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In the first chapter, for instance, a number of pages are devoted to arguments which are in fact objections to views held about perception by the logical positivists and similar thinkers, but there is nothing in the text to tell one this. It would also have been helpful, I think, to get us to see the direction of his views, had Hampshire made references to writers whose opinions on various topics he either shares or has been interestingly influenced by. Some of what he says about action and self-knowledge, for instance, bears important relations to some French writing which has not previously had much effect in this country: to Sartre and, in particular, Merleau-Ponty, among contemporaries, and to an earlier tradition going back to Maine de Biran.

He starts afresh, with lots of good sense and a genuine humility, to put together some thoughts about his own and the general experience. This gives his work a first-handness not to be despised: it is not derivative or ‘literary’ in the bad sense. Yet the price is high. By banishing from his mind that less general experience, those warnings of complexity, that the literature of love offers he hands himself over to his own particular demon—Â�a kind of clubman’s crassness which can be heard over and over again in these pages striking a false note.

The point is made over and over again, in different connexions: the point that what was said in the past is relevant to scientific inquiry only if it can stand the tests of rigorous inquiry in the present. Thus Descartes in the earliest of his philosophical works, the Rules for the Direction of Understanding, advocates a method for discovering the truth, and characteristically remarks by the way: ‘Neither, though we have mastered all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, if yet we have not the capacity for passing a solid judgment on these matters, shall we become philosophers; we should have acquired the knowledge, not of a science, but of history’.