Professor Toynbee observes in his Study of History that as he walked down Whitehall one day in the spring of 1918, and passed the Board of Education offices which had been commandeered for a new department of the War Office, “improvised in order to make an intensive study of trench warfare,” he found himself repeating the passage from St. Matthew's Gospel.

In the idealistic movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British philosophy under Hegelian influence endeavoured to demonstrate the rationality of the universe as based on logical construction. The keynote of the Hegelian dialectic, as interpreted by both F. H. Bradley and J. E. McTaggart is that the mind is there from the first. In the advance from the bare abstraction of Being to the fully concrete whole—“Before the mind there is a single conception, but the whole mind (...) itself which does not appear, engages in the process, operates on the datum, and produces the result.” The idea expressed by poetry in Tennyson's “Flower in the crannied wall,” which as the mind is fixed upon it reveals in an expansion to the universe the nature of God and Man, illustrates in a simple way the central philosophic conception of the British metaphysical idealists. Poetry could overlook the hard struggle of the little plant to keep its foothold against crowding competitors. Philosophy was perhaps too oblivious of this in its compelling postulate of the all pervading unity in which every difference and seeming contradiction would be reconciled. (shrink)

The positions that I would support in regard to the question whether philosophy has any relation to practice are as follows. In the first place, there are certain problems of modern civilization, and those amongst the most crucial, with which philosophy alone can deal. In the second place, in spite of appearances to the contrary, the present age will not be deaf to the voice of philosophy, if it can speak with sufficient clearness and power to secure a hearing. The (...) problems to which I refer do not belong to the sphere of science, in the strict modern sense. Science is triumphant in its own sphere, but it is not concerned primarily with the values of human existence, or the activity of the mind by which they are discovered, pursued, enjoyed. (shrink)

In the course of his discussion of the work of the Disarmament Commission, in his book on the League of Nations, Sir Alfred Zimmern asks why the British people were so active in sponsoring disarmament. The question arises because, as he points out, the project must evoke proposals in regard to security which they were in no mood to consider. “The explanation,” he proceeds, “no doubt is that the eventuality, however obvious it may seem in retrospect, was overlooked in the (...) enthusiasm for what had become for a certain type of British opinion a moral crusade, rather than a realistic. (shrink)