ences itself remains imperfect so long as we treat it as merely
something which 'happens to be the case' that there are many things and
many kinds of things in the universe and also a number of relations in
which they 'happen' to stand. It is significant that in his later
writings Mr. Russell has been driven to abandon the concept of personal
identity, which is so fundamental for practical life, and to assert that
each of us is not one man but an infinite series of men of whom each
only exists for a mathematical instant. I am sure that such a theory
requires the abandonment of the whole notion of value as an illusion,
and even more sure that it is ruinous to any practical rule of living,
and I cannot believe in the 'philosophy' of any man who is satisfied to
base his practice on what he regards as detected illusion. Hence I find
myself strongly in sympathy with my eminent Italian colleague Professor
Varisco, who has devoted his two chief works (_I Massimi Problemi_ and
_Conosci Te Stesso_) to an exceedingly subtle attempt to show that 'what
ought to be', in Platonic phrase 'the Good', is in the end the single
principle from which all things derive their existence as well as their
value. Mr. Russell's philosophy saves us half Plato, and that is much,
but I am convinced that it is whole and entire Plato whom a profounder
philosophy would preserve for us. I believe personally that such a
philosophy will be led, as Plato was in the end led, to a theistic
interpretation of life, that it is in the living God Who is over all,
blessed for ever, that it will find the common source of fact and value.
And again I believe that it will be led to its result very largely by
what is, after all, perhaps the profoundest thought of Kant, the
conviction that the most illuminating fact of all is the _fact_ of the
absolute and unconditional obligatoriness of the law of right. It is
precisely here that fact and value most obviously meet. For when we ask
ourselves what in fact we are, we shall assuredly find no true answer to
this question about what _is_ if we forget that we are first and
foremost beings who _ought_ to follow a certain way of life, and to
follow it for no other reason than that it is good. But I cannot, of
course, offer reasons here for this conviction, though I am sure that
adequate reasons can be given. Here I must be content to state this
ultimate conviction as a 'theological superstition', or, as I should
prefer to put it w