Reading and re-reading the difficult and important small book I and Thou , by Professor Martin Buber, which Mr. Ronald Gregor Smith has translated with so much care and skill, and trying to make it clearer to myself in words of my own, I find myself at odds on the threshold with the translator's Introduction. He is explaining the title and the general theme of the book:— “There is, Buber shows, a radical difference between a man's attitude to other men (...) and his attitude to things. The attitude to other men is a relation between persons, to things it is a connexion with objects. In the personal relation one subject— I —confronts another subject— Thou ; in the connexion with things the subject contemplates and experiences an object. These two attitudes represent the basic twofold situation of human life, the former constituting the ‘world of Thou ,’ and the latter the ‘world of It ’”. (shrink)

There is a certain experience which awaits reformers of all parties sooner or later. They make plans for amending some small part of the world, and consider means for getting the idea into practice, and then someone interposes a comment: “This plan,” he says, “is all very well, but it is mere machinery. The world can be saved only by what is inward and living, by change in heart and thought, by renewal of spirit.”.

Reading and re-reading the difficult and important small book I and Thou, by Professor Martin Buber, which Mr. Ronald Gregor Smith has translated with so much care and skill, and trying to make it clearer to myself in words of my own, I find myself at odds on the threshold with the translator's Introduction. He is explaining the title and the general theme of the book:— “There is, Buber shows, a radical difference between a man's attitude to other men and (...) his attitude to things. The attitude to other men is a relation between persons, to things it is a connexion with objects. In the personal relation one subject— I —confronts another subject— Thou ; in the connexion with things the subject contemplates and experiences an object. These two attitudes represent the basic twofold situation of human life, the former constituting the ‘world of Thou,’ and the latter the ‘world of It ’”. (shrink)

Describing and explaining; tracing the outlines and smoothing out the folds; making clear and making plain; in either case hoping that our hearer may be able to say, “Yes, I see it better now.” Is there really a fundamental difference between these two? Common parlance uses both words for the same kind of process. We may be asked either to “explain” or to “describe” the working of a machine, answering the English boy's question “Why does it do this?” or the (...) Scotch “What's the go of it?” To account for a sum of money is to explain its absence by describing its expenditure. We say, “Why is that man offended?” or, equally, “What's the matter?” and a brief description of the man's character and history, showing on what structure a casual remark has impinged, may lead us to say, “That explains it.” Even where purpose enters we may vary the words we use. “Why on earth did you do that?” “What was your idea in doing that?” “Describe what you had in your mind.” “Please explain”. (shrink)

The vitalizing effect, spoken of somewhere by Graham Wallas, which one University “subject” may have upon another if the traditional division of compartments can be broken down, has nowhere been better illustrated of late years than by the life brought into the English school at Cambridge through the teaching of Dr. I. A. Richards, who came out of the school of Mental and Moral Science. Not only his students, but contemporaries and elders as remote as myself, are grateful for the (...) stimulus he has given; and not least grateful for the necessity imposed upon them of making clearer to their own minds the grounds upon which at various points they find themselves in disagreement with him, and the positive suggestions which they would wish to substitute for his. Their final task must be to try to make those suggestions in some language which both sides may agree to use; barring out, therefore, a good many terms which Dr. Richards regards as standing for “evident fictions”—“fictions such as universals, essences, concepts, causes.”. (shrink)

In an interesting article in a recent number of Philosophy Mr. H. Wallis Chapman examines Colour as one of the commonest illustrations of the universal; and comes to conclusions of a nominalist kind. I desire to propose alternative solutions for the problems he deals with. If my statements seem too dogmatic, or my quotations too brief, the motive is economy of space. I trust that any reader of the present paper will read the whole of Mr. Chapman's.

What are we to say then to the account of the object of religion as Unseen? It is so in the sense explained in the last chapter, that we never come to the end of seeing it: It is so, in the sense that every attempt at a photograph will have blurred  ...

Originally published in 1944, this book questions whether it is possible to have religion without God, or God without religion. Wodehouse examines many areas of life and philosophy in which religion may play a role, including prayer and love of one's neighbour. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the longstanding conflict between religion and humanism.