492
PARTISAN REVIEW
able ambassador from the academic world in the country of the journal–
ists; but he is weakened by irresolution at home. Is there any reason
why philosophies of mind, attempts at some systematic classification of
human powers and interests, should not still be the center of philosophy,
as they have always been in the past? I cannot myself see any good
reason, provided that every system of classification is now recognized
to be tentative and provisional, as one of many possibilities. There are
two strands in contemporary philosophy which can be held apart: the
first denies that any unconditional necessity can be claimed for any
conceptual scheme, since all conceptual schemes are liable to revision
as positive knowledge increases. This is a principle to which Morton
White returns again and again in the essays, and I do not dispute it.
The second is the claim that philosophy should now properly be an
a priori
study of the forms of language, and never again an
a priori
study of the distinct powers of the human mind. This seems to me a
confusion, almost a contradiction. The forms of speech have to be un–
derstood in their full context, as parts of "a form of life," as Wittgen–
stein remarked, and as social institutions. A proposition of a certain
form can be identified as a moral or as an esthetic judgment, and the
The Third Voice
Modern British and American Verse Drama
By Denis Donoghue
In this stimulating survey of the entire field of modern English
verse drama, William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot are regarded as the
key figures. Shorter studies are included of Christopher
Fry,
E.E. Cum–
mings, W.H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens,
and Richard Eberhart. In a persuasive and perceptive exposition, Mr.
Donaghue indicates his belief that verse drama is a major creative
art fonn, with a vigorous present and the promise of a vital future.
288
pages.
$5
Order from your bookstore, or
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton, New Jersey
