ABSTRACT
There are two schools of thought for both of which I always have felt great sympathy, and an adequate combination of which, if that be possible, would constitute the high-water mark of philosophical achievement as far as I can conceive it. One is the idealist school which dominated Oxford towards the end of the last century and was still a fairly powerful influence, especially on undergraduate reading, in my student days there at the end of the First World War. The other is the Cambridge school of Moore and Broad as developed in the ’twenties or earlier. The sweep and richness of thought and profundity of the former appealed to me as did their faith in the rationality of the universe and their attempts at a comprehensive metaphysics, although I was not quite convinced by most of their central arguments including the one that the esse of physical objects necessarily involves reference to mind or experience. On the other hand, the Cambridge school had a far greater mastery of the linguistic tools of philosophy and a method of clear analysis which, I thought, was just what was needed to test whether the idealist claims were true or false or at least whether they had good reason or fallacies behind them. I felt that they were lacking in certain insights which the idealists possessed, but that they also escaped their vagueness, obscurities, and apparent confusions. They aimed at making philosophy as clear as the nature of the subject allows, and I have always thought that to try to do this is the first and one of the most neglected duties of the philosopher. Without committing themselves much to conclusions, they tried to develop the means by which any philosophy that is fully worthy of the subject must be built up. Whether you are a positivist or a transcendent metaphysician, it is your duty to make what you have to say as clear as possible, showing just what, if anything, you hold to be self-evident or immediately known, and what your arguments precisely are, otherwise it is impossible for readers to know what they are up against and put your views to the test. And I have seen how often, when a particular problem is analysed into its constituent parts or alternative meanings and the ambiguities of the words in which it is expressed are revealed, it is already more than half solved. My idea was that the Cambridge school catered, roughly speaking, for the means, and the idealists for the end of philosophy, and I had the notion that one might use to rebuild a metaphysical system of idealism the tools forged under a quite different inspiration, or if not to build a system as a whole, at least to solve particular problems in philosophy on lines with which the originators of the technique would not have had much sympathy. However, every philosopher has his own way, and what I have adopted from the thinkers I have mentioned is hardly anything definite enough to be called a technique. I have never felt inclined to be a disciple of any philosopher, but I hope the spirit of both schools has entered deeply into me.
