Full text of "Fate of man"

^n£3i«r'''^^'^''*'^^t'*CM^'*y **'"^ UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES COLLEGE LIBRARY Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2010 witii funding from Lyrasis IVIembers and Sloan Foundation http://www.archive.org/details/fateofmanOObrin The Fate of Man BY CRANE BRINTON A History of Western Morals (1959) The Anatomy of Revolution (1957) Modern Civilization (1957) Portable Age of Reason Reader (1956) History of Civilization (1955) The World of History (1954) The Shaping of the Modern Mind (1954) The Temper of Western Europe (1953) English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1950) Ideas and Men (1950) The United States and Britain (1948) From Many One (1948) Nietzsche (1941) The Lives of Talleyrand (1936) French Revolutionary Legislation on Dlegitimacy (1936) A Decade of Revolution (1935) The Jacobins (1930) Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (1926) THE FATE OF MAN Edited with Introductions and Postscript by CRANE BRINTON GEORGE BRAZILLER NEW YORK 1961 Copyright © 1961 by Crane Brinton All rights reserved For information, address the publisher: George BrazHler, Inc. 215 Park Avenue South, New York 3, N. Y. First Printing — March 1961 Second Printing — October 1962 Third Printing — September 1963 Fourth Printing — February 1965 ibrary of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-8477 Printed in the United States of America Acknowledgments The editor and publisher have made every effort to determine and credit the holders of copyright of the selections in this book. Any errors or omissions may be rectified in future volumes. For permission to use these selections, the editor and publisher make grateful acknowledgment to the following authors, publishers and agents, who reserve all rights for the matter reprinted: From THE FUTURE OF UNBELIEF by Gerhard Szczesny. Translated by Edward B. Garside. Copyright © 1961 by George Braziller, Inc. By permission of George Braziller, Inc. From THE NAVAHO by Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton. Copyright, 1946, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. By permission of Harvard Uni- versity Press. From PROCESS AND REALITY by Alfred North Whitehead. Copyright 1929 by The Macmillan Company, copyright renewed 1957. By permission of The Mac- millan Company. From OF STARS AND MEN by Harlow Shapley. Copyright, ©, 1958, by Harlow Shapley. By permission of Beacon Press and Elek Books Limited. From ARISTOTLE by John Herman Randall, Jr. Copyright © Columbia University Press, New York. By permission of Columbia University Press. From A COMPANION TO THE SUMMA, Vol. IV, by Walter Farrell, O. P. Copy- right, 1942 by Sheed & Ward. By permission of Sheed & Ward, Inc. From SKETCH FOR A HISTORICAL PICTURE OF THE HUMAN MIND by the Marquis de Condorcet. Translated by Jane Barraclough. By permission of The Noonday Press; Library of Ideas and Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. Acknowledgments v From THE MARXIAN THEORY OF THE STATE by Sherman H. M. Chang. Copyright 1931 by the Author. By permission of University of Pennsylvania Press. From ETHICS AND LANGUAGE by Charles L. Stevenson. © 1944 By Yale Uni- versity Press, Inc. By permission of Yale University Press. From A MODERN THEORY OF ETHICS by Olaf Stapledon. By permission of Methuen & Co. Ltd. and the Executrix of the Estate of Olaf Stapledon. From THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY by Aldous Huxley. Copyright 1944, 1945 by Aldous Huxley. By permission of Harper & Brothers and Chatto and Windus Ltd. From MEISTER ECKHART, a modern translation by Raymond B. Blakney. Copy- right 1941 by Harper & Brothers. By permission of Harper & Brothers. From BLAISE PASCAL by Ernest Mortimer. Copyright © 1959 by Ernest Mortimer. By permission of Harper & Brothers and Methuen & Co. Ltd. From THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. Translated by John Jay Chapman. Copy- right, 1930, by John Jay Chapman. By permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. From THE MAXIMS OF LA ROCHEFOUCAULD. Translated by Louis Kronen- berger. © Copyright 1959 by Random House, Inc. By permission of Random House, Inc. From THE LICHTENBERG READER. Edited and Translated by Franz H. Mautner and Henry Hatfield. By permission of Beacon Press, Inc. From HUMAN NATURE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION by Joseph Wood Krutch. © Copyright 1959 by Joseph Wood Krutch. By permission of Random House, Inc. From IN SEARCH OF HUMANITY by Alfred Cobban. © Alfred Cobban 1960. By permission of George Braziller, Inc. and Jonathan Cape Ltd. From ISSUES OF FREEDOM by Herbert J. MuUer. Copyright © 1960 by Herbert J. MuUer. By permission of Harper & Brothers. From THE CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE. Translated by F. J. Sheed. Copyright, 1943, by Sheed & Ward, Inc. By permission of Sheed & Ward, Inc. and Sheed & Ward Ltd. From BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND SELECTIONS FROM HIS OTHER WRITINGS. Farrand edition. Copyright, 1949, by University of California Press. By permission of University of California Press. From THE TWO CULTURES AND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION by C. P. Snow. © C. P. Snow, 1959. By permission of Cambridge University Press. From THE INTELLECTUALS edited by George B. de Huszar: America's Post- Radical Critics by Harold Rosenberg. (Originally published in The Tradition of the New by Harold Rosenberg, Horizon Press, 1959-60.) Copyright © 1960 by The Free Press, a Corporation. By permission of The Free Press, Horizon Press, and Harold Rosenberg. From WORDS AND THINGS by Ernest Gellner. © 1959 by Ernest Gellner. By permission of Beacon Press and Victor GoUancz, Ltd. From THE WAY THINGS ARE by P. W. Bridgman. Copyright 1959 by the Presi- dent and Fellows of Harvard College. By permission of Harvard University Press. From SOCIALISM: UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC by Frederick Engels. Translated by Edward AveUng. Copyright, 1935, by International Publishers Co., Inc. By Dermission of International Publishers. Vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS From THE PATTERN OF THE PAST: CAN WE DETERMINE IT? by Pieter Geyl, Arnold J. Toynbee, and Pitirim Sorokin. Copyright, 1949, The Beacon Press. By permission of Beacon Press and Uitgeverij F. G. Kroonder. From THE FUTURE AS HISTORY by Robert Heilbroner. Copyright © 1959, 1960, by Robert L. Heilbroner. By permission of Harper & Brothers and William Morris Agency, Inc. From THE RECOVERY OF BELIEF by C. E. M, load. By permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. From AN OUTLINE OF MAN'S KNOWLEDGE OF THE MODERN WORLD edited by Lyman Bryson: The Search for Answers by Clarence H. Faust. Copy- right © 1960 by Catherine McGrattan Bryson, Executrix of the estate of Lyman Bryson. By permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc., and published by McGraw- Hill Book Company, Inc. From THE WAY OF ZEN by Alan W. Watts. Copyright © 1957 by Pantheon Books, Inc. By permission of Pantheon Books, Inc. and Thames and Hudson Ltd. From THE STANDARD EDITION OF THE COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD. Translated and edited by James Strachey and Anna Freud. Translation © James Strachey 1959. By permission of Hogarth Press Ltd., Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Sigmund Freud Copyrights Ltd. From THE NEW AGE OF FAITH by John Langdon-Davies. Copyright, 1925, by The Viking Press, Inc., 1953 by John Langdon-Davies. By permission of The Viking Press, Inc. From MAN THE UNKNOWN by Alexis Carrel. Copyright 1935 by Harper & Brothers. By permission of Harper & Brothers. From ACCENT ON FORM by Lancelot Law Whyte. Copyright 1954 by Lancelot Law Whyte. By permission of Harper & Brothers and Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. From SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN TEMPERAMENT by Erwin Schrodinger. Copyright © by Erwin Schrodinger 1935. (Copyright © by Dover Publications, Inc. 1957 under the title SCIENCE THEORY AND MAN.) By permission of George Allen & Unwin Ltd. From WHAT SCIENCE STANDS FOR by Orr, Hill, Philip, Gregory, Hall and Hogben. By permission of George Allen & Unwin Ltd. From MIRAGE OF HEALTH by Rene Dubos. Copyright © 1959 by Rene Dubos. By permission of Harper & Brothers and George Allen & Unwin Ltd. From THE FOREST AND THE SEA by Marston Bates. © Copyright 1960 by Marston Bates. By permission of Random House, Inc. and Museum Press Ltd. From THE NEXT MILLION YEARS by Charles Galton Darwin. Copyright 1952 by Charles Galton Darwin. By permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc. and Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd. From POSTHISTORIC MAN by Roderick Seidenberg. Copyright 1950 by the Uni- versity of North Carolina Press. By permission of The University of North Caro- lina Press. From Encounter, May 1960: "Inventing the Future" by Dennis Gabor. © 1960 by Encounter Ltd. By permission of Encounter. I wish to thank the many authors and publishers who have made it possible for me to include in this book so much contemporary writing. In particular, I am grateful to Henry Murray, whose pro- vocative Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1959 set my mind run- ning on several different tacks, one of which ended — for the moment — with this book. My gratitude may seem at first sight paradoxically near ingratitude, since one of my purposes has been to demonstrate how hard it will be, on these matters of the condition of man, to achieve the refreshing meeting of minds Dr. Murray wants. But I take it that we both believe that disagreement must precede agreement in our kind of society. The professional ethics of that singular vocation, book pub- lishing, will not permit me to single out by name the members of the Braziller staff who have done so much to make this book. I am sure they know how grateful I am. Finally, and once more, I wish to thank my secretary. Miss Elizabeth F. Hoxie, for invaluable help with type- script and proofs. CRANE BRINTON Cambridge, November 15, 1960 Table of Contents I. SETTING THE PROBLEM 3 HENRY A. MURRAY Beyond Yesterday's Idealisms 11 GERHARD SZCZESNY The Future of Unbelief 19 n. THE WAY THINGS ARE 27 A. Order: Cosmologies, Cosmogonies, Cosmographies 31 GENESIS 32 CLYDE KLUCKHOHN and DOROTHEA LEIGHTON The Navaho View of Life 37 J. J. M. DE GROOT The Tao or Order of the Universe 45 LUCRETIUS The Formation of the World 51 ST. AUGUSTINE The Cosmology of Genesis 57 ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD God and the World 63 HARLOW SHAPLEY Organization in Nature 71 B. Purpose: Teleologies, Eschatologies 77 PLATO Priority of the Soul 78 ARISTOTLE The Order of Being 84 LUCRETIUS The Universe Not Designed for Man 91 ST. THOMAS AQUINAS The End of Life 96 MARQUIS DE CONDORCET The Doctrine of Natural Salvation 101 HERBERT SPENCER Reconciliation of Science and Religion 112 SHERMAN H. M. CHANG The Stateless-Communistic Society of Marxism 121 X CONTENTS C. Right and Wrong: Ethics 127 THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS The Ten Commandments 128 The Sermon on the Mount 130 PLATO The Natural Appetites 132 ARISTOTLE Classification of Virtues 138 EPICTETUS The Practice of Stoicism 141 ST. AUGUSTINE Christian vs. Pagan Ethics 145 IMMANUEL KANT The Metaphysics of Morality 155 JEREMY BENTHAM The Principle of Utility 161 CHARLES L. STEVENSON The Semantic Approach 164 OLAF STAPLEDON Moral Zeal, Disillusion, and Ecstasy 171 D. Transcendence: The Mystic Dimension 179 ALDOUS HUXLEY The Perennial Flight 180 ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS Practical Advice to the Religious 185 MEISTER ECKHART Idealism 191 BLAISE PASCAL Renunciation 195 III. THE WAY MEN ARE 199 SOPHOCLES "What a Thing Is Man!" 203 ECCLESL\STES 205 FRANCOIS, DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD Aphorisms 207 ANTHONY, EARL OF SHAFTESBURY Concerning Enthusiasm 212 BERNARD MANDEVILLE Private Vices, Public Honor 218 Contents xi JEAN DE LA BRUYERE Varieties of Character 224 GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG More Aphorisms 229 FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE Human, All Too Human 234 JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH The Conditioned Man 242 ALFRED COBBAN The Decline in Ethical Judgment 255 HERBERT J. MULLER The Nature of Man 261 ST. AUGUSTINE Confession 270 FRANCOIS, DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD Self-Portrait 273 JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU One Confession Out of Many 277 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN Moral Perfection 285 IV. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: SEA OF TROUBLES 291 A. The Alienation of the Intellectuals 295 C. P. SNOW The Literati and the Scientists 296 CRANE BRINTON On the Discrimination of Anti-Intellectualisms 304 HAROLD ROSENBERG America's Post-Radical Critics 314 B. Meaning Is All: The Linguistic Philosophy 319 ERNEST GELLNER The Mystical Philistines 320 P. W. BRIDGMAN Words and Meanings 328 C. Historical Inevitability 335 FRIEDRICH ENGELS Scientific Socialism 336 ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE The Pattern of the Past 340 Xii CONTENTS ROBERT L. HEILBRONER The Limits of Determinism 352 D. Back to Religion 365 C. E. M. JOAD The Plight of the Intellectual 366 A. R. ORAGE Life of Gymnastics "ill CLARENCE H. FAUST The Search for Answers 381 ALAN W. WATTS "Sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing" 391 CARL GUSTAV JUNG The Modern Spiritual Problem 403 E. The Voices of Science 419 SIGMUND FREUD Psycho-Analysis 420 JOHN LANGDON-DAVIES Science, the New Religion 427 ALEXIS CARREL The Remaking of Man 436 LANCELOT LAW WHYTE The Search for Understanding AAA ERWIN SCHRODINGER The Not-Quite-Exact Sciences 452 ARCHIBALD VIVIAN HILL The Humanity of Science 463 F. Inventing the Future 467 RENfi JULES DUBOS Utopias and Human Goals 468 MARSTON BATES Man and the Balance of Nature 482 SIR CHARLES GALTON DARWIN The Next Million Years 491 RODERICK SEIDENBERG Another Distant View 505 DENNIS GABOR The New Golden Age 514 Postscript: The Tradition of the Enhghtenment 519 Reading Suggestions 529 PART I SETTING THE PROBLEM I Setting the Problem THE VERY DISPARATE WRITINGS GATHERED IN THIS BOOK ARE THERE FOR a purpose. They are part — a very small part indeed — of what an inter- ested mid-twentieth-century American might use to help locate himself in the bewildering world of twentieth-century thought on the great ques- tions we still call philosophical. The book is frankly and unashamedly didactic. It is one of a genre that, lowly though it be in the hierarchy of literary genres, is surely indispensable in our democracy: the do-it-yourself book. Make, if you must and can, your own world-view. I shall shortly attempt to explain more fuUy what might be done with the materials here collected. But first, in fairness to the prospective reader, I must make clear what this anthology is not. It is not a collection of excerpts from the best books, the greatest books, the books everyone ought to read. It is not a chronologically arranged book of readings in formal philosophy or in the now fashionable history of ideas, designed to ac- company a systematic textbook in these subjects. It is not a collection of "primary" source materials in original forms. Indeed, I have not hesi- tated to use "secondary" materials, good clear expositions of one man's ideas by another man, especially when the original is gracelessly written, very technical, difficult, as, for example, the writings of Aristotle in the form we have received them. This book is not, though a sampling of its later pages might make it appear so, a collection of essays on contemporary "problems," a collection designed to elicit thoughtful and literate composi- tions from freshman English classes. It is not a collection of pieces that I like, or agree with, or even find always very interesting. But it is, I hope, a useful and only very roughly systematic assemblage of a wide range of human thinking about man's place in the universe. It is meant for the relatively few who feel a need to do such thinking for themselves. Are they indeed in our mid-twentieth-century world few? We encounter at the very start of our enterprise one of the most difficult and contro- versial aspects of the basic problem of man's fate as it seems to men today. Are men — Western men, men of the free world at least — in unusually large numbers puzzled, disturbed, adrift — "alienated," as the psychologist 3 4 SETTING THE PROBLEM likes to put it? I give later in this introductory section a firm statement that ours is indeed an age of — I put it mildly — spiritual confusion, and that we need badly to clear that confusion up. But let me cite now two passages from contemporary writers, both trained psychologists, which put clearly and succinctly the opinion, widespread among the articulate few, that the less-articulate many are today in a state of intellectual and emotional crisis, are, in fact, "alienated." First, here is the distinguished psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim^: We are in great haste to send and receive messages from outer space. But so hectic and often so tedious are our days, that many of us have nothing of importance to communicate to those close to us. Never before have so many had it so good; no longer do we tremble in fear of sickness or hunger, of hidden evils in the dark, of the spell of witches. The burden of killing toil has been lifted from us, and machines, not the labor of our hands, will soon provide us with nearly all we need, and much that we don't really need. We have inherited freedoms man has striven after for centuries. Because of all this and much more we should be living in a dawn of great promise. But now that we are freer to enjoy life, we are deeply frustrated in our disappointment that the freedom and comfort, sought with such deep desire, do not give meaning and purpose to our lives. With so much at hand that generations have striven for, how bewildering that the meaning of life should evade us. Freedoms we have, broader than ever before. But more than ever before most of us yearn for a self realization that eludes us, while we abide restless in the midst of plenty. As we achieve freedom, we are frightened by social forces that seem to suffocate us, seem to move in on us from all parts of an ever contracting world. The tedium and dissatisfaction with life are becoming so great that many are getting ready to let freedom slip out of their hands. They feel it is all too complicated, too difficult to hold on to it, and to themselves. If meaning has gone out of their lives, then at least they wish not to be responsible for it, to let society carry the burden of failure and guilt. Just how to achieve self realization, to preserve freedom, and adapt society to both, seems increasingly harder to know; it is felt as a central, overwhelming problem of our days. From finding security in a repetition of sameness, of only slight and slow variations, we are having to live with a very different kind of security; one that must rest on achieving the good life, with very little chance to predict the out- come of our actions in a fast changing world. To manage such a feat, heart and reason can no longer be kept in their separate places. Work and art, family and society, can no longer develop in isolation from each other. The daring heart must invade reason with its own living warmth, even if the symmetry of reason must give way to admit love and the pulsation of life. No longer can we be satisfied with a life where the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know. Our hearts must know the world of reason, and reason must be guided by an informed heart. ^ Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart (Glencoe, III.: The Free Press, 1960), pp. vii-viii. This interesting and controversial book deals centrally with Dr. Bettel- heim's own direct experience of Nazi Germany, including a year in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. It is also a tract for the times, worried but not alarmist. The reader will find a stimulating discussion of the meaning of attitudes re- vealed in the Diary of Anne Frank, pp. 252-254. Setting the Problem 5 Second, here is a much more worried passage from a young Harvard psychologist, Kenneth Keniston^: This is an age that inspires little enthusiasm. In the industrial West, and increasingly now in the uncommitted nations of the East, ardor is lacking; instead men talk of their growing distance from one another, from their social order, from their work and play, and even from the values that in a perhaps romanticized past seem to have given their lives cohesiveness and direction. Horatio Alger is replaced by Timon, Napoleon by Ishmael, and even Lincoln now seems pallid before the defiant images of "hoods" and "beats." The vocabu- lary of social commentary is dominated by terms that characterize this distance: alienation, estrangement, separation, withdrawal, indifference, disaffection, apathy, noninvolvement, neutralism — all these words describe the increasing distance between men and their former objects of love, commitment, loyalty, devotion and reverence. Alienation, once seen as the consequence of a cruel (but changeable) economic order, has become for many the central fact of human existence, characterizing man's "thrown-ness" into a world in which he has no inherent place. Formerly imposed upon men by the world around them, estrangement increasingly is chosen by them as their dominant reaction to the world. Dr. Keniston's recital of woe must not be confused with what the his- torian of Western thought knows is never quite absent from the record — that is, the complaints of the bright young men — and those not so young but still bright — against the ways of their less-gifted fellow men. The now fashionable phrase, "alienation of the intellectuals," if it is taken to mean no more than the discontent of sensitive, high-minded, imaginatively in- ventive and adventurous persons, expressed in particular over the be- havior of the rest of the human race, may be said almost to describe a constant of history. You can find such alienation in the writers of ages that now look most golden and happy, in Plato, in Shakespeare, in almost all the writers of that "Century of Hope," the nineteenth. Here is an example from yesterday: Why have you Bloomers and Women's Rights Men, and strong-minded women, and Mormons, and anti-renters, and "vote myself a farm" men, Millerites, and Spiritual Rappers, and Shakers, and Widow Wakemanites, and Agrarians, and Grahamites, and a thousand other superstitious and infidel Isms at the North? Why is there faith in nothing, speculation about everything? Why is this un- settled, half-demented, state of the human mind co-extensive in time and space, with free society? Why is Western Europe now starving? and why has it been fighting and starving for seventy years? Why all this, except that free society is a failure? Slave society needs no defense till some other permanently prac- ticable form of society has been discovered. Nobody at the North who reads my book will attempt to reply to it; for all the learned abolitionists had uncon- sciously discovered and proclaimed the failure of free society long before I did.^ Perhaps one might say that Fitzhugh, a Southern journalist who wrote ^ Kenneth Keniston, "Alienation and the Decline of Utopia," American Scholar, 29, Number 2 (Spring, 1960), p. 1. ^Letter from George Fitzhugh to A. Hogeboom, 14 January 1856, quoted in the John Harvard Library edition of Fitzhugh's Cannibals All, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. xxvii. 6 SETTING THE PROBLEM in defense of slavery, meant by "unsettled, half-demented" substantially what Dr. Keniston means by "alienated"? And a hundred years ago ap- parently there were those who were aware of the unconscious. This brief paragraph deserves careful analysis, for some of it drives home the eternal alienation — at least in what Fitzhugh calls "free society" — of the intel- lectual; it reminds us that "multanimity"* among men is not just of today; and it exhibits one of the weaknesses of these fighters with words, namely their disregard for facts. Surely Western Europe did not starve in those marvelous seventy years of Progress, 1786-1856? But the alienation of our intellectuals today, if Henry Murray, Gerhard Szczesny, Kenneth Keniston, and a host of others are right, is something more than indignant impatience with the imperfections of human insti- tutions and human "nature." Our intellectuals are discontented with them- selves as well as with the universe and their fellows, are prey to an existentialist whistling in the dark, are above all uncertain as to whether they really know, can really plan, let alone achieve, a better way of life here on earth. In fine simple terms: they lack what may well be an essen- tial of human existence, a confident sense that they understand their place in the universe; they lack a firm metaphysics, a firm teleology, a firm cos- mology; perhaps we might as well say they lack a firm, consohng, yet duly stimulating religion. Now the above is put with some exaggeration. Historians in the future, with a perspective we cannot gain, may find our twentieth century a fertile and creative time, no more disturbed than seems necessary if we are to grow, or at least, change. Certainly our leading intellectuals are not re- signed, defeated, apathetic; they may be bewildered, but they are also indignant, and very, very articulate. I quite deliberately did not write above that they lack a firm ethics, for they clearly do not have any such lack. Their standards of right and wrong are not very different from those of theur grandparents, nor, except in manners rather than in morals, is their behavior very different. I feel sure that no one who knows the ways of American intellectuals — teachers, preachers, writers, artists, yes, scien- tists, for they too are intellectuals — can fairly maintain that as a group they are less well behaved than the rest of Americans. Their spiritual troubles, which are real, have not for the most part undermined their moral sense. I say this firmly, in part just because of recent T.V. quiz scandals. But how about the rest of our country or, indeed, of the West, for the problem is by no means pecuUarly American? Is this aUenation of the intellectuals also an alienation of the nonintellectuals? Are the many spiritually disoriented, disturbed, and, if so, are the moral consequences of such widespread popular alienation Ukely to be a danger to the very *I find it hard to believe that I have coined so obvious and useful a word as "multanimity," but I confess I have not found it in any of the three unabridged dictionaries I have consulted. — C. B. Setting the Problem ^ 7 existence of the free world? These are enormous questions, to which the wisest of our spiritual guides and the ablest of our social scientists cannot give the kind of answer we should all like to have. I should not dream of attempting such an answer, but I should like, in order to clarify to the reader just what I expect of him, to set down very briefly indeed a few propositions on this subject, propositions which I trust will encourage the fit reader to go on, and encourage the unfit reader (who may well be very fit indeed for other things, indeed, for other reading) to refrain from go- ing on. First, though probably all human beings save for the very feeble- minded do have what I shall call "metaphysical concern," do have "ideas" about religion, philosophy, man's condition and man's fate, only a few "think" about such matters; probably only a few can think about such matters. I realize that this is a very controversial statement, and one that can hardly be verified experimentally, at least not in the present state of the appropriate social sciences. Yet the range or spectrum of individual human differences in readily assessed external or "physical" capacities and achievements is great and obvious even to the most democratically inspired. We do not usually expect most people to be, or even to become, platinum blondes, possessors of absolute pitch, .300 hitters, or heroic mountain cHmbers; notably, we do not expect football linemen to serve also as coxswains of eight-oared shells; and — though the ardent demo- cratic egalitarians take this hard — we are resigned to the apparent fact that the male and female of the human species are not quite interchange- able in all respects. I think it clear that not all human beings can think. Of course I use that word snobbishly, imprecisely — and usefully — to mean a particular kind of thinking, the kind of manipulation of "abstractions" you and I are now indulging ourselves in, thinking "philosophically." This kind of thinking is also, for the person doing it, in a sense deserving of those nice adjectives "original" and "creative" even though it results in nothing that has not been thought and said many many times before. Thinking, like loving, is for the individual always a unique and pristine adventure. At this point, I face great temptations to digression and amplification. Let me content myself with noting that our Western tradition, if somewhat ambivalent toward this kind of thinking, on the whole has held it to be a form of privileged, that is, aristocratic, excellence, which is one reason why so many Americans would like to believe that everyone can and ought to indulge in it. In a variant form, still essentially philosophical, which is now called scientific, thinking is today held in high esteem by most Ameri- cans. Second, though probably all mentally normal persons from infancy on do think in concrete daily matters of problem-solving in ways by no means wholly unlike the ways of philosophic or scientific or abstract or analytical thought, it seems likely that their opinions in actual philosophy, 8 SETTING THE PROBLEM religion, ethics and the like are pretty painlessly acquired by a kind of cultural inheritance and training; or at any rate that, once acquired, these opinions are held comfortably, firmly, consciously, of course, but not proddingly. They are part of the ritual regularities of Ufe. Conservative social thinkers — Burke, Le Play, Pareto — have long recognized the im- portance of these "inherited" and consoling beliefs; hopelessly unreaUstic thinkers — ^Uke a John Stuart Mill — themselves always thinking, thinking, have wholly misunderstood them, even to the point of maintaining that the unhappy holders actually find their treasured beUefs ("dogmas," hor- rid word) a burden. Now I am at least unconvinced that the ahenation of the intellectuals in our modern West has spread very far among the non-intellectual (though not stupid) many. Enlightened secularists, numerous among in- tellectuals, certainly exaggerate the extent to which the fundamentals of our Judaeo-Christian religious inheritance no longer hold the many. Need- less to say, this Judaeo-Christian tradition can give a very firm, and very consoling, grasp on its ultimates. Moreover, most of the surrogates for Christianity, and even a Christianity watered down with doubts as to possible transcendence of the this-world of science, can and do for many in our world fend off the cosmic worries that show up in ahenation. In- deed, even what I like to call, not secular religion, but the religion of the Enlightment, once it is stripped of its expectation of an immediate First Coming of Happiness on this earth, can be and for many is a consoUng faith, suitably prophylactic against the ills of doubt and despair. Third, however, I should indeed agree with Messrs. Murray, Szczesny, Keniston and many others — some of whom I have included in later sec- tions of this book — that the state of mind diagnosed by them as "aliena- tion" is real, important, and to be fought against, even though it is prob- ably limited to the intellectual few. Let me make here three final comments. First, though we do not by any means understand, for complex societies such as those of the West, the relations between the intellectual few and the rest of the society, the two groups are not mutually isolated, nor neces- sarily mutually hostile. Somehow, what the few do does seep down among the many, does affect their behefs and hence theh conduct. Again I brush lightly against an enormous subject. To be summary: I do not think we can have many bright young men in the state of mind Dr. Keniston de- picts without a serious corruption of our whole national will to five. Second, the plight of the ahenated intellectuals, though it is certainly due to many complex and interrelated factors, is in part at least, or so it must seem to a historian, due to their fine American ignorance of the past — even of our own past. They, as grandchildren of the eighteenth- century Enlightment, really were brought up to believe that man's normal condition on earth is the successful pursuit of happiness. As Robert Hetl- broner puts it very succinctly m his recent The Future As History, they believed in the "inevitabiUty of progress," moral as well as material; they Setting the Problem 9 were optimists, indeed Utopians. And they ran up against a catalogue of horrors, from Sarajevo to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Third, and put very briefly: although relatively few in the billions of humanity, these troubled intellectuals are absolutely numerous indeed, and very important. I shall attempt further reflections on these matters at the end of this book. Here let me note that I have shaped this anthology above all for the now unhappy few who feel the need of thinking about man's fate and their own, and who have begun to realize that neither their scholastic education, with its neglect of history for vague and quite unreassuring "social studies" slanted toward the democratic pieties, nor their family training with its excessive lack of the vein of iron, has prepared them for the task of placing themselves in a world like ours. What I have gathered under section IV from twentieth-century writers might well have filled the whole book, but this would have meant the loss of what is in some respects the most important thing for our troubled seekers to face: simple historical perspective. Literally hundreds of generations of thinkers have had to face the kind of problems we face — yes, even the apocalyptic fears of total destruction of the race and the universe. The problems have not of course been identical, and their solutions have varied; it is possible that over the long centuries there has been in these phases of human culture an understandable and explicable process of the kind we understand well enough in biology by a term like "evolution," in technology by terms like "progress" or "greater efl&ciency." But on this very problem of the nature and existence of a "cultural evolution," we in the West are by no means in agreement today, as can be seen from the foreword by Leslie A. White and the chapters on the Law of Evolutionary Potential in the excellent volume by Sahlens and Service, Evolution and Culture, which I refer to on page 427. Briefly, men — many men — are obviously driven to ask the kind of question, set the kind of problem, we are concerned with in this book. Quite as obviously, they have not succeded in getting answers, solutions, on which all men can agree. They have not got even the kind of agreement which we expect from common sense, from science, and which the Chris- tians must still expect ultimately in religion — the securus judicat orbis terrarum of St. Augustine. A twentieth-century school of philosophers we shall meet briefly in section IV — the logical positivists, or logical analysts, or Unguistic philosophers — has been taken among popularizers of philo- sophical thought and hostile philosophers to have maintained that since such problems (metaphysical, theological, ethical, aesthetic problems) cannot be "solved" as, say, the chemist or the mathematician solves prob- lems in his field, such problems are "meaningless" and therefore not really problems. Yet the most determined logical positivist — better, the most naive convert to what is itself a rather old metaphysical position — clearly faces, and in a sense solves, such problems daily as a citizen, a husband,. 10 SETTING THE PROBLEM a father, a professional man, a reader, a viewer of television, a traveler, and even as that puzzling creature, an individual human being. He may well, in our day, be very greatly troubled over the difficulties and uncertainties he encounters as he faces these interminable problems; he may even be, as Dr. Keniston holds, "alienated," driven to a despair- ing abandonment of any attempts to improve his spiritual lot. But he need not feel ashamed, need not feel alone, need not feel that he wants something not quite natural. For what he is after — put it as vaguely, if you like, as "a search for the meaning of life" — is as natural a desire, as essential a part of man's condition, as eating, drinking, or making love. Here, in a recent book^, is a fine concrete statement of this need: I had spent some years in the intensive study of imaginative and philosophical literature, and was continually brought up against the problem of the contrast between the meaning of a man's work and life for us, the "likeness" we make, and his own image or idea of himself. We generally underestimate the im- portance in a man's life of his "life-illusion," and I wanted to compensate my own bias by studying autobiography, the record of this illusion. Personal experiences reinforced, and perhaps in reality prompted, this purpose. I was frequently startled to find that for other people I was a person with definite characteristics, who in given circumstances could be expected to have certain views and to act in certain ways; while I remained in my own eyes rather indefinite and capable of unforeseeable reactions. I came to realise that I was deluding myself in some degree, but felt that the others were deluding themselves about me also. I am not so fixed as I appear to them, and I am not so indeterminate as I assume. Thinking over recent changes in my thoughts and habits, I found it immensely difficult to decide whether they were fore- seeable, as the assertion of a deeper trend over less fundamental attitudes, or whether they were something really new. In either case, it seemed curious that I should be so anxious to persuade myself that I was consistent, that this "I" was an identity; for even if something new had emerged, I tried to prove to myself that it grew organically out of the old. As if freedom could mean something to me only if it was destiny, as if a choice was satisfactory only if it imposed itself as my nature. This intellectual problem presented itself however as an insistent moral pressure. I do not mean concern for the morality of my behavior and thoughts, though old faults and follies of course cause sleepless nights. / mean a need for meaning (italics C. B.). I do not believe that an individual fife has a reli- gious or transcendental meaning, and I cannot even comfort myself with the metaphysical despair, the Angst, of the existentialists. Nor is it enough to prove to myself that I am fulfilling a social purpose in a useful job. The meaning had to be personal, subjective. I did not pitch my hopes extravagantly high, and felt one could be content if one could feel one's self to be consistent, to have developed naturally and organically, to have remained "true to itself," and if within this framework one could order certain intense experiences whose significance defied analysis but which were peculiarly one's own. The terms are vague, and I cannot say where this pressure comes from, but I think I am delineating a state of mind from which autobiography springs. '^Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: 1960), pp. vii-viii. HENRY A. MURRAY Beyond Yesterday's Idealisms Henry Murray (1893- ) is Professor of Psychology at Harvard. He gave this address, which is in tone and content a model of its kind, before the Harvard Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa during Commencement week of 1959. It sets neatly some of the problems we shall try to set more fully — and more skeptically — in this book. Note that Dr. Murray asks for a "mythology" worthy of our group adulthood, as, he holds, the Judaeo- Christian "mythology" is not worthy; and note that he does not ask for a "religion" worthy of our adulthood. I am afraid that for most human beings when a set of cosmic beliefs is a mythology it is no longer a set of beliefs. It would be nice if "mythology" did the fob of "religion" — in which case Dr. Murray's proposed new New and Old Testaments might be, if at all possible, also useful. But religions just aren't mythologies — not at least while they are alive as religions. I may, however, be unfairly quibbling over definitions. The reader who wants to go further can start with a very sug- gestive collection by trained scholars, Henry A. Murray, ed., Myth and Mythmaking {New York: George BrazHler, Inc., 1960). MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES, AND GENTLEMEN: THE LIST OF ORATORS SINCE the first performance of this rite in 1782, the blaze of famous names, was blinding to one who as an undergraduate was never on the Dean's list but often in his office, blinding to one who has been fumbling in the dark for many years, in the underground of mind, well below the level of luminous rationality sustained by members of this elite society. From the parade of annual orations one receives imposing views of the diversity of elevated thinking in America, challenging yet humbling, I would guess, to pretty nearly anyone your President might pick to add another theme to this medley of reflections. Happily for a man in this predicament there are transfusions of courage to be had from a host of predecessors, especially, as you well know, from those wondrous emanations in 1837 of the Platonic Over-Soul of Ralph Waldo Emerson, To this apostle of self-confidence I attribute whatever 11 12 HENRY A. MURRAY Stamina is required to speak freely to you today, some hundred and twenty years beyond his yesterday. Here my cue comes from Emerson himself who reminded his enthralled audience that each age "must write its own books." "The books of an older age will not fit this." Emerson's preoccupation was Man Thinking, or, to be more accurate, Mr. Emerson Thinking, serene and saintly, solitary and aloof, residing in his own aura without envy, lust, or anger, unspotted by the world and im- pervious to its horrors. My preoccupation will be a little different, a dif- ference that makes all the difference: men and women thinking, privately and publicly, in the teeth of an infernal, lethal threat that will be here as long as our inhuman human race is here. In the realm of thought, Sigmund Freud — who, on the question of in- nate, potential evil, concurred with St. Augustine — Freud marks the great divide which separates us irrevocably from the benign atmosphere of the untempted, unhurt, and unmolested sage of Concord. Also separating us from that tall, angular, gentle, blue-eyed mystic, who saw evil at such a distance that he could dismiss it and condone it, and who, in so doing, as his admirer Santayana pointed out, "surrendered the category of the better and the worse, the deepest foundation of life and reason" — separating us incurably from that justly-venerated poet-thinker are the blights and blasts of more than forty lurid years of enormities and abominations perpetrated by our fellow-men on the sensitive bodies and souls of other men. Before the occurrence of this global epidemic of lies, treacheries, and atrocities, most of us Americans were temperamentally with Emerson, strongly in- clined to optimism, and so to shun or to deny the fact that human creatures were still capable of surpassing all other species as callous and ferocious torturers and killers of their own kind. But now that we have seen all this, the darker vision of the once-rejected Herman Melville resonates with more veracity in some of us. Would that I could offer, out of my well of joy, a nicer prospect, more appropriate to this festive week! But were I, with bland, buoyant or urbane ideas to indulge both you and me, I would deserve that label that Melville, on second thought, attached to Emerson — Confidence Man. You see there is still danger that out of shallowness and the desire to be pleasant at all costs — two of our besetting sins — we may rid consciousness of the unflattering knowledge we have gained, and, by so doing, cancel the possibility of ever reaching the conclusion that the present degree and aim of certain of our dispositions and certain states and aims of our various societies are definitely out of date, unsuitable for survival. It looks to me as if we must transform or fall apart. The inevitable decision is that the eminent Yankee seer was right: the books of his age, his own books — imperishable as they surely are — are not in all respects fitting to this age. The present age and your coming age must write its own books. I suppose that most of you, just-honored intellectuals, will necessarily be occupied for the next years in thinking in a differentiated way, thinking as Beyond Yesterday's Idealisms 13 specialists — as lawyers, business-men, doctors, scientists, historians, edu- cators. There is vigor and ample creativity involved in all of these profes- sions. But later, if not sooner, you will be pressured from within or from without to think seriously once more about yourself and your relations with women and with men, to think personally and then impersonally, to ask yourself embarrassing questions — knowledge for what? freedom for what? existence for what? — to think, in other words, as a free-lance philosopher, or generalist, about matters of profound and superordinate concern: ways and ends of being and becoming, morals, religion, the human situation, the world's plight. At such times each of you will be, in Emerson's sense, Man Thinking, and your reflections may beget a book or brace of books fitting to your age. Your capacity to write a book — logical, critical, and substantial — has been accredited by the conferring of the Key, symbolic of the fact that learning and transforming what you learn may be the happiest of ac- tivities, and may, with luck on your side, lead to the solution of crucial problems, turn the lock and open the door to new knowledge. Today the really crucial problems, as I hook them, are all deep, deep in human nature, and in this country with our long preference for appearances, for tangible, material realities, for perceptible facts, acts, and technics, for the processes and conclusions of conscious rationality, and for quick attain- ments of demonstrable results — with this native and acquired bent for things that one can plainly see, grasp, count, weigh, manipulate, and photo- graph, the probability of our solving or even seriously grappling with the strategic problems of our time does not appear to be encouragingly high. Only if this appraisal is somewhere near the truth can I discern a single reason for your President's election of a depth psychologist as orator for this day. What could his reason be except to have the depth dimension stressed, with the accompanymg hint that the key to the more perplexing problems might be lying in the dark. Pertinent to this issue is the old story of the London bobby who, in the blackness of one night, came upon a man half-seas-over stumbling in a circle within the Ughted zone around a lamp- post. "I am looking for my key," the man explained. "Are you sure you dropped it by this light?" the bobby asked. "No," the man replied, "I dropped it out there in the dark, but I can't see out there and I can see here." What Freud discovered in the dark of the unconscious was what Puritan and Victorian morality suppressed as Sin, spelt with a capital. But now those floodgates are demolished and sexuality is conspicuously in the open, running loose among the young without benefit of form, grace, or dignity; and what is nowadays repressed, if my reading of the signs is not awry, are all the hopes, yearnings, claims, both dependent and aspiring, which down the centuries were comforted and directed by the mythologies and rituals of religion. Here I leave Freud and stand with Dr. Jung. That a bent for the ideal is latent in the psyches of men and women of your age is not what I've been told by any confiding undergraduate, and it is about the last conclusion that a reader of modem literature would be likely 14 HENRY A. MURRAY to arrive at. For certainly most of the best poets, playwrights, and novelists, together with many psychoanalysts, behavioral psychologists, social phi- losophers, existentiaUsts, and some angry others, seem to be conspiring, with peculiar unanimity, to reduce or decompose, to humiliate so far as they can do it, man's image of himself. In one way or another, the impres- sion is conveyed that, in the realm of spirit, all of us are baflBed Beats, Beatniks, or dead-beats, unable to cope as persons with the existential situation. But tell me, what is the underlying meaning of this flood of discontent and self-depreciation? One pertinent answer comes from Emerson himself. "We grant that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours, of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim." Yes, surely, "its enormous claim," and in the very midst of this American Paradise of material pros- perity. The enormous claim of the sensitive, alienated portions of our society — artists, would-be artists, and their followers — comes, as I catch the innuendoes, from want of a kindling and heartening mythology to feel, think, live, and write by. Our eyes and ears are incessantly bombarded by a mythology which breeds greed, envy, pride, lust, and violence, the mythol- ogy of our mass media, the mythology of advertising, Hollywood and Madison Avenue. But a mythology that is sufiicient to the claim of head and heart is as absent from the American scene as symbolism is absent from the new, straight-edged, bare-faced, glass buildings of New York. An emotional deficiency disease, a paralysis of the creative imagination, an addiction to superficials — this is the physician's diagnosis I would offer to account for the greater part of the widespread desperation of our time, the enormous claim of people who are living with half a heart and half a lung. Paralysis of the imagination, I suspect, would also account, in part, for the fact that the great majority of us, wedded to comfort so long as we both shall live, are turning our eyes away from the one thing we should be looking at: the possibility or probabiUty of co-extermination. In his famous speech of acceptance upon the award of the Nobel prize for literature, Albert Camus declared as follows: "Probably every genera- tion sees itself as charged with remaking the world. Mine, however, knows that it will not remake the world. But its task is perhaps even greater, for it consists in keeping the world from destroying itself." Were this statement to be made before an auditory of our faculty and students — even by Camus himself, speaking with utter candor out of his embattled deeps of agony — I fear it would be met by a respectful, serious, yet stony silence, an apparent silence, for, coming from behind the non- committal, uncommitted faces, all would be aware of the almost palpable, familiar throb of Harvard's splendid engines of sophisticated demolition. We are as sick of being warned of our proximity to hell as were the mem- bers of Jonathan Edwards' congregation. Wolf! Wolf! How, in heaven's name, does Camus imagine that a league of artists and philosophers could Beyond Yesterday's Idealisms 15 possibly prevent the destruction of the world? The nearest that he comes to telling us is when he states that his "generation knows that, in a sort of mad race against time, it ought to re-establish among nations a peace not based on slavery, to reconcile labor and culture again, and to reconstruct with all men an Ark of the Covenant." These words — "re-establish," "reconcile," "reconstruct," — suggest that in his mind the prevention of destruction does, in fact, call for a remaking of the world, the building of a new Ark of the Covenant as basis for re-union. Here, reason might lead us to infer that Camus was thinking of the in- stitution of world government, which as scores of enlightened men, from Woodrow Wilson to Bertrand Russell, have insisted is the only rational answer to global, social chaos, a central government being the sole means that man has ever found of securing and maintaining order. But framing a constitution for world government, as the competent Mr. Grenville Clark has done, is not in line with the special genius of Camus, and, furthermore, it is apparent that the concept of world government, though absolutely necessary, is gaining little popular or Federal support. Sanity is over- matched: deep, blind, primitive compulsions which by-pass consciousness are towing us with a cable we have no knife to cut and driving us nearer and nearer to the verge of death. At such a time, when hidden passions are deciding things, a legal scheme, no matter how commonsensical and logical, is not a magnet to large num- bers of men and women: it chills them, leaves them frigid, uninvolved. Nor, at such a time, could something like Plato's plan for a Republic guided by philosophers arouse enthusiasm. But when Plato, envious of Homer's enormous influence in Greece, banished poets and myth-makers from his Republic, he deprived it of the springs of charismatic power, and so, when it came to a show-down with the masses, his beautifully reasoned books were ploughed under by the passionate myths and images of the poet-authors of the Bible. The Bible proved to be the fitting book not only for that century but for many centuries to come. It seems highly significant to me that Camus, a firm opponent of the theism of Judaeo-Christianity, should have reached into the fathomless well of the Old Testament to gain a potent image for his hope — Ark of the Covenant. It is there, among those images, that one can find the moulds that shaped the deepest passions of the Western World, including Russia. At this juncture I shall seize, with your permission, the remaining minutes of this proffered opportunity, with its cherished privilege of free speech, to submit a micro-sketch of a hypothetical book that I would write if I had been vouchsafed the necessary genius and resources. This hypothetical book would also be a sketch, though a far larger and more detailed sketch, of a book to come composed by other authors, a super-personal book, a book of books, that might be termed a testament, a world testament. Before submitting this micro-sketch of a macro-sketch of a book for a new age, I should warn you that this imagined testament will carry us beyond the mythology of dependent and compliant childhood, the same as 16 HENRY A. MURRAY that of the dependent childhood of our society in colonial days, that is, the authoritarian father-son mythology of the religion we inherited, and also beyond the mythology of adolescence, the same as that of the adolescence of our Nation, the mythology of protest, rebelUon, independence, rugged individualism. Both of these mythologies are still operative. In fact, the mythology of adolescence, stressing freedom without qualifications or con- ditions, constitutes our national religion. Please understand and hold in mind that in looking forward to a future that has moved beyond these idealisms of today and yesterday, I am not forsaking them. There is a help- less, suffering child and a frustrated, rebellious adolescent in every one of us, and always will be. I would say, there is a time and place for authority and the founding of character, and there is a time and place for Uberation from authority and the development and expression of a self-reUant per- sonality. But, as I see the human situation, we are in need of a mythology of adulthood, something that is conspicuous by its absence in Western literature, a mythology of interdependence and creation, not only on the level of imaginative love, marriage, and the forming of a family, but on other levels, especially that of imaginative international reciprocities. Have we not pretty nearly reached the age when we can well afford to go beyond the glorification of vanity, pride, and egotism, individual and national? Well, now, to return to my sketch of a sketch. The essential features of the testament that now occupies my mind would be roughly these: it would be the product of the interdependent judgments and imaginations of nu- merous composers, drawn from different cultures and from different call- ings. The initial task of these presumably creative and judicious thinkers would be to select from the vast libraries of the world, arrange, and edit, whatever past and present writings in poetry or prose were suitable to the appointed purpose. Except for more abundant stores from which to draw their substance, a larger scope and longer span of time, these testament- makers would proceed, we may suppose, as did the compilers and editors of the canonical and non-canonical books of the Bible. They would cer- tainly be advantaged by the example of those fore-runners. Like the Old Testament, this new one would contain numerous variations of subject matter and of style: narratives, historical and biographical, stories, parables, legends, and myths, songs and poems, psalms of praise, codes and ordi- nances, premonitions and philosophical reflections. Most difficult for the testament-makers would be the task of loosely integrating, as in the Bible, the selected parts in terms of a philosophy of social evolution — cycles of creation, conservation, decay, or induration — tending, in the long run, toward the fulfillment of that dream of human fel- lowship which centuries of deep and loving people have recommended to our hearts. This testament would differ radically from the Bible inasmuch as its mythology would be consonant with contemporary science: its personifica- tions would all refer to forces and functions within nature, human nature. Also, it would differ radically from previous testaments of the Near East Beyond Yesterday's Idealisms 17 and West — the Bible, the Koran, and the Testament of Karl Marx — by describing and praising, with even-handed justice, forms of excellence, achieved by each and every culture. There would be no bowing to special claims, made by any single collectivity, of unique superiority, of divine elec- tion, of infallible truth, of salvation for its members and damnation for all others. There would be no ovation for the apocalyptic myth, either m its ancient form — Persian or Judaeo-Christian — or in its modern Communistic form; the myth of the inevitable and final Great Encounter between the all-good and the all-evil, resulting in an eternity of bliss for chosen saints or comrades, and death or everlasting torments for the enemy. There would be no acceptance of the necessity of inquisitions, persecutions, brain-wash- ings, or concentration camps. In a sense, the world testament would be a parable, a parable of parables, expressive of the universal need for peace, for interdependence, for fruitful reciprocations among those manifold units of mankind which are still proud and quarrelsome, still locked in clenched antagonisms. Its symbolisms would commemorate on all levels the settlement of hostilities between opposites, their synthesis, or creative union: man and nature, male and female, reason and passion, understanding and imagination, enjoyable means and enjoy- able ends, science and art, management and labor. West and East. Its ulti- mate, ethical ideal would be the resolution of differences through mutual embracement and subsequent transformation. In the words of Henry James, senior: "It is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one's own in another, to love another for his conformity to one's self: but nothing can be in more flagrant contrast with the creative Love, aU whose tender- ness ex vi termini must be reserved only for what intrinsically is most bit- terly hostile and negative to itself." In the judgment of America's most profound philosopher, Charles S. Peirce, this sublime sentence "discloses for the problem of evil its everlasting solution." Finally, in contrast to the umelieved sociological language of the out- moded testament of Marx, this world testament, heir to the secret of the Bible's everlasting magic, would consist in its best parts of moving and re- vealing poetic passages. Some devout Christians overlook the fact that the stirring and sustaining influence of the Book they dream and live by de- pends on the marvelous words, the vivid imagery and figures of speech with which its wisdom is transmitted. This is one of the chief qualities by which a religion can be distinguished from a moral philosophy or system of ethics. If the New Testament, for example, had been written by a modem social scientist in the jargon of his profession it would have died at birth, and Mithraism, or Manichaeanism, or Mohammedanism would have taken possession of the European mind. A religion is propagated by the alchemy of the aesthetic imagination, in striking parables and metaphors that solace, cheer, or channel our profoundest feelings. A code of morals, on the other hand, can appeal only to our intellects and to a few of our more shallow sentiments. If, perchance, a world testament with the mythic qualities I have men- 18 HENRY A. MURRAY tioned became an invitation to the feelings and thoughts of men and women, it would gain this influence only through its power to enchant, charm, clarify, edify, and nourish. There would be no agents of sovereign authority with threatened penalties to enforce compliance, and, in contrast to the testaments of our estabUshed Churches, it would be always susceptible to revisions, additions, and subtractions. Everybody, I assume — especially on reaching the accepted age for the retirement of his brain — is entitled to a dream, and this is mine, heretical at certain points, but not so visionary as it sounds. Works of the magnitude of this imagined testament have been composed in the past, notably in India. Much of what is needed has been in printed form for years. Ample energy and genius is available — hterary critics, historians, social scientists, philosophers, and poets — in different quarters of the globe. Enough money for the effort is in the keep of men who are aware of humanity's dire strait. A provisional first edition of the testament would not be very long in coming. Translated into all languages it might turn out to be the book this age is waiting for. A war that no one wants, an utterly disgraceful end to man's long ex- periment on earth is a possibility we are facing every day. Events are hang- ing by a thread, depending on an accident, on some finger on a trigger, on a game of wits and tricks, of pride and saving faces. But ours is no momen- tary problem to be solved by this or that practical expedient. Does a mature nation sacrifice the future for the present? The day will come when small countries will possess enough lethal energy to ehminate a large country. Does a mature nation have the arrogance to believe that it can buy with dollars the permanent good-will and loyalty of other peoples? Has our government a long time-perspective, a philosophy of history, a world-view to guide its day-by-day and year-by-year decisions? If yes, only a few of us have heard of it. It is such considerations that have pressured the generation of a vision of something which intellectuals like you and other members of the Phi Beta Kappa society might have a hand in shaping. Why not? Many times in the past, the direction of events has been affected by the pubhcation of a single book. At the very least, the composition of this testament would constitute a brave, far-seeing try — no vulgar try — to kindle a httle veritable light in a black world. The one conversion requisite for those who would lose themselves in this demanding enterprise was long ago described in two famous, pithy sen- tences by a stubborn American patriot, contemporary with Emerson. No doubt many of you have had occasion to saunter down the elm-shaded path in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue and, arriving at the statue of William Lloyd Garrison, stopped to read these words: "My country is the world. My countrymen are all mankind." GERHARD SZCZESNY The Future of Unbelief Gerhard Szczesny (1918- ) is a German writer and broadcasting ex- pert, Director of Special Programs of Radio Bavaria. His Die Zukunft des Unglaubens (1958) {translated into English in 1961 as The Future of Unbelief] has attracted wide attention in Germany. It is a most discerning study of the relation between Christianity and what the author calls the "ersatz" or "surrogate" religions of our time, religions which I in this book lump together as sects of the "religion of Enlighten- ment." Dr. Szczesny's diagnosis of our present troubles — our alienation — will admirably supplement Dr. Murray's and help prepare the reader for what follows. The reader will find it profitable to read The Future of Unbelief in its entirety. THE EVENTS OF THE FIRST HALF OF OUR CENTURY CERTAINLY HAVE NOT led to a renascence of the Christian faith. They have, however, brought about a revival of the secular currency and authority of Christianity. After the failure of recent substitute religions, Christianity again seems like the unassailable treasure house of all human values. The writings of a David Friedrich Strauss, a Ludwig Feuerbach or a Friedrich Nietzsche, if pub- lished today, in all likelihood would be greeted as a public scandal and give rise to parliamentary protest by all "Christian" parties. We are faced by the fact, a fact in many respects historically and psychologically ex- plainable, yet on the whole still extraordinary, that the argument with Christianity which began more than a hundred years ago has in recent decades become increasingly taboo. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is the collapse of the intellectual and moral optimism that was the mark of the century past. As opposed to a simple, pristinely joyous belief in life, Christianity proved itself to be a richer and deeper thing. It knew more of the unavailingness of all human striving and the need always to take this frustration into account. Finally, From Gerhard Szczesny, The Future of Unbelief (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1961), pp. 11-17, 75-80. 19 20 GERHARD SZCZESNY it knew more about man's inclination to turn to the mysteries, to form some notion of what hes beyond the rationally knowable. This rediscovery and reawakening of Christianity as a universally bind- ing moral institution has not, to be sure, altered the fact that the real content of the Christian doctrine of salvation, for a dominant type of modem man, has become completely unacceptable, indeed, a matter of indifference. Intelligent Christians admit this without hesitation. However, in the face of modem crises and catastrophes the security afforded by a venerable and firmly built structure of beUef makes Christianity, as a whole, taboo and hinders open critical analysis of it, even of its now unbelievable metaphysics. Thus, existing Christian dogma, which possesses social cur- rency even while no longer seriously believed, obstructs that looking out and beyond needed to find new answers to the "final questions." Our inquiry in this direction is not undertaken with any intention of making apostates of Christians. It is rather concerned with those to whom "unbelievingness" has become habitual, and from whom a return to Christianity can no longer be expected. It is aimed at overcoming the illusion that the "godless" man is an inferior creature, a nihilistic form of existence making for the total mination of all human order — in sum, an utterly devilish sort of apparition the fighting of which with every means at hand demonstrates insight, humanity and adherence to the Christian way. This book is anti-Christian only in its contention that such views are en- joined or promoted, that there is a recognizable procHvity to bring the non- Christian standpoint into disrepute and to put social, moral and political pressure to bear on those who embrace it. Otherwise this book is no more intended to be anti-Christian than anti-Taoist or anti-Anthroposophic. It will defend the freedom of Christians to profess their beliefs and practice their form of worship. But it will equally defend the rights of those who have non-Christian forms of conviction and modes of behavior. And pre- cisely on this account it will repudiate Christian claims to cultural or polit- ical dominion. The sharpness of many ensuing formulations is conditioned not by the subject matter itself, but by the situation surrounding the subject matter. The author is neither a backslider nor a protester, nor any sort of anti- or pro-religionist. He respects Christianity as a world-shaking historical manifestation, which has left its mark for two thousand years. But Chris- tianity as a confession of faith he does not respect. The author is also well aware that many people who cling eamestiy and honestly to Chris- tianity are people of good will and good faith. It is not easy for him to wreak injury on his friends among such Christians. But under present cir- cumstances he sees no way of taking up the cause of the "unbelievers" without at the same time putting the patience and open-mindedness of the believers to a severe test. Any reader who considers this to be asking too much may as well lay the book aside at once. But anyone who, as a Christian, decides to hear the author out, might bear in mind that every- The Future of Unbelief 21 body denied the gift of "belief" can hardly, on that account, abandon all thinking about the world and the role he plays in it, and how these are to be understood. The following observations represent random thoughts on the relation- ships between Christianity and modem crises in belief, rather than a systematic analysis. They also represent an attempt to characterize the typical content of a post-Christian ideology or world-outlook. Among these random thoughts appear certain remarks on this great family of problems which assume a solution in a certain direction. Yet in no wise are they to be understood as final or comprehensive. Our task is to throw Hght on the basic, root question of diversity of viewpoint. Certain trains of thought will recur again and again, since they estabUsh a connection between the widely disparate objects of our analysis. Many things in the following pages may appear trivial. But it is the fate of certain truisms that whereas every- one knows them, no one reaUy pays them the least attention. There are commonplaces which, if publicly expressed, arouse resentment. They are allowed to hold good only as long as no one brings them to mind. This is understandable. The bad conscience of our epoch not only makes for complicated illusions, but for downright suppressions as well. This observer's platform, then, is nothing more than the usual vantage from which the normal man of our times occasionally tries to cast a look at the great context of his life. "Unbehef" is no longer the prerogative of an especially enlightened minority. It is the fate of a contemporary type of Western man who may actually be in the majority, or who at any rate is very frequently encountered. This contemporary normal man is concerned with the old basic questions : Who am I? What is the nature of the world? What can I believe in and what must I do about it? It is hard to fimid an- swers to these questions in the field of learning appropriate to their con- sideration. Without wishing to beUttle the significance of modem philos- ophy, one must recognize the fact that its contributions toward resolving the spiritual crises of our time are small indeed. On the one hand the philosophers wear themselves out making ever more refined interpretations of handed down conceptual. On the other, their voice never reaches beyond a small circle of initiates to those who might profit by philosophy's answers or solutions. Christianity's claim to spiritual leadership, its fear of the "ideological" and the murkiness of its own terminology seal the self- chosen or guilt-bora apartness of Western philosophy. The implicit and unsettled conflict with the Christian metaphysic Ues like mildew over all the philosophers' effort to show us how the innermost world is made. Also, the way our school philosophers write, their very style has always served more to cloud than to clarify and continues to do so to this day. The European's specific "intellectual gift" is to think and argue. Yet this gift, in all probability, is largely intelligible as nothing more than the product of a centuries-old clash with theology, in the course of which the art Qf concealment, evasion and deception has been consummately developed. 22 GERHARD SZCZESNY But a philosophy that can function only under camouflage and proviso eventually loses clarity of insight and impartiality of judgment. In conse- quence, the day finally arrives when it can produce nothing but the ambigu- ous and equivocal. In all events — the average modern man — and by this we mean the aver- age "educated" man — must manage his life, its problems and tragedies, without benefit of advice from our professional thinkers. There is also reason to suspect that as soon as these people have to measure up to the fundamental questions of human existence outside their bookish province, they, too, will behave in a "dilettante" and naive fashion. Anyone who has ever listened in on a discussion among philosophers, or a discussion in which philosophers took part, will have noted with astonishment that at decisive moments in the debate they abandon the well-traveled paths of their specialized fund of knowledge and, like any other mortal, at best can utter only subjective, perplexed and simple opinions on God and the world. Actually this is a gratifying thing. At the bottom, to philosophize simply means a direct attempt to read meaning into the nature of things, not spin- ning thoughts about other thoughts and writing another book about other books. Therefore, since here what we have in mind is a direct interpretation of the modem situation rather than another contribution to academic philos- ophy, we shall give up all dependence on documents, writings and citable names to prop our argument. Very little or nothing will be taken for granted. For it must be possible to develop out of raw experience a line of thought that will be accessible to everybody, and to develop it in such fashion that everybody can follow it through. What does it profit us to drag in the name of this or that author, however prominent, if we are not in a position to explain the reference we have in mind in our own words? And would it make our thesis any more enlightening or true if we took refuge behind the authority of some philosopher whose authority, mean- while, was being questioned by still other authorities? Our deUberations go straight to the heart of the matter. The world in which we find ourselves offers such aspects as these: birth and death, old age and sickness, happiness and misery, the results of man's scientific insight into nature and into himself. Thus a picture of relationships is generated, and a need to interpret the picture. In this manner what is known as a "Weltanschauung," an ideology, a way of looking at the world, comes into being. As a word and concept "Weltanschauung" has fallen into disrepute since it was taken over by the propagandists of the new German barbarism. Nevertheless, we feel we cannot dispense with it. The word as such stems neither from Marx nor Haeckel nor Hitler. It was discovered by the Roman- tics and popularized by Wilhelm Dilthey. And no one was ever less ma- terialistic or trite than he. The word "Weltanschauung" — a way of viewing the world intuitively arrived at — in our opinion more intelligibly expresses The Future of Unbelief 23 the common human need for a comprehensive interpretation of all exist- ence, within reason's grasp and beyond it, than does the word "rehgion." So thoroughly is the term "religion" steeped in Christian notions of faith and Christian emotional values that it has become virtually unusable except to connote a specifically Christian form of man's response to the cosmos. A restoration of the discredited concept of "Weltanschauung" to its original worth seems possible to us. It can be done if "Welt" (world) is understood as containing everything in the cosmos, known and un- known. Beyond this, "Anschauung" (contemplation) must refer to an intuitive as well as a rational apprehension of the aforementioned totaUty. Actually everything that will be said in this book could be couched in terms of an interpretation of both concepts, "religion" and "Weltan- schauung" (hereafter, in English, world-outlook or ideology). If "re- ligion" seems to us to be something larger, deeper and more inclusive than mere "ideology," at the same time we are aware that we still harbor a secret wish to fashion our own way of regarding the world, and one which will have no connection with what in this country is called "religion." With this the stage is spiritually and psychologically set for our delibera- tions. . . . Today the real Christian creed, viewed in the broad, scarcely survives as a vitally creative force. The peoples of the West, as they live out their lives — and this takes into account the majority of those who call them- selves Christians — in their thinking and behavior have ceased to pay the least attention to Christianity's idea of God and the hereafter, or the Chris- tian notions of sin and grace. Christianity was once a faith that really pervaded human existence. But it has been supplanted by a kind of indiffer- ent tolerance of that theological phraseology which, every Sunday, resounds from pulpit and loudspeaker. It has come to be accepted as a ritual com- posed of humanitarian protestations, appeals and activities, pursued by dint of much expensive publicity. We, the inheritors of Western culture, live in the midst of all kinds of testimonials and memories of Christianity, as will many generations to come, and this circumstance still leaves a characteristic mark on our lives. Yet, in this same connection, the bulk of people who busy themselves professionally with the appreciation and evaluation of these Christian memorials are not motivated in truth by religious zeal, but by a mere philological or esthetic interest. In spite of this epigonal state of affairs it would be false and reprehen- sible to propagate the destruction of the inherited form and content of the Christian-Occidental culture. For "progress" of this nature would not only disrupt the historical continuum, but at the same time rob the world of the fruits of the past, riches without which neither present nor future can have meaning. Therefore, it is not so much a question of opposing Christianity as such, as of further awakening a consciousness of the spiritual condition of mankind outside the framework of inherited conviction. 24 GERHARD SZCZESNY Looking back over the years, we are certainly justified in concluding that none of the ersatz rehgions — either those tried and found wanting or those still extant, from materialism to psychologism to sociologism — can ever contain reality's plenum of being. At the same time these one-sided and counterfeit movements can be validly adjudged symptomatic of a basic change in the Western-European consciousness. There is no fault to be found with these experiments in the sense that they represent an attempt to bring man and the world into a system based on demonstrable truth. But where they are naive and false is in their assumption that any new cor- relation of reality must take, by all means available to the human intellect, the form of a reduction to a common denominator, an ultimate formula acceptable to all. As a matter of fact, in our own times it has been realized that to fill with rational material the "religious" void left by the overthrow of the Christian metaphysic is an impossible task. It is this discovery which holds us in irons, and which has led to a revival of all kinds of antirational- ism and subjectivism. In whatever direction we look, toward philosophy, the arts, literature or science, everywhere minds are hard at work laying bare to view the back- ground and the underground of fife, exposing the metaphysical and meta- psychical, the magical, the unreal and the beyond-the-real. These analysts, having cut reality ignominiously open on their dissecting table, try to breathe new meaning and mystery into the corpse. Meanwhile, in defensive reaction to this proces, others adjure us to open our eyes to this vain and foolish "flight from God," and again seek refuge and safety in the true faith. The whole history of European enlightenment, these people say, is nothing more than a great heresy, a dangerous illusion and overevaluation of man's intelligence. It behooves us, henceforth, to restore Christ's mes- sage of redemption to its rightful supremacy, since from this message alone true knowledge and release can come. None but Christ's teachings can control reason's arrogant claims and again commit mankind to lost moral and spiritual values. Our conviction is quite opposite. It is our belief that the process of trans- forming and widening the Western consciousness has been a necessary thing, and cannot be reversed. Within this development there may be errors in need of correction. But this does not hold true for the development as such. Not all the results of scientific study can be suddenly judged false simply because certain credulous men of science happen to draw unwar- ranted inferences from them. Western man's emancipation from the spiritualistic and dualistic Chris- tian metaphysic is basically characterized by a discovery of the unity of all being, which revelation has spilled over into the general awareness. As the struggle to get to the bottom of all things is pressed farther and farther, the seeking mind comes hard up against the fact that man and all the forces which motivate him and constitute him are part of the con- tinuum of reality. The world cannot be divided into a life on earth and a hereafter. Actually everything contains a "this side" and a "that side." The Future of Unbelief 25 The "this side" turns out merely to be that part of world unity which is ac- cessible to the senses, and "that side" the part of the whole which remains in the dark. The absolute dualism of the Christian concept of the world and the concept of deity linked to it, in this view have been done away with. What remains is the relative dualism of the know able and unknowable. This simply indicates that a portion of the world lies outside human experience, but "not outside the world." Today we are witnessing an inescapable breakdown of all forms of speculation and myth derivative from ignorance of reality's true relation- ships. Meanwhile a need has arisen to project a kind of metaphysic that will go beyond the accumulated facts of experience, yet stUl be rooted in experience. We find ourselves today in a period where the old and new outlooks overlap. On the one hand we see an attempt to force inductive truth into traditional doctrine; on the other, a need to formulate a system of belief resting easily and naturally on these same demonstrable truths. Even where Catholicism is still deeply rooted, as in such rural and back- ward parts of Europe as Spain, or in Latin America, places in which Catholicism is still a state religion seemingly in possession of unlimited power over men's souls, it is doubtful whether oncoming generations will spontaneously accept the Christian tradition and carry it forward in time. And in the highly civilized, dominantly Protestant countries — above all in the United States, the nation which henceforth will lead the Western World — in these countries, where Christianity still holds uncontested sway over the cultural fagade, the Christian idea has degenerated into trivial moralism, which has no religious superstructure left at all, and in lieu of it projects the Babbitt ideal, of the man who is in all ways healthy, normal and satisfied with himself, the world and providence. The settlers of the "New World" soon found themselves in a situation not unlike that of the Continental peoples at the time of their encounter with Christianity. There was a great urge to create a new way of life. Indeed, this had to be done. This impulse merged with the individualistic, activist and missionary ideology of Christianity, without, however, greatly exciting any desire to think seriously about the religious and philosophical motivation of this ethic. It is fairly obvious, in this general connection, that the pioneer spirit, as linked with Christian individualism, played an essential part in spreading practical humanitarianism and the democratic way of life. But it is only a half-century ago that the problem of finding an ontologically sound and reasonable foundation for ethic and being began to be discussed in America, whereas in the Old World thinking people had been wrestling with the problem for centuries. As soon as man begins to live consciously, as soon as he ceases to be guided by imported norms and instead conceives a desire to do and strive, wish and want in terms of his own insight, so that he may bring his life, as he feels, into an intelligible relationship with all reality — when this hap- pens any lack of harmony between motive and deed, idea and configuration, the beUeved and the known tends to become intolerable. Having arrived 26 GERHARD SZCZESNY at this stage, man must either find new motives while continuing to act as before, or new forms of action while retaining his old motives. That is, he must either find a new way to accommodate his existence to the Chris- tian idea of faith, or rebuild his existence on a non-Christian basis. In the end there is nothing left for him to do but to bring everything that he does, hopes or wishes into harmony with what he has come to believe is the nature of the whole. Though modern "unbelief" is a deep-reaching, collective phenomenon, the process from which it results is still immature, which in turn limits individual apostasy. It is a gradual thing. The transformation of a "be- liever" into an "unbeUever" does not threaten to upset the individual's psychic equilibrium, as a rule, since it comes about insensibly from a gradual widening of the consciousness. This process is occurring every- where. The facts which make for doubt and which force human beings to think things over and form new ideas are reaching out into the remotest villages. These facts come into purview, too, without any special outside assistance. Whether remotely situated people respond to these forces, or let them pass in indifference depends, of course, on their relative intellectual and psychological development. The spirit listeth where it will, but bears fruit only on fertile ground. If a genuine desire for enlightenment obtains, contemporary man has only to reach out his hand to satisfy it. If this desire is lacking, better then that he remain secure in his old faith. As far as prognosis is possible, it seems almost certain that among im- mediately ensuing generations the structure of consciousness will suffer a fundamental change. This change will occur even among populations stUI living on the periphery of civilization. The thinking of erstwhile backward and primitive peoples will tend more and more toward the objective. The same prognosis also applies to the peoples of Asia and Africa, though here the collision between enlightenment and traditional religious beUefs, in accordance with the tremendous variety of the latter, very likely will give rise to motley results and bring all sorts of divers consequences to a head. Not only Buddhism but Islam as well contains metaphysical postu- lates which might very well prove quite serviceable as a superstructure for advancing scientific thought. We have already indicated the compatibility of the Buddhistic world-idea and rational knowledge. Mohammed's message, too, is anti-miraculous, and is characterized by a strong incentive, liable at any moment to be quickened, to make use of man's God-given powers of understanding in praise of creation. Both reUgions could have a great deal of appeal in the West, if they were skillfully maneuvered. The great conflict among the world's three principal religions has yet to come. There could be a phase of de-Christianization in which Buddhism and Islam might come to be r'egarded as acceptable substitutes. For men driven to despair will tend first to seek a new meaning for existence in already great and recognized systems of belief. PART II THE WAY THINGS ARE II The Way Things Are I HAVE GROUPED IN THIS SECTION EXAMPLES OF APPROACHES TO PROBLEMS of what until quite recently everyone would call "philosophy." As philoso- phy became a professional academic disciphne a few centuries ago, how- ever, its followers naturally enough became more exclusive. They not only rejected the old folk-sense in which anybody might have a "philosophical" outlook or interest or temperament; they also rejected that less vague but stiU unprofessional range of thinking about man's condition of which the Kluckhohn and Leighton analysis of the Navaho "view of life" (p. 37) or the Marxist eschatology (p. 121) are examples. Nonetheless I shall unashamedly, though with protective punctuation, call this section "philos- ophy." The subdivisions by no means include all aspects of philosophy. Notably I have been obliged to omit poUtical philosophy, epistemology (theory of knowledge), logic, and a good deal else. But I have tried to give a wide if unsystematic range of subject matter. I begin suitably with what is a fine example of the human need to understand the universe as a system, as something that has a beginning and may have an end, that may once have been chaos, but now has order — in short, a cosmology. I have chosen to end this series of cosmologies with that of a contemporary astron- omer, Harlow Shapley, to emphasize the fact that, though as a good En- lightened humanist he might not wholly accept the analogy, he, Uke the authors of Genesis, is composing a cosmology. Don't let him fool you with his "cosmographies"; he too is inventing a universe, as indeed is Whitehead. To Dr. Shapley, at least, his is quite clearly a consoling invention. The second subheading should give no trouble. Teleology, the knowl- edge of design, and eschatology, the knowledge of ends, final ends, not just current purposes, are both ten-dollar words, but both are worth the money. Here too the sequence from Plato to Marx seems to me at least to be obvious, and not at all rigged. The "classless society" is a heaven, a Utopia, an eschatology in short. Perhaps for many in the democracies of the free West this phase of a world-view is somewhat vague, remote, and certainly not apocalyptic. But I beUeve it is there, a less pressingly optimis- 29 30 THE WAY THINGS ARE tic version of Condorcet's Utopia, to which has been added a dose of Evolution as seen by T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer. It is not only Americans who believe that "prosperity is just around the comer." Indeed, the whole world has begun to believe that it ought to be there, or even closer. Ethics is a branch of philosophy we all recognize. I have of course by no means "covered the field," which is almost limitless, but I have again attempted to present samples of ethical thinking which can bring home both the range of such thinking and the persistence within our Western tradition of that range. Finally, I must apologize for the somewhat nebulous title I have given the final subdivision of this section — "Transcendence: The Mystic Experience." What I am trying to bring before the reader here is that range of human experience indicated by such colorless words as "mysticism," "quietism," and, in political thought, "non-violent non-resistance." By temperament (a question-begging phrase if there ever was one) I suppose I am as incapable of understanding the mystical experience as the tone-deaf man is incapable of understanding music. But no tone-deaf man ought to announce that music is a fake, a wicked fake at that. Something very strong in Western intellec- tual — and emotional — habits resists Mr. Huxley's "perennial philosophy," though Westerners have long been addicted to somewhat simpler forms of transcendence achieved by alcohol or other drugs. At any rate, here too I have given the reader a sampling. There is much, much more available in any library — for the mystic, transcend what these stand for though he may, simply has to make use of the stained and worldly counters of com- munication we call words, has indeed to put them together by the worldly devices we call grammar and rhetoric. A Order: Cosmologies, Cosmogonies, Cosmographies GENESIS Perhaps the cosmogony of Genesis should be taken as it comes. But I have followed the dominant opinion of modern biblical scholarship that there are in the story of the creation as it appears in Genesis two different ac- counts, one older and more naive or "primitive," the other later and closer to developed Jewish monotheism. I have therefore put the older account first. The two are of course so well put together by the Jewish scholars who edited them that it was only in the last few centuries that the linguistic and historical scholarship of the "higher criticism" was able to discern the fact of editing. THE EARLIER ACCOUNT OF CREATION Chapter 2 4 % These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens. 5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. 6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. 7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of hfe; and man became a living soul. 8 ^ And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of Hfe also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. 10 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. . . . 15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: 32 Genesis 33 17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. 18 H And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. 19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. 21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; 22 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. 23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. 24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. 25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. Chapter 3 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman. Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? 2 And the woman said unto the serpent. We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: 3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said. Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. 4 And the serpent said unto the woman. Ye shall not surely die: 5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. 6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. 7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. 8 And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. 9 And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? 34 GENESIS 10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, be- cause I was naked; and I hid myself. 1 1 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? 12 And the man said. The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. 13 And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said. The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. 14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent. Because thou hast done this thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: 15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. 16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shah bring forth children; and thy deske shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. 17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying. Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; 18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; 19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. 20 And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. 21 Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them. 22 f And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: 23 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. 24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. THE LATER ACCOUNT Chapter 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon Genesis 35 the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 il And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. 6 f And God said, Let th