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age and with new empmclst assumptions be engaged in with a
difference. After the first and more destructive phase of modern
empiricism, this activity will doubtless find its right place
in
philosophy once more.
If
Mr. Gellner's main complaint had concerned the failure of
this sort of creativeness I should have felt more sympathy. He has
however preferred to attack modern philosophy as a whole. It is
not just that any living philosophical tradition is likely to be better
than none, since philosophy is an intensely traditional subject. It
is
also that this tradition is a good one, the legitimate heir of an
older British empiricism, and is at present in an extremely lively
and interesting state of change. When it is at last agreed that
philosophy is a waste of time we shall indeed be stuck
in
the Cave.
Iris Murdoch
HOW IT STRIKES A COMPATRIOT
THE GliTIERING COFFIN.
By
Dennis Potter. Victor Gollancz.
18s.
In
The Glittering Coffin
Mr. Dennis Potter, a young
working-class undergraduate just down from Oxford, raises a voice
of genuine social protest. Unfortunately he accompanies it with
so
much rant and rhetoric that he virtually drowns his own words.
It seems to me dubious whether the few scraps of coherent sense
that are likely to drift across to the reader will mean much to
him,
particularly if he is at all unfamiliar with their place of origin.
May I say how it strikes a compatriot?
But to do so one must go back
in
time. In 1853, Gladstone,
then Chancellor of the Exchequer, asked Sir Stafford Northcote
and Sir Charles Trevelyan to prepare for his use a report on the
general condition of the Civil Service. In November of that year
the report appeared, a highly conscientious piece of work, com–
plete with criticisms from eminent administrators and education–
alists and with replies to these criticisms from the two authors.
Amongst other things the report recommended that the old system
