I doubt if he is much, or ever, read nowadays.

De BurghFootnote ³⁵ was another picturesque figure, with a long corrugated neck which ran straight from his chin into his loose low collar, making him look like a benevolent exotic wading-bird. The neck produced a huge roaring voice; even his confidential whispers seemed stentorian. Once, when we were guests sitting together at a very grand banquet given by Lord LondonderryFootnote ³⁶ in the Great Hall of Durham Castle to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the University, de Burgh said, confidentially into my ear, ‘REID, I HAVE NO IMAGINATION!’ I think someone choked; everyone stopped eating and looked round; de Burgh seemed quite unaware.

He was a very religious man, and his voice even got into his prayers. I am afraid that I came to know this, quite unavoidably, once when he was staying at my house and sleeping in the room next door. Late at night we heard strange loud noises, with an occasional shout. It was puzzling, even a little alarming at first; then we realised, on hearing the words that it was only our guest at prayer. On another occasion, staying with his wife, we heard him sternly say (this time in the morning) to Mrs. de Burgh: ‘YOU MUST NOT TALK TO ME WHEN I AM SHAVING!’ This same vehemence got into his philosophical writing.

With a neck shaped not altogether unlike de Burgh's – though of course utterly unlike him in every other way – was Bertrand Russell. His physical appearance, well known to the public, was once compared with the Mad Hatter in Alice.Footnote ³⁷ He did not very often come to conferences, but of course his words, spoken with effortless fluency in his rather unpleasantly clipped voice, were listened to with great deference. He was not picturesque in the same way as the others I have mentioned, and had it not been for his great philosophical reputation and influence, he would not (I think) have been outstandingly noticeable among philosophers – though in the street he certainly would. Whether this is true or not I think one's impression was not just of someone less attractively picturesque, but of a personality whose philosophy and outlook had little outgoing warmth, whose cold intellect dominated everything and chilled even his humanitarian beliefs and the good works for which he was, in his later years, to become known throughout the world.

Russell could well have profited from a sermon, preached by the eighteenth century philosopher Bishop Butler, on the text ‘And who is my neighbour?’ Butler's answer was, ‘No, not Humanity in general, but, literally, my neighbour’.Footnote ³⁸ I have only hearsay knowledge of Russell's relations with his actual ‘neighbours’ from his Autobiography, his biography, and gossip in North Wales. Out of his own mouth he seems to show himself as sometimes callous and occasionally cruel. It would be irrelevant, perhaps even improper, to say this here were it not that it seems to throw light on the defect of the kind of temperamental intellectualism which was Russell's. Only a few years before I first saw him he had written his Introduction to Mathematics. He had expounded there his view of ‘propositional functions’, in which it was argued that the title of existence is conferred by the fact of satisfying a propositional function. If a propositional function is true, then there are instances for which it is true. We can pass from ‘Men exist’ to propositions like ‘Bertrand Russell exists’. This view of a person is clear-cut, even simple when understood. But it is not only arid; it seems to turn the truth upside down – or to put the cart before the horse. Concepts prior to existence!

It would hardly be possible to find a greater contrast between two personalities who at one time worked in the closest collaboration – Russell and Whitehead. They were peers in intellect. But in the one, brilliance, cleverness, wit – and, sometimes, the scoring of points – tended to prevail over good judgment, certainly over global judgment. In Whitehead, a global sense, and love of real people, kept intellect in its proper place as instrument. I read somewhere a story that when the two were working together, Whitehead said: ‘You know, Bertie, there are two sorts of people – the simple minded and the muddle-headed. I'm muddleheaded; you Bertie, are simple minded’.

Two other contrasted figures – intellectual giants each in his own way – were Norman Kemp SmithFootnote ³⁹ and A.E. Taylor.Footnote ⁴⁰ They are coupled here, not because they collaborated, but because they were both professors at Edinburgh at the same time, succeeding Pringle-PattisonFootnote ⁴¹ and SethFootnote ⁴² respectively. Kemp Smith was a powerful figure in every sense of the word. He was physically broad, massive, with the suggestion of a bull, even in the slumbering strength behind his slightly bloodshot eyes. But if I say that something of this characterised his personality and his thinking, it could be instantly misleading. Obstinate stupidity, the sex symbol – these of course have nothing to do with the image as used now. The image is of latent power suddenly exploding into bursts of energy, aggressive attack on formidable difficulties, whether intellectual or personal. Anyone who could tackle Kant, by translation and commentary, as Kemp Smith did, must have possessed these powers; and he showed them also in his less extensive constructive writing.

It came out too in conversation. I knew him well; on country walks or in his garden or study he would explode into the very centre of a problem. Although he was a genial companion, and always courteous and kind, especially to younger people, he was, because of this tremendous drive, better at stating a point of view than in open discussion: and, because he was a Master, one listened to his wisdom as he gave it forth, and pondered it, then and for long afterwards. This happened because one knew that every idea was the result of a tough struggle. His thinking and speaking and writing bore the impress of that struggle. There was nothing of the smooth fluency of Russell about him.

Moreover his conflicts, and his relish for battle with them, were not simply philosophical ones. They were personal as well. His whole life was a battle in which he engaged with relish. He found it difficult to get down to work (surprising as that may sound). He said to me once – with his strong Scots accent driving the point home – of writing and getting down to work, ‘Ye walk round the garden, ye light another cigarette. It's like a dog returning to its vomit’. As to cigarette smoking, he got hooked, which displeased him. He told me how he got over it. He wrote down on a piece of paper: ‘If I smoke, I shall lose my self-respect’. The paper was then ritually burned! His battling spirit even challenged the obstinacy of his own continuing existence. One day in old age he decided, in his forthright way, that he had lived long enough. So he went into a nursing home with full Kemp-Smithian decision to die. But, this time, he just couldn't do it! I am told he was rather annoyed.

A.E. Taylor, a very religious man, also got annoyed once with God, after a bereavement. It was a very different quality of annoyance from Kemp Smith's; and Taylor was about as different from Kemp Smith as it is possible for two men to be. Taylor was a short, rather unprepossessing figure, with a huge head held on one side like a bird listening for a worm, and a hesitating, squeaky and rather hoarse voice. He was like Tom Toddy, ‘all head and no body O’.Footnote ⁴³ (But his Gifford lectures suggest that he had plenty of problems about the body.)Footnote ⁴⁴ He was a truly prodigious scholar: his range of knowledge was immense, and he was a philosophical thinker of the first order. His was a curious make-up. I think he was a case for an analyst – apart from any personal knowledge of him, his writings show this.

He was voluble, and wrote at great length – and almost in the free-associative way demanded by some analysts. Yet, although one thing might lead by association to another, everything he said and wrote was not only packed with learning written off the cuff but had the stamp of philosophically close, analytic thought. I had many voluminous letters from him; they were ‘as good as a book’. Again, although he had lived the life of a scholar protected from life outside – and there were many things in outside life of which he did not approve – his imaginative powers enabled him to have profound insights into a very wide range of questions in theology, morals, metaphysics. This, of course, in addition to his huge and detailed knowledge of ancient philosophy. He was a prodigy, in own way a great prodigy, even if something of the infant persisted until old age. I think his God would regard him with compassion.

There were other good philosophers, older or younger; too many to give even brief impressions of. Among those no longer alive were W.D. Ross,Footnote ⁴⁵ J.L. Stocks,Footnote ⁴⁶ H.W.B. Joseph,Footnote ⁴⁷ C.D. Broad, John Laird, and Susan Stebbing.Footnote ⁴⁸ Ross was an austere and courteous Highlander. Stocks, good looking, urbane, with an acute Aristotelian mind, died far too early. Joseph was short, swarthy, formidably logical, fierce in attack, but approachable and kind; also there was an aesthetic quality in his thinking which may seem surprising. Broad was at one time a great influence and in great demand for symposia. He was a fastidiously critical recluse, who at a certain point got bored with people and ideas and walked away. He was economical of speech; his wit was delightful, charming, and often devastating.

Laird, a big man with genial and offhand manner (the ‘Laird manner’ was well known in Dundee in my mother's time) was like a large shaggy dog, looking down, I remember, with friendly amusement when Susan Stebbing (a greatly respected philosopher and a very kind one, who died, also, too soon) got furious when JoadFootnote ⁴⁹ pulled her leg and talked about ‘putting up the bowling’ to her. Stebbing was a woman of passionate philosophical integrity and a great influence on her many students. She was incensed by Joad's treatment of philosophy as a ‘game’. But he often did treat it so.

Joad was not in the same street as the others I have mentioned. He was a good philosophical journalist, with the journalist's penchant for clarity at the expense of oversimplification. But he was not a really scrupulous thinker or critic, and unashamedly he enjoyed showing off. (He told me how he read and reviewed books on the tube from Hampstead to Goodge Street.) But he was a very noticeable personality. I remember him long before he became ‘Professor Joad’ of the Brains Trust,Footnote ⁵⁰ and before he grew his beard. He had a beautiful golden complexion and bright eyes for pretty girls.

Perhaps the figure of always present importance was G.E. Moore (Wittgenstein's presence was striking too, but he was much less seen outside a small circle). Moore was a sort of saint of philosophy – though he (a professed atheist) would no doubt have been horrified by the term. He was wholly single-minded, devoted to the search for truth or, as he might have preferred to say, clarity. He never, never tried to score points for the sake of a dialectical victory; he never tried to be ‘clever’. His own practice was of analysis, and analysis, and analysis, thinking over and over again questions he had answered before, but never to his satisfaction. He was in fact a simple and lovable person, putting up no barriers beyond those conditioned by a natural shyness, and interested too in problems in which he found the simplest and most ordinary examples the most helpful.

One of his most controversial beliefs was of goodness as a simple quality, like yellow; he spent years too on the problem of perceptual knowledge – where a simple example was always ready to view – the back of his hand. (I sometimes wondered what proportion of his philosophical life Moore spent in gazing at the back of his hand.) As a person he was kind, and, I think, really humble; age made no difference. As a co-examiner he was kind too, possibly sometimes over-kind. The other side of all this simple integrity was ruthlessness in argument – ruthlessness, never cruelty. His desire for clear statement, whether in himself or in others, was passionate. If he thought (rightly or wrongly) that someone was avoiding the issue in any way, he would pounce like a tiger.

On one occasion (which became legend) at a meeting where I was present, there was some argument over the stick half immersed in water which looks bent (this was another chestnut, like the back of the hand, of the Twenties). Whitehead was in the chair. Moore asked him: ‘What is it that is bent?’ Whitehead's reply was: ‘the pattern of the molecules’. (Why he should have given this, to me, surprising answer, I don't to this day know. But he did: I can hear Whitehead's bland voice: ‘the pattern of the molecules’.) Moore thought Whitehead was evading, and repeated his question. Whitehead repeated his answer. At this Moore got excited, stood up and said ‘You're evading my question; what, I ask, is bent?’ Whitehead repeated his answer, using the same words. At this Moore got out of his seat, advanced to the dais threateningly and shook his fist in Whitehead's face: it almost looked as if he was going in to attack.

Whitehead, smiling, was undisturbed: Moore was gently led back to his seat.

Moore's devotion to clarity was physical as well as mental. When puzzled by someone's statement (and he seemed puzzled by almost everything) he would spring up and give his forehead or the top of his head a great full-armed slap. (It gives me a headache even to think of it). And unfortunately it was catching. Lesser and younger fry would, no doubt quite unconsciously, imitate Moore (or others who had already imitated Moore).

Wittgenstein accentuated these influences on physical behaviour. He wasn't a very regular attender at conferences, as I have said, and at this time his greatest influence was directly on his pupils at Cambridge. But when he did come, he was always listened to, and watched, with great attention. When he was thinking on his feet he had a habit of, as it were, trying to catch physically some elusive idea, up there somewhere in the empty air just out of reach. He looked, with open-necked shirt, like a poet, seeking inspiration from ‘out there’. ‘Half a mo., half a mo.’, he would cry (pronouncing ‘a’ as ‘eh’), raising his arm to catch an invisible cricket-ball-idea. And then the younger fry caught that, too. It spread like an epidemic, and lasted for many years. The antics of young to middle-aged men clutching, slapping, holding their foreheads as if in agony (as Wittgenstein did), bending, dancing, turning their backs on the audience, addressing the ceiling: all this was not at all exaggerated in Beyond the Fringe, ‘Jumpers’, and other shows.Footnote ⁵¹

Three last anecdotes about Moore. At one conference John Laird said to me: ‘Have you seen Moore's copy of the Proceedings?’ (provided before the meeting). He said, ‘Take a look if you can. When Moore doesn't agree with anything he just scores it out. In his copy, nearly everything's scored out!’ Another story is simple and I think rather beautiful. It is a picture I have of Wittgenstein giving Moore a music lesson. Both Moore and Wittgenstein were amateur musicians; Wittgenstein was, I believe, very knowledgeable. On this occasion Moore was sitting at an upright piano playing a fugue (one of the forty-eight), sitting for all the world like a docile little schoolgirl, hair down her back, obediently following the music master's suggestions, he standing on his pupil's left, looking down with critical appraisal.Footnote ⁵²

The third is hardly a story; it is a vignette of Moore, the great Cambridge Don, wandering over Oxford, guidebook in hand, learning the Colleges. The occasions of the Joint Sessions were, as I have been suggesting, happy ones, where all sorts of people met philosophers of varying views, including some interested non-professionals, and met on terms of free exchange, and without any artificial barriers.

Logical Positivism

Quite suddenly, somewhere about the year 1937, all this changed. The influence of Logical Positivism, deriving from the much earlier influence of the Vienna Circle, suddenly fanned out, becoming the chief and absorbing focus of interest of the younger generation of philosophers. An article in Mind by A.J. Ayer,Footnote ⁵³ ‘Demonstration of the Impossibility of Metaphysics’, followed very soon by his book on much the same theme, Language, Truth and Logic, was the catalyst for what was almost an explosion. I am not concerned here with any sort of assessment of this book, or of logical positivism, the influence of which lasted for a good many years. But what I am concerned with is the split, about 1937–8, which opened up into a chasm, between the older and more traditional philosophers, and that part of the younger generation who were disciples of positivism.

Since, on assumptions of logical positivism, all significant statements (not self-evident, or tautological) must be testable, at least in principle, by sense-observation, and neither ‘metaphysical’ statements nor ethical statements can be so tested, they are, in a strict and technical sense, ‘non-sense’. The traditional philosophers had for centuries been solemnly discussing all sorts of questions which could not possibly be verified in sense experience: they had been talking ‘non-sense’. It was not just that what they said was false: strictly it was meaningless. And although some positivists might indignantly correct you if you accused them of saying that the metaphysical and ethical thinkers were talking ‘nonsense’ in the popular sense, and reply that ‘non-sense’ was a technical term – it was a hollow answer. It is a short step, or no step at all, from affirming that what a person is saying is meaningless, to affirming that he is just talking nonsense in its quite ordinary meaning.

And it is a short step, or no step at all, from saying that people are just talking nonsense, to feeling, and showing contempt for them. This then is exactly what happened. Those who still assumed that in spite of all the multifarious errors and presumptions in the metaphysical and moral philosophy of twenty-six centuries, it still had a great deal to teach, were, in the first explosions of the logical positivist fireworks, regarded as rather credulous and very old fashioned simpletons – though they were, generously, allowed to read metaphysics as ‘poetry’.

It is not too much to say that this attitude of contempt adopted by some of the (mostly younger) logical positivists towards those who still held different philosophical views, was destructive of something which had been very precious in philosophical society, and that the contempt, conceit and sense of superiority sometimes led to radical bad manners. Of course the positivist assumptions were met by argument (including good arguments from a philosopher whom I have not mentioned, A.C. EwingFootnote ⁵⁴) and the whole thing was quickly exposed. What is extraordinary is that the effects of such philosophical brashness lasted for so long. And if philosophers were just logical machines, without prejudices and emotions, no doubt it would have vanished almost as soon as it appeared.

On the other hand, philosophical mistakes stimulate criticism and new constructive thinking to meet them. There is a sense in which the history of philosophy is a history of significant mistakes. And the critical work on logical positivism did in fact lead to new developments of great importance, linguistic analysis and the distinguishable but intimately related conceptual analysis. Analysis has always, from the time of Socrates, played an important part in good philosophy, and is nothing new. But the very careful study of linguistic and logical grammar and syntax, and the ways in which it affected the statement and conception of philosophical questions and answers – this was new, and it threw light on many old problems. Of course sometimes it was carried too far; but the sweeping judgment often made, that it reduced philosophy to talk about words, is unfair.

Yet, in spite of this, the bad habits of clique-thinking, ‘in’ groups and ‘out’ groups, deliberately developed by some of the positivists tended, and for a great many years, to persist. (It is now largely over, and philosophy, helped greatly, I think, by study of the later Wittgenstein, has returned or is returning to a sanity in which conversation between persons holding different viewpoints, seems again natural and right.)

Of course it is natural and proper that people of like mind, or working on similar questions, should group together, getting to know their own group better than others outside it. Interests, too, are necessarily limited; one cannot attend to everything. And nowadays, because of increasing specialisation and professionalism, catholicity is more difficult than it used to be – though it is well to be aware of the dangers of these changes. True enough. But it is no justification for the cultivation of a clique outlook.

Something has tended to be forgotten – and that is the implicit obligation, and it is a moral obligation, to support and defend if necessary the very conditions which make it possible to do philosophy well – possible to get clearer, or nearer, to complex and elusive truth. The conditions include the co-operation which requires the contributions of very different points of view, and requires that anything serious should be carefully considered before being judged, and should not be judged or (even) ruled out of court without such consideration.

It is natural that ‘the latest’ that happens in your village is ‘news’, and it is perhaps natural that the young particularly should think that the latest, or what happens to be in fashion this month, is important. It is natural; but it is provincial to act as though your village is the central metropolis, or your local dialect the language of the cosmopolis.

And there is evidence to show that for a considerable stretch of years the publication of books and articles, book reviews, to some extent broadcasting, academic appointments and so forth, were unduly influenced by a one-sided tolerance of some points of view, and a one-sided intolerance of others. Thank goodness this has now changed. But the fact that it happened is warning.