ONE FEELS THAT A perceptive reader of Hume should not be so certain of any of this, and in true anti-foundationalist/rationalist spirit might instead manage at least one cheer for prejudice, or at least for animal belief. If we are honest, we have to acknowledge that there is a sense in which we do not really believe in philosophy as critical rationalism. We will tend to use philosophy’s critical edge highly selectively, against believers in fairies and in the literal truth of the book of Genesis, but not against the things which go to constitute our own ‘robust common sense’, hardly recognising the variability of what over the years has been taken to shelter under the umbrella of robust common sense.

The whole Millian enterprise of continuous criticism, the enterprise of critical rationalism, in other words, is open to question in further way, as Jacob Burckhardt maintained: ‘Keeping everything persistently subject to discussion and change… will end up with a host of irreconcilable contradictions’. The point is that continual scrutiny and review of one’s assumptions will deprive one of any firm ground from which to base judgements. In the practical, but not only the practical sphere, there can be many starting points and many goals which are not simultaneously reconcilable. To take a standard example, in the political sphere equality will conflict with liberty and liberty may impede security. But similar tensions will arise in the epistemological domain. Certainty may be bought, relatively speaking anyway, but at the expense of content and creativity. In aesthetics concentrating on formal perfection may well produce dullness; on the other hand exuberance may undermine structure and clarity. Trying to achieve all these goals together will be impossible, as they are not reconcilable in a pure state. In so far as criticism may proceed simultaneously from any and all directions, it too will undermine the coherence of one’s projects. We are drawn back once more to the adoption of priorities, to premisses, in other words.

I say ‘adoption’ rather than ‘choice’ here because I do not think that people chose premises or ends in the way they might chose a tin of biscuits. Normally we do not see ourselves as confronted with equally valuable or valid alternatives, for one of which we simply have to opt. Many factors bear on which premises people adopt, social, psychological, stylistic, developmental and, up to a point, rational. Nor do I want to deny that sometimes people do change their fundamental commitments, intellectual and moral, as much as any others. The claim I am making is that intellectual-cum-argumentative factors are not going to be sufficient in the sense that they are rationally compelling in themselves and on their own. Even if they seem to be to the one who loses a faith, they will not really be. Faiths can always be rationally defended as well as attacked, and if a particular line of defence seems to a majority at a particular time to be unconvincing and if a particular convert chooses not to give much weight to the defences offered by those whose group he is leaving, that may not be for wholly rational reasons.

In The Russell/Bradley Dispute and Its Significance for Twentieth Century Philosophy, Stewart Candlish shows convincingly enough that Russell, though defeating Bradley comprehensively in terms of influence and the course of philosophical history (including the later writing of that history), did not actually provide rationally compelling refutations of Bradley’s views. In discussing this episode Candlish refers to a remark of Geoffrey Warnock, that philosophical systems such as Bradley’s are more vulnerable to ennui than to disproof. Comparing the turgid and convoluted texts of the English idealists with the briskness and crispness and day-light feel of Russell and Ayer, one can certainly appreciate Warnock’s observation. Further, for many, now as then, there is something reactionary and claustrophobic about the atmosphere of idealism, as compared to the progressive and energetic debunking of worn-out pieties and religion, spilt or otherwise, which we find in Russell, Ayer and their successors, as they force their opponents to say what they mean and profess to find their answers incomprehensible.