ABSTRACT
In September 1904 Moore’s Fellowship at Trinity College came to an end, and he moved from Cambridge to Edinburgh, where he lived for the next three years. This change in the circumstances of his life is marked by a change in his intellectual style. The naive but engaging self-confidence of the early period (which even led him to think that he should have been appointed in 1900 to succeed Sidgwick as Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge1) is replaced by anxious self-criticism. One manifestation of this is a tendency to devote a great deal of space to clarifying the issues he wants to discuss. In his 1905 paper NROP, after two pages of such clarification, he writes:
(p. 38)
There then follow several more pages of tedious explanation. To criticise Moore in this respect is not, of course, to say that his aim is misguided; it is just that the means employed are often disproportionate to the results achieved and, in the worst cases, make his writings barely readable.
