"ALL MEANINGFUL KNOWLEDGE IS FOR THE SAKE OF ACTION, AND ALL MEANINGFUL ACTION FOR THE SAKE OF FRIENDSHIP."(SA p.15)underline text

1. The Reality of Religion. "To think of Religion as illusory and pointless has always seemed to me as preposterous as it would be to say the same thing of Music."(SRR p.2).

2. Human Nature as inherently social. "There are few things that I desire to do… which do not depend upon the active cooperation of others… I need you in order to be myself." (PR, passim). "We become persons in community in virtue of our relations to others. Human life is inherently a common life." (CF p. 37)

3. Community and Society compared. "Associations of Human beings are of various types, resting on different principles (of which) two are so radically distinct that confusion has dangerous consequences. There is one type constituted by a common purpose; there is another which consists in the sharing of a common life. It is essential to distinguish these; and I propose to use the terms "society" and "community" for this purpose." (CF p. 35)

4. Politics and Religion. "The proper relation of religion and politics is the unsolved problem of our civilisation. Our tendency is to keep the two in different compartments… This way of dodging the difficulty has had disastrous consequences. What is sought is the clue to their harmonious integration. If the functional life is for the personal life it is also true and important that the personal life is only possible through the functional life." ("Persons and Functions" series, Talk III, December 1941.)… "The final issue we shall have to face will be concerned with the economics of the Kingdom of Heaven." (SRR p. 79)

5. Relation between thinking and action. "Reality in human life is action… The real world is the world defined by action, in action. Ideas are the eyes of action"… "Idealism consists finally in the divorce between love and hunger, through which love becomes an ideal and hunger is left to control and determine action." (CS pp. 151, 152)

6. Information compared with knowledge. "Knowledge is always personal, always somebody's; but information is just anybody's… Science is not the personal knowledge of this scientist or that; it is information out of which you and I can pick or choose what we want for our purposes… This concentration on the object, characteristic of the 'information' attitude, is often called objectivity. It is really only impersonality." (RE pp. 150, 151)

7. Scientific Method. "The Scientific attitude and method is an effort to amend beliefs by accepting them as a basis for experiment. We might say… that the scientist experiments with his knowledge not in order to prove it true, but in the hope of proving it faulty." (Adventure (1927) p. 35)

8. Reason. "Reason is the capacity to behave consciously in terms of the nature of what is not ourselves… in terms of the nature of the object; that is to say, to behave objectively." (RE p. 19)