GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

IO ' INTRODUCTION
to a separate and distinct branch of enquiry. They were
so discussed by Hobbcs and Locke and Rousseau in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by Hegel, Marx
and Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century. An
account of these discussions will be found in Part III,
where some of the more important theories which have
been propounded in answer to these questions are sum*
mariscd.
At this point I feel constrained to introduce a word of
defence against anticipated criticism.
Defence of Scheme. The separation of ethics from
politics in Parts II and HI is for the purposes of exposition
only. I am fully aware that the issues raised by these two
branches of enquiry cannot be satisfactorily discussed in
isolation. I am also aware that some of the writers whom
I am proposing to assign to the one branch or to the other,
treating them purely as writers on ethical or as writers
upon political questions, did in fact pursue both: that
Hume and Kant, for example, who appear in Part II,
wrote on politics, T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley, whose
views are discussed in Part III, on ethics. I urge in my
defence that I am not writing a history, and that I am not
seeking to be comprehensive: My concern is with the
direction and divisions of human thought rather than
with the history of its thinkers. My approach is logical
rather than chronological. What I have sought to do is
to present a number of theories which have been actually
entertained by European thinkers upon a confused and
ill-defined subject, or rather upon a pair of interlocking
subjects, in the clearest and simplest form of arrangement
which the nature of the subject matter permits. As
to the names ofthose who, in the course of history, advanced
the theories, I introduce them only when it is convenient
to affix labels, or when a knowledge of the time and
circumstances in which a particular theory was enter*
tained may be held to contribute to an understanding of
that which it asserts. Such a mode of treatment not only