Abstract

We are nowadays so often reminded that we live in times of crisis that no controversy is likely to arise on that score, but the knowledge of its source and nature is not so easy to come by as the awareness of the fact. Macmurray is not the first to suggest that the crisis springs from the oversight or suppression of personality. Max Horkheimer, for instance, some years back deplored the submergence of the individual in a totalitarian mass civilization; but whereas Horkheimer traces back the salient characteristics of the crisis situation to the subversion of reason as an objective standard, Macmurray's diagnosis seems, at least prima facie, just the opposite--the substitution of thought for practice as our philosophical presupposition and of the subject for the agent in our idea of the person. This opposition of the two analyses is, however, only apparent as I shall try to show anon.