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 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

for human happiness that children should be shut out of a true liberal education?—then the question takes on a different look. In other words, the question of mere production tends to fall into the background, the question of the end or meaning of it takes the front place.

The

The same is true in relation to the question, What trade unions have done. It is extremely difficult— much more than you would suppose at first-to prove that trade unions have actually raised wages. more you hear and see and read, the more difficult you find it to answer that economic question. But when you come to the other side, to the ethical question, Have trade unions raised the working classes? have they made the working classes more respected and selfrespecting ?—that is a very different problem, and I have no difficulty in answering that.

"The living wage" is another case. It is very difficult to prove economically that the living wage is a good thing, though I think the case here is stronger than the economic argument in favour of trade unions. But when you come to the ethical question, and ask what the depression, the degradation, of sinking below the living wage means for the individual, for his wife and family, then you come to a clear issue. The whole question takes a new aspect; it becomes a more serious and interesting one.

The ideal of general progress is another ethical question, which it has struck me that economists tend to ignore, to the detriment of their treatment of their own specific problem. What is meant by progress in the working class, or any other class? Does it mean merely increase of desires? I read a good many political economy books, and those that are better

disposed denounce the want of desires, the want of a standard of life, the want of tastes among the working classes; they suggest that the great thing is to create desires in the working classes, in order that they may demand higher wages. They appeal to what the Germans call the "verdammte Bedürflosigkeit" in the working classes. But surely we cannot treat this increase of desires as itself a good, apart from the quality and organisation of the desires. It is easy enough to create desires and tastes. I take it a taste for loafing and the racecourse is easily enough acquired. It is the quality of the desires that we should look to. The need of the working classes is the chance of developing better desires and of subordinating them to a true conception of life. I need not go on; the general conclusion is plain. At every point our social problems open out upon ethical problems, and no one can deal with them satisfactorily who "hath not deeply meditated upon the human mind and upon the summum bonum.”

It was this conviction which led me to take an interest in the foundation of a School of Ethics and Social Philosophy. I think, if the school can take up that position, can force those who are interested in such questions to face them from this point of view, to treat laws and institutions from the point of view of their effect upon human character and the ultimate ideal of the community, they will have done something worth doing, and something not yet done in connection with our social problems in London.

I have said a great deal about philosophy and the study of philosophy; and perhaps there are some here who are rather more of beginners than myself, to

whom, without offence, I might venture to offer, in closing, one or two pieces of practical advice on this head.

The first piece of advice that it strikes me to give, from my own experience and circumstances, is, Do not begin at the end; do not begin at the difficult things in philosophy. Do not begin, for instance, with Hegel's Logic, or even with Bosanquet's Logic. If you do that, you will be like one who sets about the study of mathematics beginning with the differential calculus. Those who are beginners must be content with something a little more elementary and attractive-the Dialogues of Plato must come before the Critiques of Kant. About these there is now no difficulty, with the translations and commentaries that we have in English. Following on the Dialogues come the Ethics, with the first two and the last book of the Politics of Aristotle. Of modern books, besides old Locke, there are the Principles of Bishop Berkeley, from which I have quoted, and the Essays of Hume-all in cheap editions now. There are Mill's works-his Liberty, his Utilitarianism, his Discussions, the last book of the Logic, not sufficiently read by students.

Then there is Caird's Hegel, in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics; Mr. Bosanquet's smaller works; all that Professor Wallace has written-beginning with his biographies of Schopenhauer, Kant, and Epicurus; and perhaps more than all, the recently published Philosophical Lectures and Remains of R. L. Nettleship, beginning with the Biography by his friend Professor Bradley. From these last alone you will have a very fair idea of what philosophy is, what a fine mind like Nettleship's made of it, and what a fine man it made of him.