To anyone who has been engaged in teaching and studying Plato, particularly the Republic, for the last thirty or forty years, one fact must stand out with special prominence. That is the remarkable increase during that period of the direct applicability of Plato's discussions to our own problems. Thirty-five years ago the concrete situations which Plato had in mind in these discussions, the general assumptions at the back of them, the possibilities for good or evil that he envisaged, would all seem to the student of that time remote and almost unreal, and it required a considerable exercise of the imagination to discover that there were certain underlying ideas in them which had application to our own time. If we wanted contemporary illustrations of the rise of a tyrant we had to turn to some of the most backward States in South America. The idea of a completely planned society existed only in the minds of the writers of Utopias, to whom we were accustomed, sometimes, to say rather patronizingly that they had forgotten that constitutions, grow and are not made. We could study the criticisms of democracy as an intellectual exercise without any feeling that they might be one day applied in practice. How different is the situation now! Many of the possibilities are as near for us as they were to Plato. Many of the general ideas of Plato's day are as readily assumed by us as they were by him. Indeed the difficulty now is greater in trying to gain a sympathetic hearing for the ideas of thirty or forty years ago than for the ideas of the fourth century b.c.

It is too often assumed that Voltaire is uninterested in metaphysics and that his whole attitude is inimical to such studies. This assumption is of course largely dependent on the definition of the term metaphysics. To modern minds metaphysics tends to imply knowledge of the absolute obtained by some direct intuition of reality, and to the Bergsonian definition of metaphysics as the science which claims to dispense with symbols the present writer would largely subscribe. Given this modern definition of metaphysics, which is also the Kantian one, as a special mode of knowledge, it is an undoubted fact that Voltaire is not in this sense a metaphysical mind; the appeal to any peculiar or specifically a priori mode of thought was, of course, incompatible with his empiricism.

In recent years ethical discussion has centred round the problem of the relation between the idea of right and the idea of good. Previously it had been more or less generally assumed that moral philosophy was principally concerned with the idea of good, and followed its course by asking such questions as: What is the meaning of good? or, What are the characteristics which anything must have in order to be good? or even, What things are good? The idea of right was generally regarded as subordinate, and it was perhaps more often implied than stated that an action was right if by it something good was realized.

Auguste Comte, writing of one of his forerunners, Montesquieu, said that the great merit of the latter's memorable work L'Esprit des Lois appeared to him to be in its tendency to regard political phenomena as subject to invariable laws like all other phenomena. Comte himself writes with regard to sociology: “the philosophical principle of the science being that social phenomena are subject to natural laws, admitting of rational prevision, we have to ascertain what is the precise subject, and what the peculiar character of those laws.” “Such prevision,” says Comte in another place, “is a necessary consequence of the discovery of constant relations between phenomena, and it is the unfailing test which distinguishes real science from that erudition which mechanically accumulates facts without aspiring to deduce them one from another.” Elsewhere he speaks of “rational prevision, the principal characteristic of true science.” And Branford and Geddes quote his saying: “Savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour pourvoir.”

In earlier articles an account has been given of some of the chief notions in the Organic Philosophy, namely Creativity, Actual Entities, Eternal Objects, God. In the present article the writer will endeavour to present Whitehead's doctrine concerning the space-time continuum and the nature of enduring objects implicated therein.