ABSTRACT
When Professor Lewis, in the exercise of his editorial office, urged me to give my impressions of philosophy during the last fifty years—a suggestion I had casually thrown out, along with some others, in a too light-hearted spirit—I received something of a shock; for as soon as I began to take the proposal seriously, I saw at once how subjective any such impressions of mine must be. To attempt a balanced and dispassionate estimate would require five to ten years of solid work. Hence it has seemed to me less misleading, and in the last resort more modest, to cast my impressions in an unashamedly autobiographical form. This may throw less light on philosophical progress than on personal limitations of no interest to any one except myself. Yet in a way perhaps I may hope to represent, however inadequately, what has sometimes been called ‘the lost generation’—the many scholars whose lives were sacrificed in the early years of the First War because generals had not then discovered that brains may have a greater military value than can be displayed in trench warfare by platoon commanders. The loss of these men—and of their sons—has contributed to the melancholy mediocrity of the subsequent period in so many walks of life, but especially in politics. In philosophy it has helped to make development more abrupt, and perhaps less balanced, than it would otherwise have been.