Sometimes we draw conclusions about a thing's existence or its value by considering what are thought to be its consequences. I shall say that an argument is pragmatic when it consists in estimating an action, or any event, or a rule, or whatever it may be, in terms of its favourable or unfavourable consequences; what happens in such cases is that all or part of the value of the consequences is transferred to whatever is regarded as causing or preventing them.

In the summer of 1953 a lecture-course organized by the British Council was given at Peterhouse, Cambridge. The Faculty of Moral Science were responsible for the programme of lectures and discussions, and Miss Margaret Master man and Dr. Theodore Red path were appointed by the Faculty as joint directors. The lectures must have been well received by the teachers of philosophy who attended and participated in the discussions— representatives from the Continent, the United States and even China were on hand; and the suggestion arose quite naturally that they be published in a single volume. However, some of the lecturers wished to redraft the papers they had read and hence the essays now presented, under the editorship of C. A. Mace, in the volume British Philosophy in the Mid-Century, A Cambridge Symposium (George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1957) are in a number of instances dressed up and greatly expanded versions of the lectures actually given. Further, it is worth noting that the essay by G. E. Moore was written specifically for this volume and is based on a discussion held with some students who attended the sessions at Peterhouse. Thus it is that the papers now published vary greatly in length from the welcome ten pages contributed by G. E. Moore to the seventy-nine pages from Miss Master man. This disparity is, of course, an anomaly in a volume explicitly designed to reflect trends in very recent British philosophy and to convey, to those relatively unfamiliar with it, some reliable picture of its condition at mid-century. But this volume records a present-day Cambridge symposium and as such it must in some measure reflect quite local interests and conditions. However, most of the contributors are very well known and the essays now presented to the public contain a good deal that will interest and profit the reader.

“The pattern is new,” T. S. Eliot has written, “at every moment”: for our past and the history of our culture forms a pattern for us, and each new step that we take implies a revaluation of all that has gone before. Professional philosophers are no longer much given to sayings of this sort; they leave it to poets to make them. Yet surely if these words apply anywhere they apply to the history of Philosophy. A new philosophy or a new position in Philosophy, genuinely new, involves the adoption of different categories, a new orientation; it involves the re-writing of its history and a changed outlook on a whole landscape of problems. The perspective is altered, we find; the masses re-group themselves and the relations fall differently into place.