Poppies in a field of corn may annoy a farmer and rejoice an artist. Clearly they are not in their right place, if the standard of judgment be immediate utility; but it is better that they should be accidentally there than nowhere at all to be found. The political organization of social life and, still more obviously, the economic, does not promote devotion to other purposes than those which appear to be practical in the eyes of men who cannot see very well. To suppose, for example, that beauty or truth is not useful is the result of philosophical nearsightedness. But there are some men, women, and children who are moved deeply by beauty and the divine whose emotion is not easily understood in political terms and is altogether unintelligible in terms of exchange-value.

It is much more certain that the artist can help the philosopher than that the philosopher can help the artist. The purpose of this paper is to indicate the kind of questions about art which the philosopher asks, in order that those whose concern is with art, artists themselves in the first instance, and critics of art, may judge if these questions are interesting to them, and if so may co-operate with the philosophers in seeking to answer them. Now that the sciences and the other occupations of man become so sharply separated from each other, philosophy has come to have a peculiar position. It deals with the questions which are left over from the sciences, and this gives it a specific and important office to perform.

Philosophical instruction in the French Universities usually consists in more or less direct preparation for the licence-ès-lettres (the “M.A.”) and the agrigation, or in informal discussion with candidates preparing for the Doctorate. But it has for long been the practice at the Sorbonne in Paris for the Professors to deliver a course of public lectures lasting throughout a half or the whole of the academic year. And since the eleinehts of logic and philosophy are taught in the top form of every lycèe quite a large part Of the ordinary educated public is able to follow with profit the communications of the foremost philosophers. This year, Professor A. Lalande lectures on “General Methodology”; Professor Brunschvicg on “The Object in Perception and in Science”; Professor Delacroix on “Consciousness and Personality”; Dr. Wallon on “Explanation and Constructive Thought in the Child”; Professor Basch on “The Æsthetic Categories,” and on “English Æsthetics in the Eighteenth Century,” and Professor E. Gilson on “The Main Problems of Mediaeval Philosophy.” At the College de France, Professor Le Roy lectures on “The Primitive Forms of Intelligence,” Professor Pierre Janet on “The Psychological Evolution of Personality,” and Professor Pièron on “Pain and Affective Reactions.”

An ethic is rational if it can justify itself rationally—that is to say, if there is a “why” and a “wherefore” in it amenable to reflection, and underivative. An ethic, on the other hand, is irrational if reason and reflection are irrelevant to it, or if, being relevant, they are fundamentally subordinate, and are only the lackeys of a governing consideration which is either irrational or non-rational. The intention of this lecture is to explore the possibilities of rationalism in ethics, supposing that the meaning of rationalism is, broadly speaking, what has just been stated.

Only one adult in a hundred gets his food and clothing without doing anything directly in exchange for them. The other ninety-nine form active parts of the system of relations in society which will be called, in what follows here, economic; and even the one in the hundred who does not give, takes something, as children and imbeciles take, out of the store of services which are economic life. Boots and bread are but the bridges over which one man is connected with another, through services exchanged. The philosophy of social life, therefore, must “place” these economic relations in the whole complex unity of human experience. The science of economics analyses some of the aspects of the relations of men in exchanging services, and it provides a language which is already sufficiently current to be used here without full explanation of the terms. Therefore, without more ado, the philosophical aspects of the economic system may be considered in the terms of economic science, but outside the frontiers proper to that partial analysis.