800 KS
475
understand by "the human mind," conceived in familiar ways as a
faculty of active powers of imagination, deliberation, judgment and
decision, cannot
be
explained in terms appropriate exclusively to our
conceptions of physical objects, and that we land in confusion when we
combine the idea of an automaton with that of a responsible man.
Patterns of change, however subtle, do not remotely add up to a pur–
posive action, nor, in particular, do oddities in the behavior of a feather–
less biped amount to the misbehavior of a human being. And this, not
because there are facts about the behavior of persons that cannot be
accounted for in terms of facts about the behavior of featherless bipeds,
but rather because what we are
saying
and so
doing
in discussing the
one is of a wholly different order from what we are saying and doing
in talking about the other.
None of the exponents of linguistic philosophy has practiced that
discipline with more concern for the forms of language that protect the
life, and hence the freedom, of the individual human mind than Stuart
Hampshire, lately of Oxford and the University of London, and cur–
rently Chairman of the Philosophy Department at Princeton. Few phil–
osophers have so well understood how that life and that freedom has
been eroded by the misplaced exactitudes of scientistic logicians who
ask us to treat everything as the value of a variable or who deny intel–
ligibility to statements not verifiable by the procedures of physical science.
Significantly, the classical philosopher with whom Hampshire has most
closely identified himself is Spinoza. For of course it is Spinoza who,
whatever may be said for his simulations of the geometrical method, con–
ceived the overriding purpose of his whole austere philosophy to be the
elucidation of the idea (and ideal) of human freedom. Hampshire prac–
tices his own more informal logician's and grammarian's art with so
straight a face that few perceive what he has been up to: the protec–
tion of the integral activities of the mind from the prevailing and para–
lyzing confusion with the bodily processes that may be correlated with
them. Most of his writings are concerned with spheres of its activity
which nowadays are designated as "the humanities." But every lover of
freedom, including indeed lovers of scientific inquiry, are in his debt, and
none more so than those philosophical apes of science who know not
whereof they
think.
In
The Freedom of the Individual
Professor Hampshire opens his
defense of the idea ,of individual freedom rather obliquely by contrasting
two forms of impossibility: one of them (call it "physical impossibility")
is exemplified in such a statement as "the gas cannot escape now"; the
other (call it "human" or "personal impossibility") in such a
state~ent
