SIR,—It was a relief to turn from your correspond- ence
columns to your wise editorial of March 30 on 'The Two Cultures.' You comment on the omis- sion of 'philosophy' from the Rede Lecture and explain that you are using the word to stand for 'that effort to impart moral direction, which is to be found in the best nineteenth-century English writers' (and in some of their successors as well, one might add: D, H. Lawrence, Middleton Murry, T. S. Eliot and Dr. Leavis himself, for example). You then observe that 'Knowledge is power, but it is not the knowledge of how that power should be used. That is the affair of conscience and conscious- ness.' I take you to mean that conscience and con- sciousness are the affair of philosophy.
That this view of philosophy is often rejected nowadays is one of the worst symptoms of our cultural decadence. Long may you continue to affirm it, and so help to prevent us from being bundled into a 'scientistic' future 'like children in the arms of an automaton.'
RICHARD REES
London, SW 3
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