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Just as Peirce distinguishes three fundamentally different kinds of reasoning, so he believes that there are three fundamental categories. He calls them respectively : Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness and refers to them sometimes as Modes of Being and sometimes as Ideas.

In a famous passage in the first of his lectures on Pragmatism, James declares his opinion that ‘the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments’.1 He has in mind a fundamental difference in outlook which he thinks is also exhibited in other fields, such as politics or literature. In philosophy it comes out as the distinction between Rationalists and Empiricists, or as James more picturesquely puts it, between the tender- and the tough-minded. The tender-minded philosopher is not only Rationalistic, going by ‘principles’, whereas the tough-minded is Empiricist, going by ‘facts’, but also Intellectualistic while the other is Sensationalistic, Idealistic as opposed to Materialistic, Optimistic as opposed to Pessimistic, Religious as opposed to Irreligious, Free-Willist as opposed to Fatalistic, Monistic while the tough-minded is Pluralistic, and Dogmatical while the tough-minded is Sceptical. Though it is doubtful whether any great philosopher satisfies all the criteria on either side, this is a fair summary of two persistently opposing tendencies in philosophy, going back to the almost wholly tender-minded Plato and the tough-minded Sophists whom Plato sought to discredit. No doubt the models whom James chiefly had in mind were Hegel and his followers on the one side and Hume, James Mill and John Stuart Mill on the other.

Every modern century has its paragons, its culture-heroes, who fill the place once taken by saints and messiahs. For the first half of the twentieth century, outside the totalitarian states, the most celebrated paragons have been Gandhi, Schweitzer, and Einstein; and of these the most influential as a thinker was clearly Albert Einstein.

There are in science’, says Peirce, ‘three fundamentally different kinds of reasoning.’ These three kinds, which were already distinguished by Aristotle, are Deduction, Induction, and one for which Peirce most frequently uses the term Abduction, though he thinks that Retroduction would be a better name for it and sometimes also calls it Hypothesis. He also admits Analogy, but does not put it on a level with the other three, since he thinks that it combines the characters of Induction and Abduction.1

My remarks on Professor Williams’ paper will be relatively brief, both because I think that the opener of the discussion should be brief, and because I am in substantial agreement with what Professor Williams has said. In the first place, I accept his distinction between propositional and practical knowledge, and I too shall have nothing to say about practical knowledge. I agree with him that the labels which Ryle used to mark this distinction are not quite satisfactory, and I think that his use of the formula “A knows wh-p,” in the propositional case, is an improvement on Ryle’s “knowing that.” I think he is right in saying that one narrows the problem unduly, if one concentrates only on true assertions of the form “it is known that p,” and I agree that from the fact that a person A knows that some proposition p is known it does not follow that A himself knows that p.

How radical is the central thesis of Ryle’s The Concept of Mind? Would it be true to say that it denied the very existence of minds, insofar as their existence is understood to imply that there are “inner” states or processes, or objects or events? There is, indeed, a great deal of evidence in the book that this is what Ryle intends. “It is being maintained,” he says, “throughout this book that when we characterise people by mental predicates, we are not making untestable inferences to any ghostly processes occurring in streams of consciousness which we are debarred from visiting: we are describing the ways in which these people conduct parts of their predominantly public behaviour.”1 Or again: “The radical objection to the theory that minds must know what they are about, because mental happenings are by definition conscious, or metaphorically self-luminous, is that there are no such happenings: there are no occurrences taking place in a second-status world, since there is no such status and no such world and consequently no need for special modes of acquainting ourselves with the denizens of such a world.”2 Or again: “It has been argued from a number of directions that when we speak of a person’s mind, we are not speaking of a second theatre of special-status incidents, but of certain ways in which some of the incidents of his one life are ordered.

In a quite ordinary sense, it is obvious that there can be private languages. There can be, because there are. A language may be said to be private when it is devised to enable a limited number of persons to communicate with one another in a way that is not intelligible to anyone outside the group. By this criterion, thieves’ slang and family jargons are private languages. Such languages are not strictly private, in the sense that only one person uses and understands them, but there may very well be languages that are. Men have been known to keep diaries in codes-which no one else is meant to understand. A private code is not, indeed, a private language, but rather a private method of transcribing some given language. It is, however, possible that a very secretive diarist may not be satisfied with putting familiar words into an unfamiliar notation, but may prefer to invent new words : the two processes are in any case not sharply distinct. If he carries his invention far enough he can properly be said to be employing a private language. For all I know, this has actually been done.

In the ordinary way, we do not talk of the meaning of a proper name. If I say ‘Napoleon died at St. Helena’ and someone fails to understand me because he does not know what the word ‘died’ means, he may be said to be ignorant of the English language. But if it is my reference to Napoleon or St. Helena that he fails to understand, he is thought to display ignorance, not of English, but of history or geography. We say that he does not know who Napoleon was, or that he does not know that St. Helena is an island, not that he does not know what the words ‘Napoleon’ or ‘St. Helena’ mean. Indeed, in the sense in which a dictionary may give a list of English words, these are not counted as words at all. It would not be thought a defect in an English dictionary that it did not contain them. On the other hand, it also seems incorrect to say, with John Stuart Mill, that proper names have no meaning, that they are ‘simply marks’. For they help to determine the meaning of the sentences into which they enter. If in the sentence ‘Napoleon died at St. Helena’ I substitute the name ‘Wellington’ for ‘Napoleon’, or ‘Elba’ for ‘St. Helena’, I obtain a sentence with a different meaning. But if we admit that a change of name can produce a change of meaning, it seems odd to insist on saying that the names themselves have none.

There is a sense in which we know well enough what is ordinarily meant by a law of nature. We can give examples. Thus it is, or is believed to be, a law of nature that the orbit of a planet around the sun is an ellipse, or that arsenic is poisonous, or that the intensity of a sensation is proportionate to the logarithm of the stimulus, or that there are 303,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules in one gram of hydrogen. It is not a law of nature, though it is necessarily true, that the sum of the angles of a Euclidean triangle is 180 degrees, or that all the presidents of the third French Republic were male, though this is a legal fact in its way, or that all the cigarettes which I now have in my cigarette case are made of Virginian tobacco, though this again is true and, given my tastes, not wholly accidental. But while there are many such cases in which we find no difficulty in telling whether some proposition, which we take to be true, is or is not a law of nature, there are cases where we may be in doubt. For instance, I suppose that most people take the laws of nature to include the first law of thermodynamics, the proposition that in any closed physical system the sum of energy is constant: but there are those who maintain that this principle is a convention, that it is interpreted in such a way that there is no logical possibility of its being falsified, and for this reason they may deny that it is a law of nature at all.

The principle of the identity of indiscernibles would seem, in the forms in which it is usually stated, to be at best contingently true. It does not appear that even Leibniz held it to be logically inconceivable that different things should have all their properties in common. That ‘no substances are completely similar, or differ solo numero’1 was established, in his view, by the principle of sufficient reason, but he conceded that ‘the supposition of two indiscernibles seems to be possible in abstract terms’.2 Indeed, it may plausibly be argued that even to ask whether things can be different without being discernible from one another is to admit that it is logically possible. For what sense could there be either in affirming or in denying that two things could have all their properties in common unless they were already distinguished? As Russell put it, ‘it is a sheer logical error to suppose that, if there were an ultimate distinction between subjects and predicates, subjects could be distinguished by differences of predicates.

‘The law-giver should be no more impassioned than the geometrician. They are both solving problems by sober calculation.’ The quotation is from Jeremy Bentham’s Deontology,1 and it gives a measure both of his peculiarity and his importance as a moral philosopher. His peculiarity was that he believed that morals and politics could be made into a branch of science: his importance lies in the way in which he worked this theory out.

BERTRAND RUSSELL is the Picasso of modern philosophy. He has expressed himself very differently at different periods; and in each period he has exerted deservedly great influence and aroused extravagant hostility. That his works have always produced so strong a reaction is partly due to the sharpness and clarity with which they have been written. But this, unfortunately, does not hold good of his latest book, which differs not so much in its subject matter as in its style from anything that he has written before. It deals in a comprehensive, if unsystematic, way with the class of philosophical problems that are conventionally brought under the heading of the theory of knowledge. Many interesting questions are raised by it and ingenious answers suggested. But the argument as a whole suffers from a hesitancy and discursiveness which make it unexpectedly difficult to follow. An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth By Bertrand Russell. Pp. 352. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1940). 12s. 6d. net

Prompt relief of priapism is essential to prevent importance. We report a case of priapism treated rapidly and effectively with intracorporeal epinephrine.