Arthur Balfour

“ When men said, which they have done now for over thirty years, that Arthur Balfour was too much of a philosopher to be really interested in politics, I always contradicted them. With his intellectual taste, perfect literary style and keen interest in philosophy and religion, nothing but a great love of politics could account for his not having given up more of his time to writing. ”

“ The philosopher conceives that within the unchanging limits of his system an appropriate niche can be found for every new discovery as it arises. My view is that the contents of a system are always reacting on its fundamental principles, so that no philosophy can flatter itself that it will not be altered out of all recognition as knowledge grows.
This last statement may look like a truism; but it is a truism which few philosophers are, in practice, disposed to accept; and the generality of mankind are perhaps even less disposed to accept it even than philosophers. ”

“ Arthur Balfour was never a standard-bearer. He was a self- indulgent man of simple tastes. For the average person he was as puzzling to understand and as difficult to know as he was easy for me and many others to love. You may say that no average man can know a Prime Minister intimately; but most of us have met strangers whose minds we understood and whose hearts we reached without knowledge and without effort ”

“ That little speech gave one a clearer sense of what through all these years Arthur Balfour has been doing than anything that ever has before come to me. There is something supremely brave about a man of such 136fine understanding, such humorous and distinguished cynicism, standing by through all of the disillusions, disgust, deceptions, forced evil choices of public life, never quitting whatever the temptation. ”

“ For forty years now Arthur Balfour has stood by. He is, I believe, 73 years old. He has never had so much reason in all his long political career to believe that the good will of men can be mobilized for the world’s service. ”

“ The mere existence of natural laws is not, as it seems to me, a sufficient basis for the argument; we require also that these laws should combine to subserve an end. Were the universe, for example, like a huge impervious reservoir of some simple gas, where nothing rested but nothing changed, where amid all the hurry and bustle of colliding atoms no new thing was ever born, nor any old thing ever perished, we might find in it admirable illustrations of natural law, but no hints, so far as I can see, of purpose or design. ”

“ It could always be hoped that human efforts would leave behind them some enduring traces, which, however slowly, might accumulate without end. But hopes like these are possible no more. The wider is the sweep of our contemplative vision the more clearly do we see that the rôle of man, if limited to an earthly stage, is meaningless and futile;—that, however it be played, in the end it “signifies nothing.” Will any one assert that universal history can maintain its interest undimmed if steeped in the atmosphere of a creed like this? ”

“ PERCEPTION, COMMON SENSE, AND SCIENCE I
Nothing would seem easier, at first sight, than to give a general description of the ordinary beliefs of ordinary people about our familiar world of things and persons. It is the world in which we live; it is for all men a real world; it is for many men the real world; it is the world of common sense, the world where the plain man feels at home, and where the practical man seeks refuge from the vain subtleties of metaphysics. Our stock of beliefs about it may perhaps be difficult to justify, but it seems strange that they should be difficult to describe ”

“ The very essence of the physical order of things is that it creates nothing new. Change is never more than a redistribution of that which never changes. But sensibility belongs to the world of consciousness, not to the world of matter. It is a new creation, of which physical equations can give no account; nay, rather, which falsifies such equations; which requires us to say that, before a certain date in the history of the universe, energy in one shape was converted into precisely the same amount of energy in another shape, and into nothing more ”

“ Many of those who look at these problems from (what they deem to be) a strictly scientific point of view are not likely to be more favourable. Their loyalty to experience takes the form of supposing that men accumulate knowledge by peering about for “sequences” among “phenomena,” as a child looks for shells upon the beach—equally ready to go north or south, east or west, as the humour of the moment moves him. They would regard any antecedent preference for this or that sort of explanation as a sin against the categorical imperatives of intellectual morals. ”

“ Butcher died after a brief illness. This event loosened the ties which bound him to Edinburgh; and, having held his professorship long enough to earn a pension, he resigned in the following year. At a farewell dinner in January 1904 Mr. Arthur Balfour presided, and many speeches, made by distinguished persons, testified to the esteem and affection which he had won. He removed to London, taking a house (No. 6) in Tavistock Square, where he passed the remainder of his life. In 1904 he accepted an invitation to lecture at Harvard University and elsewhere in the United States. ”

“ I can devise no more extravagant hypothesis. But though, if it were true, the “fitness” of the higher morality might seem to have found an explanation, it is not the explanation we require. It is too external. It gives no account of the appeal which the nobler ends of action make to our judgments of intrinsic value. It suggests the way in which a higher ideal might increase the number of its possessors at the expense of a lower, but not the way in which the higher ideal might itself arise. ”

“ In the meanwhile we must, I fear, suffer under a system of beliefs which is far short of rational perfection. But we need not acquiesce, and we should not be contented. Whether this state of affairs will ever be cured by the sudden flash of some great philosophic discovery is another matter. My present aim, at all events, is far more modest. But they, at least, should make no complaint who hold that common-sense beliefs, and science which is a development of common-sense beliefs, are, if not true, at least on the way to truth. ”

“ It may be said, for example, that, under the stress of emotions like those I have69 described, no man troubles his head about problems of cosmology; thought is merged in feeling; speculation is smothered. But though this is true, it is not wholly true. As no pain, I suppose, is so intense as to exclude all reflections on its probable duration, so no rapture is so absorbing as to exclude all reflections on its probable source. I grant that at such moments we do not philosophise; we do not analyse a problem, turning it this way or that, and noting every aspect of it with a cool curiosity. ”

“ According to the view which I desire to press in these lectures, this marks a philosophic omission. I regard the belief in an external world as one of a class whose importance has been ignored by philosophy, though all science depends on them. They refuse to be lost in the common herd of empirical beliefs; though they have no claim to be treated as axioms. We are inclined to accept them, but not rationally compelled. The inclination may be so strong as practically to exclude doubt; and it may diminish from this maximum to a faint feeling of probability. ”

“ But, in the meanwhile, it may be observed that though no tragic accompaniments attach to the growth of a purely Absolutist philosophy, this by no means implies that metaphysics is better than religion. It is true that, for the sake of a purely logical Absolute, no man has been moved to do what a later and higher morality condemns—to placate it, for example, with bloody rites or obscene revels. But this is because, for the sake of such an Absolute, no man has ever yet been moved to do anything at all. ”

“ In perception there is no reaction by the perceiving mind on the object perceived. Things in their true reality are not affected by mere observation, still less are they constituted by it. When material objects are in question, common sense never supposes that esse and percipi are identical. ”

“ A belief may be more probable or less probable. Inevitableness, on the other hand, seems at first sight to be insusceptible of gradation. It is, or it is not. Yet this extreme definiteness vanishes if we regard it as a limiting case—as the last term of a series whose earlier members represent varying degrees of plausibility. On this view we should regard our beliefs about the universe as moulded by formative forces, which vary from irresistible coercion to faint and doubtful inclination. Beliefs in the reality of the external world and in its regularity are important products of the first. ”

“ It is content to say that, though a thing is doubtless always more than the sum of those aspects of it to which we happen to be attending, yet our knowledge that it is and what it is, however imperfect, is, for practical purposes, sufficiently clear and trustworthy, requiring the support neither of metaphysics152 nor psychology.—This, with all its difficulties, is, I believe, an account, true as far as it goes, of the world of things as common sense conceives it. This is the sort of world which science sets out to explain. ”

“ It is enough that we must undoubtedly include feeling and all other phases of consciousness. We must include them, even if they be no more than the passive accompaniments of material change; still more must we include them if we speculatively accept (what I deem to be) the inevitable belief that they can, within limits, themselves initiate movement and guide energy. The choice, therefore, is not between two accounts of the universe, each of which may conceivably be sufficient. The mechanical account is not sufficient. It doubly fails to provide a satisfactory substitute for design. ”

“ The philosopher refuses—in theory—to assume anything which requires proof. I assume (among other things) the common-sense outlook upon life, and the whole body of the sciences. The philosopher admits—in theory—no ground of knowledge but reason. I recognise that, in fact, the whole human race, including the philosopher himself, lives by faith alone. The philosopher asks what creed reason requires him to accept. I ask on what terms the creed which is in fact accepted can most reasonably be held. ”

“ We reject it because it is out of harmony with the ideal we have formed of what the material universe ought to be and is: and so strong is this speculative prepossession that there is no experimental evidence which would convince a man of science that, when physical causes were the same, physical consequences could be different. ”

“ Yet none, I think, would maintain that mass and motion abstractly considered, nor any concrete arrangement of moving atoms or undulating ether, are beautiful as represented in thought, or would be beautiful could they become objects of perception. We have a bad habit of saying that science deals with nothing but “phenomena.” If by phenomena are meant appearances, it is to æsthetics rather than to science that, on the principle of Solomon’s judgment, phenomena most properly belong. To get away from appearances, to read the physical fact behind its sensuous effect, is one chief aim of science ”

“ "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." ”

“ I am not the least concerned to defend this theory. It has been much derided, and is certainly open to attack. But something like it seems to be an inevitable stage in the development of modern views of nature. The whole effort of physical science is to discover the material or non-psychical facts which shall,159 among other things, account for our psychical experiences. It is true that there are men of science, as well as philosophers, who regard all such constructions as purely arbitrary—mere labour-saving devices which have nothing to do with reality. ”

“ Things are not changed by a mere change of place, but a change of place relative to an observer always changes their appearance for him. Common sense is, therefore, compelled in this, as in countless other cases, to distinguish the appearance of a thing from its reality; and to hold, as an essential article of its working creed, that appearances may alter, leaving realities unchanged.
Common sense does not, however, draw the inference that our experiences of material things is other than direct and immediate. ”

“ They interrogate consciousness, and are convinced that every experience can be analysed into sensations and ideas, some of which, no doubt, suggest externality, but none of which are external. If, then, the worst comes to the worst, they can, and often do, lighten their philosophic ship by pitching the whole material universe overboard as a bit of superfluous cargo. But physical science cannot (at least in my opinion) do anything of the kind. Its whole business is with the material universe. Its premises are experiences of external things, not of internal sensation and ideas. ”

“ We like to think that beliefs which claim to be rational are the product of a purely rational process; and though, where others are concerned, we complacently admit the136 intrusion of non-rational links in the causal chain, we have higher ambitions for ourselves.
Yet surely, on the naturalistic theory of the world, all such ambitions are vain. It is abundantly evident that, however important be the part which reason plays among the immediate antecedents of our beliefs, there are no beliefs which do not trace back their origin to causes which are wholly irrational. ”