We partner with a secure submission system to handle manuscript submissions.
Please note:
You will need an account for the submission system, which is separate to your Cambridge Core account. For login and submission support, please visit the
submission and support pages.
Please review this journal's author instructions, particularly the
preparing your materials
page, before submitting your manuscript.
Click Proceed to submission system to continue to our partner's website.
To save this undefined to your undefined account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your undefined account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
In the first part of this article an attempt was made to clear the ground for a functional theory of knowledge, and the discussion of structure and function with which it concluded enables us to approach the problem of cognition. If the view already set forth is sound, it seems clear that the relation of the mind to its object is a function and not a structure of the mental processes involved. The mere existence of a mental content, however complex it may be, however decorated with fringes or set off by a background, does not constitute an act of knowledge or give the content a meaning. In order to see a mental act as cognitive we must consider its function, its origin, its results, and in general the circumstances in which it stands.
We may consider the possibility of man's freedom from two points of view: (i) From the point of view of the metaphysical problem of “ free-will “; (2) from the point of view of the meaning and conditions of felt freedom. The first point of view is the more familiar, and I propose to discuss it here only by way of preparing for a consideration of the second.
Ethics and psychology are apt to look askance at one another. The ethicist warns the psychologist that he cannot “ explain away ” the objective distinction between good and evil merely by describing the process by which we come to apprehend that distinction. Nor can he in any such manner show that moral obligation is illusory. On the other hand, some psychologists do claim that in exposing the psychological sources of moral experience they show that no objective distinction is involved in it.
This paper is intended to be an interpretation of what I shall venture to call—the deliberate philosophy of Santayana, as outlined in his recent and most penetrating book: Scepticism and Animal Faith. I refrain from employing the battered term metaphysics, because this candid “ lover of wisdom ” has reminded us that his system is not metaphysical, “ except in the mocking literary sense of the word.” What the vulgar (among which I count myself), however, understand by the term, he is guilty of offering in this mature work. It is my desire to try and see his philosophy under the searchlight of contemporary discussion;and I shall introduce some remarks of my own on what I consider significant Realistic issues of the day. My philosophy, however, on nearly all conditions, has been formed by, and is in concord with, the system here expounded.
