Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

interventions were his recruiting trips into the south Wales valleys in the course of the war on behalf of Lloyd George's government. Boucher and Vincent report these trips with little comment, but surely they must have given rise to some conflict in Jones's mind in view of Christian pacifist traditions in Wales and Jones's own loss of a son in the slaughter in France. Like his fellow Hegelian, T. H. Green, Jones was an ardent supporter of the Liberal cause and followed with close interest the movement for the disestablishment of the Church in Wales, serving on the Royal Commission on the Welsh churches in 1907. Jones was not a nationalist but in common with many Welsh Liberals aspired to a form of self-rule for Wales. It was a matter on which he thought Lloyd George might deliver, but Jones seemed to accept that the Welsh issue was not a top priority for the British government. There are grounds for Jones's support for Welsh nationhood in Hegel's philosophy. Hegel believed that national institutions and cultural practices were vital transmitters of ethical values. He marked himself off from Kant through the concreteness of his ethics and believed that the voice of inner conscience should take second place to the observance of the customs and laws of one's land. But for Hegel it was not so much the ethnic community to which men and women owed their primary allegiance as the legal community of which they were part. The ethnic community played its proper role in so far as it supported and reinforced the established sovereign. As a Hegelian, then, Jones had to marry his support for a distinctive Welsh identity with a loyalty to the institutions of the British Crown. He felt that he achieved this remarkable feat, stating that Wales 'is a partner in all the privileges and responsibilities of the Empire' and what it asks of West- minster is 'room to live within that Empire its own life' (p. 140). Although presented as an account of Jones's social and political philosophy, the book also provides a valuable introduction to Jones's philosophy as a whole. Chapters Two, Three and Four are devoted to an exposition of Jones's views on knowledge, religion and evolution. In the theory of knowledge Jones follows Hegel closely in doubting the value of any prior inquiry into the nature of knowledge. In keeping with Hegel's argument in the Phenomenology of Spirit Jones argues that if we are validly to set limits to our knowledge then this presupposes that we already know what knowledge is. Both Jones and Hegel are trying to undermine Kant's claim that there are limits to the application of human reason. In Kant's view we can only know things as they appear to the human senses and, as they are constituted by the human mind, so we could not attribute ratio- nality to the universe in itself. In contrast, Hegelians like Jones believed that the universe was inherently rational and it was the job of the philosopher to demonstrate that rationality. Because of his Hegelian rationalism, Jones's view of religion was bound to be differ- ent from that of the ordinary Christian. This must have led to considerable tensions as Jones was first developing his Hegelian convictions. It was Jones's Calvinist Methodism which had first propelled him into philosophical studies. As Hegel saw it, religion (and, in particular, the revealed religion of Christianity) represented the realization of the rational spirit which underlay the universe but at a lower level than philosophy. Religion depicted in a pictorial form the truth of Absolute Idealism. But philosophy was the sphere in which this Absolute Idealism was made most fully manifest. Quite literally, in