BOO K S
489
LOGICIANS AND SPECULATORS
RELIGION, POLITICS, AND THE HIGHER LEARNING. By
Morton
White. Harvard University Press. $3 .50.
In each of the ten essays which are here put together to
form a book, Professor Morton White was originally commenting on con–
temporary philosophy before an audience of intelligent laymen: the lay–
men were sometimes listeners to the Third Program of the British
Broadcasting Corporation, sometimes readers of such periodicals as
Confluence
and
Perspectives.
He is concerned with the public rela–
tions of philosophy rather than with philosophy itself. Have the ana–
lytical philosophers of the present time withdrawn too far into a corner,
away from the public forum of debate around social and moral issues?
Have they been too intent upon scientific method and too little intent
upon religion, education, law and esthetics? Why have they surren–
dered so much of the wide territory of general discussion that was
claimed as their own by John Stuart Mill and John Dewey? Morton
White is not in the least disposed to apologize for, or to decry, the
varied methods and achievements of analytical philosophers in America
and in Britain in the last thirty years. On the contrary, hc takes these
patient philosophers to be the true exponents of rationality outside the
sciences, and he is himself to be counted as one of them. Rather he
wishes them to be less modest and unassuming, and to advance nearer
to the center of public attention. By their own choice they have left
an empty space, unoccupied and undefended, in the thought of their
own time, and this space is being filled by cloudy prophets, who are
quite unashamed of self-contradiction and obscurity and who are cer–
tainly not indifferent to public attention. He shows very clearly what
may happen when rational control is rela.xed in his essay "Original Sin,
Natural Law and Politics," originally published in this review. This
study of "atheists for Niebuhr" is both amusing and frightening, and it
certainly illustrates his warning.
I think that there can be little doubt that he is right in his socio–
logical remarks. There is in fact an urgent and still growing demand,
both in America and Britain, for philosophical guidance about the
foundations of law, of social policy and political consent, and of the
principles of criticism in the arts. The market exists and will certainly
be supplied from one source or another. In England the new democracy
of speculation is in part the result of the expansion of universities and
of the training of more teachers and technicians, and it is already re-
