Two rival passions are at work in men's hearts to-day, the cult of individuality and the cult of society. They give rise all too often to extravagant praise of liberty and to a no less extravagant insistence on discipline for society's sake. It is impossible to form a balanced idea of the functions of liberty and discipline, or of the right relation between the individual and his social environment, without having a clear view of the nature of personality and community. (...) I offer a brief and dogmatic sketch of this subject. A personality is the product of the impact of the objective universe, past and present, on a particular experiencing subject. I do not wish to imply that a “subject” is necessarily a substance or a metaphysical ego, or an immortal soul. Whether such eternal individual spirits exist or not, I do not pretend to know. I do not even, by the word “subject,” pledge myself to what Professor Broad has called a “centred theory” of the nature of mind, I do not know whether a mind is a system of experiences united in an enduring centre, as the spokes of a wheel are united in the hub; or whether it is a centreless “net” of experiences all related together in a special way. By “subject” I mean only “that which experiences,” whatever the true philosophical account of it. I mean the seeming focus or centre of experience and action. This focus is in some sense located in time and space, in fact it is located within the organism. For my purpose the subject is simply that to which experience happens, and that which responds with conscious behaviour. I do not wish to raise the epistemological problem. I merely assume the rejection of solipsism, and the reality of an objective universe which the individual experiences, however imperfectly. (shrink)

The troubles of our time have many causes, economic, political, cultural. All are intimately connected. Of the cultural causes, one of the most important has been disillusionment about human nature. The old view which exalted man to something a little lower than the angels has given way in many quarters to the conviction that in essentials he is no higher than the beasts, and that anyhow the very notion that anything can be ethically higher than anything else is illusory. I (...) believe that in each of these attitudes to human nature there is a distorted half-truth, in both a blindness to the half-truth of the other. In this essay I shall try to map out the main contours of human nature, so as to emphasize that, although man is at bottom identical with the beasts, he is also in a limited but all-important manner unique. I shall also argue that one consequence of his uniqueness is moral experience, and that in human nature properly understood, a moral goal is very clearly revealed. (shrink)

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Ethics and psychology are apt to look askance at one another. The ethicist warns the psychologist that he cannot “ explain away ” the objective distinction between good and evil merely by describing the process by which we come to apprehend that distinction. Nor can he in any such manner show that moral obligation is illusory. On the other hand, some psychologists do claim that in exposing the psychological sources of moral experience they show that no objective distinction is involved (...) in it. (shrink)

Common sense holds that a physical object is confined to a definite region of space, and that it endures through a definite period of time. It scatters effects through other regions and periods, but it is the cause of those effects, and is just where it is and not everywhere. Physically its existence may entail other objects, but logically it entails nothing whatever beyond the limits of a certain volume.