ALDOUS

HUXLEY

COMPLETE

ESSAYS

Volume V, 1939-1956

EDITED WITH COMMENTARY BY

Robert 8. Baker

AND

James Sexton

IVAN R. DEE

Chicago 2002

COMPLETE ESSAYS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY, Volume V, 1939-1956. Copyright © 2002 by Ivan R. Dee, Publisher. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. For information, address: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1332. North Halsted Street, Chicago 60622. Manufactured in the United States of America and printed on acid-free paper.

The publishers gratefully acknowledge the assistance and support of the Estate of Aldous Huxley in preparing this

volume.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Huxley, Aldous, 1894-1963.

[Essays]

Complete essays / Aldous Huxley; edited with commentary by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Contents: v. 1. 1920-1925 — v. 2. 1926-1929

ISBN 13: 978-1-56663-441-0

I. Baker, Robert S., 1 940- II. Sexton, James. III. Title.

PR6015.U9 A6 2000

824’.912.—dc21

000-034564

Volume III ISBN: 1-56663-347-8

Volume IV ISBN: 1-56663-394-X

Volume V ISBN: 1-56663-441-5

For our wives, Mary Meckemson and Janice Sexton

Contents

Cover

Half Title

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

A Note on This Edition

Introduction

I, POLITICS, RELIGION, SCIENCE

Politics and Religion

Introduction to The Perennial Philosophy

Stars and the Man

Variations on a Philosopher

The Double Crisis

A Case for ESP, PK, and Psi

The Doors of Perception

The Education of an Amphibian

Knowledge and Understanding

Adonis and the Alphabet

Miracle in Lebanon

II. HISTORY, POLITICS, SOCIAL CRITICISM

War and Peace

Science, Liberty, and Peace

The French of Paris

The Desert

Ozymandias

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Censorship and Spoken Literature

Hyperion to a Satyr

Mother

Usually Destroyed

Famagusta or Paphos

Faith, Taste, and History

Liberty, Quality, Machinery

Canned Fish

III, ART, LITERATURE, MUSIC

Conversation with Stravinsky

Art and Religion

Variations on a Baroque Tomb

Variations on El Greco

Variations on The Prisons

Variations on Goya

[A Word About Dylan Thomasl

Doodles in the Dictionary

Gesualdo: Variations on a Musical Theme

Domesticating Sex

Appendix

A NOTE ON THE EDITORS

A Note on This Edition

the editors have included all of Huxley's published essays as well as a generous selection of shorter reviews and brief occasional pieces. When an essay appeared in a periodical to be followed by a slightly

revised version in a published collection, we have included the latter as Huxley’s preferred text. This volume chronologically overlaps with the succeeding volume (vol. six), which will contain the remainder of Huxley's 1956 essays. We have adopted an austere policy regarding footnotes. Only minor figures are identified on their first occurrence in the text and then only when their identification appears necessary to comprehend the essay. It has, however, been difficult to apply this policy as consistently as we would have liked. The essays have been placed in chronological order and divided by topic. The reader or scholar who desires to read the essays in the original order as determined by Huxley will find the tables of contents of Themes and Variations and Adonis and the Alphabet reproduced in an appendix. We have not translated foreign language quotations except for the occasional long passage and a few important terms or phrases.

We wish to thank the Huntington Library for use of "Stars and the Man" and the UCLA Department of Special Collections, University Research Library for use of "A Word About Dylan Thomas." We also wish to express our gratitude to Eileen Ewing for her expert and untiring editorial assistance.

Introduction

in JULY 1939, Aldous Huxley completed his last important novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, which he had begun in October 1938, during the end of the Munich crisis. On the 26th he turned forty-five, and a few days later he hosted a luncheon party that included Lillian Gish, Paulette Goddard, Helen Hayes, Orson Welles, and Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin gave an advance preview of his balloon dance (the filming of The Great Dictator would begin the following Monday). Huxley, employed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, had recently moved from Hollywood to Pacific Palisades. In August he would undertake a cinematic adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. In September Europe would be at war.

In a letter to Frieda Lawrence (October 7), he reported that he had seen a private showing of Chaplin's film "about Hitler and Mussolini, which is really a major contribution to the cause of decency and sanity-immensely funny and very moving. However, one is compelled by present circumstances to doubt whether human beings any longer want decency or sanity." This tension between a belief in "the cause" and a deeper cynicism regarding progressivist history animates much of Huxley's social and political criticism of the late thirties and early forties. History had taken a wrong turning, and all rivers were running to the same sea.

The essays of 1939-1956 reflect the wide range of his interests in social institutions and practices throughout the war years and the immediate postwar period. Oddly, Huxley wrote comparatively little about the cinema or Hollywood. His essays, for the most part, register his customary fascination with history, technology, and religion. He had come to America, he said, "to learn." In a letter to Julian Huxley, written in December 1940, over three and a half years after his arrival in New York (Huxley and his wife left England on April 7,1937), he expressed his sympathy with his brother's interest in the possible appearance of an improved humanity after the war: "I was interested by the passage in your letter about the new Ideal Man. I have long been interested in the history of such ideal men. The Renaissance all-round Greek-through-rose-colored-spectacles. The 17th-century honnete homme. The 18th-century philosophe. The 19th-century respectable man-(and 'highly respectable,' as Surtees remarked of Mr. Jorrocks, really meant 'very rich¹). For the 20th century, the ideal of the Social Man seems, as you say, to be imposing itself." Huxley went on, however, to propose the Brahmin ideal of "the theocentric Man, not primarily concerned with human values at all."

The idea of rising above "human values" was self-defeating for a social novelist and satirist, as Huxley's later works would demonstrate. Nevertheless, his novels of the thirties had turned, in part, on his endeavor to define his ideal type, for example the pacifist James Miller in Eyeless in Gaza and the Jeffersonian William Propter in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. In one of his finest collections of essays, Themes and Variations (1943), included in this volume, Huxley continued his effort to recover some plausible notion of such a staunchly theocratic hero. Maine de Biran, the subject of the longest of the Variations essays, seems a curious choice. Born on November 29, 1766, at Bergerac, in Perigord, France, he witnessed the French Revolution and defended Versailles against the Paris mob as a member of the Royal Bodyguard. In the Engineers he studied mathematics and the natural sciences. Escaping the guillotine, he pursued a career of provincial administration. Biran, however, was also a philosopher. He was associated for a time with the French ideologues, but eventually he embarked on his own line of philosophical inquiry, publishing his Memoir on Habit (1803), which Huxley describes as "a masterpiece of analytical introspection." Biran published other works, including his Journal Intime, which has been described as one of the outstanding examples of French introspective literature.

Biran began as a disciple of Condillac, but he embraced the empiricist sensationalism of the ideologues only to reject it. At the end of his life (in 1824), he had turned from his earlier skepticism to its opponent, Roman Catholicism. What is unmistakable in the arc of Biran's intellectual viewpoint is its relevance to Huxley's, a movement from skeptical scientism to religious mysticism but one always anchored in intellectual speculation and analysis. Biran believed that the human ego or enduring self was characterized as pure will. It was beyond analysis, an ineffable entity that could only be known through mystical intuition. Such a being participated in a progressive movement conceived as a withdrawal from materialist experience and the spatio-temporal world, through increasing awareness of the limitations of that external reality, to a stage of transcendent self-loss whereby the ego is erased in a state of unity with God.

Huxley notes that in Biran's journal Intime, "the individual’s relation to history and society is normally that of victim to monster," adding significantly that "this being so, every reasonable person should try, so far as he can, to escape from history-but into what?" In Ulysses, James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus declared that "history ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." The Christian Mr. Deasy responds to Stephen's cri de coeur by proclaiming that "all human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God." Huxley replies to his own question by staunchly recommending that the individual abandon history and retreat "into abstract thought and inner life, or else (and this was the conclusion reached by our philosopher towards the end of his career) into the loving contemplation of the divine spirit." Huxley did not resemble Joyce's Mr. Deasy, however. The knowledge of god, he believed, was neither dogmatic nor inseparable from some form of teleological history. His study of biran's philosophy is accompanied by a sustained critique of history and modernity's excesses. Huxley's vigorous aversion for the abuse of "advanced technology," whereby the standard of machine efficiency supplants a more humane and human tempo, is conspicuously on display in the Variations essays. The nature and scale of modernity's global ambitions, especially its connection to state bureaucracy, will be familiar to readers of Huxley's earlier essays. Maine de Biran's rejection of nationalism accords well with Huxley's own preference for being "a good European," one who is wary not only of chauvinism but of the dangers of "faith in inevitable progress and the redemptive power of history to save humanity in some more or less distant future." Hypostatized and "personified History" lead inevitably to "systematic sadism" and "paranoia in high places," in particular, to the master narratives of providential and secular history:

In the high vacuum of the modern world not a trace of the divine or the eternal remains, and the notions of State, Nation, and Party are therefore free to expand into vast and monstrous caricatures of God. In the service of this God-surrogate and of his prophet, Efficiency, totalitarian dictators find it right and proper to behave with systematic savagery. In the democratic countries we worship the same deity and prophet, but under the influence of an old irrelevant habit we neglect to draw the practical conclusions which logically flow from the premises of nationalism and technics .... In 1984 we shall all be living under totalitarian conditions.

The reference to 1984, however, was not an unqualified endorsement of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley believed that there was no real and enduring resolution of social conflict; but if there was to be an endpoint to secular history, he regarded his dystopian novel Brave New World as a closer approximation to the grim modalities of modern progress. It was during the years covered by this volume of his essays that Huxley corresponded with Orwell on the relative accuracy of their two dystopias. Huxley preferred Brave New World, arguing that advances in biology, nuclear physics, and general technological and industrial efficiency were both historic and current impulses, traceable to modernity and inevitably dominant in postwar Europe and America. Like Orwell, Huxley feared the disparities in value and ethics that defined the "incommensurability" of "the individual and the social, the personal and the historical."

The essays of this volume chart the final stages of Huxley's retreat from history, an intellectual movement that parallels his abandonment of England as war approached and his final turning away from the novel of social history and its engagement with political and cultural issues. Ideology, history, and society remain a palpable and exigent topic in the Esquire essays or in Adonis and the Alphabet, but other categories begin to impinge on his customary interests. As he noted of Biran, "Even at moments when history pressed upon him most alarmingly, he found it possible to take a complete holiday in abstract thought." Biran, who had survived the Revolution of 1789, the Terror, the rise of Napoleon, and the return of the Bourbon monarchy, had come to regard the social and the historical, Huxley notes, with an "apprehensive dislike." Huxley too felt an increasing, almost culpably exaggerated aversion for contemporary events. More than that, he followed Toynbee in his belief that history "is a matter of very long durations and very large numbers." While individual events can be experienced by individuals, the latter "can never actually experience the long-range process which, according to the philosophical historians, gives meaning to history." He had come to believe only in the local and particular where "every individual simply finds himself where in fact he is-here, not there; now, not then." Conversely, the master narratives of history were hypothetical fabrications that buried the here and now in imaginative but undocumented interpretation.

Despite these reservations, Huxley was eager to speculate about the nature and scale of modernity, and the threat of what he saw as a discernibly destructive historical trend that might culminate in a society like that depicted in Brave New World. Increasingly, however, he emphasized individual physiology and psychology in a way that fostered a view of public life and what he called "the circumambient culture" as inherently monstrous. As a result, his essays are crosshatched with the contending impulses of political criticism and a mystical religious philosophy founded on the complete abandonment of history and the personal ego.

Huxley's ironic critique of history is inseparable from his rejection of the "Cartesian world-picture which has been accepted so long and so universally." In the Variations essays as well as in a number of the Esquire essays, his skepticism concerning Cartesian rationalism and the self-conscious and autonomous self does not extend to areas of paranormal experience. He appears naively to embrace a pastiche of ideas traceable to the work of C. D. Broad, H. H. Price, and others. These include what he surprisingly terms "the facts of parapsychology," a dubious category that consists of notions like psycho-kinesis, foreknowledge, "magical ecstasy," and mental telepathy. Huxley's interest in telepathy and telekinesis is, I believe, merely a superficial symptom of a deeper interest in religious mysticism and levels of experience that cannot be accounted for in terms of orthodox scientific categories of interpretation. Again, the lengthy essay on Maine de Biran incisively crystallizes these notions. Arguing that "the ultimate elements of the mental world" are "ideas," he replicates the Cartesian split between mind and body but assimilates this dualism to what he calls "Buddhist philosophy." Buddhism (although he offers no systematic discussion of it) promotes the notion of a human consciousness "without a substantial and permanent soul." Like Biran, Huxley believes that "the germ of the spiritual life is always present in the depths of the soul" but that the soul itself is ephemeral, transient, without real being. Such a foundational level of spiritual essence is, he maintains, "something that can be known only when the soul is inherently abandoned, alertly passive." What he calls "redemptive self-knowledge" occurs "when the I breaks out of its homemade and secondhand frame of reference and is thus enabled to see itself freshly, from moment to moment, in that light which it finds, but does not create." Huxley's "divine not-1" is less an ethical and more an ontological category, a level of authentic being that precludes everything encompassed by natural science, art, philosophy, and so on: "Anybody with the requisite wits and learning can write philosophy, the problem is to be a philosopher or lover of wisdom. Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche ... all wrote, but none of them was.” An arrogant statement, by any standard, but illustrative of how far Huxley was willing to go in the abandonment of human desire and the secular human-istic values encoded in philosophy and literature. The "fact" of mystical illumination depends, however, on a fairly orthodox rhetoric, the customary repertoire of metaphors or tropes including levels of being, light, silence, and a discourse that turns on negativity or negation. The dilation of some aperture opening out onto "the Unknown" as a result of a discipline of "self-emptying" was certainly known to the T. S. Eliot of Four Quartets. But Huxley's desire to transcend "all that binds us to the interests of this world" had significant consequences for his appraisal of art and literature.

Art, Literature, and Mysticism

In Themes and Variations Huxley argued that the romantic concept of art as redemptive was a delusion. From Wordsworth and Schiller to Pater and Clive Bell, aesthetics had often been grounded in a secular teleology whereby art was proffered as a substitute for God and as the creative energizer of history. Huxley's essays of the 1940s and '50s are pitched between estrangement and involvement where painting and literature are concerned. What unites his essays during this period is his interest in Baroque architecture and painting. He tended to reject the concept of periodization when it was founded on a metaphor of organic unity or ideal essence. The romantic idea of the spirit of the age-that is, some incorporeal property that permeates the art, music, and literature of a period-is rejected in favor of Huxley's preference for the particular and the local. "Environment is never the sole determinant," and "variety" is celebrated: "all the potentialities of human nature exist at all times, and at all times ... practically all the potentialities are to some extent actualized." His analysis of Baroque art accords well with recent scholarship in this area of art history. His interest in Bernini or El Greco, however, is often motivated by their failure adequately to encompass religious themes. Art and religion are compartmentalized: "Man and society are, doubtless wholes; but they are wholes divided, like ships, into watertight compartments. On one side of a bulkhead is art; on the other is religion ... only for the overseeing intellect that looks down and can see both simultaneously and recognize them as belonging, by juxtaposition rather than by fusion, to the same individual or social whole." Art is not religion nor a substitute for it. Baroque art, despite its Counter-Reformation affiliations, tends to focus on "physical dissolution and the grave." It is intensely dramatic, indeed emotionally histrionic in its stylistic flourishes, apt to defeat itself through excess but, at least, a style that attempts to focus on a transgressive subject.

Huxley's interest in Baroque art and its obsession with tombs, skulls, death, and the body, emblematized by the Baroque skeleton, lies with its denial of secular progress. "Historical generalizations," he warns, "can never be more than partially true":

In spite of which and at the risk of distorting the facts to fit a theory, I would suggest that, at any given period, preoccupation with death is in inverse ratio to the prevalence of a belief in man's perfectibility through and in a properly organized society. In the art and literature of the age of Condorcet, of the age of Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx, of the age of Lenin and the Webbs there are few skeletons. Why? Because it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that men came to believe in progress, in the march of history towards an even bigger and better future, in salvation, not for the individual, but for society.

This passage is an exemplary one in relation to Huxley's later view of art. While the Baroque style may have been excessive (in his early and late novels it is a metaphor for excessive emotionalism and sham histrionics), it is not grounded in an endorsement of temporality and historicism.

Huxley's preference for what he called "Transcendental Pragmatism" led him to a systematic repudiation of language, speculation, philosophy, and literature. T. S. Eliot, for example, is severely taken to task for asserting that a knowledge of the Upanishads depends on a fluent grasp of Sanskrit-what Eliot called a "highly developed language." Huxley, impatient with Eliot's concern about the nuances of interpretation, simply waved aside the farmer's caution and in "Knowledge and Understanding" asserted that what counted was mystical comprehension, not linguistic or philosophical knowledge: "But like all other great works of oriental philosophy, the Upanishads are not systems of pure speculation, in which the niceties of language are all important. They were written by Transcendental Pragmatists ... whose concern was to teach a doctrine which could be made to 'work,' a metaphysical theory which could be operationally tested, not through perception only, but by a direct experience of the whole man on every level of his being." What counts is action, experiences, and the "given fact of direct, unmediated experience" (emphasis mine). Characteristically, Huxley assumes what he must prove. It is hard to see how an understanding of the Upanishads can be divorced from language and meaning. The problem lies with Huxley's abuse of the word "fact." He assumes direct mystical intuition as a fact on the basis of his reading, that is, of his interpretation of a linguistic sign or set of signs. Yet the signs do not matter except as they stand for or simply assert a religious "fact." This rejection of language, like Huxley's turning away from history, was to have significant consequences for his aesthetics, including his art criticism and his practice as a novelist.

The Doors of Perception, published in 19 54, is an interesting example of Huxley's exigent need to find a "factual" basis for the "primordial fact" of mystical intuition. He did not regard his experiment with the hallucinogenic Mescaline as a form of religious "Enlightenment." Nevertheless, it closely resembles what he describes in "Knowledge and Understanding" as a special case of ontological perception, of the direct intuition of the divine ground of being. Typically the experience is defined against a background of negation, especially a repudiation of "words and notions." He first took mescaline in 1953 under medical supervision. It involved a transformation of the mundane world of Cartesian dualism. He employs religious discourse to evoke it, words like "transfiguration," "grace," or "miraculous," as well as "panic," "being mad," and "beauty." As a biochemical alteration of sense experience, it would be relatively easy to explain. Huxley, however, linked it to a mystical conception of "Mind at Large," a heightened state of perception whose origins were traceable not to the brain but to a kind of world-soul. The perceptions were not produced by the individual mind but transmitted within a wider context, a universal matrix of understanding that the drug had tapped into.

In "Knowledge and Understanding" he criticized Descartes's theory of mind in a way that illuminates his position in The Doors of Perception: "Even my claim to think is only partially justified by the observable facts. Descartes's primal certainty, 'I think, therefore I am,' turns out, on closer examination, to be a most dubious proposition. In actual fact is it I who do the thinking? Would it not be truer to say, 'Thoughts come into existence, and sometimes I am aware of them?"' Thoughts, he maintains, "have their origin 'out there,' in something analogous, on the mental level, to the external world." Thoughts are external, not subjective phenomena. Such a total awareness of the mind's extensive complicity with some larger matrix of being, where the nature of all reality is made manifest, also entails that "the nonsensical utterances of the mystics are seen to be true." Given the slender underpinning of fact in this argument, it is easy to see why the mescaline experience was so important to Huxley. It proved the existence of "Mind at Large," comparable to the results of "deliberate 'spiritual exercises.'" A further conclusion was drawn:

... What sort of pictures did Eckhardt look at? What sculptures and paintings played a part in the religious experience of St. John of the Cross, of Hakuin, of Hui-neng, of William Law? ... 1 strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art.... Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness ....

What can be detected here is the beginnings of religious intolerance, albeit of a special kind. It flows from Huxley's deep desire to locate a foundational truth that bridges Cartesian dualism and encompasses all experience. It also reduces literature and music to the level of weak substitutes for the experience of "the unfathomable Mystery" of being.

The vintage Huxley still reasserts himself in essays like "Faith, Taste, and History" or "Gesualdo" in Adonis and the Alphabet. Witty, wide-ranging, and informed, they testify to the survival of the 1920s intellectual and social satirist. But Huxley's interests have changed: art no longer enlarges the stock of available reality, the mind is not significantly creative. The watchword now is "alert passivity" and an openness to the "boundlessness and emptiness" of the Vedantist's notion of the Godhead.

ROBERT S. BAKER

Aldous Huxley

Complete Essays

Politics,

Religion

Science

Politics and Religion

about politics one can make only one completely unquestionable generalization, which is that it is quite impossible for statesmen to foresee, for more than a very short time, the results of any large-scale political action. Many of them, it is true, justify their actions by pretending to themselves and others that they can see a long way ahead; but the fact remains that they can't. If they were completely honest they would say, with Father Joseph,

J'ignore ou mon dessein, qui surpasse ma vue,

Si vite me conduit;

Mais comme un astre ardent qui brille dans la nue,

Il me guide en la nuit.¹

If hell is paved with good intentions, it is, among other reasons, because of the impossibility of calculating consequences. Bishop Stubbs therefore condemns those historians who amuse themselves by fixing on individuals or groups of men responsibility for the remoter consequences of their actions. "It strikes me," he writes, "as not merely unjust, but as showing an ignorance of the plainest aphorisms of common sense.... to make an historical character responsible for evils and crimes, which have resulted from his actions by processes which he could not foresee." This is sound so far as it goes; but it does not go very far. Besides being a moralist, the historian is one who attempts to formulate generalizations about human events. It is only by tracing the relations between acts and their consequences that such generalizations can be made. When they have been made, they are available to politicians in framing plans of action. In this way past records of the relation between acts and consequences enter the field of ethics as relevant factors in a situation of choice. And here it may be pointed out that, though it is impossible to foresee the remoter consequences of any given course of action, it is by no means impossible to foresee, in the light of past historical experience, the sort of consequences that are likely, in a general way, to follow certain sorts of acts. Thus, from the records of past experience, it seems sufficiently clear that the consequences attendant on a course of action involving such things as large-scale war, violent revolution, unrestrained tyranny, and persecution are likely to be bad. Consequently, any politician who embarks on such courses of action cannot plead ignorance as an excuse. Father Joseph, for example, had read enough history to know that policies like that which Richelieu- and he were pursuing are seldom, even when nominally successful, productive of lasting good to the parties by whom they were framed. But his passionate ambition for the Bourbons made him cling to a voluntary ignorance, which he proceeded to justify by speculations about the will of God.

Here it seems worthwhile to comment briefly on the curious time sense of those who think in political terms. Courses of action are recommended on the ground that if carried out, they cannot fail to result in a solution to all outstanding problems—a solution either definitive and everlasting, like that which Marx foresaw as the result of the setting up of a classless society, or else of very long duration, like the thousand-year futures foretold for their regimes by Mussolini and Hitler. Richelieu's admirers envisaged a Bourbon golden age longer than the hypothetical Nazi or Fascist era, but shorter (since it had a limit) than the final, classless stage of Communism. In a contemporary defense of the Cardinal's policy against the Huguenots, Voiture justifies the great expenditures involved by saying that "the capture of La Rochelle alone has economized millions; for La Rochelle would have raised rebellion at every royal minority, every revolt of the nobles during the next two thousand years." Such are the illusions cherished by the politically minded when they reflect on the consequences of a policy immediately before or immediately after it has been put in action. But when the policy has begun to show its fruits, their time sense undergoes a radical change. Gone are the calculations in terms of centuries or millennia. A single victory is now held to justify a Te Deum, and if the policy yields apparently successful results for only a few years, the statesman feels satisfied and his sycophants are lavish in their praise of his genius. Even sober historians writing long after the event tend to express themselves in the same vein. Thus, Richelieu is praised by modern writers as a very great and far-sighted statesman, even though it is perfectly clear that the actions he undertook for the aggrandizement of the Bourbon dynasty created the social and economic and political conditions which led to the downfall of that dynasty, the rise of Prussia, and the catastrophes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His policy is praised as if it had been eminently successful, and those who objected to it are blamed for their short-sighted views. Here, for example, is what Gustave Fagniez has to say of the French peasants and burgesses who opposed the Cardinal's war policy—a policy for which they had to pay with their money, their privations, and their blood. "Always selfish and unintelligent, the masses cannot be expected to put up for a long time with hardships, of which future generations are destined to reap the fruits." And this immediately after a passage setting forth the nature of these particular fruits—the union of all Europe against Louis XIV and the ruin of the French people. Such extraordinary inconsistency can only be explained by the fact that, when people come to talk of their nation's successes, they think in terms of the very briefest periods of time. A triumph is to be hymned and gloated over, even if it lasts no more than a day. Retrospectively, men like Richelieu and Louis XIV and Napoleon are more admired for the brief glory they achieved than hated for the long-drawn miseries which were the price of that glory.

Among the sixteen hundred-odd ladies whose names were set down in the catalogue of Don Giovanni's conquests, there were doubtless not a few whose favors made it necessary for the hero to consult his physician. But pox or no pox, the mere fact that the favors had been given was a thing to feel proud of, a victory worth recording in Leporello’s chronicle of successes. The history of the nations is written in the same spirit.

So much for the consequences of the policy which Father Joseph helped to frame and execute. Now for the questions of ethics. Ethically, Father Joseph's position was not the same as that of an ordinary politician. It was not the same because, unlike ordinary politicians, he was an aspirant to sanctity, a contemplative with a considerable working knowledge of mysticism, one who knew the nature of spiritual religion and had actually made some advance along the "way of perfection" towards union with God. Theologians agree that all Christians are called to union with God, but that few are willing to make the choice which qualifies them to be chosen. Father Joseph was one of those few. But having made the choice, he went on, some years later, to make another; he chose to go into politics, as Richelieu's collaborator. As we have seen, Father Joseph's intention was to combine the life of political activity with that of contemplation, to do what power politics demanded and to annihilate it in God's will even while it was being done. In practice, the things which had to be done proved unannihilatable, and with one part of his being Father Joseph came to be bitterly sorry that he had ever entered politics. But there was also another part of him, a part that craved for action, that yearned to do something heroic for the greater glory of God. Looking back over his life, Father Joseph, the contemplative, felt that he had done wrong, or at any rate been very unwise, to enter politics. But if he had not done so, if he had remained the evangelist, teacher, and religious reformer, he would probably have felt to the end of his days that he had done wrong to neglect the opportunity of doing God's will in the great world of international politics— gesta Dei per Francos.

Father Joseph's dilemma is one which confronts all spirituals and contemplatives, all who aspire to worship God theocentrically and for his own sake, all who attempt to obey the commandment to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect. In order to think clearly about this dilemma, we must learn first of all to think clearly about certain matters of more general import. Catholic theologians had done a great deal of this necessary clear thinking, and, if he had cared to make use of them, Father Joseph could have found in the teachings of his predecessors and contemporaries most of the materials for a sound philosophy of action and a sound sociology of contemplation. That he did not make use of them was due to the peculiar nature of his temperament and talents and, above all, to his intense vicarious ambition for the French monarchy. He was lured away from the path of perfection by the most refined of all temptations—the baits of loyalty and self-sacrifice, but of a loyalty to a cause inferior to the supreme good, a sacrifice of self undertaken in the name of something less than God.

Let us begin by a consideration of the theory of action which was current in the speculative writings available to Father Joseph. The first thing we have to remember is that, when theologians speak of the active life as contrasted with that of contemplation, they do not refer to what contemporary, non-theological writers call by the same name. To us, "life of action" means the sort of life led by movie heroes, business executives, war correspondents, cabinet ministers, and the like. To the theologians, all these are merely worldly lives, lived more or less unregenerately by people who have done little or nothing to get rid of their Old Adams. What they call active life, is the life of good works. To be active is to follow the way of Martha, who spent her time ministering to the material needs of the master, while Mary (who in all mystical literature stands for the contemplative) sat and listened to his words. When Father Joseph chose the life of politics, he knew very well that it was not the life of action in the theological sense, that the way of Richelieu was not identical with the way of Martha. True, France was, ex hypothesi and almost by definition, the instrument of divine providence. Therefore any policy tending to the aggrandizement of France must be good in its essence. But though its essence might be good and entirely accordant with God's will, its accidents were often questionable. This was where the practice of active annihilation came in. By means of it, Father Joseph hoped to be able to sterilize the rather dirty things he did and to make them harmless, at any rate to him self.

Most people at the present time probably take for granted the validity of the pragmatists' contention, that the end of thought is action. In the philosophy which Father Joseph had studied and made his own, this position is reversed. Here contemplation is the end and action (in which is included discursive thought) is valuable only as a means to the beatific vision of God. In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, "action should be something added to the life of prayer, not something taken away from it." To the man of the world, this statement is almost totally devoid of meaning. To the contemplative, whose concern is with spiritual religion, with the kingdom of God rather than the kingdom of selves, it seems axiomatic. Starting from this fundamental principle of theocentric religion, the practical mystics have critically examined the whole idea of action and have laid down, in regard to it, a set of rules for the guidance of those desiring to follow the mystical path towards the beatific vision. One of the best formulations of the traditional mystical doctrine in regard to action was made by Father Joseph's contemporary, Louis Lallemant.- Lallemant was a Jesuit, who, in spite of the prevailing anti-mystical tendencies of his order, was permitted to teach a very advanced (but entirely orthodox) kind of spirituality to the men entrusted to his care.

Whenever we undertake any action, Father Lallemant insists, we must model ourselves upon God himself, who creates and sustains the world without in any way modifying his essential existence. But we cannot do this unless we learn to practice formal contemplation and a constant awareness of God's presence. Both are difficult, especially the latter which is possible only to those very far advanced along the way of perfection. So far as beginners are concerned, even the doing of good works may distract the soul from God. Action is not safe, except for proficients in the art of mental prayer. "If we have gone far in orison," says Lallemant, "we shall give much to action; if we are but middlingly advanced in the inward life, we shall give ourselves only moderately to outward life; if we have only a very little inwardness, we shall give nothing at all to what is external, unless our vow of obedience commands the contrary." To the reasons already given for this injunction we may add others of a strictly utilitarian nature. It is a matter of experience and observation that actions undertaken by ordinary unregenerate people, sunk in their selfhood and without spiritual insight, seldom do much good. A generation before Lallemant, St. John of the Cross had put the whole matter in a single question and answer. Those who rush headlong into good works without having acquired through contemplation the power to act well—what do they accomplish? ”Poco mas que nada, y a veces nada, y aun a veces dano" (Little more than nothing, and sometimes nothing at all, and sometimes even harm.) One reason for hell being paved with good intentions has already been mentioned, and to this, the impossibility of foreseeing the consequences of actions, we must now add another, the intrinsically unsatisfactory nature of actions performed by the ordinary run of average unregenerate men and women. This being so, Lallemant recommends the least possible external activity until such time as, by contemplation and the unremitting practice of the presence, the soul has been trained to give itself completely to God. Those who have traveled only a little way along the road to union, "should not go out of themselves for the service of their neighbors, except by way of trial and experiment. We must be like those hunting dogs that are still half held upon the leash. When we shall have come by contemplation to possess God, we shall be able to give greater freedom to our zeal." External activity causes no interruption in the orison of the proficient; on the contrary it is a means for bringing them nearer to reality. Those for whom it is not such a means should as far as possible refrain from action. Once again Father Lallemant justifies himself by the appeal to experience and a purely utilitarian consideration of consequences. In all that concerns the saving of souls and the improving of the quality of people's thoughts and feelings and behavior, "a man of orison will accomplish more in one year than another man in all his life."

What is true of good works is true, a fortiori, of merely worldly activity, particularly when it is activity on a large scale, involving the collaboration of great numbers of individuals in every stage of unenlightenment. Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced. All Catholic theologians were well aware of this truth, and the church has acted upon it since its earliest days. The monastic orders—and preeminently that to which Father Joseph himself belonged —were living demonstrations of the traditional doctrine of action. This doctrine affirmed that goodness of more than average quantity and quality could be practically realized only on a small scale, by selfdedicated and specially trained individuals. In his own work of religious reform and spiritual instruction, Father Joseph always acted on this same principle. The art of mental prayer was taught by him only to individuals or small groups; the Calvarian rule was given as a way of life to only a very few of the nuns of Fontevrault, the order as a whole being much too large to be capable of realizing that peculiar spiritual good which the reform was intended to produce. And yet, in spite of his theoretical and experimental knowledge that good cannot be mass-produced in an un-regenerate society, Father Joseph went into power politics, convinced not only that by so doing he was fulfilling the will of God, but also that great and lasting material and spiritual benefits would result from the war which he did his best to prolong and exacerbate. He knew that it was useless to try to compel the good ladies of Fontevrault to be more virtuous and spiritual than they wanted to be; and yet he believed that active French intervention in the Thirty Years' War would result in "a new golden age." This strange inconsistency was, as we have often insisted, mainly a product of the will—that will which Father Joseph thought he had succeeded in subordinating to the will of God, but which remained, in certain important respects, unregenerately that of the natural man. In part, however, it was also due to intellectual causes, specifically to his acceptance of a certain theory of providence, widely held in the church and itself inconsistent with the theories of action and the good outlined above. According to this theory, all history is providential and its interminable catalogue of crimes and insanities is an expression of the divine will. As the most spectacular crimes and insanities of history are perpetrated at the orders of governments, it follows that these and the states they rule are also embodiments of God's will. Granted the truth of this providential theory of history and the state, Father Joseph was justified in believing that the Thirty Years' War was a good thing and that a policy which disseminated cannibalism, and universalized the practice of torture and murder, might be wholly accordant with God's will, provided only that it was advantageous to France. This condition was essential; for as a politician, one was justified by the providential theory of history in believing that God performs his gesta per Francos, even though, as a practical reformer and spiritual director one knew very well that the deeds of God get done, not by the Franks at large, but by one Frank here and another there, even by occasional Britons, such as Benet Fitch, and occasional Spaniards, such as St. Teresa.

Mystical philosophy can be summed up in a single phrase: "The more of the creature, the less of God." The large-scale activities of unregenerate men and women are almost wholly creaturely; therefore they almost wholly exclude God. If history is an expression of the divine will, it is so mainly in a negative sense. The crimes and insanities of large-scale human societies are related to God's will only in so far as they are acts of disobedience to that will, and it is only in this sense that they and the miseries resulting from them can properly be regarded as providential. Father Joseph justified the campaigns he planned by an appeal to the God of Battles. But there is no God of Battles; there is only an ultimate reality, expressing itself in a certain nature of things, whose harmony is violated by such events as battles, with consequences more or less disastrous for all directly or indirectly concerned in the violation.

This brings us to the heart of that great paradox of politics—the fact that political action is necessary and at the same time incapable of satisfying the needs which called it into existence.

Only static and isolated societies, whose way of life is determined by an unquestioned tradition, can dispense with politics. In unstable, unisolated, technologically progressive societies, such as ours, large-scale political action is unavoidable. But even when it is well intentioned (which it very often is not) political action is always foredoomed to a partial, sometimes even a complete, self-stultification. The intrinsic nature of the human instruments with which, and the human materials upon which, political action must be carried out, is a positive guarantee against the possibility that such action shall yield the results that were expected from it. This generalization could be illustrated by an indefinite number of instances drawn from history. Consider, for example, the results actually achieved by two reforms upon which well-intentioned people have placed the most enormous hopes—universal education and public ownership of the means of production. Universal education has proved to be the state's most effective instrument of universal regimentation and militarization, and has exposed millions, hitherto immune, to the influence of organized lying and the allurements of incessant, imbecile, and debasing distractions. Public ownership of the means of production has been put into effect on a large scale only in Russia, where the results of the reform have been, not the elimination of oppression, but the replacement of one kind of oppression by another—of money power by political and bureaucratic power, of the tyranny of rich men by a tyranny of the police and the party.

For several thousands of years now men have been experimenting with different methods for improving the quality of human instruments and human material. It has been found that a good deal can be done by such strictly humanistic methods as the improvement of the social and economic environment, and the various techniques of character training. Among men and women of a certain type, startling results can be obtained by means of conversion and catharsis. But though these methods are somewhat more effective than those of the purely humanistic variety, they work only erratically and they do not produce the radical and permanent transformation of personality, which must take place, and take place on a very large scale, if political action is ever to produce the beneficial results expected from it. For the radical and permanent transformation of personality only one effective method has been discovered—that of the mystics. It is a difficult method, demanding from those who undertake it a great deal more patience, resolution, self-abnegation, and awareness than most people are prepared to give, except perhaps in times of crisis, when they are ready for a short while to make the most enormous sacrifices. But unfortunately the amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist. Because of the general reluctance to make such efforts during uncritical times, very few people are prepared, at any given moment of history, to undertake the method of the mystics. This being so, we shall be foolish if we expect any political action, however well intentioned and however nicely planned, to produce more than a fraction of the general betterment anticipated.

The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free, and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence. Large-scale organizations are capable, it would seem, of going down a good deal further than they can go up. We may reasonably expect to reach the upper limit once again; but unless a great many more people than in the past are ready to undertake the only method capable of transforming personality, we may not expect to rise appreciably above it.

What can the politicians do for their fellows by actions within the political field, and without the assistance of the contemplatives? The answer would seem to be: not very much. Political reforms cannot be expected to produce much general betterment, unless large numbers of individuals undertake the transformation of their personality by the only known method which really works—that of the contemplatives. Moreover, should the amount of mystical, theocentric leaven in the lump of humanity suffer a significant decrease, politicians may find it impossible to raise the societies they rule even to the very moderate heights realized in the past.

Meanwhile, politicians can do something to create a social environment favorable to contemplatives. Or perhaps it is better to put the matter negatively and say that they can refrain from doing certain things and making certain arrangements which are specially unfavorable.

The political activity that seems to be least compatible with theocentric religion is that which aims at increasing a certain special type of social efficiency—the efficiency required for waging or threatening large-scale war. To achieve this kind of efficiency, politicians always aim at some kind of totalitarianism. Acting like the man of science who can only deal with the complex problems of real life by arbitrarily simplifying them for experimental purposes, the politician in search of military efficiency arbitrarily simplifies the society with which he has to deal. But whereas the scientist simplifies by a process of analysis and isolation, the politician can only simplify by compulsion, by a Procrustean process of chopping and stretching designed to make the living organism conform to a certain easily understood and readily manipulated mechanical pattern. Planning a new kind of national, military efficiency, Richelieu set himself to simplify the complexity of French society. That complexity was largely chaotic, and a policy of simplification, judiciously carried out by desirable means would have been fully justified. But Richelieu’s policy was not judicious and, when continued after his death, resulted in the totalitarianism of Louis XIV—a totalitarianism which was intended to be as complete as anything we see in the modern world, and which only failed to be so by reason of the wretched systems of communication and organization available to the Grand Monarque’s secret police. The tyrannical spirit was very willing, but, fortunately for the French, the technological flesh was weak. In an era of telephones, finger printing, tanks, and machine guns, the task of a total-itarian government is easier than it was.

Totalitarian politicians demand obedience and conformity in every sphere of life, including, of course, the religious. Here, their aim is to use religion as an instrument of social consolidation, an increaser of the country's military efficiency. For this reason, the only kind of religion they favor is strictly anthropocentric, exclusive, and nationalistic. Theocentric religion, involving the worship of God for his own sake, is inadmissible in a totalitarian state. All the contemporary dictators, Russian, Turkish, Italian, and German, have either discouraged or actively persecuted any religious organization whose members advocate the worship of God, rather than the worship of the deified state or the local political boss. Louis XIV was what is called "a good Catholic"; but his attitude towards religion was characteristically totalitarian. He wanted religious unity, therefore he revoked the Edict of Nantes and persecuted the Huguenots. He wanted an exclusive, nationalistic religion; therefore he quarreled with the Pope and insisted on his own spiritual supremacy in France. He wanted state-worship and king-worship; therefore he sternly discouraged those who taught theocentric religion, who advocated the worship of God alone and for his own sake. The decline of mysticism at the end of the seventeenth century was due in part to the fatal over-orthodoxy of Berulle- and his school, but partly also to a deliberate persecution of mystics at the hands of ecclesiastics, who could say, with Bossuet,- that they worshipped God under the forms of the King, Jesus Christ, and the Church. The attack on quietism was only partly the thing it professed to be—a punitive expedition against certain rather silly heretical views and certain rather undesirable practices. It was also and more significantly a veiled assault upon mysticism itself. The controversial writings of Nicole,- who worked in close collaboration with Bossuet, make it quite clear that the real enemy was spiritual religion as such. Unfortunately for Nicole, the church had given its approval to the doctrines and practices of earlier mystics, and it was therefore necessary to proceed with caution; but this caution was not incompatible with a good deal of anti-mystical violence. Consciously, or unconsciously, Nicole and the other enemies of contemplation and theocentric religion were playing the game of totalitarianism.

The efficiency of a pre-industrial totalitarian state, such as that which Richelieu planned and Louis XIV actually realized, can never be so high as that of an industrial state, possessed of modern weapons, communications, and organizing methods. Conversely, it does not need to be so high. A national industrial system is something so complicated that, if it is to function properly and compete with other national systems, it must be controlled in all its details by a centralized state authority. Even if the intentions of the various centralized state authorities were pacific, which they are not, industrialism would tend of its very nature to transform them into totalitarian governments. When the need for military efficiency is added to the need for industrial efficiency, totalitarianism becomes inevitable. Technological progress, nationalism, and war seem to guarantee that the immediate future of the world shall belong to various forms of totalitarianism. But a world made safe for totalitarianism is a world, in all probability, made very unsafe for mysticism and theocentric religion. And a world made unsafe for mysticism and theocentric religion is a world where the only proved method of transforming personality will be less and less practiced, and where fewer and fewer people will possess any direct, experimental knowledge of reality to set up against the false doctrine of totalitarian anthropocentrism and the pernicious ideas and practices of nationalistic pseudo-mysticism. In such a world there seems little prospect that any political reform, however well intentioned, will produce the results expected of it.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved. Individuals and small groups do not always and automatically behave well. But at least they can be moral and rational to a degree unattainable by large groups. For, as numbers increase, personal relations between members of the group, and between its members and those of other groups, become more difficult and finally, for the vast majority of the individuals concerned, impossible. Imagination has to take the place of direct acquaintance, behavior motivated by a reasoned and impersonal benevolence, the place of behavior motivated by personal affection and a spontaneous and unreflecting compassion. But in most men and women reason, sympathetic imagination, and the impersonal view of things are very slightly developed. That is why, among other reasons, the ethical standards prevailing within large groups, between large groups, and between the rulers and the ruled in a large group, are generally lower than those prevailing within and among small groups. The art of what may be called "goodness politics," as opposed to power politics, is the art of organizing on a large scale without sacrificing the ethical values which emerge only among individuals and small groups. More specifically, it is the art of combining decentralization of government and industry, local and functional autonomy, and smallness of administrative units with enough over-all efficiency to guarantee the smooth running of the federated whole. Goodness politics have never been attempted in any large society, and it may be doubted whether such an attempt, if made, could achieve more than a partial success, so long as the majority of individuals concerned remain unable or unwilling to transform their personalities by the only method known to be effective. But though the attempt to substitute goodness politics for power politics may never be completely successful, it still remains true that the methods of goodness politics combined with individual training in theocentric theory and contemplative practice alone provide the means whereby human societies can become a little less unsatisfactory than they have been up to the present. So long as they are not adopted, we must expect to see an indefinite continuance of the dismally familiar alternations between extreme evil and a very imperfect, self-stultifying good, alternations which constitute the history of all civilized societies. In a world inhabited by what the theologians call unregenerate, or natural men, church and state can probably never become appreciably better than the best of the states and churches, of which the past has left us the record. Society can never be greatly improved, until such time as most of its members choose to become theocentric saints. Meanwhile, the few theocentric saints which exist at any given moment are able in some slight measure to qualify and mitigate the poisons which society generates within itself by its political and economic activities. In the gospel phrase, theocentric saints are the salt which preserves the social world from breaking down into irremediable decay.

This antiseptic and antidotal function of the theocentric is performed in a variety of ways. First of all, the mere fact that he exists is profoundly salutary and important. The potentiality of knowledge of, and union with, God is present in all men and women. In most of them, however, it is covered, as Eckhart7 puts it, "by thirty or forty skins or hides, like an ox's or a bear’s, so thick and hard." But beneath all this leather, and in spite of its toughness, the divine more-than-self, which is the quick and principle of our being, remains alive, and can and does respond to the shining manifestation of the same principle in the theocentric saint. The "old man dressed all in leather" meets the new man, who has succeeded in stripping off the carapace of his thirty or forty ox-hides, and walks through the world, a naked soul, no longer opaque to the radiance immanent within him. From this meeting, the old man is likely to come away profoundly impressed by the strangeness of what he has seen, and with the nostalgic sense that the world would be a better place if there were less leather in it. Again and again in the course of history, the meeting with a naked and translucent spirit, even the reading about such spirits, has sufficed to restrain the leather men who rule over their fellows from using their power to excess. It is respect for theocentric saints that prompts the curious hypocrisy which accompanies and seeks to veil the brutal facts of political action. The preambles of treaties are always drawn up in the choicest Pecksniffian style, and the more sinister the designs of a politician, the more high-flown, as a rule, becomes the nobility of his language. Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.

The theocentric saint is impressive, not only for what he is, but also for what he does and says. His actions and all his dealings with the world are marked by disinterestedness and serenity, invariable truthfulness and a total absence of fear. These qualities are the fruits of the doctrine he preaches, and their manifestation in his life enormously reinforces that doctrine and gives him a certain strange kind of uncoercive but none the less compelling authority over his fellow men. The essence of this authority is that it is purely spiritual and moral, and is associated with none of the ordinary social sanctions of power, position, or wealth. It was here, of course, that Father Joseph made his gravest and most fatal mistake. Even if his mysticism had proved to be compatible with his power politics, which it did not, he would still have been wrong to accept the position of Richelieu's collaborator; for by accepting it he automatically deprived himself of the power to exercise a truly spiritual authority, he cut himself off from the very possibility of being the apostle of mysticism.

True, he could still be of use to his Calvarian nuns, as a teacher of contemplation; but this was because he entered their convent, not as the foreign minister of France, but as a simple director. Outside the convent, he was always the Grey Eminence. People could not speak to him without remembering that he was a man from whom there was much to hope or fear; between themselves and this friar turned politician, there could no longer be the direct contact of soul with naked soul. For them, his authority was temporal, not spiritual. Moreover, they remembered that this was the man who had organized the secret service, who gave instructions to spies, who had outwitted the Emperor at Ratisbon, who had worked his hardest to prolong the war; and remembering these things, they could be excused for having their doubts about Father Joseph's brand of religion. The tree is known by its fruits, and if these were the fruits of mental prayer and the unitive life—why, then they saw no reason why they shouldn't stick to wine and women, tempered by church on Sundays, confession once a quarter, and communion at Christmas and Easter. It is a fatal thing, say the Indians, for the members of one caste to usurp the functions that properly belong to another. Thus when the merchants trespass upon the ground of the kshatriyas and undertake the business of ruling, society is afflicted by all the evils of capitalism; and when the kshatriyas do what only the theocentric brahmin has a right to do, when they presume to lay down the law on spiritual matters, there is totalitarianism, with its idolatrous religions; its deifications of the nation, the party, the local political boss. Effects no less disastrous occur when the brahmins go into politics or business; for then they lose their spiritual insight and authority, and the society which it was their business to enlighten remains wholly dark, deprived of all communication with divine reality, and consequently an easy victim to preachers of false doctrines. Father Joseph is an eminent example of this last confusion of the castes. Abandoning seership for rulership, he gradually, despite his most strenuous efforts to retain it, lost the mystical vision which had given him his spiritual authority—but not, unfortunately, before he had covered with that authority many acts and policies of the most questionable nature. (Richelieu was a good psychologist, and it will be remembered that "whenever he wanted to perform some piece of knavery, he always made use of men of piety.") In a very little while, the last vestiges of Father Joseph's spiritual authority disappeared, and he came, as we have seen, to be regarded with general horror, as a man capable of every crime and treachery.

The politically minded Jesuits, who practiced the same disastrous confusion of castes, came to have a reputation as bad as Father Joseph's. The public was wrong in thinking of these generally virtuous and well-intentioned men as fairy-tale monsters; but in condemning the fundamental principle of their work in the world, it was profoundly right. The business of a seer is to see, and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him. Mystics and theocentrics are not always loved or invariably listened to; far from it. Prejudice and the dislike of what is unusual may blind their contemporaries to the virtues of these men and women of the margin, may cause them to be persecuted as enemies of society. But should they leave their margin, should they take to competing for place and power within the main body of society, they are certain to be generally hated and despised as traitors to their seership.

To be a seer is not the same thing as to be a mere spectator. Once the contemplative has fitted himself to become, in Lallemant's phrase, "a man of much orison," he can undertake work in the world with no risk of being thereby distracted from his vision of reality, and with fair hope of achieving an appreciable amount of good. As a matter of historical fact, many of the great theocentrics have been men and women of enormous and beneficent activity.

The work of the theocentrics is always marginal, is always started on the smallest scale and, when it expands, the resulting organization is always subdivided into units sufficiently small to be capable of a shared spiritual experience and of moral and rational conduct.

The first aim of the theocentrics is to make it possible for anyone who desires it to share their own experience of ultimate reality. The groups they create are organized primarily for the worship of God for God's sake. They exist in order to disseminate various methods (not all of equal value) for transforming the "natural man," and for learning to know the more-than-personal reality immanent within the leathery casing of selfhood. At this point, many theocentrics are content to stop. They have their experience of reality and they proceed to impart the secret to a few immediate disciples, or commit it to writing in a book that will be read by a wider circle removed from them by great stretches of space and time. Or else, more systematically, they establish small organized groups, a self-perpetuating order of contemplatives living under a rule. In so far as they may be expected to maintain or possibly increase the number of seers and theocentrics in a given community, these proceedings have a considerable social importance. Many theocentrics, however, are not content with this, but go on to employ their organizations to make a direct attack upon the thorniest social problems. Such attacks are always launched from the margin, not the center, always (at any rate in their earlier phases) with the sanction of a purely spiritual authority, not with the coercive power of the state. Sometimes the attack is directed against economic evils, as when the Benedictines addressed themselves to the revival of agriculture and the draining of swamps. Sometimes the evils are those of ignorance and the attack is through various kinds of education. Here again the Benedictines were pioneers. (It is worth remarking that the Benedictine order owed its existence to the apparent folly of a young man who, instead of doing the proper, sensible thing, which was to go through the Roman schools and become an administrator under the Gothic emperors, went away and, for three years, lived alone in a hole in the mountains. When he had become "a man of much orison," he emerged, founded monasteries, and composed a rule to fit the needs of a self-perpetuating order of hard-working contemplatives. In the succeeding centuries, the order civilized northwestern Europe, introduced or re-established the best agricultural practice of the time, provided the only educational facilities then available, and preserved and disseminated the treasures of ancient literature. For generations Benedictinism was the principal antidote to barbarism. Europe owes an incalculable debt to the young man who, because he was more interested in knowing God than in getting on, or even "doing good," in the world, left Rome for that burrow in the hillside above Subiaco.)

Work in the educational field has been undertaken by many theocentric organizations other than the Benedictine order—all too often, unhappily, under the restrictive influence of the political, state-supported and state-supporting church. More recently the state has everywhere assumed the role of universal educator—a position that exposes governments to peculiar temptations, to which sooner or later they all succumb, as we see at the present time, when the school system is used in almost every country as an instrument of regimentation, militarization, and nationalistic propaganda. In any state that pursued goodness politics rather than power politics, education would remain a public charge, paid for out of the taxes, but would be returned, subject to the fulfilment of certain conditions, to private hands. Under such an arrangement, most schools would probably be little or no better than they are at present; but at least their badness would be variegated, while educators of exceptional originality or possessed of the gift of seership would be given opportunities for teaching at present denied them.

Philanthropy is a field in which many men and women of the margin have labored to the great advantage of their fellows. We may mention the truly astounding work accomplished by Father Joseph's contemporary, St. Vincent de Paul,- a great theocentric, and a great benefactor to the people of seventeenth-century France. Small and insignificant in its beginnings, and carried on, as it expanded, under spiritual authority alone and upon the margin of society, Vincent's work among the poor did something to mitigate the sufferings imposed by the war and by the ruinous fiscal policy which the war made necessary. Having at their disposal all the powers and resources of the state, Richelieu and Father Joseph were able, of course, to do much more harm than St. Vincent and his little band of theocentrics could do good. The antidote was sufficient to offset only a part of the poison.

It was the same with another great seventeenth-century figure, George Fox.- Born at the very moment when Richelieu was made president of the council and Father Joseph finally committed himself to the political life, Fox began his ministry the year before the Peace of Westphalia was signed. In the course of the next twenty years the Society of Friends gradually crystallized into its definitive form. Fanatically marginal—for when invited, he refused even to dine at Cromwell's table, for fear of being compromised —Fox was never corrupted by success, but remained to the end the apostle of the inner light. The society he founded has had its ups and downs, its long seasons of spiritual torpor and stagnation, as well as its times of spiritual life; but always the Quakers have clung to Fox's intransigent theocentrism and, along with it, to his conviction that, if it is to remain at all pure and unmixed, good must be worked for upon the margin of society, by individuals and by organizations small enough to be capable of moral, rational, and spiritual life. That is why, in the two hundred and seventy-five years of its existence, the Society of Friends has been able to accomplish a sum of useful and beneficent work entirely out of proportion to its numbers. Here again the antidote has always been insufficient to offset more than a part of the

poison injected into the body politic by the statesmen, financiers, industrialists, ecclesiastics and all the undistinguished millions who fill the lower ranks of the social hierarchy. But though not enough to counteract more than some of the effects of the poison, the leaven of theocentrism is the one thing which, hitherto, has saved the civilized world from total self-destruction. Father Joseph's hope of leading a whole national community along a political short cut into the kingdom of heaven on earth is illusory, so long as the human instruments and material of political action remain untransformed. His place was with the antidote makers, not with those who brew the poisons.

[From Grey Eminence, 1941]

1. Father Joseph (1577-1638). French priest and assistant to Cardinal Richelieu, known as the "Eminence Grise." The lines can be translated as: "I don't know where my design, which surpasses my sight, / So quickly conducts me; / But like an ardent star which shines in the skies, / It guides me in the night."

2. Armand Jean Duplessis, Cardinal, Due de Richelieu (1585-1642). French prelate and statesman during the regency of Marie De Medicis and the reign of Louis XIII.

3. Louis Lallemant (1588-1635). French Jesuit teacher.

4. Pierre de Berulie (1575-1629). French prelate, theologian, and founder of the Congregation de 1'Oratoire to educate priests and oppose the Reformation.

5. Jacques Benigne Bos suet (1627-1704). French churchman, orator, and author.

6. Pierre Nicole (1625-1695). French Jansenist theologian and author of The Logic of Port Royal (1662).

7. Johannes Eckhart (c. 1260-1327). German mystic and author.

8. St. Vincent de Paul (c. 1581-1660). French priest and philanthropist.

9. George Fox (1624-1691). English Quaker leader and founder of the Society of Friends.

Introduction to The Perennial Philosophy

Biran did not himself undertake physiological expe

The Double Crisis

The Doors of Perception

The Education of an Amphibian

Adonis and the Alphabet

The French of Paris

Ozymandias

Hyperion to a Satyr

Famagusta or Paphos

Conversation with Stravinsky

Variations on The Prisons

Gesualdo: Variations on a Musical Theme

Introduction to The Perennial Philosophy

PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS—the phrase was coined by Leibniz; but the thing—the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being—the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again, from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages of Asia and Europe. In the pages that follow I have brought together a number of selections from these writings, chosen mainly for their significance —because they effectively illustrated some particular point in the general system of the Perennial Philosophy—but also for their intrinsic beauty and memorableness. These selections are arranged under various heads and embedded, so to speak, in a commentary of my own, designed to illustrate and connect, to develop and, where necessary, to elucidate.

Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing. For example, the being of a child is transformed by growth and education into that of a man; among the results of this transformation is a revolutionary change in the way of knowing and the amount and character of the things known. As the individual grows up, his knowledge becomes more conceptual and systematic in form, and its factual, utilitarian content is enormously increased. But these gains are offset by a certain deterioration in the quality of immediate apprehension, a blunting and a loss of intuitive power. Or consider the change in his being which the scientist is able to induce mechanically by means of his instruments. Equipped with a spectroscope and a sixty-inch reflector an astronomer becomes, so far as eyesight is concerned, a superhuman creature; and, as we should naturally expect, the knowledge possessed by this superhuman creature is very different, both in quantity and quality, from that which can be acquired by a stargazer with unmodified, merely human eyes.

Nor are changes in the knower's physiological or intellectual being the only ones to affect his knowledge. What we know depends also on what, as moral beings, we choose to make ourselves.

"Practice," in the words of William James, "may change our theoretical horizon, and this in a twofold way: it may lead into new worlds and secure new powers. Knowledge we could never attain, remaining what we are, may be attainable in consequence of higher powers and a higher life, which we may morally achieve." To put the matter more succinctly, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." And the same idea has been expressed by the Sufi poet, Jalal-uddin Rumi, in terms of a scientific metaphor: "The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love."

This book, I repeat, is an anthology of the Perennial Philosophy; but, though an anthology, it contains but few extracts from the writings of professional men of letters and, though illustrating a philosophy, hardly anything from the professional philosophers. The reason for this is very simple. The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfil certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit. Why should this be so? We do not know. It is just one of those facts which we have to accept, whether we like them or not and however implausible and unlikely they may seem. Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly, nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has, as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when that mind is subjected to certain rather drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest, not only to the mind itself, but also, by its reflection in external behavior, to other minds. It is only by making physical experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of matter and its potentialities. And it is only by making psychological and moral experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of mind and its potentialities. In the ordinary circumstances of average sensual life these potentialities of the mind remain latent and unmanifested. If we would realize them, we must fulfil certain conditions and obey certain rules, which experience has shown empirically to be valid.

In regard to few professional philosophers and men of letters is there any evidence that they did very much in the way of fulfilling the necessary conditions of direct spiritual knowledge. When poets or metaphysicians talk about the subject matter of the Perennial Philosophy, it is generally at second hand. But in every age there have been some men and women who chose to fulfil the conditions upon which alone, as a matter of brute empirical fact, such immediate knowledge can be had; and of these a few have left accounts of the Reality they were thus enabled to apprehend and have tried to relate, in one comprehensive system of thought, the given facts of this experience with the given facts of their other experiences. To such firsthand exponents of the Perennial Philosophy those who knew them have generally given the name of ’’saint" or "prophet," "sage" or "enlightened one." And it is mainly to these, because there is good reason for supposing that they knew what they were talking about, and not to the professional philosophers or men of letters, that I have gone for my selections.

In India two classes of scripture are recognized: the Shruti, or inspired writings which are their own authority, since they are the product of immediate insight into ultimate Reality; and the Smriti, which are based upon the Shruti and from them derive such authority as they have. "The Shruti," in Shankara's words, "depends upon direct perception. The Smriti plays a part analogous to induction, since, like induction, it derives its authority from an authority other than itself." This book, then, is an anthology, with explanatory comments, of passages drawn from the Shruti and Smriti of many times and places. Unfortunately, familiarity with traditionally hallowed writings tends to breed, not indeed contempt, but something which, for practical purposes, is almost as bad—namely, a kind of reverential insensibility, a stupor of the spirit, an inward deafness to the meaning of the sacred words. For this reason, when selecting material to illustrate the doctrines of the Perennial Philosophy, as they were formulated in the West, I have gone almost always to sources other than the Bible. This Christian Smriti, from which I have drawn, is based upon the Shruti of the canonical books, but has the great advantage of being less well known and therefore more vivid and, so to say, more audible than they are. Moreover, much of this Smriti is the work of genuinely saintly men and women, who have qualified themselves to know at first hand what they are talking about. Consequently it may be regarded as being itself a form of inspired and self-validating Shruti—and this in a much higher degree than many of the writings now included in the Biblical canon.

In recent years a number of attempts have been made to work out a system of empirical theology. But in spite of the subtlety and intellectual power of such writers as Sorley, Oman, and Tennant,¹ the effort has met with only a partial success. Even in the hands of its ablest exponents empirical theology is not particularly convincing. The reason, it seems to me, must be sought in the fact that the empirical theologians have confined their attention more or less exclusively to the experience of those whom the theologians of an older school called "the unregenerate"—that is to say, the experience of people who have not gone very far in fulfilling the necessary conditions of spiritual knowledge. But it is a fact, confirmed and re-confirmed during two or three thousand years of religious history, that the ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended, except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit. This being so, it is hardly surprising that a theology based upon the experience of nice, ordinary, unregenerate people should carry so little conviction. This kind of empirical theology is on precisely the same footing as an empirical astronomy, based upon the experience of naked-eye observers. With the unaided eye a small, faint smudge can be detected in the constellation of Orion, and doubtless an imposing cosmological theory could be based upon the observation of this smudge. But no amount of such theorizing, however ingenious, could ever tell us as much about the galactic and extra-galactic nebulae as can direct acquaintance by means of a good telescope, camera, and spectroscope. Analogously, no amount of theorizing about such hints as may be darkly glimpsed within the ordinary, unre-generate experience of the manifold world can tell us as much about divine Reality as can be directly apprehended by a mind in a state of detachment, charity, and humility. Natural science is empirical; but it does not confine itself to the experience of human beings in their merely human and unmodified condition. Why empirical theologians should feel themselves obliged to submit to this handicap, goodness only knows. And of course, so long as they confine empirical experience within these all too humah limits, they are doomed to the perpetual stultification of their best efforts. From the material they have chosen to consider, no mind, however brilliantly gifted, can infer more than a set of possibilities or, at the very best, specious probabilities. The self-validating certainty of direct awareness cannot in the very nature of things be achieved except by those equipped with the moral "astrolabe of God’s mysteries." If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do, in the field of metaphysics, is to study the works of those who were, because they had modified their merely human mode of being, capable of a more than merely human kind and amount of knowledge.

[The Perennial Philosophy, 1946]

I. William Ritchie Sorley (1855-1935). British philosopher and author of Moral Values and the Idea of God (1918). John Wood Oman (1860-1939). Scottish theologian and author of The Natural and the Supernatural (1931). Frederick Robert Tennant (1866-1957). English theologian and author of Philosophical Theology (2 vols., 1928 and 1930).

Stars and the Man²

seven hundred years ago, every schoolboy knew that the radius of the universe, from its center (which was, of course, the center of the earth) to the surface of the outermost heaven, or firmament, was precisely 109,375 Roman miles. By 1620, when Burton was writing The Anatomy of Melancholy, the distance from the earth to the eighth sphere had increased very considerably. The radius of the universe was now 170,000,803 miles. But the concentric spheres of the older system were already going out of fashion. The Copernican Revolution was in full swing, and Burton’s younger contemporaries knew that the earth was a planet, revolving, with its fellow satellites, about a central sun. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the solar system had been measured with a high degree of accuracy. But exact knowledge ended with the orbits of the planets. All that could be said about the fixed stars was that they must be a long way off. Not until 1840 was the distance of one of the nearer stars precisely measured. In that year Bessel was able to observe the parallax of Alpha Centauri and to calculate that the star was at a distance of a little more than 4 light-years—in other words, about 25 million million miles—from the solar system. How far away were the stars with no observable parallax? Ten times as far? A hundred times? It was anybody’s guess.

This was where the matter stood when I was a boy, at the beginning of the present century. Then, almost suddenly, another intellectual revolution took place—a revolution no less momentous than the Copernican shift from a tiny nest of spherical boxes centered upon the earth to a solar system within a much larger configuration of stars. The history of this second great revolution in cosmological thought may be followed in the successive editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In the edition of 1910 there is an excellent article by Eddington- on the nebulae. In this article it is taken for granted that all the nebulae, of whatever type, are within our own galactic system, at no greater distance from us than the remotest of the stars. Twelve years later the Britannica was brought up-to-date by the issue of three supplementary volumes. In the first of these volumes is an article on Astronomy, also by Eddington. It contains the announcement of the first phase of the revolution. The spiral nebulae are now described as "island universes," outside our own system of stars. By 1928, when the fourteenth edition of the Britannica made its appearance, astronomers were making the first tentative estimates of the remoteness of these islands in outer space. Distances of millions, even tens of millions, of light-years are mentioned in the new article on nebulae, and the author closes with an almost purple passage about the incomprehensible vastness of the cosmos. Today the universe of 1928 seems almost cozy. The 200-inch reflector has revealed nebulae at a distance of a thousand million light-years, and all the island universes in the corner of infinite space accessible to our observation are apparently receding from us at a rate, proportionate to their distance, of hundreds or even thousand of miles a second.

The man who, more than any other single individual, is responsible for this new revolution in cosmological thought, is Dr. Edwin Hubble.- For the universe as we know it today infinitely improbable, fathomlessly mysterious—rests in the main on Hubble's observations. (For the interested reader, there are Hubble’s original papers and his classical monograph, The Realm of the Nebulae, together with a small library, popular as well as technical, on astronomy and cosmology.) My concern here is not with science as such, but with one particular man of science, and with that man of science in his relations to the world outside the observatory.

In this context, the most remarkable fact about Edwin Hubble is his catholicity, his all-roundedness. This great researcher in the purest of the pure sciences is widely and profoundly cultivated; this inhabitant (almost literally) of an ivory tower on a mountain top is also a complete human being and the best of good citizens. And yet, from the very first, astronomy was his manifest destiny. On his fourth birthday little Edwin was told to choose his treat. Instead of ice cream or a visit to the circus, he asked to be allowed to sit up late so that he might watch a meteor shower which was expected that night. At the age of eleven he wrote an exhaustive treatise on Mars, which was printed in the local newspaper; it was his first astronomical publication. Through his boyhood and adolescence, astronomy dogged him like a guilty conscience. At the University of Chicago, the Hound of Heaven was at his heels. There was a general viewing with alarm and, at Oxford, where he went as a Rhodes Scholar, Hubble did his best to escape. He studied law. And for a whole year, after his return to the United States, he practiced as an attorney—very successfully. Then the Hound caught up with him. He took down his shingle and returned to Chicago for post-graduate work in his predestined subject. The budding corporation lawyer was no more; the astronomer had been reborn. There was no money in it, of course. The millions with which stargazers deal are of years and miles; their dollars are reckoned only by hundreds. But what did it matter? The important thing was that a manifest destiny was in process of fulfilment.

But this young man with a vocation was never a one-track specialist. When he graduated from high school, the principal declared that he had never seen Edwin Hubble do an hour's work—then handed him a scholarship to the University of Chicago. Never an hour's work—but any number of hours of play. For the future author of The Realm of the Nebulae was an athlete who excelled in every sport and especially boxing. At Oxford he boxed, as heavyweight for the University; and later, in New York, he was invited to act as Carpentier's sparring partner in an exhibition bout. And all the time, as well as boxing, there was literature, there was philosophy, there was history, there were plants and animals and landscapes, there was botany, zoology, geology. It is difficult nowadays to talk to Hubble about any subject in which he is not deeply interested and widely informed. And if by any chance, you mention a book he does not know, you can be quite sure that Mrs. Hubble will have read it.

Finally, there were the claims of citizenship. Young Edwin was brought up in a small Kentucky town and imbibed his first notions of what the pedagogues now call "civic" from a grandfather, who knew the family history back to its American beginning in the seventeenth century, who had fought in the Civil War, who had lived and worked in the old America of Jeffersonian democracy—a rural community of cooperating individualists, with a passion for self-government, combined with the purest and most fervent patriotism. In 1916 the young astronomer had to decline the offer of a particularly attractive job. He had enlisted, and it was not until a year after the Armistice that the major, as by that time he was, found himself free to go where his manifest destiny now led him—to Mount Wilson and the newly complete one-hundred-inch reflector.

A little more than twenty years later, at the height of his career, another war called him down from the mountain to the flatlands of the Aberdeen Proving Ground. There followed three years of grueling and incessant labor in the field of ballistics. Then, with the Medal of Merit and a crusading zeal for world government, he returned to pure science and the still unfinished two-hundred-inch mirror.

Three more years went by, and at last the great telescope was in operation. From the heights of Palomar new facts came showering down. The radius of the known universe jumped overnight to a billion light-years, and even at a third of that distance the nebulae were seen to be rushing away from us at thirty thousand kilometers a second. In their studies, meanwhile, the theorists were hard at work, extrapolating and inferring, postulating and drawing conclusions from the postulates. There were the men of the Big Bang school, who maintained that everything had started, four or five billion years ago, with a cosmic explosion. Ranged in opposition were the proponents of the Steady State Universe—the men who, like Hoyle and Gold and Bondi, believed in a process of continuous creation. The argument continues. Hubble listens, but takes no sides. He is an observer and has all the observer’s polite skepticism in regard to theories which cannot be tested against facts. Such theories, he likes to say, are subject for conversation, not for serious scientific dissertation. Conversation is delightful and stimulating; but it must always be taken with a grain of salt. While the others dispute of the nature of the unknown and the unknowable, Hubble patiently extracts from the tiny blurs and dots of photographic negatives fresh information about the unimaginably distant worlds, with which the new cosmology has peopled the infinity of space.

The effects of any given scientific discovery upon the philosophy by which men actually live are hard to predict. How precisely will man’s worldview be modified by this latest, this more than Copernican revolution, for which the great telescopes and their users, above all Edwin Hubble, have been responsible? Bulldozers and atom bombs have intoxicated us with the illusion that man is virtually omnipotent. On the other hand, cybernetics and biochemistry have inclined us to the belief that individual human beings are merely the by-products of molecular arrangements and subatomic events. Will the new cosmology confirm us in that sense of personal insignificance, which is the paradoxical corollary of our collective bumptiousness? Or will the strangeness, the enormous unlikeliness of the universe, as it now reveals itself do something to restore the conviction that there may be quite a few more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in any of the "nothing-but" philosophies? For the answers to these questions we shall have to wait until such time as the new cosmology shall have become familiar and, so to say, axiomatic. Meanwhile, it may be pertinent to ask how the chief author of that cosmology feels about the world, what he thinks of human beings and their destiny. Hubble has never ventured into the field of systematic philosophy, and a certain natural reserve, a distaste for psychological exhibitionism, has kept him from every form of autobiography or self-revelation. But in certain lectures and addresses he has at least dropped a few significant hints.

"We are born," he writes in The Role of Science in Education, "without consent into a world we do not understand. Driven by an instinct of survival, a spirit of adventure, a faith in a higher power, we make the best of the situation. And we produce others who, in their turn, will take our places when we are dead. Our only assets, both for ourselves and our children, are the faculties with which we are born and the accumulated experience of past generations. If we hope for success, we must develop the one and learn the other." The experience of past generations is "culture," and culture "can be analyzed into two ingredients—knowledge and wisdom, or, in other words, science and values." Science, of course, has its own categorical imperative—the duty to follow wherever the facts may lead, to seek the truth without reference to current interests, preconceived notions, or even social needs.

Pure science is not to be confused with applied science. "The problems of applied science lend themselves readily to organization." But, unfortunately, "where there is organization for a practical end, research is generally regimented and freedom of enquiry is curtailed." The man of science, as opposed to the technologist, must forget "the specious benefits of increased efficiency in the fields already known." His duty is to keep himself free to "explore the by-paths," to "follow his star." Applied science positively demands centralized planning, and is perfectly compatible with totalitarianism. The pure scientist must be an individualist. But he must be an individualist in a field which he is never allowed to treat as his own, his personal property. For "the realm of science is the public domain of positive knowledge." It thus differs from the world of values, which is "the private domain of personal convictions." In other words, there is a hierarchy of experience. We know the average behavior of particles on one level; we know the unique behavior of human individuals on another; and on each level our awareness is of an aspect of reality. Nebulae are real; but so are people. What we observe and infer about the nature of protein molecules is valid; but so also is the experience of beauty. The phenomena of life and consciousness are obviously associated with the phenomena of physics and chemistry; but they cannot be adequately described, or fully explained—still less explained away—in terms of physics and chemistry. Wisdom, then, has as good a right to be taken seriously as knowledge. But whereas knowledge can be traded, stored, and compounded, wisdom (in Hubble's words) "cannot be readily communicated, hence it cannot be pooled and it does not accumulate through the ages. Each man acquires his own wisdom from his own experience. About all that can be done in the way of instruction is to expose others to vicarious experiences in the hope of favorable reactions." Hubble has always practiced what he preaches. Wise out of his own experience, he has mellowed and enriched his wisdom by constant self-exposure to the vicarious experiences offered by historians, philosophers, and men of letters.

In this twentieth century of ours the representative, the all too representative man is what Keyserling-once called "the Chauffeur"—the highly trained technician who, outside the limits of his own field, is more or less completely barbarous. Can the Chauffeur be civilized? The question is one which, for some years past, has greatly exercised the minds of our educators. For all students, whatever their field of study, most universities now insist on a basic training in the humanities. In many technical schools a fifth or even a quarter of the future specialist's time is assigned to literature, history, and sociology. To bring the two elements of culture a little closer together, Hubble has suggested that the budding physicist and chemist should be exposed to other people's wisdom in the course of a study of the history of knowledge—the history, in particular, of the sciences and the history, more generally, of those great ideas (Nature, Justice, the Soul, Society, and the like), which have been fundamental to man's thinking throughout the centuries. Whether such a program will have the desired effect we cannot, of course, predict. In the nature of things, all educational reformers must work more or less completely in the dark. To determine the respective merits of any two systems of education, it would be necessary to conduct experiments and make continuing observations over at least one (and preferably over two or more) human lifetimes on control groups of several hundred thousand individuals. As things are at present, the proponents of any specific reform in the educational system are acting on a mixture of faith and deductive reasoning—the latter based upon temperamental and cultural preferences, which each reformer treats as self-evident postulates.

My own temperamental and cultural postulates bear some resemblance to those of Edwin Hubble. Consequently I agree, in its main outlines, with his plan for the civilization of the Chauffeur. What I do not profess to know is whether, in the kind of environment we may expect from now onwards, the Chauffeur is civilizable by any educational system we can devise. Perhaps the best that can be hoped is that, in spite of their surroundings, some Chauffeurs will always choose to civilize themselves.

So much for the hints of a general philosophy to be found in Hubble's writings. To these merely verbal adumbrations of a world-view should be added the much more significant testimony of what their author does and is. Of his doings and his being in the field of citizenship I have already spoken. But beyond citizenship is personality; above society is the individual; transcending humanity is Nature. Religion, in Whitehead's phrase, is what a man does with his solitude—what he does with his solitude in relation to other individuals and their solitude; what he does with his solitude in relation to the other-than-human world without and the other-than-human worlds, from the physiological to the spiritual, within his own being. In this sense of the words, Hubble's religion is a profound Natural Piety. It expresses itself in that atmosphere of active serenity, with which a singularly happy and harmonious marriage has filled his home. It expresses itself again in that love, quiet but passionate, instinctive but informed, for trees, flowers, grasses, everything that lives and grows. I have seen him in the cactus garden of the Huntington Library, at Pasadena, standing in a kind of rapture, at once aesthetic, mystical, and scientific, before the fantastic black and emerald green blossoms of a South American puya; have watched him in the desert enjoying silently, intensely, the yearly miracle of lilies out of the desolation of life, indomitably beautiful, in the dry dunes and among the rocks. And the same Natural Piety characterizes his relations with animals. Hubble seems not merely to know, but actually to feel, to realize with his entire being, his kinship with them; and this felt kinship excludes all sentimentality, all patronage, all indifference. He loves animals with the humorous, understanding affection which is true charity. The wild things return his gift with interest. They will eat out of his hand, perch on his shoulder, permit themselves, if they are hurt, to be taken, held, worked upon. Between the man of the nebulae and the extraordinary black creature called Nicolas Copernicus, who shares his house and who, three hundred years ago, would undoubtedly have been burned as a familiar, or even a witch in his own right, there exists a strange telepathic intimacy. The shyest, wildest, most intransigent of individualists, Nicolas Copernicus remains nevertheless acutely conscious of all that his human friend is feeling, of his impending departures from home and the approaching moment of his return. And when the man is sick, the cat keeps watch with untiring devotion at the foot of the bed—only to retreat again into a wild aloofness as soon as the illness has taken a definitely favorable turn. But it is in fishing that the astronomer's Natural Piety finds its most satisfying outlet. Sometimes, when he is camping in the mountains and there are no other sources of food, he fishes for his dinner. But mostly he fishes in the spirit of that Old Man who, as Chuang Tzu records, was seen by Prince Wen Wang "fishing, not in order to catch fish, but to amuse himself. So Wen Wang wished to employ him in the administration of government, but feared lest his own ministers, uncles, and brother might object. On the other hand, if he let the old man go, he could not bear to think of the people being deprived of such an influence." Fishing for fishing's sake, Hubble employs a barbless hook and returns his trout to their native element, in the hope that this experience of being caught may teach them the rudiments of fishy wisdom. And meanwhile, all around him, are the enormous vacancies of the Rockies or the Sierra, the humanized Nature (if he happens to be fishing on the other side of the Atlantic) of those meadows, those low hills, those embowered church spires, which are the same today as they were when Izaak Walton cast his homemade flies. And as he wades in the torrent, or stands on the green bank above the sliding water, there comes that sense "of something far more deeply interfused"; that consciousness of being intensely oneself and yet at one with stream and sky, with the trees and the wild flowers, with the poised or darting shapes of the fish, with the bees, the dragonflies, the invisible wren soliloquizing in the bushes. This "obscure knowledge," as the mystics call it, is of eternity in the perpetual perishing of Nature, of infinity in this spray of willow leaves, this rock, this white cloud. It inspired Thoreau and Whitman; it is the theme of all Wordsworth’s greatest poetry; it is a diffused radiance (for though obscure, this knowledge illuminates) in all that Chaucer wrote; it flashes like lightning in Blake and Shakespeare; it is the very essence of that Liberation offered by Zen Buddhism and expressed, or rather hinted at, in Sung painting, in the landscapes of the Japanese masters who were inspired by that painting, in the haiku, those vanishingly brief and yet im-measurably pregnant poems by Basho and his successors.

From the holiday solitudes of trout streams, the fisherman returns to the professional solitudes of midnight on Palomar. Under the huge dome he waits in patience for the sky to clear, hopes against hope for one of those miracles of perfect seeing which occurs less and less frequently as the size of telescope increases. (One such miracle took place on the night of November 26,1924, when the one-hundred-inch reflector took its finest picture and revealed the individual stars within a spiral nebula.) He sits there listening to the silence, listening to those nocturnal sounds which intensify the silence.

Stillness!

The voice of the cicada

Sinks into the rocks.

And sinks, still more impossibly, into the realm of the nebulae. For such sounds constitute, in Thoreau’s words, "a sort of rudimental music, suitable to the ear of night, and the acoustics of her dimly lighted halls."

And now the clouds are gone. The photographic plate is slipped into position and, as the telescope turns, picks up the faint and, to human eyes, invisible light that started on its pilgrimage a thousand million years ago. The positive knowledge that is science is being collected. But for the observer, meanwhile, there is the obscure knowledge of oneness in difference, of the absolute otherness that is yet identical with the ground and the essence of the perceiving mind.

[unpublished, 1953]

2. Unpublished essay reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

3. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882—1944). English astronomer.

4. Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953). American astronomer who in 1929 discovered the "red shift," radically changing current ideas regarding the expansion of the universe.

5. Hermann Graf von Keyserling (1880-1946). German philosopher.

Variations on a Philosopher

PORTRAIT OF A PHILOSOPHER

That summer of 1816 the Quaestor of the Chamber of Deputies- was taking a cure at a small but fashionable spa in the Pyrenees. On the morning of July 30 he was called, as usual, at six o'clock and, as usual, experienced that awful sense of emptiness, confusion, and incapacity which now made his daily resurrection from sleep an event to be dreaded. For the first hour after getting out of bed and for much more than the first hour after rising from table, he knew the humiliation of being less than himself, of undergoing in his own person the triumph of the animal over the human, of physiology over intellect and will. "Wretched man that I am," he kept repeating as he put on his clothes, "who will deliver me from the body of this death?" De corpore mortis hujus. Who will deliver me, who will deliver me? There was no answer.

He left the house. The morning was cold, with menacing clouds and a wind that seemed to blow through him. His nerves responded, like an Aeolian harp, with the most excruciating discord. It was going, he foresaw, to be one of his bad days.

The Quaestor turned into the bathing establishment, was shown into his cubicle and a few minutes later stretched himself out voluptuously in the warm mineralized water. Through the steam of sulphurated hydrogen an attendant appeared, bringing half a bottle of Cauterets water and an equal quantity of ass's milk. The Quaestor mixed the two together, drank, dried his hands, and opened his copy of Pascal's Pensees, with notes by Voltaire and Condorcet. It was to these notes at the end of the volume that he first turned. Not in the hope of any profit or enlightenment, but simply because, by their shallowness, their deliberately frivolous incomprehension, they filled him with such indignation. He read and re-read them as a man perversely touches his aching tooth, merely for the sake of feeling a renewal of his pain. Here was Voltaire on contemplation. Thinking it "very droll that anyone should imagine that laziness was a title to greatness and action a lowering or diminution of our nature." Idiot, fool! But, after all, why should one expect such a creature to understand the true nature of contemplation? But enough of this commentary of apes! The Quaestor turned back the pages until he found himself among the Pensees.

"We are not satisfied," he read, "with the life we have in ourselves and our own being; we want to live an imaginary life in other people's idea of us. Hence all our efforts are directed to seeming what we are not. We labor incessantly to preserve and embellish this imaginary being, and neglect that which is really ours."

The Quaestor put down the book, took another gulp of milk and Epsom salts, and ruefully reflected that all his own troubles had arisen from this desire to seem what in fact he was not. To seem a man of action, when in fact he was a contemplative; to seem a politician, when nature had made him an introspective psychologist; to seem a wit, when God had intended him for a sage. What folly! And there were other follies even more discreditable. He looked down through the water at his withered shanks and scrawny body. How ridiculous, how lamentably unheroic! He was almost fifty and prematurely old. Ecce enim breves anni transeunt et semitam, per quam non revertar; ambulo. And yet with pomatum and toilet waters, with cream of almonds and powder, he still made efforts to seem young, to look like the sort of man that young persons of the opposite sex would find as attractive as he still found them. To what end did he thus make a fool of himself ? With what intentions? His timidity and his moral principles were such that he would never act upon these vague desires of his. And he was clear-sighted enough to be aware that the young persons looked upon him as an old bore with one foot in the grave. And yet he persisted in this effort to seem other than himself. His folly was gratuitous. He pursued it and persisted in it as he ought to be pursuing and persisting in virtue—for its own sake and as its own reward.

But, oh, the musk and the patchouli! And, under the chandeliers, those arms and throats, those high-husked bosoms offered as though on platters—on silver salvers, like the strawberry ices at the reception given last month by the Keeper of the Seals. How graciously his host had addressed him, how attentively he had listened, while the Quaestor expressed his views on the best way to serve the Dynasty! And then, as usual, had come the moment of humiliation. In the middle of a sentence he was suddenly aware that the great man had moved away and was talking to M. de Chateaubriand—M. de Chateaubriand, around whom at that moment three pairs of naked arms, three bosoms on platters, three flawless necks, three flushed and animated faces were grouped in attitudes of almost reverential admiration. These geniuses, these golden voices united to pinchbeck minds! Bitterly the Quaestor reminded himself of what he had so frequently observed in the course of his far from brilliant career—that success in public life is due more often to a man's defects than to his merits. He sighed, drank some more milk and purgative, then lay back and closed his eyes. His mind wandered. When the attendant knocked at the door and announced that it was eight o'clock, he realized with a start that he had wasted yet another of the few thousand hours—or perhaps only a few hundred, a few scores—which were now left to him. Miserere nobisI With an inward groan he got out of his bath and, feeling if anything rather worse for his medication, started to dry the bag of bones which had once been the graceful body of one of Louis XVI's youngest guardsmen.

He dressed, hurried back to his lodgings, undressed again, went to bed for an hour, but was unable to relax, dressed for the third time, and sat down, agitated and thoroughly out of sorts, to his correspondence. His wife came in with his coffee. How was he feeling? Not well at all. Was there anything she could do? No, he snapped, and was immediately ashamed of himself, but at the same time resentfully wished she would leave him alone. Pointedly he reached for his pen and started to write. She took the hint and went out. Poor woman, he thought, as he heard the door close behind her; but all the same, thank God!

Laboriously, against the enormous internal obstacles, he wrote a report to the Minister of the Interior on the state of public opinion in his constituency; then took a fresh sheet of paper and began to jot down those notes on Kant for which his friend Stapfer had asked him.

’’That celebrated philosopher," he wrote, "mistakenly drew a line between the principles of cognition and those of human mortality. He failed to see that the primitive act of willing is at one and the same time the principle of knowledge and the principle of human mortality. Without the intimate sense of effort which constitutes the 'I,' there can be nothing in the understanding, and thus even the ideas of sensation and perception are dependent upon willing. As for the noumenal self...." His right eyelid began to twitch. It was the last straw. He rang the bell and gave orders that his horse be saddled. What happened next was recorded that evening in his Journal.

"The state of my nerves was bad, and I was just mounting my horse in the hope that a brisk canter would put my sorry machine to rights, when the Duchesse de Rohan, accompanied by my colleague Castel-Bajac, knocked at my door to take up a collection for the poor of Saint-Sauveur. I knew that this collection was to be made, and I had decided in advance to give six francs, thinking that this would be the accepted rate for visitors in comfortable circumstances. Accordingly I dropped my crown into the collection bag, wondering, with a certain embarrassment, whether I was doing the right thing. That I had not done the right thing was made very plain, when the Duchess mentioned the names of several persons who had given her one or two louis. Her words overwhelmed me, and I immediately experienced an agitation and a sense of remorse that could not have been more intense if I had committed the basest and most dishonorable of acts. But I lacked the presence of mind to speak and allowed the charitable lady to take her departure without uttering a word.

"From that moment it was impossible for me to think of anything else. What would the Duchess think of me? What would be the comments of my colleague, whose feelings towards the Quaestor of the Chamber were anything but friendly? Would I not be made the laughing stock of the whole company? And my offering, so disproportionate to my disposition—would it not be treated as a symptom of the most sordid avarice? ... I, who, in most circumstances, care so little for money—how simple it would have been for me to give the Duchess a louis! Why had I not opened my purse and shown my willingness to come to the aid of the unfortunate—merely remarking, which is all too true, that a collection taken up in this way for a multitude of the poor can be but of the smallest assistance to each one in particular?

manners! I was inconsolable.... I mounted my horse, hoping to divert myself from an idea so wearisome in its fixity. But it pursued me wherever I went. I cut short my ride and returned home with the intention of seeking out the Duchess and adding a louis to my contribution, with a graceful little explanation.

"With this in mind I went and walked up and down in front of her house, but did not go in for fear of making a fool of myself yet again. I went home to dinner full of the same anxiety. My fixed idea haunted me to the point of making me talk and gesticulate to myself. I caught myself several times in this condition bordering almost on insanity.

"During dinner I said nothing to my wife; for I was absorbed in my own thoughts, and anyhow I never confide to others my feelings or impressions when they are sad or painful."

It was to his Diary and not to his wife that the Quaestor confided his troubles. He himself remained unconsoled, but posterity has been the gainer. The profit was not his, it is all ours—for the Journal Intime of Maine de Biran has emerged, after all these years, as one of the classics of the inner life, a book to be read and ruminated and read again.

Philosophy is written for the most part in terms of the highest abstractions, the widest generalizations. Rightly, I suppose, and properly. Nevertheless, it seems good, for a change, to consider some of its problems, not, so to speak, in the void, but within the framework of an actual existence. And if that existence should be that of a man who was himself a philosopher, so much the better. For in that case we shall be in a position to think our thoughts in relation, not only to a particular life in time, but also to the system of ideas in terms of which the proprietor of that life sought to interpret his experience.

Maine de Biran’s Journal Intime is a document almost unique in the history of philosophy. Thanks to its minute and detailed sincerity, we know Biran as we know no other of the great metaphysicians of the past. We know how he felt from day to day and what he thought about his feelings; we know how his bodily states affected his mind, and his mental states, his body; we know how he reacted to nature, to works of art, to persons of various temperaments, abilities, and social conditions; we know what he wished and willed, and what he actually accomplished; we know what he thought and we know the psychological and even the physiological context of his thinking, what and how he actually was while playing the part of a philosopher. For all these reasons and because he was a man of the highest ability (his philosophical contemporaries called him "the master of us all" and "the greatest French metaphysician since Malebranche"), Biran provides us with a particularly helpful frame of reference within which to do our own thinking about the perennial problem of philosophy. In what follows I shall make no attempt to write a new biography of Maine de Biran or to offer yet another critique of his system. My concern is with certain aspects of man’s nature and destiny; and my purpose is to discuss these matters in the light, now revealingly bright, now no less revealingly dim, of Maine de Biran’s life and writings. Let us begin with a brief record of the external facts.

"Instead of this, what awkwardness in my behavior towards the Duchess! What downright bad

Francois-Pierre Gontier de Biran, later known (after the inheritance of an estate called Maine) as Francois-Pierre Maine de Biran, was born on November 29, 1766, at the capital city of the old province of Perigord, where his family, notable without being actually noble, had for three centuries played an important part in local society and local politics. His grandfather had been Mayor of Bergerac, and so had his great-grandfather. His father practiced as a physician in the same town and managed the family estates in its vicinity. Educated at home and later at the College of the Doctrinaires at Perigueux, young Biran received a sound eighteenth-century grounding in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. At eighteen he entered the Royal Bodyguard and became a young man about town and the court. "What the world calls pleasure" (and it was the world, let us remember, of Choderlos de Laclos and Andrea de Nerciat⁷) "I tasted to the full." He tasted it for five years. Then came 1789. In October of that year Biran saw action, fighting with the Compagnie de Noailles to defend Versailles against the Parisian mob. The Revolution took its course, and a little later the Royal Bodyguard was disbanded. Hoping to start his military career anew in the Engineers, Biran plunged into the study of mathematics and the physical sciences. But as time went on it became clear that an ex-guardsman's chances of getting into the new army were growing steadily smaller, his chances of going to prison and perhaps the scaffold steadily greater. In 1793 young Biran prudently decided to go home to Perigord. During his absence in Paris both his parents had died and he now found himself the proprietor of an estate, with a small but regular income and, to live in, a seventeenth-century manor house five miles from Bergerac. The name of this house was Grateloup, from gratum lupis, "agreeable to wolves," and in this sylvan solitude he took refuge from a world of revolutionary violence. Outside, beyond the sheltering wall of trees, the indefatigable Lakanal was riding through the country, organizing groups of "civic apostles," whose duty it was to preach the revolutionary gospel to the peasants and to collect gossip about suspected royalists. Thanks to these apostles, six members of the Biran clan were briefly imprisoned, four went into voluntary exile. Our philosopher, however, was left in peace.

After the fall of Robespierre the government purged its civil service of all extreme Jacobins and appointed men of less radical opinions to fill the vacancies. Biran came from a family which enjoyed a high reputation for probity and efficiency in the public service. In the summer of 1795 he was appointed Administrator of the department of the Dordogne. That same year he fell in love with, and married, Marie-Louise Fournier, the young widow of one of his cousins, M. du Cluzeau, who had gone abroad during the Terror and, never having been heard of since, was presumed to have died.

After two years as Administrator of his native province Biran was elected by his fellow citizens as their representative of the Council of Five Hundred. The young deputy's politics were frankly antirevolutionary—so much so that, before he could take his seat, his election was declared invalid. Biran found himself simultaneously out of a job and out of politics. Relieved rather than distressed, he plunged into philosophy and the joys of domesticity. Those years at Grateloup, with his wife and young children, among his books and papers, were the happiest of his life—so happy, indeed, that he kept no record of them. While Marie-Louise was alive he never opened his diary.

It was during this period that Biran first attracted notice as a philosopher. From the Institute of France he received an honorable mention for his first Memoir on Habit, a gold medal for the second, augmented and revised version of the same treatise. Prizes crowned the works submitted to the Academies of Berlin and Copenhagen. He became the friend and correspondent of such representatives of the older school of thought as Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy,- as well as the younger men, such as de Gerando and Royer-Collard.

Then, in 1805, after only eight years of marriage, Marie-Louise suddenly died. According to La Valette-Monbrun, Biran's latest biographer, who had the information from a direct descendant of the philosopher, her last illness was brought on by a painful emotional shock. Du Cluzeau, her first husband, was not dead, as had been assumed; he had merely been a poor correspondent. One fine day, after eleven years of foreign wanderings, he calmly walked into Marie-Louise's drawing-room at Bergerac. Three weeks later she was dead. Biran's unhappiness was extreme. Grief deprived him of all power to think or act, even of all desire to live. But in the end time, necessity, and habit saved him in spite of himself. After six months of mental and physical prostration Biran gradually re-emerged into life. He embarked again on his reading, his fragmentary composition, his analytical meditations. He wrote long letters to his philosophical friends and followed up the letters by personal visits.

This was the period of his intimacy with the Ideologists of Auteuil, Cabanis, and Destutt de Tracy. "The two friends," he wrote, "lived solely for their beloved Ideology. Ideology, they say, must change the whole face of the world, and that precisely is why those who, for their own good reasons, would like the world to go on being stupid" (the reference is, of course, to the First Consul) "detest Ideologists and Ideology." Biran was too much of a realist, too close to the facts of inner experience, to accept a system which owed its specious perfection to the crudest kind of over-simplification. The sages of Auteuil hopefully regarded him as their disciple; but in fact, as they were later forced to admit, they had incubated a bird of quite another species.

Two years after his wife's death, Biran was back again in harness, this time as Counsellor to the Prefect of Perigueux. It was a very modest post; but he needed the money and had been unable to find anything better. He would have preferred a professorship of mathematics, or a rectorate in the University. No suitable posts were available. Well, then, if he had to reenter the administration, what about a prefecture? His friends, Malleville and de Gerando, did their best for him; but without success. Malleville even presented the Third Consul with a handsomely bound copy of the Memoir on Habit; the effect was decisive and disastrous. After skimming through the book, Lebrun gravely remarked that "the man who could write such a work will never be good for anything." He was, of course, perfectly right. The Memoir on Habit is a masterpiece of analytical introspection and, in a man of affairs, a gift for analytical introspection is not merely useless, but may even be an actual handicap. The Consulate gave place to the Empire; but the official opinion of our philosopher's political abilities did not change. Biran had to be content with his Counsellorship. A year passed and the Emperor relented a little. The Counsellor was promoted to be Sub-Prefect of Bergerac.

Zeal was the order of the day and, during the six years of his reign at Bergerac, Biran was admirably zealous. Few of the local peasants could read or write or speak anything but a barbarous patois; but the Sub-Prefect issued innumerable and emphatically eloquent proclamations, exhorting them to be thankful that the Revolution was over and to express their gratitude to the Emperor by joining the National Guard and, above all, by paying their taxes—those crushing war-time taxes which it was so horribly distasteful to have to collect by threats or naked force. In the intervals he built roads and bridges, preached afforestation and modern methods in agriculture, set up centers for the gratuitous vaccination of the poor. Distressed by the fact that people were constantly falling into the Dordogne, he installed in the hospital the latest marvel of the scientific age, a machine fumigatoire, guaranteed by its inventor to restore life to the drowned. He founded a Medical Society, brought back the Sisters of Charity, reformed the local secondary school, and imported from Switzerland a pupil of Pestalozzi's to direct an institution for younger children. In 1809 his compatriots did what they had done fourteen years before and elected him as their representative to the Legislative Assembly. But a Sub-Prefect might not resign until his successor had been appointed; and since the Emperor chose to wait three years before making the nomination, Biran did not take his seat until 1812. From that date until his death in 1824, he was to serve as deputy for Bergerac, spending the greater part of each year in Paris, while his second wife, whom he married in 1814, stayed at home and managed the estate. Under Napoleon and, later, the Bourbons, a deputy received a salary which was sufficient, in Biran's case, to make all the difference between pinched, rather shabby gentility and easy independence. He could now buy all the books he wanted, entertain his scientific and philosophical friends to dinner, take cabs, and indulge a propensity for lending money to all who asked for it.

Biran entered public life just as Napoleon was about to leave it. As a functionary of the State, he had served the Emperor well and faithfully. As an anti-revolutionary, he was thankful to Bonaparte for having restored internal order. But as a child of the Enlightenment, he loathed the military dictator and his horde of soldiers; as a royalist by conviction and sentiment, he abhorred the usurper of an authority which belonged by right to the sons of St. Louis. At the end of 1813 Biran had an opportunity for giving public expression to his feelings about the Emperor. With his friend Laine and three other members of the Commission of Five, he drew up a resolution, later adopted by the Chamber, demanding an immediate end to hostilities, the conclusion of a just peace, and a greater measure of liberty for the French people. Napoleon's reply was to dissolve the Chamber and continue a hopeless war to its inevitable conclusion.

When the Bourbons returned in 1814, Biran found himself almost a hero and was rewarded by being made Quaestor of the Chamber with twice the ordinary deputy’s salary. The Hundred Days sent him back to Grateloup, the Second Restoration confirmed his Quaestorship. Prevented by shyness and weakness of his voice from being a successful orator, he did all his parliamentary work behind the scenes, on committees or in private conversations with the ministers and his more influential colleagues. A convinced moderate, he was at home in no party, being disliked by the Ultras as no better than a Liberal, by the Liberals as a reactionary monarchist. It was an uncomfortable position; but fortunately Biran had other interests than those of politics. After consulting his conscience he decided that he was not in duty bound to give more than six hours a day to his parliamentary functions. The rest of his time might legitimately be devoted to philosophy and the occupations of private life. He was on intimate terms with some of the most eminent men of his age—Ampere, Cuvier, Guizot, Victor Cousin, Royer-Collard, de Gerando.- Over the dinner-table, or walking in the Luxembourg, or at the fortnightly meetings of the Metaphysical Society, he discussed with them the problems of man's nature and position in the universe. And meanwhile he was forever writing and deleting and re-writing some part of the comprehensive treatise in which he hoped some day to set forth his completed system.

When he died, this magnum opus was still an unrealized dream. Given the nature of Biran's mind, it could not have been otherwise. An empiricist of the spirit, he was always ready to modify his opinions in the light of new experience. His thought never completely crystallized into a system, but remained, in regard to certain vital subjects, tentative and, as it were, fluid to the very end of his life. That end came in 1824. His fellow philosophers paid their tribute of respect and regret; the electors of Bergerac chose another deputy, and his son Felix was heard to say that he wished the old man had left fewer books and papers and more government securities.

"O why was I born with a different face?" It was a question that, in the course of his daily soliloquies, rose over and over again to Biran’s lips. He was painfully aware that he had not been "born like the rest of his race," that he was a foreigner, far from home in an environment he did not like and with which he was congenitally unfitted to deal. But whereas the poet's unlikeness to his fellows was due to an excess of imagination and intuition, the philosopher belonged to that more numerous class of aliens, the temperamental introverts. A portrait of Biran at twenty-nine reveals one of those slender, small-boned, thin-muscled persons, in whom the nerves and vital organs are uncomfortably close to the surface. Such persons are as a rule sensitive to excess and have a tendency, in mere self-protection, to turn inwards, away from their surroundings, which they experience as a standing menace to their well-being.

Like the world of all extreme cerebrotonics, Biran's universe was primarily that of his own inner experiences and only secondarily that of other people and autonomous objects. He knew that, whereas he was an alien, most men were more or less at home in the world and that some had an all but infallible instinct for finding their way through life. To make up for his own lack of this instinct, he was gifted (as most of his fellows were not) with "a rapid tact in regard to what is going on within me." In his own eyes it was this tact which, above all else, qualified him to be a psychologist and a metaphysician.

An extreme cerebrotonic can never be a successful behaviorist and, conversely, an extreme somatotonic or extreme viscerotonic is organically debarred from the psychology of introspection. By nature Biran was quite incapable of behaviorism, and this incapacity was, by systematic exercise, converted into a state almost of solipsistic preoccupation with the inner life. His Journal Intime is consistently intimate; it contains no anecdotes, no descriptions of other people, no speculations as to their motives, their modes of thought, or the reasons for their idiosyncrasies. Biran had an opportunity to meet almost "everybody who was anybody" and was, as we have seen, on intimate terms with some of the most remarkable men and women of his day. The Diary merely records their names; of their appearance, their behavior, their character, our philosopher says nothing. He dines with Mme. de Stael, he meets Chateaubriand; but what he thought and felt about those rather alarming forces of nature disguised as human beings, or whether indeed he thought and felt anything about them as they were in themselves, we do not know. He merely states that he saw them and proceeds, if the meeting took place on one of his good days, to describe his own euphoria, if on one of his bad days, to analyze the psychophysiological causes of his melancholy or his sense of frustrated inadequacy. Foreign celebrities possess as little autonomous reality as his compatriots. Wellington and Brougham are no more than names in a list of those present, and when he dines out to meet Maria Edgeworth, all he says is that he "permitted himself to be carried away by disordered movemen ts"—movements which, we can be sure, had their source, not in the lady's charms, which in 1820 can hardly have been overpowering, but in the state of the philosopher's nervous system. In the six or seven hundred pages of Biran's Journal I have found but one comment on another human being as existing independently of the diarist, in his own right. Speaking of Destutt de Tracy, Biran says that "he is, in spite of his caustic tongue, a kindly and lovable man. He has had the misfortune to lose his sight, and supports this affliction with courage." That is all. And of his other philosopher friends—of such persons as Ampere, the ingenuous eccentric and many-sided man of genius, as Cuvier, the founder of a science, as Guizot, the scholar who was one day to control the destinies of France—he says nothing at all. They exist in the Diary only in so far as they react, favorably or unfavorably, to Biran's psychological and metaphysical views.

How significant, in this context, is the description of our philosopher given, many years after his death, by an old lady who had known him when she was a very young girl and he, the Sub-Prefect of Bergerac! The young girl was the daughter of M. Maurice, the Prefect of Perigueux. Not infrequently the Sub-Prefect rode over to dine with his official superior and unofficial friend. On these occasions, general conversation tended to dwindle into philosophical argument. More than half a century later, Mlle. Maurice recalled that "the ego (Je moi) played an important part in these discussions. My sister and I have not forgotten that, in every enunciation of this monosyllable, M. de Biran would energetically press the tips of his extended and unseparated fingers against his chest, in order, no doubt, more emphatically to assert the fact of his personality."

Too much the introvert to be concerned with other people's unconscious behavior, Biran himself would never have noticed such a fact as this, or at least would never have troubled to record it. In this respect the Maurice girls were better psychologists than he. Intuitively they recognized that there was something profoundly significant in the Sub-Prefect's curious gesture. Le Moi, and he points at himself; le moi, and again the rigid fingers turn back towards the heart. It happens invariably, it happens automatically. Habitual gestures of this kind are not very common; but one may observe them frequently enough to be sure that they are always a symptom of an intense self-consciousness. This selfconsciousness is sometimes unresistingly egotistic; sometimes, as in Biran's case, it is associated with a constant preoccupation with moral problems, an unremitted effort to conform to a high ideal. The ego can be intensely aware of itself either as deliberate and sophisticated Epicurean, as earnest and virtuous Stoic, or as ruthless power-lover. As twice-born Christian, twice-born Buddhist, or Vedantist, it ceases to be a self-conscious ego, and becomes "not I, but Christ, Mind, and Atman in me."

Human beings are not all of one kind, but vary continuously between the viable extremes of a tri-polar system. Any individual is a mixture, in varying proportions, of three physical and closely correlated psychological components. The exclusively introspective psychologist has it in his power to discover the characteristics which are common to all human beings, together with those peculiar to himself and to all the other individuals, who stand in the same relation as he does to the three co-ordinates of the classificatory system. Of the traits which distinguish men and women standing in a different relation to the three co-ordinates, he cannot, merely by looking into himself, discover anything at all. To acquire this kind of extensive knowledge of psychology, he must learn the, to him, rather difficult art of looking outwards.

Conversely the born outward-lookers must, if they are to have an intensive knowledge of the human soul, learn how to examine and dissect their own. Introspective methods require to be supplemented by those of behaviorism; behavioristic methods by those of introspection. Biran, as we have seen, made no effort to overcome his native incapacity for outwardness. The results were what might have been expected. "In the practical affairs of life," he sadly remarks, "my psychological knowledge does not help me at all." And how touching is the innocence, the naivete even, which has its source in our introvert's often abysmal ignorance of the external world! He is over fifty when, in a Duchess's drawing-room, he first makes the startling discovery that "there is a natural affinity between persons of the same caste." At about the same time he is not only shocked, but actually astonished, when he learns that the Minister of Police under the legitimate monarch is using methods of corruptive persuasion identical with those employed by his predecessor under Napoleon. And a year or two later he is equally surprised and still more deeply shocked to discover that a lady, with whom he was in the habit of discussing Platonic love, had cherished all the time the most primitively feminine designs upon his heart and person.

This last episode is so curiously characteristic, that it seems worth while to record it in some detail. Love, according to our philosopher, played an important part in his life up to the age of forty-five. Thereafter his passions lost their urgency. Each successive spring, it is true, "aroused cravings which selfrestraint, prudence, and timidity prevented him from satisfying." And even in his last years he noticed in himself, and deplored, the access of low, unreasoning pride which always followed "the momentary awakening of those youthful appetites which would have humiliated me, and of which I should have feared attacks, when I was in the prime of my strength and passions." In practice, if not invariably in desire and intention, our philosopher seems always to have been entirely blameless. Even in his forties love is wholly a matter of sentiment. "Mlle. Festa of the Opera Bouffe continues to inspire in me the liveliest interest." "Today Mme. Moilien caused me to experience a tender emotion." In his fifties the remnants of his passions manifest themselves in ways even more refined. There was Mlle. Alpy, the friend, only a few years older than they, of Biran's daughters. For this charming creature our philosopher cherished a sentiment that was "more than friendship, but less than love." The days which he passed with her, in a post-chaise on the road from Paris to Perigueux, were days of unalloyed happiness. It was a kind of Last Ride Together, which he would have liked to prolong indefinitely.

And then there was Mme. de Caffarelli, the heroine or villainess of our cautionary story. Mme. de Caffarelli had a drawing-room in Paris and a chateau in the country, was a student of philosophy and liked to talk about religion and the occult.

Biran made her acquaintance four or five years before his death, was charmed and soon came to be infatuated. When the lady was in Paris, he invited her to meetings of the Metaphysical Society, when she was out of town he wrote her long letters and sometimes spent the weekend with her in the country. As always, however, his behavior was entirely blameless—but blameless, as his Diary reveals, in a style that was peculiarly his own. "An elevated and truly moral man," he wrote, "should not place his happiness or unhappiness in a passion that is independent of him. He should, so far as possible, discard everything connected with the object of his sentiment and attach himself exclusively to the sentiment itself. He should cherish this sentiment in so far as he finds peace of mind through the elevated ideas, amiable emotions and generous disinterested acts inspired by the beloved object. In an advanced age, this is the only permissible kind of love." And on to a later page we read that "the sentiment of pure love is the soul’s whole good and its true life. When it is disobjectified, that is to say, when it has no correspondence with our sensations and imaginings, or with the objects which produce them—only then is the sentiment pure." In other words, love is pure only when the independent existence of the beloved is denied, only when a veil is drawn over the deplorable fact that she is another person, a separate center of physical, mental, and spiritual experience. Pure love, in fact, is the love inspired by the beauty of his own sentiments in the breast of Narcissus. Such are the fruits of a lifelong and exclusive habit of introspection.

As was only to be expected, Mme. de Caffarelli had no intention of being disobjectified, nor had she any desire to disobjectify her distinguished admirer. He was a great philosopher, he was full of charm, he was touching and pathetic. All the mother in her, all the grande amoureuse, all the Egeria went out towards him. After a time certain hints were dropped. Our philosopher began to suspect that all was not entirely as it should be. "A person whom I thought to be spiritual today denied that there could be energy without passion." He had replied, of course, that true energy is the voluntary overcoming of passion. A little later, the inevitable happened. Exactly how it happened, we are not told. All that we know is that Biran broke off his relations with the all too objective lady and asked her to return his letters. In his Diary the absurd and painful episode is thus summed up. "When a woman seems to feel the passion of love, as we men do, it almost always has a source that is impure and corrupt. It is not produced by an immediate and dominating propensity, but by levity, vanity and sensuality. Such a suspicion of Mme. de C. would have seemed to be a blasphemy. The esteem I felt for her during the first period of our friendship made me imagine that she was unlike the rest of her sex. I resisted all proofs to the contrary, and when it was impossible for me to go on believing that the person was virtuous, I fell into a living death."

The introvert, who is ignorant of the outer world, is not for that reason unaware of it. Though he knows very little about his fellows and the social order, he constantly feels them, and feels them with discomfort, as alien and often hostile presences. Hence his sense of inadequacy, of being alone, inferior, born with a different face. Like the rest of his species, Biran suffered all his life from an excruciating shyness. When, as a middle-aged man, he had his first interview with Louis XVIII, his knees trembled, his heart palpitated, and his poor stomach was so painfully affected that he almost disgraced himself by being sick at the royal feet. (One of my own early memories is of a similar experience at the unveiling of my grandfather's statue by that Prince of Wales who was later to be Edward VII. My father, I recall, handed me his top-hat, just in case the worst should come to the worst. Luckily it didn't. Honor was saved; but the recollection of those moments of ghastly uncertainty are still vividly humiliating. And how much worse it must have been for the unhappy Biran! Such things are excusable in a child, as I was, of five or six. But in a widower with two marriageable daughters and a son in the army, in a member of Parliament, in an eminent philosopher, they are simply out of the question. And yet, though out of the question, such things do, in fact, occur. The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable.)

It did not take a king to give our philosopher stage fright. Any and every assemblage of his fellows intimidated him. Public speaking was an agony, often a physical impossibility. Here, from the Moniteur, is the official report of one of our philosopher's essays in oratory. "M. Maine de Biran is called to the tribune. The weakness of the honorable member's organ not permitting him to make himself sufficiently heard, he requests M. Blanchard Bailleul to give a reading of his opinion." In the chamber almost all Biran's eloquence was by proxy. In other places, when a speech had to be made and no friendly reader was available, he had to force himself to do his own talking. Sometimes the effort was crowned with success. Despite the "weakness of the organ," people listened and were, if not emotionally moved, at least impressed by the speaker's intelligence and honestly. But there were other times when the unhappy philosopher found himself staring at those rows of expectant faces, his head empty of ideas and his vocal cords completely paralyzed. Even the most unimpressive audiences had power to inflict these humiliations upon him. As Sub-Prefect, for example, he had found himself tongue-tied when distributing prizes at a boys' school.

Biran's sense of being alien and inadequate found expression in an almost systematic avoidance of conflict and refusal to insist on his rights. Such was his dislike of argument (except on philosophical matters and then only among friends) that in a hostile group he would either keep silence or give a polite and somewhat hypocritical assent to opinions which were not his own. Where money was at stake he always preferred loss to haggling, his own disadvantage to a battle with opposing interests. To those who asked for a loan he found it almost impossible to say no, and from those to whom he had advanced money he found it no less difficult to demand repayment. His account books show that not more than one in ten of the neighbors whom he had thus obliged ever paid him back. The rest were evidently of the opinion that one should "never give a sucker an even break."

Sometimes this amiable reluctance to fight or press claims had the most disastrous results. Consider, for example, the case of Biran’s daughters, Elisa and Adine. After their mother's death the two girls were placed under the care of an aunt, Mme. Gerard. Mme. Gerard was a woman of exemplary piety and diabolic character. A tyrant with the highest religious principles, a martinet in the name of virtue and Christian charity, a shrew who loved to scold and thought that she was giving utterance to righteous indignation, she was determined to have her own way in all things, to force others to bow to her will. The pleasure she took in bullying the orphans was such that, when they grew up, she refused to permit them to go and live with their father. Paris, she insisted, would be bad for their health and fatal to their morals. At Grateloup they would have to put up with a stepmother. It was essential that they should remain with their loving aunt in the prison-like house near Perigueux. Repeatedly, but always feebly, the philosopher pleaded for their liberation. But he was so much frightened of his sister-in-law, he had such a physical repugnance for the violent scenes which were her specialty, that he did not dare to insist. The rescue of the girls was postponed from month to month, from year to year. Biran loved his daughters tenderly, he longed to have them with him, he knew how passionately they hoped and prayed to be delivered. But meanwhile there was a dragon in the path and, alas, our philosopher was no St. George. Elisa and Adine were never to get out of Mme. Gerard's clutches. Their father merely wrote them long letters urging a Christian resignation to their lot. A man of less timorous disposition would have taken the unpleasant steps necessary to change that lot into one which did not call for quite so much resignation. When Biran died, the girls were still unmarried, still in custody. Adine followed her father to the grave in 1834, Elisa four years later. Their aunt, as might have been expected, was still going strong under the Second Empire.

In society Biran was always intimidated by bigwigs and successful men and affairs. Even the basest of them, even the dullest and stupidest, had power to impose on him. In their presence his self-possession evaporated; he seemed to lose his moral independence, his very reason; he found himself saying things he did not believe, doing things of which he disapproved. And all to no purpose; for they were not gratified by his abjection; they merely despised or ignored him.

With their wives and daughters our philosopher was generally somewhat more at ease. His manners were exquisite and, like his formal clothes and powdered hair, of a vintage anterior to 1789. His intimate conversations breathed a Rousseau-esque sensibility. He was seductive and yet safe, charming but perfectly reliable. But even more than the society of women our philosopher enjoyed that of his intellectual equals. Here he felt himself, and was acknowledged, the first among his peers. When it came to a philosophical discussion, this frightened underling knew how to be authoritative, this dumb and trembling orator commanded an eloquence now subtle, now incisive, now persuasively brilliant.

But finally what a relief it was, when Parliament went into its summer recess, to go home to Perigord! Here he was genuinely and unquestionably important—important, too, without effort, just because he was his grandfather's grandson, and the deputy for Bergerac, and the only metaphysician within a radius of three hundred kilometers. He did not have to make odious comparisons between himself and those younger contemporaries who were already cabinet ministers, peers of France, millionaires, Members of the Institute. He was Maine de Biran of Grateloup, whom not to know argued oneself unknown—at least at Bergerac. And then there was the second Mme. Biran—that bonne femme who had succeeded the epouse celeste. This daughter of a neighboring squire could not write three lines without making a mistake in grammar or spelling; but she was heir to a modest estate, had a good business head, was an excellent housekeeper and could be trusted to observe the properties while her husband was away in Paris. Reviewing his domestic life, Biran felt that he had done very well to marry "a kind simple woman who, happy to be with me, demands nothing of me, and for whom I am always good enough as I am without making any effort to modify myself."

At home, as in the little town, nothing ever happened to make our philosopher feel inadequate or inferior. How restful, how reassuring! But when he looked into the situation a little more closely, he began to have his doubts. "If a man is distressed by his weakness, if he hates those who surpass him and seeks solitude only to avoid the humiliation of comparison, he is not humble, but full of pride."

To relieve the suffering imposed by his different face and native incapacity, the introvert resorts externally to flight, internally to an elaborately justified sense of being superior to the viscerotonic and somatotonic extraverts who are at home in the world and get on in it. "In spite of my shyness, in spite of my apparent modesty, I am tormented by pride. And pride will remain the torment of my life so long as I go on trying to satisfy only myself and my fellows and refuse to look higher to a Spirit who will direct my own spirit, or even take its place." The introvert's ambivalent attitude towards himself and the world around him is well illustrated by an earlier entry in the Diary. Here Biran records that he has spent some weeks writing and re-writing an article for Guizot's Archives, only to be told by the editor that his piece is too long and much too difficult for even a select public. "I am not of this world," he laments. "I ought to give up the attempt to live and work for it." But that same day he dines, as he often does, with the Abbe Morellet. Born in 1727, Morellet was the last survivor of th ephilosophes. Witty, above all at other people's expense, he had earned from Voltaire the nickname of "[Abbe Mord-les." What was the bond that united this Reverend Bite-'em¹ with our gentle philosopher? Biran, as usual, drops no hint. All we know is that on this, as on many other evenings, he accepted the old Voltairean's invitation to dinner. All went well until—how imprudently!—he started a conversation about metaphysics—"a subject which the Abbe and his circle make fun of without having the faintest idea of its nature." Such people, says Biran, "have no conception of the inner life; they regard it as mere vanity and folly. Those who know the inner life have the same opinion of the worldly, who live outside themselves. Who is the right? Those who deny what they do not know and do not wish to know? I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world. This conversation depressed me, and I left the Abbe Morellet's feeling sad and unwell. From there I went to a soiree at the Ministry of Police."

All this is wonderfully true to type. In the morning our introvert knows too little of the outer world to be fit to live in it. In the evening he knows so much that he can pass definitive judgment on it and feel superior to the extraverts who have no knowledge of the inner life. And yet in spite of this conviction of superiority, he allows himself to be worried by old Mord-Jes into an indigestion—and in spite of this indigestion, he hurries off to another party, at which he will feel even more of an alien than at the Abbe's. For it will be a huge and brilliant affair—men wearing decorations, women with bare shoulders and ropes of pearls. And the young ones will either look through him, as though he were not there at all; or if they look at him, will hastily conceal a smile. And no wonder! For "with a ludicrous self-complacency I adorn this ageing carcass of mine as if it could still, as in my youth, attract and tickle the world's attention." To be ludicrous, to know one is ludicrous, and yet to persist in the behavior that causes one to be ludicrous. ... And one calls oneself a philosopher, one cultivates the inner life, one aspires to perfection! But one mustn't be late, one mustn't be late. Tell the cabman to whip up his horse. If one goes to one's humiliation, it may as well be at the gallop.

Biran's dread of an audience extended even to the reading public. He hated to be exposed to the unsympathetic gaze of the vulgar, and hated it even when the exposure was only symbolic and on paper. Concerning his first book he wrote to a friend that "it is not without a certain terror that I find myself condemned to be printed alive." This terror remained with him, and to the end of his career publication was an ordeal to be undergone with extreme reluctance and only after long delays and a succession of second thoughts. His fear of exposure was heightened by the consciousness that he was not a born writer. He composed with difficulty, phrasing and rephrasing his ideas, but never finding a form that completely satisfied him. The right word was always something to be looked for—generally without success; it was never gratuitously given. Sentences and paragraphs did not come to him ready-made and perfect; they had to be laboriously pieced together, without inspiration and without pleasure. The product of his labors is a prose that merely permits itself to be read, never exhilarates or delights. Biran regarded his incapacity for expression as something both to be deplored and to be proud of. He lacked the gift of style and was sorry for it; but at the same time he was thankful that he was not as other authors were—a mere juggler of words. Most people, he remarks, use their minds only with the idea of letting others know the result of their labors. They never have an idea without immediately clothing it in brilliant and striking language. "The whole business of their life is the arrangement of phrases; they do all their thinking within the world of grammar and logic, and are much more concerned with forms than with substance.... My own sensibility," Biran goes on, "reacts but little externally. It is occupied either by confused inward impressions (this is its most habitual state), or by the ideas which strike me and which I shut up within myself to be sifted and examined, and all without feeling any need to spread them abroad. I neglect the problem of expression; I never make a phrase in my head; I study ideas for their own sake, in order to know what they are, what they imply, disinterestedly, without reference to self-love or passion. This disposition makes me eminently fit for the inner life and psychological research, but unfits me for everything else." Here, once again, we catch our introvert in the act of expressing simultaneously a sense of inadequacy and a conviction of intrinsic superiority. He laments his inability to embody his ideas in suitable language, but rejoices at the same time in the fact that he has ideas which are worth expressing, that, unlike his successful rivals, he is concerned with substance rather than form and that his concern, unlike theirs, is wholly disinterested. Comparisons are odious and painful; and yet, when they are made with sufficient care, we discover that it is the other fellow who has the worst of it.

Even if he had been physically healthy, Biran would have found himself a very difficult man to live with. But he was not healthy. An already obscure and tangled psychological situation was further darkened and complicated by the fact "the machine," as he liked to call it, was forever going out of order. From his parents (both of whom, incidentally, were sickly and died young) he seems to have inherited a certain weakness and instability of the nervous apparatus controlling his organic processes. It is a congenital defect for which even the highly developed medicine of the twentieth century can do very little. Biran, who was a doctor's son, and the life long friend of doctors, subjected himself to all the rather unpleasant treatments then in vogue—emetics, purges, blisters, moxas. They did him some good; but not enough. From boyhood to the last day of his life he remained the victim of his autonomic nervous system. It tormented him, played practical jokes on him, seemed maliciously to delight in thwarting his plans and bringing his good intentions to naught. It was like an indwelling poltergeist—not I, but Flibbertigibbet in me. He would wake up in the morning, full of life and energy, mentally alert, calm and competent. A few hours later, for no apparent reason, his body was as though moribund, his mind confused, agitated, incapable of thought. And at any moment his digestion might fail him, his latent bronchitis flare up into a maddening and exhausting cough. Every change in the weather produced a corresponding change in his organism. He was one man when the barometer was high, quite another when it was low. Every existence is to some extent intermittent and discontinuous; Biran's differed from most in being extravagantly so.

Our philosopher complained a great deal of his want of health, but at the same time was aware that sickness may have its compensating advantages. "Except the sickly," he wrote in 1794, "few persons ever feel themselves existing. Those who are well, even if they be philosophers, are too busy enjoying life to investigate what it is. The sentiment of their own existence does not astonish them. Health impels us towards the outside world, sickness brings us home to ourselves." In other words, sickness conspires with the introverted temperament to create the only kind of philosopher for whom Biran had any use, the kind of philosopher he was himself—an empiricist of the personal life on all its levels from the physiological to the spiritual.

In the preceding pages I have tried to paint the portrait of our philosopher. In those which follow I shall exhibit him first in relation to history and society; next as a moralist and man of goodwill painfully wrestling with the problems of ethics; and finally, as a metaphysician who was also a candidate for enlightenment, a theorizer who felt the need to act upon his theories.

THE PHILOSOPHER IN HISTORY

Looking back into the past, we tend to imagine that people who lived at the same period of history lived effectively in the same world. But the truth is that, in any complex society, there are many worlds separated from one another by impenetrable walls of mutual ignorance and misunderstanding. Consider, for example, the case of our philosopher. Mozart was his senior by nine years; Beethoven, four years his junior. And yet, in his Journal, this lover of music never so much as mentioned their names. As he grew older, Biran was increasingly preoccupied with the fact and theory of mysticism. And yet he knew nothing of Saint-Martin in France,¹ or of the contemporary theosophists beyond the Rhine. Again, Biran was a metaphysician; but he read no German, knew Kant only through a French commentary and Kant’s successors only through conversations with Victor Cousin and Stapfer. He took a keen interest in political theory; but he never cites either Fourier or Saint-Simon.- With the two greatest literary figures of his day, Chateaubriand and Mme. de Stael, he did, it is true, have some personal acquaintance. But he seems to have disliked their books; at any rate he deplores the modern tendency to "a baneful melancholy and an unwholesome craving for vague emotion."

The worlds which Biran actually inhabited were, besides the world of his inner experience, the world of politics and the world of science and philosophy. The first was the showy, but depressing, world of parliamentarians and ministerial high society; the second, a world of intelligence and intelligibility, in which one discussed the nature of the self with professional metaphysicians and philosophically-minded chemists, physicists and palaeontologists; where there were doctors with whom to talk about physiology and medicine, disciples of Mesmer to tell one about animal magnetism; Pestalozzians to discourse on education.

In every historical period human beings of every kind are born and make the best of their native gifts within a cultural environment which they may find favorable or unfavorable. No single individual can ever be representative of a period, if only for physiological reasons—for a Falstaff cannot represent a constituency of Cassiuses, nor a Scrooge a group of Pickwicks. People living in one country at one time will resemble one another superficially, in so far as they exhibit the same easily recognizable peculiarities of cultural style. On the lower levels of physique and temperament, of talents, tastes, and acquirements, they will be profoundly unlike one another. Resemblance begins again only on the deepest level of all, that of the spirit—of the something not ourselves which is the ground of our being.

No individual, I repeat, can be representative of his time; and our philosopher was probably rather less representative than most. Few men have lived a life so intensely personal, so constantly introverted and self-conscious. His Journal Intime has very little value as a historical, but very great value as a psychological document. It throws light, not on an epoch, but on a mind and temperament. Maine de Biran was not one of those who throw themselves into the life of their time with a passionate delight or a no less passionate indignation. Rather, he endured it with a kind of chronic bad grace, as one endures a trying climate, from which circumstances make it impossible to escape. And of course, if one didn't happen to like that kind of thing, life, during the Revolution and under the Empire, was no joke. It was no joke; and yet, when we read of our philosopher's encounters first with the Jacobins and later with Napoleon, we are struck, not by the ferocity, but by the forbearance displayed by the men in power. Compared with their modern counterparts, these revolutionaries of the 1790s, this military dictator of the early 1800s, seem almost humane.

Biran was a landowner, almost a noble; he had served in the King's Bodyguard and fought against the Parisian mob. And yet this man was permitted to live out the Terror, unmolested, on his ancestral estate of Grateloup. There, in his library, he studied mathematics and philosophy; there, under the oak trees of his forest, he walked and meditated and read the works of Rousseau. And all the time his peasants continued to pay their rents and he himself went on living like the cultured gentleman that birth and breeding had made him. To his Diary he confided from time to time his thoughts about contemporary politics. They were the unrealistic thoughts of a man brought up to believe in the march of progress and amazed to discover that savagery is perfectly compatible with science, "enlightenment," and powdered hair. Hence the vehemence of his rhetoric. Just because they were perpetrated in the age of Laplace and Lavoisier- (the latter, incidentally, a victim of the Terror), the crimes of the revolutionaries seemed to Biran "a thousand times more cruel than the prescriptions of Nero and Caligula, than the massacres of the Cevennes, or Ireland, or Scotland." The blood spilt by Robespierre and his crew was sufficient "to put out all the bonfires of the Inquisition, even as it serves to efface the memory of them." But in point of fact these crimes were, quantitively speaking, not excessive; and in point of morals, they could not be made an excuse for similar crimes committed by the opposite party. In regard to Biran himself, to his friends and compatriots, the revolutionaries had shown themselves remarkably considerate. A few of the philosopher's kinsmen and neighbors had thought it prudent to emigrate. Of those who remained in Perigord only twenty-five were condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal, while only a few hundreds suffered imprisonment. The rest, like Biran, retired into private life and were left in peace.

Robespierre fell; then came the Directorate, the Consulate, the Empire. Towards the close of the Napoleonic epoch, Maine de Biran, then deputy for Bergerac, became an active member of that Commission of Five which drew up a resolution, protesting against Napoleon’s tyranny and demanding a greater measure of civil and political liberty for the French people. In a Corsican fury, the Emperor denounced the commission and dissolved the Chamber which had approved its resolution. "La nation," he screamed in a paroxysm of self-adoration, "la nation a besoin de moi, etje n'aipas besoin d'elle"- From the satanically sublime to the ludicrous and the imbecile the step is almost infinitesimally short.

Only Napoleon's words were violent. The man who had actually written the offending resolution went quietly home to Grateloup and philosophy. When the Bourbon came back in 1814, Biran re-emerged in the nearest approach to a blaze of glory that he was ever to experience. The King and all the royal family were infinitely gracious. He was appointed Quaestor of the Chamber, with twice the salary of an ordinary deputy. Then came the return from Elba. Louis XVIII retired to Ghent, Maine de Biran to Grateloup. This time our philosopher feared the worst. But once again nothing happened. He had "a painful interview with the Prefect," followed, more satisfactorily, by a "frank explanation" with the General in command of the district—and that was all. He was free to do what he liked, provided always that he took no further part in political life.

Biran's denunciations of Napoleon are almost as indignant as those which he bestowed upon the Jacobins. His Diary, during the Hundred Days, is peppered with such words as "usurper," "despot," "criminal." But hell, after all, is a descending spiral; tyranny has its gradations, almost its differences in kind. Biran did not know it; but the circle, in which history had doomed him to live, was quite close to the top of the infernal pit. Under Richelieu, he would have been imprisoned or perhaps burnt for sorcery, like Urbain Grandier. And in our own days, under Mussolini, he would have been sent for seven years to an island or some dismal village in Apulia; under Hitler, he would have died in a concentration camp; under Stalin, he would have edifyingly confessed his sins before a People's Court and then have disappeared without leaving a trace even in history—for history would be falsified so as to deny him even a posthumous existence.

Bonaparte and the Jacobins lived in one of those brief Golden Ages in which even revolutionaries and dictators have their scruples and actually believe that other people—those, at least, belonging to the educated bourgeoisie—possess certain more or less inalienable rights. All this has now been changed. Under the modern dictator there is an equality of universal rightlessness. And among ever-increasing numbers of human beings this state of things is taken for granted as the normal and natural condition of man. To Napoleon, the Ideologists (among whom he mistakenly numbered our philosopher) were "a kind of vermin clinging to the skirts of my garments." But from these fierce words he did not proceed to commensurate action. Cabanis, Destutt de Tracey, Maine de Biran were only called vermin; there was never any question of swatting, or D.D.T., or pyrethrum. The insects were left to crawl and buzz and secrete the venom of subversive thought, with no more hindrance than was imposed by the imperial censorship and the decree which, by purging the Institute of its Class of Moral and Political Science, officially abolished a whole category of (to a dictator) most embarrassing speculation. Towards Mme. de Stael,- it is true, Napoleon showed himself more severe than towards Biran and the other "conspirators and bandits called philosophers." In extenuation it must be admitted that that exasperating woman insistently asked for everything she got. Moreover, what she got was nothing very terrible. Exile first from Paris and finally from France was a punishment mild indeed by comparison with what would now be meted out to an ideological dissenter by an irritated tyrant.

Confronted by the facts, on the one side, of Napoleon's character and his absolute power, on the other, of Maine de Biran's complete immunity and Mme. de Stael's tempered chastisement, we find ourselves wondering why it is that, 150 years later, we should be living in an age that has witnessed the revival of slavery, torture, forced orthodoxy, and the savage persecution of heretical opinion. We can never hope to uncover all the reasons for this enormous change for the worse; but from our vantage point in time we can detect at least a few of the more obvious and important of them. It will be instructive to see how far our philosopher was aware of the tendencies which, in four or five generations, were to transform the world of Napoleon into that of Hitler and Stalin.

Let us begin with the historical movement, of whose significance and even existence Biran seems to have been most completely unaware—I mean the Industrial Revolution. In his Journal Intime and his various philosophical writings there is, I believe, no single reference to the sufficiently obvious fact that the structure of European economy was undergoing profound and irreversible changes. Biran was, among other things, a professional politician, and to the problems of politics he devoted many pages of his Diary and not a few considerable orations. But the notion that society might be changed more radically by a revolution in the methods of production than by a revolution in the forms of government never seems to have occurred to him. The reasons for this curious blindness are in part psychological, in part social and geographical. Our philosopher, as we have seen, had a special gift and predilection for introspection—a gift and predilection that were incompatible with any very intense or sustained interest in the external world of mere things. Moreover, this introverted metaphysician was also the proprietor of an estate in one of the most exclusively agricultural areas of France. In so far as he took an interest in mere things, he took it in things connected with the woods and vineyards, the cattle and pastures of his native Perigord. His material and spiritual homes were Grateloup and psychology, Paris and the politics of moderate royalism. Of Lille and Lyons and their proliferating industrial slums, of the new steam-engines and the new factories with their expensive machinery and their regimented workers, he knew and cared nothing at all.

The fact seems less surprising when we remember the curious case of Biran's contemporary, Francois-Charles Fourier. Fourier was a man of excellent intelligence, who had seen the new industrial methods in action and had spent the whole of his adult life thinking about the organization of society and the production and distribution of wealth. And yet, writing in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, he could express the belief that the problem of rapid transport would be solved by the breeding of new species of preternaturally nimble draught animals. And this at a time when Stephenson’s "Rocket" had already outstripped the horse.

When Maine de Biran looked into the future, he saw unpleasant visions of insubordination, revolution, anarchy, and finally military dictatorship. And he saw clearly; for every outburst of collective violence always results in a more or less prolonged diminution of individual liberty. What he did not perceive was the more insidious threat to the freedom and dignity of man inherent in the new techniques of production. A human being is a not very strong animal possessed of a mind that in its higher reaches is spontaneously creative and capable of apprehending modes of existence that are "not of this world." Such a creature cannot, by its very nature, be continuously efficient. A machine, on the contrary, is designed to be efficient all the time. When a man is put in charge of a machine, or when he becomes part of some social or economic organization that is modelled upon the machine, he is compelled to be what it is not natural or normal for him to be. In more than moderate doses efficiency is incompatible with humanity.

But in a world of advanced technology efficiency tends to become the end, to which men and women are the means. The machine sets an unattainable sub-human standard; organizations and individuals are expected to conform to that standard. Failure to reach it is punished. Under democratic dispensations the punishment is relatively mild and consists in being relegated to the class of the unskilled or even of the unemployable. Under the modern totalitarian dictatorship—a regime dedicated to the pursuit of military efficiency—inefficiency receives a shorter shrift.

In this context let me quote the words of a modern French philosopher, whose thought has many affinities with that of Maine de Biran—I mean, M. Gabriel Marcel.- "Such practices as the liquidation of incurables or, during the war, the extermination of slaves who had reached a degree of exhaustion, beyond which they could no longer earn their pittance miserable as it was, practices justly regarded as monstrous and inhuman, are now seen to be the irrefutably logical results of a given point of view"—the point of view of the efficiency expert. "Such practices still, thank God, excite general indignation. But it is feared that this is so only because mankind is not yet sufficiently adapted to a world of pure technics; and we are forced to recognize that on this road, which leads to the most appalling barbarism—a barbarism supported by reasoning—a good many stages have already been passed." Biran's contemporaries were galloping enthusiastically along the early stages of that road. Twenty-five years after our philosopher's death Karl Marx began his denunciations of capitalist inhumanity. During the next seventy-five years trade unionism and liberal legislation did much to mitigate that inhumanity. Then came war, revolution, economic dislocation. The threat of anarchy was made an excuse for the concentration of power in the hands of a ruling oligarchy. And meanwhile a developing technology had created ideals of efficiency more sub-humanly remote from life than at any previous time. Men and women were expected to live up, or rather down, to standards set by machines and machine-like organizations of a hitherto unheard-of-perfection. And if they failed to do so, there at their heels was the State; and the State was equipped with every modern convenience from machine-guns to tape-recorders and concealed microphones.

To Biran, the most disturbing thing about the man who had run the secret police under Napoleon and who, in 1815, was doing the same dirty work for Louis XVIII, was his total lack of principle, his readiness to do anything for money and power. It seems never to have occurred to him that Fouche might be more alarming on account of his intellectual qualities than of his moral defects—more dangerous because he was so businesslike and efficient than because he was a low intriguing blackmailer. Still less did it occur to our philosopher that, with the general advance in science and technology, the ability of any government to spy and eavesdrop, to regiment and coerce, to suppress or fabricate opinions, to withhold truth and inculcate falsehood, was likely to increase—to go on increasing until it would become very difficult for men to think unorthodox thoughts and quite impossible for them to carry through a successful rebellion.

The Industrial Revolution was not the only great historical movement of whose significance our philosopher remained more or less completely unaware. There was also nationalism. Maine de Biran was a good Frenchman; but he was also a good legitimist and a good European of the pre-Revolution variety. Hence his inability to understand the modern frenzies of chauvinism at home and, abroad, of Young Germanism, nascent Italianism, Holy Russia-ism, British Empire-ism. During the Hundred Days we find him calmly deploring the fact that the great majority of his compatriots were praying for the success, not of the Cossacks and the English, but of the tyrant and his detestable soldiery. "We forget that the most dangerous enemy is the one who will remain to devour us, whereas the others will go their way. We are a flock of sheep, allying ourselves with the tiger against the lions who are at war with him; we do not reflect that, when he has made use of us to expel his personal enemies, he will turn and rend us with his bloodstained claws." To Maine de Biran the nationalist's first principle—that 'we' are right and 'they' are always wrong—was by no means self-evident. He admired the magnanimity of the Allies, and considered that the national honor was safe in the keeping of these generous conquerors, who had delivered France from her servitude to 'the modern Attila.'" That nationalistic idolatry was destined to become the effective religion of the twentieth century was a fact which his temperament and upbringing made it impossible for Biran to foresee. Once again he was not the only bad prophet. A generation after his death even so shrewd an observer as Karl Marx could gravely underestimate the importance of nationalism. Marx thought that local patriotism was destined very soon to be replaced by class patriotism. The idea that communism might one day become, not the ideological, emotional, and political substitute for nationalism, but an instrument in the service of a particular nation and empire, never seems to have occurred to him. Marx's contemporary, Mazzini ,z had a clearer sense of the power, the enduring historical significance of nationalism. But Mazzini was so completely blinded by his humanitarian idealism and his personal experience of foreign oppression, that he could not recognize the intrinsically evil and destructive nature of nationalism. Within five years of achieving its liberty every oppressed nationality takes to militarism, and within two or three generations, sometimes within a single generation, it becomes, if circumstances are propitious, an imperialist aggressor, eager to inflict upon its neighbors the oppression of which itself was so recently a victim.

Biran often complained that he had been born too late, and he looked back with nostalgic envy to the great age of French literature and philosophy, when the native genius of a Bossuet, a Fenelon, a Malebranche had been reinforced, had been given purpose and direction by a system of un-shakable beliefs. By ruining this system of beliefs, the "nothing-but" philosophies of the eighteenth century had weakened men's creative energies, leaving them empty and unfruitful. Biran did not see that nature's abhorrence for a vacuum is as strong in the mental as in the material world. Men cannot live in a chronic state of negation; the voids of thought and feeling must be filled, and if we reject the divine, its place will inevitably be taken by some idolatrous ersatz. Even when the belief in God is universally accepted, the worship of a God-substitute may, in fact, be the effective religion of some men all the time and of all men some of the time. Consider, for example, organized Christianity. This has always been a mixed religion, in which one part of God-worship was combined with four or five parts idolatrous Church-worship and two or three parts of fetishism. With the decline of Christianity, such God-worship as had existed went out; the idolatrous worship of the Church was exchanged for the equally idolatrous worship of the State and the Nation; and, diverted from relics, images, and hallowed formulas, the cult of fetishes came to be directed upon such things as flags, national anthems, and the slogans of political and economic theory.

The revolutionary period and the Empire provide early examples of this secular and wholly unmitigated idolatry; but the full development of the new religion has been reserved for our own century. The "nothing-but" philosophies associated with the advance of technology have now come to seem almost axiomatically true. In the high vacuum of the modern world not a trace of the divine or the eternal remains, and the notions of State, Nation, and Party are therefore free to expand into vast and monstrous caricatures of God. In the service of this God-surrogate and of this prophet, Efficiency, totalitarian dictators find it right and proper to behave with systematic savagery. In the democratic countries we worship the same deity and prophet, but under the influence of an old irrelevant habit we neglect to draw the practical conclusions which logically flow from the premises of nationalism and technics. M. Marcel is evidently of the opinion that the inner logic of our idolatry will soon prove irresistible; and Mr. George Orwell even assigns a date to our impending conversion. In 1984 we shall all be living under totalitarian conditions.

Closely associated with nation-worship and the cult of efficiency, and hardly less fruitful of evil than they, is faith in inevitable progress and the redemptive power of history to save humanity in some more or less distant future. Biran seems to have started out with a standard eighteenth-century belief in allround progress. The Terror startled him into reconsidering that belief, and by the time Bonaparte had risen to fame as the conqueror of Italy, he was most uncertain whether scientific and technological progress is inevitably correlated with improvement in behavior. The news of the wanton extinction of the Venetian Republic set him thinking of the jus gentium, as formulated by Grotius- and Montesquieu. Great men! And what they wrote had been true and fine. "But in practice what has been the use of it all? Has it made us more just in conquest, more humane and reasonable in victory? What is now happening in Italy proves the contrary." One is reminded of the words which Herodotus put into the mouth of the Persian who talked with Thersander at Thebes. "Of all man’s miseries the bitterest is this, to know so much and to have control over nothing." Doubting the inevitability and all-roundness of progress, Biran came to feel very dubious about that Future to which the Liberals looked forward with such sanguine hope and for which the revolutionaries were prepared to sacrifice so much present good, so many contemporary lives and liberties.

But how could these people feel so cocksure about the future? Except to a very limited extent, the future is unpredictable, and nobody can form more than the vaguest idea of the more distant consequences of his present actions. The best laid plans have results which no planner, however intelligent, can foresee. These are matters of everyday experience. And yet the revolutionaries and the advocates of radical reforms implicitly deny the fact of man's necessary ignorance. They claim infallibility not, like the Pope, about dogma, but in regard to the events of tomorrow and next year. In the light of this pretended knowledge they assert that their plans will result in happiness for generations

yet unborn. And this future happiness will be so enormous as to justify retrospectively the infliction of present misery without compunction and on the largest scale.

Biran concludes his reflections on the Liberals of 1820 with the remark that "Robespierre and Napoleon reasoned in this way." And, more than a century later, so did Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese war lords; so do Stalin and the lesser dictators of today. Modern tyrants differ from their counterparts in antiquity inasmuch as they are all convinced believers in Progress, in a hypostatized and almost personified History that is providentially "on our side," and in a Future so gorgeous that no present price for its attainment can be regarded as excessive. Five or six million must be liquidated, a hundred million reduced to slavery. What of it? In the twenty-second century their great-great-grandchildren will be men like gods.

Men like gods. But can it be that the printer has made a mistake? Shouldn't that final word be "dogs"? For obviously, if the attempt be made to fashion humanity's better future by means that are consistently anti-human, the end-products is likely to be something much nearer to the well-kicked animal than to Apollo or Hermes. This was a fact which our philosopher understood very well. He had seen that large-scale violence leads either directly, or through anarchy, to tyranny, and this knowledge made him a moderate in politics, a lover of peace and quiet, and a decided preference for a constitutional King Log over any kind of King Stork, whether of the extreme right or the extreme left. Sentimentally attached to the legitimate dynasty, he was yet no friend of the future Charles X or of his reactionary supporters. Their antics, he saw, might easily crack the thin precarious crust of decency, which is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hells of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface. Biran had read the story of Alypius in St. Augustine's Confessions, he had watched, from a safe hiding-place, the career of Robespierre, had served and suffered under Bonaparte; through books and at first-hand he knew that, though it may be temperament and childhood frustration that make the sadist and the despot, it is adult opportunity that finally actualizes these monsters and imposes them upon society. Suppress the opportunities and you will stop up a principal source of injustice and eliminate the sufferings associated with tyranny and paranoia in high places. And since the opportunities for tyranny and systematic sadism are most plentiful during times of social unrest, civil strife, and international war, it follows that the only reasonable policy is one of peace and order at almost any price. To this basic principle Biran was unwaveringly attached; but that attachment, ironically enough, imparted to his political career a course so consistently wobbly that the peasants of his constituency, changing the B of his name into a V, used to speak of him as Monsieur Viran.

Despite all appearances, they were unjust; for our philosopher was no weathercock, but rather a compass needle steadily pointing towards moderation. But unfortunately this pointing had to be done in relation to existing parties and policies. Thus, in 1814, we find him siding with the Ultras, whom he regarded as the staunchest supporters of legitimacy and order. By the end of 1815 he had realized that these extreme royalists were dangerous revolutionaries, who threatened the hardly won tranquillity of France and were as greedy for power and as impatient of constitutional restraint as Bonaparte or the Jacobins. In consequence of this discovery he began to work with the Liberals. But the Liberals wanted to change too much too quickly, and were altogether too democratic for the taste of an aristocratic intellectual. Biran was no believer in the virtue or wisdom of "the People," whom he regarded as a mere "collection of ignorant and passionate individuals, who act only under the impulse of blind emotion." The idea of the sovereign People was absurd. Sovereignty should be vested in a royal house, wielding an authority guaranteed by sentiment and tradition, but hedged about by a constitution and acting under advice from the representatives of the educated minority. The Liberals aimed at undermining the authority of the King and handing over more power to the People-or, to be more accurate, of using the People to increase the power of the bourgeois-industrial class to which they themselves belonged. Regarding them as the more dangerous threat to stability, Biran swung back towards the side of the Ultras. But, needless to say, the Ultras had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing, and by 1820 he was even more heartily disgusted by them than he had been in 1815.

He then came to disapprove and be disapproved by practically everybody in French politics. It was an uncomfortable but not at all discreditable position-a position analogous to that which another philosopher, Erasmus, had occupied, two centuries before, between the Reformers and the ecclesiastical conservatives. "A plague on both your houses" is the motto of all moderates.

That Biran should have been only dimly and partially aware of the historical forces at work in his society is not at all surprising. Even philosophers, even professional politicians do most of their living on the individual plane, knowing little (and generally caring even less) about the vast, vague movements taking place on the sub-personal levels of history and society, of long durations and large numbers. Biran had his blind spots and his illusions. But so did even the acute st of his contemporaries. The Ideologists, for example, lived in a fairyland of optimistic rationalism. The Ultras dreamed of a future that should be like the medieval past—or, to be more accurate, like their fantastic ideas of the medieval past. James Mill, who thought of himself as a stern, hard realist, was convinced that teaching everybody to read would, simply by exposing the electors to the arguments in favor of democracy, guarantee political liberty forever. Biran may have been strangely blind and in some respects strangely ingenious; but at least he could see through these absurdities. He knew that the Ideologists were hopelessly sunk in that Original Sin of the intellect, over-simplification. He knew that the Romantics and the Ultras were deliberately shutting their eyes to contemporary facts. And he knew the psychological baselessness of Mill's faith in primary education. Not, of course, that he had the faintest premonition of Harmsworth or Hearst, of modern advertising or the comic strip, of Goebbels or Tass. It was rather that Biran had studied his own mind too closely to be able to believe that human beings are guided in their actions by enlightened selfinterest.

Systematic knowledge of historical trends and "waves of the future" is sought only by the intellectual few. But every individual lives here and now, and is more or less profoundly affected by the fact that now is not then, nor here somewhere else. What are, and what should be, the relations between the personal and the historical, the existential and the social? Biran never posed this question in so many words; consequently we have to infer his answers from what he says in other contexts. What he seems to suggest, throughout the Journal Intime, is that the individual’s relation to history and society is normally that of victim to monster. This being so, every reasonable person should try, so far as he can, to escape from history—but into what? Into abstract thought and the inner life, or else (and this was the conclusion reached by our philosopher towards the end of his career) into the loving contemplation of the divine Spirit.

The problem is so important that it deserves a more thorough examination than Biran chose to give it. Let us begin with an analogy drawn from inanimate matter. The laws of gases are concerned with the interdependence of volume, pressure, and temperature. But the individual molecules of which the gas is composed have neither temperature nor pressure, but only kinetic energy and a tendency to random movement. In a word, the laws of single molecules are entirely different from the laws of the gases they constitute. Something of the same kind is true of individuals and societies. In groups consisting of large numbers of human individuals, certain regularities can be detected and certain sociological laws can be formulated. Because of the relatively small size of even the most considerable human groups, and because of the enormous differences, congenital and acquired, between individual and individual, these regularities have numerous exceptions and these sociological laws are rather inexact. But this is no reason for dismissing them. For, in the words of Edgar Zilser, from whose essay on The Problems of Empiricism I have borrowed this simile of molecules and gases, "no physicist or astronomer would disregard a regularity on the ground that it did not always hold."

For our purposes the important thing about sociological laws is not their inexactness but the fact that they are quite different from the psychological and physiological laws which govern the individual person. "If," says Zilsner, "we look for social regularities by means of empathy"—feeling ourselves into a situation by imagining what would be our own behavior in regard to it—"we may never find them, since ideas, wishes and actions might not appear in them at all." In a word, changes in quantity, if sufficiently great, result in changes in kind. Between the individual and the social, the personal and the historical, there is a difference amounting to incommensurability. Nobody now reads Herbert Spencer's Man versus the State. And yet the conflict between what is good for a psycho-physical person and what is good for the organization wholly innocent of feelings, wishes, and ideas, is real and seems destined to remain forever unresolved. One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.

History reveals the Church and the State as a pair of indispensable Molochs. They protect their worshipping subjects, only to enslave and destroy them. The relations between social organizations and the individuals who live under them is symbolically expressed by the word "shepherd," as applied to the priests and rulers, who like to think of themselves as God’s earthly representatives, and even to God Himself. The metaphor is of high, but not the highest, antiquity; for it was first used by the herdowning, land-destroying, meat-eating, and war-waging peoples who replaced the horticulturists of the first civilization and put an end to that Golden Age of Peace, which not long since was regarded as a mere myth, but is now revealed by the light of archaeology as a proto- and prehistorical reality. By force of unreflecting habit we go on talking sentimentally about the Shepherd of His people, about Pastors and their flocks, about stray lambs and a Good Shepherd. We never pause to reflect that a shepherd is "not in business for his health," still less for the health of his sheep. If he takes good care of the animals, it is in order that he may rob them of their wool and milk, castrate their male offspring, and finally cut their throats and convert them into mutton. Applied to most of the States and Churches of the last two or three thousand years, this pastoral metaphor is seen to be exceedingly apt—so apt, indeed, that one wonders why the civil and ecclesiastical herders of men should ever have allowed it to gain currency. From the point of view of the individual lambs, rams, and ewes there is, of course, no such thing as a good shepherd; their problem is to find means whereby they may enjoy the benefits of a well-ordered social life without being exposed to such things as shearings, milkings, geldings, and butcheries which have always been associated with the pastoral office. To discuss those means would lead us too far afield. Let it suffice to say that, given, first, the manifest unfitness of almost all human beings to exercise much power for very long, and, second, the tendency for social institutions to become pseudo-divine ends, to which individual men and women are merely means, it follows that every grant of authority should be hedged about with effective reservations; that political, economic, and religious organizations should be small and co-operative, never large, and therefore inhuman and hierarchical; that the centralization of economic and political power should be avoided at all costs; and that nations and groups of nations should be organized as federations of local and professional bodies, having wide powers of self-government. At the present time, unfortunately, all signs point, not to decentralization and the abolition of man-herders, but rather to a steady increase in the power of the Big Shepherd and his oligarchy of bureaucratic dogs, to a growth in the size, the complexity, the machine-like efficiency, and rigidity of social organizations, and to a completer deification of the State, accompanied by a completer reification, or reduction to thinghood, of individual persons.

Maine de Biran’s temperament was such that, even when he found himself on the winning side, even when he was an official personage of some importance, he continued to regard the social and the historical with the same apprehensive dislike as he had felt towards them in the days of Bonaparte and the Jacobins. In his Diary the longing to escape from his pigeon-hole in the social hierarchy, ro break out of contemporary history and return to a purely private life, is expressed almost as frequently as the longing to be delivered from the body of this death. And yet he remained to the end embedded in politics and chained to his legislative functions. Why? To begin with, our philosopher was far from rich and found it very hard, without his official salary, to make both ends meet. Next there was his sense of duty. He felt morally obliged to do all he could for the royal house and for his rustic neighbors in Perigord. And finally there was his very unphilosophical desire to seem important, to be a personage among the pompous personages of the great world. Groaning and reluctant, yet perennially hopeful of the miracle that should transform him from tongue-tied introvert into the brilliant and commanding herder of men, he went on clinging to his barbed perch among the great. It was death, and not his own will, that finally relaxed that agonizing clutch.

Fortunately for Biran, his martyrdom was not continuous. Even at moments when history pressed upon him most alarmingly, he found it possible to take a complete holiday in abstract thought. Sometimes he did not even have to take his holiday; it came to him, spontaneously, gratuitously, in the form of an illumination, or a kind of ecstasy. Thus, to our philosopher the spring of 1794 was memorable not for the executions of Hebert and Danton, not because Robespierre had now dedicated the Terror to the greater glory of the Supreme Being, but on account of an event that had nothing whatever to do with history or the social environment. "Today, the twenty-seventh of May, I had an experience too beautiful, too remarkable by its rarity ever to be forgotten. I was walking by myself a few minutes before sundown. The weather was perfect; spring was at its freshest and most brilliant; the whole world was clothed in that charm which can be felt by the soul, but not described in words. All that struck my senses filled my heart with a mysterious, sad sweetness. The tears stood in my eyes. Ravishment succeeded ravishment. If I could perpetuate this state, what would be lacking to my felicity? I should have found upon this earth the joys of heaven."

During the Hundred Days Biran was a good deal closer to history than he had been at Grateloup in 1794. Every event that occurred between the return from Elba and Waterloo filled him with a bitter indignation. "I am no longer kind, for men exasperate me. I can now see only criminals and cowards. Pity for misfortune, the need to be useful and to serve my fellows, the desire to relieve distress, all the expansive and generous sentiments which were, up till now, my principles of action, are suffering a daily diminution in my heart."

Such are the ordinary psychological consequences of violent events on the historical level. Individuals react to these events with a chronic uncharitableness punctuated by paroxysms of hate, rage, and fear. Happily, in the long run, malice is always self-destructive. If it were not, this earth would be, not a Middle World of inextricably mingled good and evil, but plain, unmitigated Hell. In the short run, however, the war-born uncharitableness of many individuals constitutes a public opinion in favor of yet more collective violence.

In Biran's case the bitterness with which he reacted to contemporary history filled only his heart. "My mind, meanwhile, is occupied with abstract speculations, foreign to all the interests of this world. The speculations keep me from thinking about my fellow men—and this is fortunate; for I cannot think of them except to hate and despise."

The life of every individual occupies a certain position in time, is contemporary with certain political events and runs parallel, so to speak, with certain social and cultural movements. In a word, the individual lives surrounded by history. But to what extent does he actually live in history? And what precisely is this history by which individuals are surrounded and within which each of them does at least some of his living?

Let us begin by considering the second of these two questions: What is history? Is history something which exists, in its intelligible perfection, only in the minds of historians? Or is it something actually experienced by the men and women who are born into time, live out their lives, die, and are succeeded by their sons and daughters?

Mr. Toynbee puts the questions somewhat differently: "What," he asks, "will be singled out as the salient event of our time by future historians? Not, I fancy, any of those sensational or tragic or catastrophic political and economic events which occupy the headlines of our newspapers and the foregrounds of our minds," but rather "the impact of Western civilization upon all the other societies of the world," followed by the reaction (already perceptible) of those other civilizations upon Western civilization and the ultimate emergence of a religion affirming "the unity of mankind." This is an answer to our question as well as to Mr. Toynbee's. For, obviously, the processes he describes are not a part of anybody's immediate experience. Nobody now living is intimately aware of them; nobody feels that they are happening to himself or sees them happening to his children or his friends. But the (to a philosophical historian) unimportant tragedies and catastrophes, which fill the headlines, actually happen to some people, and their repercussions are part of the experience of almost everybody. If the philosophical historians are right, everything of real importance in history is a matter of very long durations and very large numbers. Between these and any given person, living at any given moment of time, lie the events predominantly "tragic or catastrophic," which are the subject matter of unphilosophical history. Some of these events can become part of the immediate experience of persons; and, conversely, some persons can to some extent modify the tragedies and control the catastrophes. Inasmuch as they involve fairly large numbers and fairly long durations, such events are a part of history. But from the philosophical historian's point of view they are important only in so far as they are at once the symptoms of a process involving much greater numbers and longer durations, and the meaqs to the realization of that process. Individuals can never actually experience the long-range process, which, according to the philosophical historians, gives meaning to history. All that they can experience (and this experience is largely subconscious) is the circum-ambient culture. And should they be intellectually curious, they can discover, through appropriate reading, that the culture by which they are surrounded is different in certain respects from the culture which surrounded their ancestors. Between one state of a culture and another later state there is not, and there cannot be, a continuity of experience. Every individual simply finds himself where in fact he is—here, not there; now, not then. Necessarily ignorant of the meaningful processes of long-range history, he has to make the best of that particular tract of short-range tragedy and catastrophe, that particular section of a cultural curve, against which his own personal life traces its original pattern of youth, maturity, and decay. Once again, it is a case of the gas and its constituent molecules. Gas laws are not the same as the laws governing the particles within the gas. Though he himself must act, suffer, and enjoy as a molecule, the philosophical historian does his best to think as a gas—or rather (since a society is incapable of thought) as the detached observer of a gas. It is, of course, easy enough to take the gaseous view of a period other than one's own. It is much more difficult to take it in regard to the time during which one is oneself a molecule within the social gas. That is why a modern historian feels himself justified in revising the estimates of their own time made by the authors of his documents—in correcting, for example, the too unfavorable view of the age of Aquinas and the cathedral-builders taken by all thirteenth-century moralists, or the too favorable view of industrial civilization taken by many Victorian moralists.

History as something experienced can never be fully recorded. For, obviously, there are as many such histories as there have been experiencing human beings. The nearest approach to a general history-as-something-experienced would be an anthology of a great variety of personal documents. Professor Coulton has compiled a number of excellent anthologies of this kind covering the medieval period. They should be read by anyone who wants to know, not what modern historians think about the Middle Ages, but what it actually felt like to be a contemporary of St. Francis, or Dante, or Chaucer.

History-as-something-experienced being unwritable, we must perforce be content with history-as-something-in-the-minds-of-historians. This last is of two kinds: the short-range history of tragedies and catastrophes, political ups and downs, social and economic revolutions; and the long-range, philosophical history of those very long durations and very large numbers, in which it is possible to observe meaningful regularities, recurrent and developing patterns. No two philosophical historians discover precisely the same regularities or meanings; and even among the writers of the other kind of history there is a disagreement in regard to the importance of the part played by individuals in the short-range political and economic movements, which are their chosen subject matter. These divergencies of opinion are unfortunate, but, in view of our present ignorance, inevitable.

We may now return to the first of our two questions. To what extent does the individual, who lives surrounded by history, actually live in history? How much is his existence conditioned by the sociologists' trinity of Place, Work, and Folk? How is he related to the circumambient culture? In what ways is his molecular personality affected by the general state of the social gas, and his own position within it? The answer, it is evident, will be different in each particular case; but it is possible, none the less, to cast up a reckoning sufficiently true to average experience to have at least some significance for every one of us.

Let us begin with the obvious but none the less very strange fact that all human beings pass nearly a third of their lives in a state that is completely non-historical, non-social, non-cultural—and even non-spatial and non-temporal. In other words, for eight hours out of every twenty-four they are asleep. Sleep is the indispensable condition of physical health and mental sanity. It is in sleep that our body repairs the damage caused by the day's work and the day's amusements; in sleep that the vis medicatrix naturae overcomes our disease; in sleep that our conscious mind finds some respite from the cravings and aversions, the fears, anxieties and hatreds, the planning and calculating which drive it during waking hours to the brink of nervous exhaustion and sometimes beyond. Many of us are chronically sick and more or less far gone in neurosis. That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep. Even a Himmler, even a Marquis de Sade, even a Jay Gould and a Zaharoff² must resign themselves to being, during 30 percent of their existence, innocent, sane, and obscurely at one with the divine ground of all being. One of the most dreadfully significant facts about political, social, and ecclesiastical institutions is that they never sleep. In so far as individual human beings create and direct them, they embody the ideals and the calculating cleverness, inextricably combined with the conscious or unconscious cravings, aversions, and fears, of a group of waking selves. Every large organization exists in a state of chronic insomnia and so can never receive directly those accessions of new life and wisdom which, in dreams and dreamless unconsciousness, come sometimes trickling, sometimes pouring in from the depths of the sleeper's being or even from some source beyond those depths. An institution can be revived only by individuals who, because they are capable of sleep and inspiration, are capable of becoming more than themselves.

The enlightened person, as the word "Buddha" implies, is fully and forever awake—but with a wakefulness radically different from that of the social organization; for he is awake even during the day to that which the unregenerate can approach only in sleep, that which social organizations never approach at all. When such organizations are left to their insomnia, when they are permitted to function according to the laws of their own being, subordinating individual insights to collective tradition, they become mad—not like an individual lunatic, but with a solemn, traditional, and systematic madness that is at once majestic and ludicrous, grotesque and terrifying. There is a hymn which exhorts us to thank God that the Church unsleeping her watch is keeping. Instead of rejoicing in the fact we should lament and deplore. Unsleeping, the Church kept watch, century after century, over its bank accounts, its lands, its prestige, its political influence, its idolatrously worshipped dogmas, rites, and traditions. All the enormous evils and imbecilities recorded in ecclesiastical history are the products of this fatal incapacity of a social organization to go to sleep.

Conversely all the illuminations and charities of personal religion have their source in the Spirit, which transcends and yet is the most inward ground of our own being, and with which, gratuitously in sleep, and in moments of insight and illumination prepared for by a deliberate "dying to self," the individual spirit is able to establish contact.

One culture gives us the pyramids, another the Escorial, a third, Forest Lawn. But the act of dying remains always and everywhere identical. Like sleep, death is outside the pale of history—a molecular experience unaffected by the state of the social gas. Every individual has to die alone, to die by himself to himself. The experience cannot be shared; it can only be privately undergone. "How painful it is," writes Shestov, "to read Plato’s account of the last days of Socrates! His hours are numbered, and he talks, talks, talks.... That is what comes of having disciples. They won't allow you even to die in peace. The best death is the death we consider the worst, when one is alone, far from home, when one dies in the hospital like a dog in a ditch. Then at least one cannot spend one's last moments pretending, talking, teaching. One is allowed to keep silence and prepare oneself for the terrible and perhaps specially important event. Pascal’s sister reports that he, too, talked a great deal before he died. Musset, on the contrary, wept like a child. May it not be that Socrates and Pascal talked as much as they did because they were afraid of crying?"

Hardly less unhistorical than death is old age. Modern medicine has done something to make the last years of a long life a little more comfortable, and pension plans have relieved the aged of a dependence upon charity or their children. Nevertheless, in spite of vitamins and social security, old age is still essentially what it was for our ancestors—a period of experienced decline and regression, to which the facts of contemporary history, the social and economic movements of the day, are more or less completely irrelevant. The ageing man of the middle twentieth century lives, not in the public world of atomic physics and conflicting ideologies, of welfare states and supersonic speed, but in his strictly private universe of physical weakness and mental decay.

It was the same with our philosopher. Laplace was his older contemporary, Cuvier and Ampere were his friends. But his last years were lived, not in the age of scientific progress which history records, but in the intimate experience of dying ever more completely to love, to pleasure, to enthusiasm, to sensibility, even to his intellect. "The most painful manner of dying to oneself," he writes, "is to be left with only so much of a reflective personality as suffices to recognize the successive degradation of those faculties, on account of which one could feel some self-esteem." Compared with these facts of his immediate experience, the social and the historical seemed unimportant.

Progress is something that exists on the level of the species (as increasing freedom from and control over natural environment) and perhaps also on the level of the society or the civilization (as an increase in prosperity, knowledge, and skill, an improvement in laws and manners). For the individual it does not exist, except as an item of abstract knowledge. Like the other trends and movements recorded in books of history-as-something-in-the-mind-of-the-historian, it is never an object of individual experience. And this for two reasons. The first of these must be sought in the fact that man's organic life is intrinsically non-progressive. It does not keep on going up and up, in the manner of the graphs representing literacy, or national income, or industrial production. On the contrary, it is a curve like a flattened cocked hat. We are born, rise through youth to maturity, continue for a time on one level, then drop down through old age and decrepitude into death. An ageing member of even the most progressive society experiences only molecular decay, never gaseous expansion.

The second reason for the individual's incapacity to experience progress is purely psychological and has nothing to do with the facts of physiology. Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. By the mere fact of having come into existence, the most amazing novelty becomes in a few months, even a few days, a familiar and, as it were, self-evident part of the environment. Every aspiration is for a golden ceiling overhead; but the moment that ceiling has been reached, it becomes a commonplace and disregarded floor, on which we dance or trudge in a manner indistinguishable, so far as our feeling-tone is concerned, from that in which we danced and trudged on the floor below. Moreover, every individual is born into a world having a social and technological floor of a particular kind, and is completely unaware, except through reading and by hearsay, that there was ever any other kind of floor. Between the members of one generation and the members of the preceding and subsequent generations there is no continuity of immediate experience. This means that one can read or write books about progress, but that one cannot feel it or live it in the same way as one feels a pain or lives one's old age.

Sleep and old age account for about thirty years of our allotted three score and ten. In other words, nearly half of every life is passed either completely outside of the social and the historical, or in a world of enforced privacy, to which the social and the historical are only slightly relevant. Like the experience of old age, the experience of sickness takes the individual out of history and society. This does not mean, of course, that history is without effect on the bodily and mental health of individuals. What it does mean, however, is that, though certain diseases are less common and less dangerous than in the past, though hospitals are better and medical treatment more rational, sickness still causes an alienation from the world of history, and that, while it lasts, this alienation is as complete as ever it was in the past. Moreover, in spite of the progress in hygiene and medicine, in spite of the elimination from many parts of the earth of the contagious diseases which used to plague our forefathers, sickness is still appallingly common. Chronic, degenerative ailments are on the increase, and so are mental disorders, ranging from mild neuroses, with their accompanying physical disabilities, to severe and often incurable psychoses. Our fever hospitals are empty, but asylums are full to bursting. Thanks to events which can be recorded in social history, a person living in the twentieth century is much less likely to catch the plague than was a person living in the fourteenth, but rather more likely to develop cancer, diabetes, coronary disease, hypertension, neurosis, psychosis, and all the varieties of psychosomatic disorders.

Like death, sickness has had a great variety of cultural concomitants; but these changing concomitants have not changed the essential fact that sick persons experience an alienation from their culture and society, that they temporarily fall out of history into their private world of pain and fever.

Thus, because Biran was a child of the century which had perfected the chronometer and the clockwork flute player, he always, though a strenuous anti-mechanist, referred to his body as "the machine." And because St. Francis had been brought up in thirteenth-century Umbria, among peasants and their beasts, he always referred to his body as "Brother Ass." Differences in place, work, and folk account for these differences in terminology. But when "the machine" suffered, it suffered in just the same way as "Brother Ass" had suffered nearly six hundred years before, in just the same way as St. Paul’s "body of this death" had suffered in the first century.

Sickness, then, and old age take us out of history. Does this mean that the young and the healthy are permanently in history? Not at all. In the normal person, all the physiological processes are in their nature unhistorical and incommunicably non-social. The arts of breathing and assimilation, for example, of regulating body temperature and the chemistry of the blood, were acquired before our ancestors were even human. Digestion and excretion have no history; they are always there, as given facts of experience, as permanent elements in the destiny of every individual man and woman who has ever lived. The pleasures of good and the discomforts of bad digestion are the same at all times, in all places, under whatever political regime or cultural dispensation.

Maine de Biran, as we learn from his Journal, had a very delicate and capricious digestion. When it worked well, he found life worth living and experienced a sense of well-being which made even a dinner party at his mother-in-law’s seem delightful. But when it worked badly, he felt miserable, found it impossible to think his own thoughts or even to understand what he read. "Van Helmont, he thinks, was quite right when he situated in the stomach the centre of all our affections and the active cause of our intellectual dispositions and even our ideas." This is not a piece of cheap cynicism; for never was any man less cynical than our philosopher. It is simply the statement of a fact in the life of incarnated spirits —a fact which has to be accepted, whether we like it or not, and made the best of. A great Catholic mystic has recorded his inability to place his mind in the presence of God during the half-hour which followed his principal repast. It was the same with Biran. After dinner he was generally incapable of any but the most physiologically private life. The psychologist and the metaphysician disappeared, and for an hour or two their place was taken by the mere dim consciousness of a stomach. Biran felt these humiliations profoundly and never ceased to bemoan them. His friend Ampere, on the contrary, preferred to treat his body with a slightly theatrical defiance. "You ask of my health," he writes in reply to an enquiry from Maine de Biran. "As if that were the question! Between us there can be no question but of what is eternal."

Noble words! And yet all knowledge is in the knower according to the mode of the knower. Can the man who has an unsound body acquire an undistorted knowledge of the eternal? Perhaps health is not without its importance even for philosophers.

Though themselves non-historical, physiological processes can, of course, be influenced by the kind of events that are recorded in short-range, non-philosophical history books. By way of obvious example, wars and revolutions ordinarily result in famine, and famine strikes at the very roots of organic life in countless individuals. On a smaller scale, the same effects may be produced by a slump or, for certain classes of a population, by a faulty distribution of purchasing power.

As an organic experience, sex is as private and unhistorical a matter as death or sleep, digestion or sickness. As a psychological experience it may be shared to some extent by two people—not indeed completely, for no experience can be shared completely, but as much as any experience of one person can be participated in by another. Je crois bien, says Mallarme.

Je crois bien que deux bouches n’ont bu,

Ni son amant, ni ma mere,

Jamais a la meme Chimere.¹

In the final analysis the poet is right. But fortunately analysis is rarely pushed to the limit. For the practical purposes of life, the Chimaeras which two lovers drink at one another's lips are sufficiently alike to be regarded as identical.

Social control of sex behavior is through laws, religious precepts, ethical ideals, and codes of manners. At every period of history great organizations and a host of individuals have dedicated themselves to the task of compelling or persuading people to conform, in sexual matters, to the locally accepted norm. To what extent has this drive for conformity been successful? The evidence on which an accurate answer to this question might be based is simply not available. But such evidence as we have tends rather emphatically to suggest that collective efforts to make the sexual life of individuals conform to a socially acceptable pattern are seldom successful. In a minority of cases they are evidently successful enough to produce more or less severe mental conflicts, and even neuroses. But the majority go their private way without paying more than lip-service to religion and respectability.

Thus, fifty years ago, the rules of sexual decorum were much more rigid than they are today, and yet, if the Kinsey Report may be believed, the actual behavior of men who were young at the beginning of our century was very similar to the behavior of those who were young in its middle forties. Among the writers of memoirs, diaries, and autobiographies few indeed have left us an honest and unvarnished account of their sexual behavior. But if we read such all but unique documents as Jean-Jacques Bouchard's account of a seventeenth-century adolescence and youth, or as Samuel Pepys's day-by-day record of how the average sensual man com-ports himself a generation later, we shall be forced to the conclusion that laws and precepts, ideals and conventions have a good deal less influence on private life than most educators would care to admit. Pepys grew to manhood under the Commonwealth; Bouchard, during the revival of French Catholicism after the close of the religious wars. Both were piously brought up; both had to listen to innumerable sermons and exhortations; both were assured that sexual irregularity would lead them infallibly to hell. And each behaved like a typical case from the pages of Ellis or Ebbing or Professor Kinsey.- The same enormous gulf between theory and actual behavior is revealed by the casuists of the Counter-Reformation and in the Middle Ages, by the denunciatory moralists and the secular tellers of tales. Modern authors sometimes write as though the literary conventions of chivalrous or Platonic love, which have appeared at various times in European history, were the reflections of an unusally refined behavior on the part of writers and the members of their public. Again, such evidence as we have points to quite different conclusions. The fact that he was the author of all those sonnets did not prevent Petrarch from acting, in another poet's words, "as doves and sparrows do." And the man who transformed Beatrice into a heavenly principle was not only a husband and father, but also, if we may believe his first biographer—and there seems to be absolutely no reason why we should question Boccaccio's good faith or the truthfulness of his informants—a frequenter of prostitutes. Culture's relation to private life is at once more superficial, more spotty, and more Pickwickian than most historians are ready to admit.

In the individual's intellectual, artistic, and religious activities history plays, as we might expect, a much more considerable part than in the strictly private life of physiological processes and personal emotions. But even here we find enclaves, as it were, and Indian Reservations of the purest nonhistoricity. The insights and inspirations of genius are gratuitous graces, which seem to be perfectly independent of the kind of events that are described in the works of philosophical or non-philosophical historians. Certain favored persons were as richly gifted a thousand or five thousand years ago as similarly favored persons are today. Talent exists within a particular cultural and social framework, but itself belongs to realms outside the pales of culture and society.

At any given moment the state of the gas sets certain limits to what the creative molecules can think and do. But within those limits the performance of the exceptionally gifted is as remarkable, aesthetically speaking, at one age as another. In this context I remember a conversation between the directors of two of the world's largest and best museums. They agreed that, from the resources at their disposal, they could put on an exhibition of Art in the Dark Ages which should be as fine (within the limits imposed by the social conditions of the time) and as aesthetically significant as an exhibition of the Art of any other period. Historians have tried to find social and cultural explanations for the fact that some epochs are very rich in men of talent, others abnormally poor. And, in effect, it may be that certain environments are favorable to the development of creative gifts, while others are unfavorable.

But meanwhile we must remember that every individual has his or her genes, that mating combines and recombines these genes in an indefinite number of ways, and that the chances against the kind of combination that results in a Shakespeare or a Newton are a good many millions to one. Moreover, in any game of hazard we observe that, though in the long run everything conforms to the laws of probability, in the short run there may be the most wildly improbable runs of good or bad luck. Periclean Athens, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England—these may be the equivalents, on the genetic plane, of those extraordinary freaks of chance which sometimes permit roulette players to break the bank. To those politically-minded people, who believe that man can be perfected from outside, and that environment can do everything, this is, of course, an intolerable conclusion. Hence Lysenko and the current Soviet attack upon reactionary, idealist Mendelo-Morganism.- The issue between Soviet geneticists and the geneticists of the West is similar in essence to that which divided the Pelagians- from the Augustinians. Like Helvetius- and the Behaviorists, Pelagius affirmed that we are born non pleni (without an inherited character) and that we are affected by the sin of Adam non propagine sed exemplo—in our modern jargon, through social heredity rather than physical, individual heredity.

Augustine and his followers retorted that man in his nature is totally depraved, that he can do nothing by his own efforts and that salvation is only through grace. According to Soviet theory, Western geneticists are pure Augustinians. In reality they occupy a position half-way between Augustine and Pelagius. Like Augustine, they affirm that we are born with "original sin," not to mention "original virtue"; but they hold, with Pelagius, that we are not wholly predestined, but can do quite a lot to help ourselves. For example, we can make it easier for gifted individuals to develop their creative talents; but we cannot, by modifying the environment, increase the number of such individuals.

Where religion is concerned, the experiences of individuals may be classified under two main heads —experiences related to home-made deities and all too human notions, feelings, and imaginings about the universe; and experiences related to the primordial fact of an immanent and transcendent Spirit. Experiences of the first class have their source in history; those of the second class are non-historical. In so far as they are non-historical and immediately given, the religious experiences of all times and places resemble one another and convey a knowledge of the divine nature. In so far as they are concerned with the all too human, the home-made, and the historically conditioned, the various religions of the world are dissimilar and tell us little about the primordial fact. The direct apprehension of the immanence of a transcendent Spirit is an experience of which we have records going far back in time, an experience which, it would seem, can be had by persons belonging to very primitive cultures. At what point in their development human beings became capable of this apprehension we do not know; but for practical purposes we are probably justified in saying that, at least for some persons, this apprehension is as much an immediate datum, as little conditioned by history, as the experience of a world of objects. Only the verbal descriptions of the mystical experience are historically conditioned; the experiences themselves are not. Compare, for example, the literary styles of William Law and Jacob Boehme, the first exquisitely pure, lucid, and elegant, the second barbarous, obscure, crabbed in the extreme. And yet Law chose Boehme as his spiritual master-chose him because, through the verbal disguises, he could recognize a spiritual experience essentially similar to his own. Or consider our philosopher and his English contemporary, William Wordsworth. Both were "Nature mystics," to whom were vouchsafed ecstatic insights into the divine ground of all being. Their immediate experiences were essentially similar. We may add, I think, that they were both essentially non-historical.

In Europe, it is true, the capacity to see in the more savage aspects of Nature not only terrifying power, but also beauty, love, and wisdom, is of fairly recent growth and may be regarded as being, in some measure, historically conditioned. In the Far East, on the contrary, this capacity is of very high antiquity. Moreover, Nature is not invariably savage, and at all times and in all places many persons have had no difficulty in perceiving that her more smiling aspects were manifestations of the divine. The ubiquitous cult of trees, the myths of Eden and Avalon, of Ava-iki, and the Garden of the Hesperides, are sufficient proof that "Nature mysticism" is primordial and permanent, as unconditionally "built-in" and non-historical as any other unchanging datum of our psycho-physical experience. Biran and Wordsworth were among those moderns who had not chosen or been compelled to close the doors of their perception. They actually saw—as all might see if they were not self-blinded or the victims of unfavorable circumstances—the divine mystery that manifests itself in Nature.

But while Wordsworth (in his youth) was a great poet, capable of creating, within the splendid tradition of English poetry, a new medium of expression as nearly adequate to ineffable experience as any expression can be, Biran at his most lyrical was merely an imitator, and an imitator merely of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both historically and non-historically, as inheritor of a stylistic tradition and as literary genius, he was far less well equipped than Wordsworth to tell of what he had actually perceived and understood. And yet there is no reason to suppose that his experiences at Grateloup and in the Pyrenees were intrinsically inferior to the experiences which Wordsworth had had in the Lake Country or at Tintern.

We see, then, that while every person’s life is lived within a given culture and a given period of history, by no means all the experiences in that life are historically conditioned. And those which are not historically conditioned—sleep, for example, all the processes of our organic life in health or sickness, all our unmediated apprehensions of God as Spirit and of God as manifest in nature and persons—are more fundamental, more important for us in our amphibious existence between time and eternity, than those which are so conditioned.

Gas laws are entirely different from the laws governing molecules. Individuals think, feel, and variably apprehend; societies do not. Men achieve their Final End in a timeless moment of conscious experience. Societies are incapable of conscious experience, and therefore can never, in the very nature of things, be "saved" or "delivered." Ever since the eighteenth century many philosophers have argued, and many non-philosophers have more or less passionately believed, that Mankind will somehow be redeemed by progressive History. In his book, Faith and History, Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr has rightly insisted that, in itself, history is not, and cannot be, a redemptive process. But he goes on airily to dismiss the age-old revelation that man's Final End is the unitive knowledge of God here and now, at any time and in any place, and proclaims that, though history is not redemptive in any ordinary sense of the word, it is yet supremely important for salvation in some Pickwickian sense—because of the General Resurrection and the Last Judgment. "These eschatological expectations in New Testament faith, however embarrassing when taken literally, are necessary," he insists, "for a Christian interpretation of history." So far as I am able to understand him, Dr. Niebuhr seems to imply that the meaning of life will be clarified only in the future, through a history culminating in "the end of history, in which historical existence will be transfigured."

This seems to imply that all persons living in the past, present, and premillennial future are in some sort mere means and instruments, and that their redemption depends, not upon a personal relationship, here and now, with the divine Spirit, but upon future events in which it is impossible for them to participate. Dr. Niebuhr rejects the classical and oriental conceptions of history on the ground that they reduce historical events to the "inferior realm of coming-to-be and passing away." They offer no hope for the fulfilment of the unique capacities of human personality. But "human personality" is an abstraction. In reality there are only individual personalities. Between personalities existing today and personalities existing in 3000 B.C. there is no continuity of experience. Fulfilments of persons living now are not fulfilments of persons living then; nor will fulfilments of persons living during the millennium be fulfilments of persons living in the twentieth century. Dr. Niebuhr obscures this obvious fact by speaking of societies as though they possessed the characteristics of persons. Thus "mankind will continue to 'see through a glass darkly.'" Again, "collective organisms," like individuals, have a "sense of the contingent and insecure character of social existence." But it is very doubtful whether a society is an organism; and it is certain that it can know nothing about the character of human existence. Individuals may make true statements about large groups; but large groups can say nothing about either individuals or themselves. Or consider the following: "Man in his individual life and in his total enterprise, moves from a limited to a more extensive expression of freedom over Nature." Here everything depends upon an ambiguity of language. By a simple trick of sentence construction "man in his individual life" is assimilated to "man in his total enterprise." But the first phrase stands for Smith and Jones, for all the Smiths and Joneses since the Ice Age, each considered as an experiencing person; the second stands for those very large groups with which actuaries, sociologists, and historians are accustomed to deal. Gas laws are not the same as the laws governing molecules. What is true of large numbers is not true of individuals. From the fact that a society has achieved some measure of control over its natural environment it does not follow that the individuals who at any given moment constitute that society enjoy an analogous freedom in regard to their environment—an environment consisting of nature, their neighbors, and their own thoughts, passions, and organic processes. In the history of societies novelty is constantly emerging; but within the framework of these novelties the problems with which individuals have to deal remain fundamentally the same. The fact that one can travel in a jet plane rather than on foot does not, of itself, make the solution of those problems any easier.

"I show you sorrow," said the Buddha, "and the ending of sorrow." Sorrow is the unregenerate individual's life in time, the life of craving and aversion, pleasure and pain; organic growth and decay. The ending of sorrow is the awareness of eternity—a knowledge that liberates the knower and transfigures the temporal world of his or her own experience. Every individual exists within the fields of a particular history, culture, and society. Sorrow exists within all fields and can be ended within all fields. Nevertheless it remains true that some fields put more obstacles in the way of individual development and individual enlightenment than do others. Our business, as politicians and economists, is to create and maintain the social field which offers the fewest possible impediments to the ending of sorrow. It is a fact of experience that if we are led into powerful and prolonged temptations, we generally succumb. Social, political, and economic reforms can accomplish only two things: improvement in the conditions of organic life, and the removal of certain temptations, to which individuals are all too apt to yield—with disastrous results for themselves and others. For example, a centralized and hierarchical organization in State or Church constitutes a standing temptation to abuse power by the few and to subservient irresponsibility and imbecility on the part of the many. These temptations may be reduced or even eliminated by reforms aiming at the decentralization of wealth and power and the creation of a federated system of self-governing co-operatives.

Getting rid of these and other temptations by means of social reforms will not, of course, guarantee that there shall be an ending of sorrow for all individuals within the reformed society. All we can say is that in a society which does not constantly tempt individuals to behave abominably, the obstacles to personal deliverance will probably be fewer than in a society whose structure is such that men and women are all the time encouraged to indulge their worst propensities.

Of all possible fields about the worst, so far as persons are concerned, is that within which ever greater numbers of our contemporaries are being forced to live—the field of militaristic and industrialized totalitarianism. Within this field persons are treated as means to non-personal ends. Their right to a private existence, unconditioned by history and society, is denied on principle; and whereas the older tyrannies had found it hard to make this denial universally effective, their modern counterparts, thanks to applied science and the improved techniques of inquisition and coercion, are able to translate their principles into practice on a scale and with a discriminatory precision unknown in the past.

"How small," Dr. Johnson could write two centuries ago,

"How small of all that human hearts endure

That part which kings or laws can cause or cure!"

In the eighteenth century it was still perfectly true that "public affairs vex no man"; that the news of a lost battle caused "no man to eat his dinner the worse"; that "when a butcher tells you that his heart bleeds for his country, he has, in fact, no uneasy feeling." And even in the bloody sixteenth century Montaigne "doubts if he can honestly enough confess with how very mean a sacrifice of his peace of mind and tranquillity he has lived more than half his life, whilst his country was in ruins." But the progress of technology is rapidly changing this relatively happy state of things. The modern dictator has not only the desire, but also the effective means to reduce the whole man to the mere citizen, to deprive individuals of all private life but the most rudimentarily physical, and to convert them at last into unquestioning instruments of a social organization whose ends and purposes are different from, and indeed incompatible with, the purposes and ends of personal existence.

THE PHILOSOPHER AS MORALIST, METAPHYSICIAN, AND CANDIDATE FOR SALVATION

From private life in its relation to history we now turn to private life in its relation to the person who lives it, in its relation to current ethical theories, and in its relation to other private lives. For Biran the basic question in ethics was always that of freedom and responsibility. "If I were capable of regular, coherent work, I should like to investigate this problem: To what extent is the soul active? To what extent can it modify outside impressions, increase or diminish their intensity by means of the attention it chooses to pay to them? To what extent is the soul capable of controlling this attention? Such an examination, it seems to me, should precede any good treatise on morals. Before seeking to direct our affections, we should first find out what in fact is the extent of our powers over them. Nowhere have I seen this matter discussed. Moralists always seem to imagine that man can give himself affections, change his tendencies, destroy his passions. According to them the soul is sovereign and can command the senses. But is this true and, if so, to what extent? And how can it come about? These are precisely the points that it would be necessary to establish."

In these lines, written at Grateloup during the Terror, Biran states a problem that was to occupy him during all the remaining years of his life. "You ought, therefore you can." Originally cited by Pelagius, the phrase had been repeated, from the height of his philosophical Sinai, by Immanuel Kant. It was a noble phrase, rousing, heart-warming. But did it correspond with the facts of experience? In the Journal Biran returns again and again to these questions. His answers are contradictory, because he himself is a living contradiction. At one moment he finds that he is a person who can do what he ought; at another, that he is quite a different person and cannot.

In general we may say that he is able to do the things he ought to do when those things are single acts which do not involve a prolonged struggle with his horribly capricious and changeable organism. For example, where money is concerned, Biran can almost always be as generous and selfsacrificing as he ought to be. He is charitable towards the unfortunate and, when the government is in financial difficulties, he voluntarily renounces his salary as Quaestor and accepts only his due as a deputy. Congenitally timid, he can yet, when the occasion requires, display an admirable courage. It took courage to draft the resolution presented to Napoleon by the Committee of Five; it took courage, after the Restoration, to sacrifice the esteem of the Ultras by swinging over to the moderate party. In both these instances our philosopher acquitted himself very well. His courage failed him, however, when it came time to coping with his formidable sister-in-law. I suspect that the principal reason for this failure of nerve—a failure which cost his daughters their happiness and perhaps even their lives—was the fact that, with Mme. Gerard, it was not a question of doing something heroic and then grimly taking the consequences; it was a question, rather, of coming again and again to the charge, of battling with the dragon day in, day out, for weeks and months. But, for Biran, to fight this kind of battle was a physical and psychological impossibility. By the bitter experience of many preliminary skirmishes, he knew that, long before it could be won, the exhausted dragon-killer would have only one desire—to take refuge in some hiding-place, where the screeching of the termagant could be no more heard and where he might nurse his lacerated sensibilities and try to restore his impaired digestion to some semblance of health. For a victim of his own autonomic nervous system the most difficult moral problems are always those which involve "the machine."

For example, when his wife dies, Biran knows that he ought to accept his loss with the resignation of a Stoic philosopher. "But what can philosophy do when the soul is utterly broken, when the mind, bent under the weight of grief, has lost all its energy and activity?" With his conscious mind he can think the consolations of philosophy, he can will them to take effect. His unconscious mind pays no attention to these thoughts and his body disregards the will's commands.

It is the same with old age. According to the philosophers, who have written whole treatises on the subject, there are any number of excellent reasons why one should live out one's declining years in a cheerful contentment. But, alas, those philosophers neglected to consider "the sentiment of existence inherent in this period of life." The nature of that sentiment is such that "there is no possible consolation." What ought to be done simply cannot be done; for there are occasions—and old age is one of them—when will and reason are entirely irrelevant to the individual’s actual situation. For Biran, this irrelevance of the will and reason made itself felt in another, constantly recurrent context. During the nine months of each year which he spent in Paris, Biran led the life not only of a parliamentarian and a philosopher, but also of a man about town. He dined out constantly and would go to as many as three receptions in a single evening. "There are two reasons," he says, "for going into society. Either to amuse oneself by participating in the fun, or to observe and be instructed. I do neither." Then why, why?

Year after year the question goes echoing through the Diary. He knows that philosophy is his vocation and that the life of a man about town makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, to do the work he ought to be doing, the only work that interests him. And yet, he records, "I dine out every day, indulging my deviations from my regimen; overloading my stomach and weakening my head in proportion. I have no command over myself and wear out my weak and sickly remnant of a life, without hope of myself. For the thousandth time he resolves to turn over a new leaf, to stop going into society, to retire from politics, to settle down at Grateloup and devote himself exclusively to philosophy. But the next day he begins all over again—eating what he knows he oughtn't to eat, suffering humiliation because he feels too ill to make intelligent conversation, yet rushing from one soiree to another in a strange state of alienation and notthereness, a state which he often compares to that of somnambulism. But though a mere sleepwalker, he retains enough self-consciousness to be intensely preoccupied with other people's opinion of him. He suffers from their indifference, craves the reassurance of their approbation and interest. He even imagines that their perfunctory compliments will make him feel like a man of forty. Or perhaps he will not. Perhaps—indeed, quite certainly—he will go on feeling like the prematurely senile man of fifty he really is. But meanwhile, he must hurry from the duke's to the minister's and from the minister's to the abbee's. And then at last he goes home.

There, alone at last and once more himself, he dips into one or other of his livres de c/ievet-Fenelon’s Letters, and the Imitation, the Pensees. "There is," Fenelon- tells him (and, alas, he knows it already, knows it only too well), "there is practically nothing that men do not prefer to God. A tiresome detail of business, an occupation entirely pernicious to health, the employment of time, in ways one does not dare to mention. Anything rather than God." He puts down the book, he opens his Pascal. "Man is so wretched that he would feel bored without any external cause of boredom, merely on account of his own natural condition; and withal he is so vain and feather-headed that, full as he is of a thousand reasons for being bored, the smallest trifle is enough to divert him. So that, seriously considered, man is more wretched, in that he can be amused by things so low and frivolous, than in feeling the affliction of his effective miseries, and his amusements are infinitely less reasonable than his weariness of spirit." Thanks to the style, these thoughts always have an air of incontrovertibility and self-evidence. And yet "a reasonable boredom" is surely a contradiction in terms. Reason is incommensurable with boredom and has nothing whatever to do with distractions. "If we are bored, it is because we have an animal organization that requires constant stimulation. But this stimulation cannot be supplied by reason, or controlled by the will. It must come from without"—from those dinners, those evening parties, from all that senseless rushing from place to place.

"The bustle of social life imparts to the machine a certain state of vital activity and well-being, and this state has all the reality of an immediate experience." Biran's organism demands such immediate experiences, and demands them even though the process of getting them involves discomfort and loss of health, humiliation at the moment and shame in retrospect. The spirit is willing, is passionately desirous to lead an exclusively inward life of self-analysis and speculation; but the mind-body is weak and cannot dispense with the stimulations that come to it from outside. This fact it was "which in my youth caused me to develop a decided taste for liqueurs, which at every period of my life has made me feel the need to wind up my machine as frequently as possible."

Our philosopher's organism is addicted to society as other men's organisms are addicted to opium or alcohol. In regard to such addictions will is powerless, reason has nothing to say."Du sollst, denn du kannst." It just isn't true. And all those homilies and exhortations, all those elevating meditations and consolations of philosophy—how pointless they are, how utterly beside the mark! There is a luminous and beautifully simple world of talk, in which everything makes sense, and there is another world, obscure and labyrinthine, where men and women are condemned, or privileged, to wrestle with an unintelligible destiny.

The rational soul is often incapable of making us good. Can it at least do something to make us happy? Looking into himself, our philosopher perceives that his happiness depends, not on his will, not on his reason, but on a certain state of his psycho-physical organism. "All my thoughts and actions are directed by this condition and vary with it. Now in the most perfect calm now in unbearable agitation, I follow all the vicissitudes of this incomprehensible state. What at one moment pains me, or fills me with joy, leaves me in other circumstances perfectly indifferent. In a word, I find I am always led by a principle of which I am not the master."

This principle is what Biran calls "the sentiment of existence." And the sentiment of existence varies according to the state of our organs and "our obscure perceptions of this state." Consequently "what are ordinarily called the buffets of fortune generally contribute much less to our anxiety and unhappiness than do the derangements, insensible because unaccompanied by pain, to which our frail machine is subject. But few are capable of studying themselves closely enough to realize this truth." And here is another illuminating generalization, derived from the facts of introspective experience. "Every individual is distinguished from all others of his species by the fundamental way in which he feels his life and in which, as a result, he feels (I will not say 'judges') his relations with his fellow beings, in so far as these promote or menace his own existence. Differences in this respect are perhaps greater than those which exist between the features of men's faces, or the conformations of their bodies. Hence it follows that it is impossible for any man completely to how what, as a living and sentient being, another man really is, and that it is equally impossible for him to manifest what he really is himself.... Only ideas resemble one another, and only ideas and the sentiments attached to them can be communicated. All that is within the sphere of our organic nature is unknowable."

We see, then, that like goodness, happiness is to a considerable extent outside the dominion of the rational soul. But the processes of thought, the world of ideas—surely these lie within its control? Once more Biran turns his eyes inwards and observes that, even when exempt from violent move ments of passion, he is nevertheless by no means the master of his intellect. "Thoughts by the thousand, notions which I would like to reject, which I have not sought, which I even regard as wretchedly silly, pass through my mind. My reason sees all this, groans over it, blames or approves what is presented to it; beyond this its functions do not go. If some good sentiment arises, do you think that it is to my reason that the credit is due? No; reason confines its activity to giving its assent to what has arisen, and to doing all in its power to maintain it."

All these observations were made during, or just after the Terror, while Biran was serving his philosophical apprenticeship, alone, among his books at Grateloup. Horrible things were happening in Paris; but the young man kept his attention firmly fixed on the events of his inner world. They were disconcerting events, and the world in which they occurred was much less tidy than his philosophical predecessors had led him to suppose; much harder to live well than he had thought reading Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. For the moment he decided to do nothing in particular about the ethical problem, but to concentrate all his best efforts on the collection of psychological facts and the construction of a sound theory of human nature. The Stoics might have made some rather large and unjustifiable assumptions; but their moral system would serve very well for the time being—and perhaps if one tried hard enough and long enough the will and the enlightened reason would actually accomplish all that the great slave and the good Emperor had said that they would accomplish. But meanwhile there was a more urgent task: to make sense of the queer chaotic phenomena of the inner world—not the logically specious, because over-simplified, sense made by Locke and Condillac and the physiologists; not the specifically Christian sense that had been made by Pascal and the theologians; but the sort of sense that a good scientific hypothesis makes of the facts it covers. In a word, what was needed was a schematic representation of inner reality, sufficiently simplified to be comprehensible, but doing justice, nevertheless, to the essentially complex nature of the human being.

Biran's philosophy has been called a "spiritual positivism"; and, in effect, it is based, in all ramifications, upon carefully observed psychological facts—facts which, unlike almost all his immediate predecessors, unlike many of his contemporaries and successors, our philosopher takes as he finds them and refuses to explain away in terms of something else. For him, there is no hierarchy of facts. One datum of immediate experience is just as good as another. A fact belonging to the inner world is not less of a fact than one belonging to the outer world. "From those who explain everything in terms of sensations (Condillac and the Ideologists) to those who would have us believe that ideas, along with language, come down to us from heaven (de Bonaldz), the moderns have concentrated upon the outer man." How mistakenly! For "the inner man cannot manifest himself thus externally; anything in the form of image, discourse or reasoning changes his nature and, far from expressing the forms peculiar to him, completely distorts them. This is the greatest obstacle in the way of philosophy; and it may be that this obstacle is, in the very nature of things, insurmountable."

In other words, facts are always facts, wherever they may occur; but some facts cannot adequately be expressed; every representation of them in words is to some extent a falsification. And yet "such is the force of verbal habits that there is perhaps no absurdity of which one cannot convince oneself by long and frequent repetition of the signs that express it." Too often we imagine that we are empiricists, living in the world of directly experienced facts, when in fact we are the inhabitants of a home-made verbal universe, having only a rather remote connection with given reality.

Biran became conscious very early in his career of this hiatus between language and the data of experience. We shall see that, as he grew older, as his attention shifted more and more from psychological to spiritual reality the existence of this great gulf, forever fixed between words and the facts they are supposed to represent, became a matter of increasing preoccupation. Meanwhile he was concerned to establish the irreducible and primordial factuality of the inner world. The inner world, he insists, is simply there; it is a datum, a given fact which cannot be explained away. The physiologists had tried to reduce man to the stature of a merely animal and organic being; but their schematic picture of human nature was manifestly inadequate to actual experience. Or consider Locke and Condillac. If, as they had maintained, the whole of mental life were reducible in the last analysis to sensations and reflections, then "logic would be the first philosophy and indeed the whole of philosophy." But quite obviously this is not the case. As soon as one begins to look deeply into the subject, as soon as one honestly examines the facts of the inner sense, one discovers that, behind the outward man who feels, imagines, discourses, draws conclusions from premises, acts in order to satisfy his appetites and passions, carries on the business of society, tries to gain power over his fellows or to win their good opinion—behind this outward man, who is the subject matter of logical, moral, and physiological philosophy, there is an "inner man who bears within him his own light, a light which is not brightened, but rather obscured, by the rays which come in from without.... In his essence the inner man is ineffable, and within him how many degrees of depth, how many points of view have not as yet been so much as glimpsed!"

Biran did not himself undertake physiological experiments; but he was the friend of doctors and the founder of a medical society; he admired Charles Bonnet and followed the work of Bichat with the closest attention; and finally he was on intimate terms with Cabanis—the man who first used that delightfully comic phrase to the effect that "the brain secretes thoughts as the liver secretes bile." In spite of this extensive knowledge of the physiological science and philosophy of his time, or perhaps precisely because of this knowledge, Biran was never for a moment tempted to explain the psychic in terms of the physical. That the psychic could be profoundly affected by the physical he knew by the bitterest kind of personal experience. Bonald had pompously defined the human being as "an intelligence served by organs," servie par des organes. It would, said Biran, be much nearer the truth to say asservie e des organes. Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs. But his servitude does not constitute an explanation of intelligence. "The authors of physical or physiological explanations of our sense-impressions and ideas have created for themselves the quite inconceivable illusion that by hypothetically decomposing the functions of the brain, they have analysed thought and uncovered its most secret operations." The physiologists of Biran's day made their hypothetical decomposition of brain functions in terms of "fluids" and "vibrating fibres." Equipped with the most delicate and powerful electronic apparatus, their modern successors have come a great deal closer to the molecular, atomic, and sub-atomic facts of cerebral activity. But the gulf between thought on the one hand and, on the other, neurones and electric charges is just as wide as that which in Biran's day divided thought from fluids and fibers.

We know that there are two orders of existence and that they are closely related. But how electrical events are converted into perceptions or abstract ideas, or how a volition becomes a nerve impulse leading to muscular activity, we do not know. Biran expressed the belief that nobody ever would know, that the hiatus between thought and matter was unbridgeable by any theory devisable by man, and must simply be accepted as a brute fact. He may have been right; on the other hand, it may some day turn out that he was wrong. In any case the ignorance prevailing at any given period of history may not legitimately be promoted to the rank of a philosophical principle.

Having established the factualness and the irreducibility of events in the inner world, Biran proceeded to their classification. Following up a hint which had been dropped by Destutt de Tracy, he distinguished between active and passive states of mind, between the awareness of a voluntary force and an organic inertia. He was delighted to find that this purely psychological classification seemed in some measure to correspond with the physiological facts revealed by Bichat in the course of his researches on the voluntary and autonomic nervous systems. "This physiological division," Biran wrote, "is consonant with that which I on my side had established between the phenomena considered from the ideological point of view."

The "I" is not an object to be classified with other objects, but an act which we know from within, never from without. "When I say that my T is a force, I am expressing the real subject as I apperceive it, or know it in itself, in its essence and quite independently of any logical predicate or accidental mode." We are directly aware of hyper-organic action which has become conscious of itself. In other words, the ego is essentially will and effort. For Descartes' cogito Biran substituted volo. "I will, therefore I am." Or, to put it more accurately and completely, "I think within myself the action of which I feel myself to be the cause; therefore I am, or I exist, in virtue of being a force or cause."

The "I" is the self-awareness of an activity pitted against a resistance, of a free and at least potentially intelligent providentia at odds with brute necessity, with the givenness of an organic/atum. The effort by which the hyper-organic ego acts upon its fatum is, in Biran's words, "the type of universal causality, the model of every nexus between the two worlds of substances and voices, the notions of which rest upon the fact of consciousness and whose reality is guaranteed by the individuality and lastingness of our own being." The notion of causality is not a matter of inference; but is based upon the facts of immediate experience.

If the identity of the ego is given and can be known, the identity of the substance of the soul can only be inferred and believed. "To have self-consciousness is to exist for oneself; but to be a thing or a substance in itself is not to exist for oneself, or to feel oneself existing; for everything leads us to take the notion of being or substance in a general, universal or objective sense, as opposed to the correct and very precise meaning which the inner sense causes us to attach to the words, I exist.' One cannot logically proceed from knowledge of personal existence to knowledge of the substance of being; for the two belong to different logical orders—individual and universal, relative and absolute, person and thing, subject and object." But the experienced emergence of the self-conscious "I," as a force acting upon a resistance, imposes upon us, unavoidably and by a kind of intellectual necessity, the belief in a "virtual force, waiting to come into action." Belief in a substantial soul is forced upon us by the self-evident fact that, before there can be action, there must be being. It is legitimate, in this context, to speak of "absolute existence." By this term Biran means "the existence which we admit as going on in the soul, the brain, the organs, before it becomes known to the thinking being, while the latter exists only as a substance which will one day know that it exists, but which does not yet know it."

What shall we call the something which is not yet the "I," but which, under certain conditions, will become the "I"? "The name is indifferent. Let it be soul, entelechy, centre, anything so long as it corresponds to a notion not only indeterminate but indeterminable by the very nature of the intellectual procedure which necessitates its existence." Our mind is under the necessity of going beyond the facts of immediate experience to the principle underlying them. "This intellectual necessity is the validation of the conclusions reached, the sufficient proof of the existence of the substance to which we are unavoidably led." The primordial fact of consciousness includes the awareness of a voluntary effort and the awareness of a resistance. "This fact necessarily has its principle in, first, the unconditional activity of a substance which we may call soul, and, second, in an absolute resistance or inertia, which we may call body." We believe in a substantial soul and a substantial body; but we do not immediately know them. For "belief in the absolute attaches itself equally to each of the two terms, when one thinks of them by abstraction; but real and positive knowledge can only attach itself to the two when united," embracing both in a single apprehension, "without separation or division."

In a word, we know ourselves as incarnate spirit, and we cannot help believing in the unconditional existence of Spirit and Matter. But so far as directed experience is concerned, these first two principles are merely abstractions, of which there can be no direct intuition. "The perpetual error of German metaphysicians is to confound abstraction with intuition.... One must make it very clear to oneself that, wherever existence does not enter in, there can be no intuition." Our existence is always the existence of a merged duality; and our intuitions are of this duality and not of either of the two principles taken by itself.

Biran speaks disapprovingly of those metaphysicians who have attempted to reduce the experienced duality of the mind-body to some kind of unity, either spiritual or material. A true philosophy must be based upon facts; and the primordial fact of our experience is consciousness of the "I"—in other words, consciousness of a hyper-organic activity acting upon a passive and resistant organism. "Of necessity knowledge arises through antithesis. For man, everything is antithesis. He himself is a primitive and ineffaceable antithesis, and he forms another antithesis as against the Universe. All beings reveal themselves as antithetical in their essence—even God, whom it is impossible to conceive as a solitary being."

"Even God ..." As a young man and during his early middle age, Biran had been, never indeed a dogmatic atheist, but profoundly an agnostic. He wished and hoped that there might be a God and was only waiting to find some compelling reason to believe that there was. "If," he wrote, "I ever find God and the true laws of the moral order, it will be by good fortune, and I shall be more credible than those who, setting out from a set of prejudices, tend merely to establish those prejudices by means of a theory." A profoundly honest man, our philosopher knew that, if one is to explore the unknown, one must not start by pretending that it is already known. If one does, that which one discovers will not be the unknown in its true objective independence, but merely a projection of one's own (or, worse, one's mother's, or one's nurse's, or one's teacher’s) home-made and all too human notions about the unknown. To have a notion about a thing is never the same as being acquainted with it. Reading even the best cookery book is not equivalent to eating even the worst dinner.

As the Zen Masters like paradoxically to put it, "Buddha never taught the saving truth." Why not? Because the truth that saves is that which every individual has to realize in and for himself. The idea that saving truth can be pumped into a man from outside, by authority, is (as Biran points out in a discussion of an early and still orthodox work by Lamennais) simply preposterous. The "I" is a hyper-organic force which is at liberty to judge what comes to it from external authority and may either accept it, or pretend to accept it, or reject it. Except in infancy, or in trance, or when exposed to reiterated suggestions, the "I" is active and free. (Hence, of course, the zeal displayed by ecclesiastics for catching their clients young, for exposing them to the mesmerizing influences of symbols and ceremonials, and for making them listen to those "vain repetitions," which Jesus condemned, probably because they are so horribly effective.)

Biran was a great admirer of Pascal; but he was too earnest a seeker after the Unknown God to take Pascal's advice and force himself to make those ceremonial gestures which are said to predispose the soul to faith. That sort of thing would be cheating, and Biran wanted to play the game fairly. The object of the search was the unknown. To induce in oneself, by physical means, an unfounded conviction that one already knew the unknown was most certainly not a reasonable or honest way to conduct the search.

It is significant that, even during the last six years of his life, when his primary concern was with the problems of religion, Biran hardly ever spoke of faith. So far as he was concerned, faith was something irrelevant and beside the point. The point was salvation, and salvation consists in the direct knowledge or experience of God. To believe in a thing is radically different from knowing it. Moreover, a belief which is based upon authority, on somebody else's account of what may, or may not, have been a direct experience, is very often not an aid to redemptive knowledge, but actually an impediment. Almost everyone has had occasion to discover that a preconceived idea about some unmet persbn, or some hitherto unvisited place, may interfere with the normal process of getting to know the place or person when the opportunity of acquaintance finally presents itself. Mutatis mutandis, it is the same with God. If we start out with preconceived notions about God, we are likely to find that these home-made and second-hand ideas will make it very hard for us to have a direct and un-mediated knowledge of the divine nature.

In religion, as in science, experience is conditioned only by itself. If we think we know the unknown for which we are looking, the chances are that we shall discover only a projection of the ideas with which we set out upon our search. For Biran the great men of the age of Louis XIV seemed enviable because they held a set of beliefs which they did not question. He saw very clearly that these beliefs were an incomparable source of strength. But he never imagined that they were a source of true knowledge; nor did it ever occur to him that he himself should cultivate their beliefs. It was not strength that he desired, but a knowledge of the hitherto unknown God, and such knowledge cannot come except to those who are pure not only in heart, but also in the intellect. It is not to the knowing, but to the unknowing, mind that the Unknown presents itself as it really is.

This fact is clearly recognized by the Christian mystics, who find themselves in the embarrassing position of having to forget, every time they make a near approach to the primordial fact, most of the articles of their faith. These home-made and second-hand notions are found not to correspond with immediate experience. If these notions are retained, there will be no experience and the believer will suffer a great and perhaps irreparable loss. If the experience is preferred and the notions are rejected, even momentarily, then it must become clear to the believer, if he uses his reason, that his beliefs are not quite so important as he had been led to suppose. They may fortify and console, they may permit him to construct coherent pictures of the universe (credo ut intelligam); but they are not means to that knowledge of God, which is salvation.

Our philosopher was an agnostic who wanted to become a gnostic. So far as knowledge was concerned, faith seemed useless. Could logical reasoning be of any help? Biran examined the various proofs of God's existence and found that they proved the existence of nothing except the words of which they consisted. Nor was he convinced by the moral argument: God exists, because virtue exists; and virtue can have no other source or sanction than an all-good God. "But in all sincerity," Biran confides to his Diary during the Terror, "I can affirm that, when I do good, I never in fact think about God." If our philosopher behaved as well as he did, it was only because he saw that vice is ugly and destructive, and that virtue is intrinsically beautiful and will make us happy. In a word, to live well is merely reasonable. But delete the qualifying adverb, and what then? Simply to live, to have existence-what has reason to say about that? "The man who lives, who thinks and who does not lean on God for his support, can only shudder, amazed and appalled, at feeling himself exist. If God is not, why are we? Why is there anything?"

Like Pascal, Biran lived in the presence of an abyss. What made him dizzy was not the silence of the inter-stellar void (to which he never paid any attention), but the buzzing and pullulating fullness of consciousness. Strange to the point of inconceivability, and yet a brute fact of immediate experience. In order to become intelligible or even tolerable, this gulf of multitudinous noise seemed to require the existence of an infinite Silence. But did that Silence exist? And, if so, how was it to be discovered? In the hope of an answer, Biran turned to the records of traditional religion. "The religious and moral beliefs which reason does not make, but which are reason's basis and necessary starting-point, now appear to me as my only refuge, and it is precisely there where in the past I could see, with the philosophes, only dreams and illusions that today I find true knowledge."

Written in 1815, this passage seems to assert that our philosopher had already found what he was looking for. Over-optimistically, he often thought that he had reached his destination; but a little later it would always turn out that he had been wrong. There were always new reasons for reconsidering conclusions, for questioning apparent certainties, for yet once more suspending judgment. He may have ceased to believe, with the philosophes, that religious and moral beliefs were illusions; but he could not yet feel certain that they were substantially true.

In the writings of his maturity, Biran applied to the problem of God's existence the same arguments as he had applied to the problem of the existence of substance. We are not immediately aware of the substance of our soul or our body, but the nature of our mind is such that we are under an intellectual necessity to believe in them. It is the same with God. Our mind is under the necessity of proceeding from immediate knowledge of an "I," in relation to a passive not-I, to belief in a substantial soul, and from this belief to belief in an unconditioned Being underlying and giving support to the substantial soul. Beliefs, as Biran defines the word, are personal and individual, but for that very reason universal; for the "I" is the same in all men to the extent that all men are under the same intellectual necessities. "Deprive notions of their personal character, and you have nothing left but abstractions, mere artificial collections, or the symbols of such collections. Instead of real beings expressed by their real names, you will have the great Collective Whole, or the one Supreme Cause of all that is." Moreover, belief in God is an intellectual necessity only to the man who looks inwards. "The elements of all knowledge, including the most important of all, the notions of cause, belong to the inner world and have no analogy with the elements of the outer world, sensations and images. To derive the idea of God from a contemplation of the order of external phenomena is to draw water from the wrong well. In this way one reaches, not the living God, but the God of Spinoza. The personality of God can be understood only as the type of the personality of the 'I'- and this can be known only by immediate inner apperception.”

God may, and indeed must, be believed in. Can He also be known? Biran's answer, in these middle years of his career, was that God is not an immediate fact of the inner sense. Indeed, He cannot be; for "the fact of personal causality is the first datum of all real knowledge and admits no idea of a cause above it.” Our dependence upon God is not a datum; it is an inference from a necessary belief. The "I" cannot know God directly; nevertheless, belief is often supplemented by a kind of indirect knowledge, through feeling. "Sentiment is the mediator between human thought and the infinite.”

From this brief summary of a few of the principal features of the Biranian system, as it was elaborated in the years between 1794 and 1818, we must return again to the man and his actual experiences. As he grew older—and he aged prematurely—Maine de Biran found himself ever more helplessly the victim of his machine. In his various treatises he had clearly demonstrated the inadequacy of a philosophy of human nature, based upon the notion that the mind is wholly passive and the mere creation of its sensations.

But the knowledge that he was theoretically right could not console him for the immediate experience of being physically and morally wrong. He felt that he was a failure. He was tormented by the thought that he had betrayed his vocation, that he had been sent into the world to do something, but had done nothing. To future historians of philosophy he would be known as the man who, in the teeth of Condillac and the Ideologists, had re-habilitated the hyper-organic "I"; to himself, he was the man whose "I" was forever being defeated by his organism, "fassists a ma mort avec les forces entieres de ma vie."-

Even as a young man, in the full flower of such strength as he had ever possessed, Biran had his doubts about the ethics of Stoicism. But he had chosen to put these doubts aside and, provisionally at least, to accept Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus as his guides. This acceptance was more than merely passive. On more than one occasion Biran went out of his way to uphold the Stoic doctrine of the sufficiency of will and reason against the Christian teaching that will must be supplemented by grace and reasoning by inspiration.

But our philosopher was an empiricist who (unlike some of his fellows) was always ready, when a new fact presented itself, to modify his theories in such a way that they would "save the appearances.” For the ageing Biran, the fact of "being led by a principle of which he was not the master" was by no means new. It was a fact, of which he had taken note in 1794, but from which he had so far refrained from drawing any conclusions. By the second Restoration it had recurred so frequently and, in spite of all his efforts to be a Stoic, so insistently, so overwhelmingly, that it was no longer possible to pretend that it could be eliminated or explained away. It had now to be admitted that, all too frequently, organic inertia was stronger than hyper-organic force. And, not content with mere passive resistance, the body and the unconscious mind would often counterattack, routing the forces of will and reason and hunting them ignominiously from the field. On these occasions our philosopher would be as a man possessed, powerless to do anything but look on, while the usurping demon who bore his name and wore his elegantly old-fashioned clothes, deliberately compromised his highest interests and forced him to play the fool.

Biran admitted the existence of the unconscious mind, but attributed all its malice, its madness, and its imbecilities to its "obscure perceptions" of untoward events taking place within the body. It never seems to have occurred to him that, in some cases at least, the perversity of his organic fatum might be the effect of strictly psychological causes; that his present miseries might be due in part to his reactions to forgotten, or deliberately ignored, events in the past; and that the bodily sickness which so adversely affected his mind might itself have been aggravated by a mental disturbance of which the "I" was now completely unaware.

In this context, a special significance attaches to the rather odd and surprising fact that Biran, in his Journal, almost never speaks about his childhood or his parents. He mentions his father and mother only once, and then only to remark that he has inherited from them certain traits of physique and temperament, certain idiosyncrasies of behavior, which he wishes he didn't have. The single reference to his childhood goes back no further than his fourteenth or fifteenth year—a time when he used to be "recollected, tender, wholly occupied with the inward impressions which were then dominant," but have since given place to the adult's "frivolity and lack of feeling." In a psychologist who was the father of three children, who had studied Pestalozzi, founded schools and was the president of a semi-official committee on Elementary Education, this all but total indifference to his own childhood and the influences which had formed his character is perplexing in the extreme. Biran himself offers no hint of explanation, nor do his biographers, who tell us, presumably because they have been able to discover, absolutely nothing of what happened to our philosopher as a child and, later, a schoolboy. We may guess, I think, that Biran’s early years were uneventful, that he was not particularly fond of either of his parents and, except to the sister whose death is the subject of one of his earlier essays, was little attached to the other members of his family. If he neglected to study his own early history, it was probably because his memories of it were neither rapturous nor excruciating, and so did not compel his attention. Moreover, throughout his adult life, he was always so busy on the introspective analysis of present events that he could give no serious thought to what had happened to him in the past.

Biran was an empiricist, but an empiricist within a limited field. The facts upon which his system is based are exclusively the facts of adult experience. He analyzes this psychic life as he finds it, by introspection, here and now; and he takes no account of the fact that what he is here and now may be, to a considerable extent, the result of what he was, what he did, what he thought, willed, and felt during a much earlier and more primitive period of his personal history. Biran's is a static psychology based upon the minute analysis of a number of cross-sections of adult experience. The notion that personality is something that cannot be completely known except as a process in time does not seem to have occurred to him. Neither did it occur to his contemporaries. Dynamic and biographical psychology is a comparatively recent invention. Culture is, among other things, a negative force—a something which prevents persons, living in certain places and at certain times, from being able to think certain thoughts or adopt certain styles of expression. The culture of Biran’s time and place was such that psychologists found it very hard to think of the human being historically, as a development in time. And the culture of our own age is such that it is very hard for psychologists, who have no difficulty in thinking historically, to see the developing personality-in-time against the background of eternity.

Biran, then, was largely ignorant of the psychological, as opposed to the physical, determinants of his recalcitrant fatum. But of that recalcitrance he was acutely aware. Prolonged and most unhappy experience convinced him at last that the Stoics were wrong, that will and reason were not sufficient and that the individual could not, unaided, live as he ought to live, much less be "saved," or "illumined," or "made-perfect." His "I" knew that it needed the help of some benevolent not-I more powerful than itself. And such help was actually forthcoming. The insufficiency of the "I" was a matter of immediate experience; but so also was grace, so was inspiration. "Communication of the Spirit with our spirit is a true psychological fact and not a mere matter of faith."

Again, "men are fortified by inspiration, or the belief in inspiration. A man who does not put his trust in some higher power and who does not open himself up to inspiration, is doomed to be a mere cipher in the eyes of others as well as in his own."

And here is what he writes on a spring day in 1816. The weather has suddenly changed for the better. "I feel another man. ... In the air one breathes at this season of the year there is something spiritual, which seems to draw the soul towards another region, and to give it a strength sufficient to overcome all organic resistances." Gone are the obstacles placed by a malign fatum in the way of moral virtue and intellectual lucidity. "It is not my ideas that grow clearer—a thing which ordinarily happens when I fix my attention and apply my active faculties; it is my inner light that becomes brighter and more striking, so that the heart and mind are suddenly illumined by it. I have often detected in myself these sudden and spontaneous illuminations, when the truth emerges from behind a cloud; it seems that our material organization, which was the obstacle in the way of inward intuition, ceases to be resistant and that the spirit has nothing to do but receive the light which is appropriate to it."

These experiences make him wonder if the will has any real action upon our ideas or inward perceptions. He is inclined to think that the most it can accomplish is to "repress the influence of the organism and in this way to remove the hindrances that block our intuitions." In another entry, Biran tentatively answers his own question. "To judge by what I experience ... it seems to me that there is within me a superior sense, and as it were a face of my soul which at certain moments turns itself towards an order of things or ideas superior to all that pertains to common life, all that binds us to the interests of this world. I then have the inward feeling, the true suggestion of certain truths having reference to an invisible Order, a mode of existence better and wholly other than that which is ordinarily ours."

The same theme is more fully developed in the following remarkable passage. "If I consult my own experience I have in all honesty to confess that all my good impulses and thoughts have always depended upon certain organic conditions as foreign to my personal activity as digestion, nutrition, growth, illnesses and all the changes in my feeling of existence, which in their turn depend on the seasons of the year, the temperature and all the rest. ... There is a force independent of the will which modifies us in spite of ourselves, and upon which depends our happiness or unhappiness. ... Is this force blind and devoid of purpose? In that case it is the fatum of the body, the animal instinct, the principle of life recognized by the physiologists as being subject to the laws of medicine and hygiene. Is it intelligent and sovereign throughout nature? In that case it is God, whose effective action follows the laws of grace. On either hand we find impenetrable mysteries and insoluble questions—for the so-called solutions are wholly in the field of logic. Whether God acts directly upon our souls or whether He acts upon the organization and the affections of the vital principle so as to produce upon the soul the sentiments and ideas corresponding to changes in the body, the fact remains that in all cases it is the whole man who thinks, wills, acts, feels his existence, and not the soul in isolation. ... Certain bodily states produce good dispositions of the mind. Sometimes these dispositions have led me towards God; they were not for the body, though they came from the body. We depend on our physical organization for the higher light which illumines our minds and permits us to enjoy the truth, just as we depend on the sound conformation of our eyes to see the light of the sun."

To sum up, the hyper-organic "I" is aware not only of a resistance within the organic not-I, but also of an assistance. Moreover, the not-I is not exclusively organic; there is also an indwelling light which is seen to be as much beyond the merely hyper-organic as the hyper-organic is beyond the merely organic. These facts had been forcing themselves upon Biran's attention for half a lifetime. But it was not until after 1818 that he finally made an attempt to bring his spiritual life and his metaphysical theories into harmony with the data of his immediate experience.

But before we examine what Biran actually did and thought during the last years of his life, it seems worthwhile to consider certain things that he might have done, but actually did not do, certain thoughts which he did not think, but which, if he had, would have found a place ready and waiting for them in his system. I will not apologize for the digression; for, as I have said before, what a philosopher leaves unthought, along with the reasons for this omission, may be no less illuminating than his actual thinking.

Let us begin with a few reflections on Maine de biran's attitude towards the arts. From his biographers and from his Diary we learn, or guess, that painting and sculpture left our philosopher completely indifferent.

Once, under the Empire, he went with a party of friends to visit David’s studio. That was as near as he ever came to the plastic arts. In literature he was more at home. He was familiar with the best classical authors and, as a young man, he had written bad verses and been a worshipper of Rousseau. But the art he loved most was music. He was a fair performer on violin, harp, and keyboard instruments, and in the years spent in Paris before the Revolution, he played constantly and with delight. Indeed, his delight was so intense that he felt it necessary, when he embarked upon his philosophical career, to give up the practice of music almost completely. Music, he found, acted too strongly upon his sensibilities. To Saul, the sound of the harp brought peace; to Biran it brought an emotional and nervous agitation not at all conducive to philosophic reflection.

In this context it is interesting to read what Biran has to say (in a paper on Obscure Perceptions read before the Medical Society of Bergerac) on the effects of musical timbre. Quite independently of the words sung or the music played, the timbre of certain voices and instruments has the power to "rouse or calm the various passions, sometimes to heal and at other times to produce certain nervous disorders. I myself have witnessed the extraordinary effects produced by the sweet and melancholy tones of the Harmonica." (This curious instrument—generally known in England as "the Musical Glasses"—was perfected by Benjamin Franklin, enjoyed a fleeting but prodigious popularity during the later years of the eighteenth century and then, almost overnight, vanished so completely that, when a modern virtuoso wishes to play the ravishing harmonica music composed by Mozart, he must be content, for the lack of Musical Glasses, with a mere Glockenspiel.) "I have seen persons," Biran goes on, "too sensitive to be able to resist the effect, persons who, at the first impressions of those sounds, shuddered in every part of their body, then burst into tears and finally fell into a swoon."

That Biran himself ever actually swooned, seems unlikely; but we can feel pretty sure that he shuddered and perhaps occasionally wept. For he belonged to that not inconsiderable class of persons who love music, not wisely, but too well—love it sensually and viscerally, with their nerves, the solar plexus, their palpitating heart and yearning bowels. Because of their excessive sensibility, such persons cannot see the wood for the trees—cannot hear the music for the noise. They are so completely intoxicated by their immediate sensations that it is impossible for them to pay attention to the artistic whole, of which the intoxicating sounds are the constituents. The combination of, say, clarinet with strings, of harpsichord with viola da gamba, is intrinsically delicious. Whether the music produced by the happy concord of these instruments is good or bad is a question which, for these voluptuaries of sound, hardly arises. From the references to music scattered throughout his Journal, it is evident that our philosopher never asked himself this question. Music, for him, is simply a pleasure—self-forbidden just because it is a pleasure and distracts him from philosophical labors.

In 1815 he comes away from the Opera, feeling sadly that he is too old for music, that he has lost his taste for any kind of pleasure. His relish for sound is purely physiological; it belongs to the organic not-I and is so imperious, so mind-eclipsing, that it prevents him from understanding that works such as Don Giovanni or Orfeo give not only pleasure, but a great deal more beside. Biran's curious inability to hear anything in music but the delightful noise is betrayed by the fact that, though he frequently makes mention in his Diary of concerts and operas, he only once records the name of a composer. Thus at one soiree he hears "a duet for harp and horn"; at another, where "the music and the company are both first-rate," M. Garat-Faby "sings admirably"; at a third, given by the Minister of Police, there is "a fine concert." But a concert of what? And what did Garat-Faby sing? And who wrote the duet for harp and horn? We are left completely in the dark. On only one occasion is the music named and attributed to an author. In December 1820, he goes to hear Rossini's The Barber of Seville. At the theater he finds himself in a box next to that of Pozzo di Borgo, the Corsican who had become a Russian and was now the Tsar's ambassador to France. Biran is so "transported by the fine music" that he "ventures to talk with the ambassador in a more open and animated way than he had done at other times about the change of ministry and the position of the new ministers in relation to the Chamber."

In a word, the fine music excited him to the point where he loses his shyness and can open his heart to a foreign diplomat about domestic politics. Once again we see that, for our philosopher, art is merely a stimulant, a something that "winds up the machine." It is experienced as a fact that primarily concerns thefatum, not the hyper-organic "I," still less the divine not-I, which transcends the ego and is its ground.

For George Herbert—a man who physically and temperamentally was very close to our philosopher— music was a permissible pleasure, inasmuch as it seemed to give the soul a foretaste of the joys of heaven. In other words, the aesthetic experience is in some sort an analogue of the mystical experience. By coming to know perfection in a work of art, we gain a kind of knowledge of the ultimate nature of things. Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil. By itself, art can never be completely redemptive. It can only point in the direction from which redemption comes; it can only indicate at one remove the nature of the primordial and ineffable Fact. Don Giovanni is about a man who, in Spain alone, seduced 1,003 women, and it tells the story of this man consummately well. Yet the total effect of the opera is to "give us a foretaste of heaven."

That Biran had at least some theoretical notion of the significance of art may be inferred from an entry in the Journal, in which he professes himself to be thoroughly persuaded that "without virtue there is no true genius. And if one sometimes meets with lofty minds accompanied by vile soul, the reason is that such men lose their baseness in the instant of starting to write, and that, for a few moments, genius elevates the soul. The vicious man is not the same as the man who writes; in the act of writing he has forgotten his true nature."

This passage implies a belief in the reality of artistic inspiration and a conviction that, as well as giving pleasure, art effects a temporary transfiguration and illumination of the soul. But this adumbration of a theory of art was based on no immediate experience, and for this reason, presumably, was never fully developed. The fact seems all the more astonishing when we reflect, first, that Biran was an existentialist, who insisted that man must always be considered as he really is, an incarnate spirit or mind-body, and, second, that art is manifestly, among many other things, a kind of "spiritual exercise," by means of which the incarnate spirit can advance towards redemption. His failure to give art its proper due must be attributed, I think, to physical causes altogether beyond his control. He was a chronically sick man, who had to suffer endlessly from the vagaries of "the machine." In the inseparable "duumvirate," as he liked to call his mind-body, the second constituent was a "body of this death"; and for this reason he was constantly tempted to pass from existentialism to Platonism, from an acceptance of life as it really is to a longing for a life completely "spiritualized" by the elimination of Brother Ass.

This Platonizing propensity reveals itself in what our philosopher says about beauty. "Strange that all which is beautiful, grand, perfect, everything truly harmonious and unified, exists only in man's mind, has no archetype in external objects and indeed cannot be realized apart from man! In Nature there is no model of perfect beauty and no perfectly regular figure." In a philosopher who had insisted that we must always think of man in his wholeness, as he really exists, this association of perfection with the abstract seems strangely inconsistent. Pure geometry and the beau ideal are symptoms of the weakness of minds which cannot grasp life as it is, in the concreteness of individual existence, and which therefore arbitrarily abstract from reality only those elements which are amenable to logical treatment.

Biran, unfortunately, had never read Meister Eckhart. If he had, he would have known that "my inner man relishes things, not as creatures, but as the gift of God; but to my innermost man, they savour, not of God's gift, but of ever and aye." Interpreted in aesthetic terms, this means that, whereas the spiritualizing Platonist finds perfect beauty only in the Ideas which are supposed to fill the mind of a mathematical God, the mystical existentialist finds it in concrete things; for he perceives the divine in every creature and the eternal in every moment of time. In this and other instances, Biran's inconsistencies were imposed upon him by his yearning to be rid of the burden of an ailing body. "'Few,' writes the author of the Imitation, 'become better through illness.' I am habitually ill; in consequence I feel myself profoundly incapable, and am far from becoming better."

That Biran could have thought so little about art, and with such a lack of his ordinary subtlety and penetration, is strange but, in view of his excessive sensibility and his chronic ill-health, comprehensible. Much less easy to explain his neglect of a subject which he had ample opportunities of investigating at first hand, and from the study of which he might have learned many things of the utmost importance to a metaphysician of the inner life. I refer to what, in our philosopher's day, was called "animal magnetism."

Like every intelligent Frenchman of his time, Biran was well acquainted with the facts and fictions of animal magnetism, with the excessive claims of its proponents and the wholesale denials of the medically orthodox. He had studied the record and he agreed with his eminently judicious friend, Cuvier, that some at least of the effects of mesmerism were real. He knew that many people had been cured by animal magnetism of their diseases. He considered it probable that there was "in all living organisms a more or less marked power to act at a distance and exercise an influence outside themselves within a certain sphere of activity, analogous to the atmosphere that surrounds the planets."

He accepted extra-sensory perception as a reality and considered that "those who deny such communication between persons, or between a soul and a higher spiritual power, have a very narrow and materialistic view of the faculties of the soul." The fact that minds could communicate with one another directly, without making use of their physical organs, seemed to make the facts of grace and inspiration a little more comprehensible. "Prayer," he wrote near the end of his life, "is turning the eyes towards the light; effort creates the conditions which make it possible for light to penetrate the soul. In the words of a greatly gifted woman of my acquaintance, 'Prayer is the magnetism of the soul."'

To anyone who accepted the reality of the principal phenomena of the mesmeric trance-healing, clairvoyance, and thought transference—it must have been very evident that, for a psychologist and metaphysician of the inner life, the whole subject of animal magnetism was one of capital importance. And yet, after writing a youthful memoir on Somnambulism, our philosopher chose to do almost nothing about it. And this in spite of the fact that, after 1818, he was on terms of personal friendship with two eminent magnetists: Sebastien de Planta, a Voltairean converted by the study of mesmerism to a kind of theosophical Catholicism; and J. P. F. Deleuze, librarian of the Museum of Natural History, translator of Erasmus Darwin, author of the standard history of animal magnetism and himself a veteran magnetic healer and investigator, with an unblemished reputation for moral integrity and scientific accuracy. So far as we know, Biran never made use of the opportunities which these friendships placed within his reach. He never made magnetic experiments on others, and he never submitted to any on his own person. And yet, if he had done the first, he would very quickly have discovered that the problem which had baffled him all his life was in certain circumstances actually soluble—that there were means whereby organic resistance could sometimes be overcome, whereby the sub-personal not-I could be made to obey the commands, first of an alien "I" and then, as hetero-suggestion gave power to autosuggestion, of its own hyper-organic self.

And if he had permitted the second, if he had allowed himself to be mesmerized by an experienced operator such as Deleuze, it is more than possible that this victim of psycho-somatic illness might have been almost miraculously cured of many of his most distressing symptoms. We know at any rate that, some few years later, Harriet Martineau, who suffered from a more excruciating form of our philosopher's chronic indigestion, was, after five years of painful and, medically speaking, incurable sickness, completely restored to health by four months of magnetic treatment.

What were the reasons for Biran's neglect of a subject possessing, for a spiritual positivist, such profound significance? Could it be that he was put off by the name "animal magnetism," and the physical or physiological theories with which Mesmer had tried, and most of his successors, were still trying, to explain the phenomena of trance, healing, and extra-sensory perception? In Biran's day the wilder spirits still spoke of a cosmic force, akin to magnetism or electricity, which the operator could somehow concentrate and direct. The more cautious, like Cuvier, contented themselves with a mere transfer of nervous energy across the gap that separated the operator's fingers from this patient's head or body. In either case something physical, something fluidic or vibratory, was involved.

Because of this something physical behind and beneath the psychological phenomena, certain enthusiastic magnetists, such as Elliotson, H. G. Atkinson, and Harriet Martineau,- felt themselves justified in professing a thorough-going materialism that culminated in philosophic atheism. (In later life, Dr. Elliotson graduated from mesmerism to table-turning, and from spiritualism to Christianity. Miss Martineau stuck to her magnetic guns to the bitter end.)

That our philosopher should have wished to steer clear of this revived physiologism is very comprehensible. But meanwhile there was, quite obviously, nothing to prevent him from studying the psychological phenomena without reference to the theory which sought to explain them in terms of cosmic forces or nervous fluids. Alexandre Bertrand had already done precisely this, and even Deleuze, who believed in the magnetic fluid, had the good sense to be consistent and to speak, whenever it suited him, a purely psychological language. Biran must have known very well that the investigator of animal magnetism was committed neither to animals nor to magnets, but could, if he chose, do his work without reference to physics or physiology and within a frame of reference exclusively psychological.

Clearly, then, our philosopher's failure to seize the golden opportunities provided by Deleuze¹ and Planta was due to something more than a distaste for the name and a disbelief in the current theory of this new branch of psychological science. We shall not, I think, go far wrong if we attribute it to a combination of causes, constitutional, temperamental, and intellectual. To begin with, he was, at the epoch of his intimacy with Deleuze and Planta, a prematurely old man, too sick and too tired to undertake the new and arduous business of psychological experimentation. But Deleuze was a veteran therapist, and being cured by him would have involved no effort. Alas, Biran was too touchily oversensitive to submit to being made the corpus vile of someone else's experiments, too secretively the introvert, too inhibitedly cerebrotonic, to be willing to take the risk of "giving himself away." For a man of his temperament, being experimented on, even for his own good, was practically out of the question. And for a psychologist, who had been driven by this same temperament to reject behaviorism and adopt a purely introspective approach to his subject, so was experimentation on others. Even as a young and relatively healthy man, Biran had never chosen to look for light outside the confines of his own mind.

And finally, there was a cogent intellectual reason for our philosopher's neglect of animal magnetism. He was a meta physician of the inner life; but the introspection upon which he relied for the data of his philosophic system could reveal only a fragment of that life. Outside the little circle of light was a vast dark universe in which organic resistances and repressed memories played the part of monsters, but where (as he was now coming to realize) there were also good angels in the form of graces and inspirations having their origins at every level from the purely physiological to the spiritual and perhaps the divine. In magnetic trance considerable areas of this hidden world beyond the ken of introspection were plainly revealed, and others could be guessed at. But Biran had spent half a lifetime refuting Condillac's sensationism. Again and again, as he pronounced the word, moi, his pointing fingers had touched his own breast, symbolically attesting the reality of the hyper-organic "I." But if animal magnetism had any lesson to teach, it was that the hyper-organic "I" is less important in the total human economy than it likes to think. Through direct experience, interpreted in terms of Christian mysticism, Biran had come, in these last years of his life, to an essentially similar conclusion, and in the Nouveaux Essais d'Anthropologic he meant to bring his philosophy into harmony with these conclusions, by incorporating it with a few necessary modifications, into the Platonic-Christian framework of the three lives, animal, human, and spiritual.

A study of mesmerism might have enlightened him as to the way in which the three lives are connected and act upon one another. But since time was short—so short, indeed, that the New Essays were never more than adumbrated—Biran preferred to concentrate all his energies on thinking out the problem within the ancient and hallowed frame of reference provided by classical philosophy and Christian spirituality. If the "I" had to surrender some of its proud claims, let it be to Plato and Fenelon rather than to Mesmer, Puysegur, and Deleuze. And let the surrender be purely voluntary and selfsuggested, not imposed from without by a study of other "I's."

Biran's almost pathological reluctance to look into any mind but his own caused him to miss another golden opportunity for increasing his knowledge of inspiration and the gratuitous graces. For years his closest friend had been the elder Ampere, and Ampere was that almost unique phenomenon, a man of all-round genius who had started life as a "calculating boy." When a child, who has not yet learned the rules of arithmetic, solves in his head and almost instantaneously complicated problems which would cost an intelligent and highly trained adult hours of wearisome labor, who is it that accomplishes the feat? Certainly not the infant "I" and certainly not the organic resistance to that hyper-organic force. Somebody else is at work. But who, and where, and how? So far as one can discover, Biran never put these questions to his friend; nor did Ampere ever propound them as a subject worthy of philosophical discussion.

In this matter their younger contemporary, Sir John Herschel, saw further and more clearly than they. Herschel possessed the curious faculty of seeing, while fully awake, "geometrical spectres," which "obtruded themselves on his notice and, by calling attention to themselves, directed the train of thought into a channel it would not have taken of itself.... If it be true that the conception of a regular geometrical pattern implies the exercise of thought and intelligence, it would almost seem that in such cases we have evidence of a thought, and intelligence, working within our own organization, distinct from that of our own personality."

The infant Ampere’s prodigies of calculation were instances even more striking of the workings of an intelligence within the organization and yet distinct from the personality. For a philosopher who had spent his best energies in establishing the reality of the hyper-organic personality, and who was now wrestling with the problems of grace and inspiration, the opportunity to study the intelligent not-I at first hand was not to be missed. But in fact it was missed, and missed even more completely than the opportunity to study the intelligent not-I as it manifests itself in the magnetic trance. With Deleuze and Planta, Biran at least talked about these problems. In his discussions with Ampere they were not even mentioned.

Biran was by no means the only philosopher to ignore the subject of animal magnetism. "1 should doubt," wrote F. W. H. Myers more than half a century ago, "whether there have been a hundred men in all countries together, at the ordinary level of professional intelligence, who during the century since Mesmer have treated hypnotism as the serious study of their lives." The great majority of philosophers have not treated hypnotism and the allied phenomena of healing and extra-sensory perception as the serious study of a year or even a semester. And yet if they had looked into the matter, if they had examined the masses of carefully sifted evidence accumulated by such scientific organizations as the Society for Psychical Research, they would have found themselves confronted with strange data very hard to explain in terms of the philosophic systems recently current in the West. A natural reluctance to give up deeply rooted intellectual habits coupled with the disreputableness of a subject that had attracted more charlatans than serious investigators, sufficiently accounts for the fact that most modern philosophers have chosen to go about their business as though hypnotism and its related phenomena were simply nonexistent.

That they will be able for much longer to preserve the virginity of their voluntary ignorance seems unlikely. Up till now the story of hypnotism has been a record of alternating ups and downs, of periods of popularity followed by periods of neglect. In the 1820s Deleuze felt quite certain that magnetic therapy was destined very shortly to become a branch of orthodox medicine; his German contemporaries shared his conviction, and so did his English successors of the thirties and forties. All were wrong. From a note appended by the American translator to the sixth chapter of Deleuze's text-book we learn that "probably there is not a city nor village in North America where there could not be found at this time— 1878—one or more magnetizers; usually one can be found in every family." A few years later they were all gone. In the last years of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century there was a certain revival of interest in the subject. But Freud disparaged the therapeutic value of hypnotism, and it is only recently that psychiatrists have begun once more to make extensive use of it as an adjutant of analysis. But meanwhile the soldiers and the policemen and the politicians have discovered its possibilities. In a recently published volume C. H. Estabrooks has described some of those possibilities. To the horrors outlined in his chapter on "Hypnotism in Warfare" must be added the psychological atrocities which are being perpetrated in the prisons of the police states. So far these methods have been used for the extraction of confessions. But, skilfully employed, hypnotism can do much more than this. By its means the dictator can modify the expression of his subjects' personality, can compel their idolatrous devotion to the State and Party, can invade and almost abolish their private life, can make them love their slavery. And if these methods, along with those of childhood conditioning and life-long suggestion, can serve the purposes of totalitarian dictatorship, it is virtually certain that they will be used, and used on an ever-increasing scale.

At the same time we may expect to see in the West an increasing concern with the techniques of yoga. The spiritual exercises of India and the Far East will be scientifically studied, improved, and then applied (as the Nazis seem to have applied them in their Schools for Leaders, as the Japanese militarists applied them in the training of officers) for the purpose of achieving purely mundane and even diabolic ends. The corruption of the best is always the worst. We have come to our present plight by concentrating too exclusively on externals, but our present plight will seem paradisal by comparison with the state we shall be in after concentrating, for a generation or two, on psychology, particularly at its deeper levels. In a certain sense it was perhaps fortunate that nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science should have paid so little attention to animal magnetism. Because they refrained from investigating the facts or working out an explanatory theory, there was no "pure science" of psychology for such all too practical men as soldiers, politicians, and policemen to apply. Thanks to nineteenth-century materialism on the one hand and, on the other, to nineteenth-century idealism and respectability, the date of the third and final revolution was postponed for more than a century.

We have had political revolutions and economic revolutions. Nominally for the benefit of the masses, these revolutions have resulted in the concentration of power in a few hands; and the maintenance and increase of this concentration of power have tended to become their main purpose. But economic and political power is, by those who exercise it, never felt to be enough. Tyrants cannot be satisfied until they wield direct psychological and physiological power. The third revolution is that which will subvert the individual in the depths of his organic and hyper-organic being, is that which will bring his body, his mind, his whole private life directly under the control of the ruling oligarchy.

Sixteen years ago, when I wrote Brave New World, I fancied that the third revolution was still five or six centuries away. Today that estimate seems to me excessive. Mr. Orwell's forecast in 1984 was made from a vantage point considerably further down the descending spiral of modern history than mine, and is probably more nearly correct.- It may be indeed that he is completely right and that, only thirty-five years from now, the third revolution, whose crude beginnings are already visible, will be an accomplished fact —the most important and the most terrible fact in human history.

Meanwhile we are still happily at liberty to discuss the purely philosophical implications of animal magnetism. What, we may still ask, are the conclusions, to which a serious study of those tabooed phenomena may be expected to lead? The question may best be answered by a statement of what in fact has been thought by some of the few men, in Biran's day and in our own, who have chosen to recognize their importance for philosophy.

By profession Deleuze was not a philosopher, but a naturalist and scholar, who during more than half of a long life devoted all his leisure to the gratuitous healing of the sick by the methods of animal magnetism. He developed no metaphysical system and, since he was a Catholic, felt no need to do so; but here and there in his historical and practical writings he sometimes states the metaphysical conclusions which the observed facts have forced upon his mind. Thus, he is convinced that "though it generally makes use of the sense organs, the soul can in. certain states receive ideas and sensations without the mediation of these organs." And he adds that "this principle once recognized, the strongest argument, nay, the only argument, against the immortality of the soul is destroyed."

Another interesting conclusion is that all human beings possess within themselves "a torch and a compass." At ordinary times the distractions of worldly life and their native egotism prevent them from being illumined by the inner light or guided by inspiration. But torch and compass are always there, ready and waiting to serve their appointed purpose.

Deleuze draws this conclusion from his observations of a rare somnambulistic state in which the hypnotized person seems to be in a kind of contemplation or samadhi that alternates between rapt silence and the utterance of sublime things. "Happy the man," says Deleuze, "who has chanced to meet a somnambulist of this kind! For there is no means of bringing forth from an ordinary somnambulist the faculties just described." He adds that the state would probably occur more frequently if magnetizers were less frivolously curious, less eager to prove their own preconceived theories and more ready to allow the subconscious mind of the patient to go its own way.

From Deleuze we turn to another of Biran's contemporaries, a man whom our philosopher never knew and whose works he could not read. The fact is unfortunate; for, in spite of all his eccentricities, Franz von Baader- was a profound and original thinker, in whose discussions of the problems of religion Biran might have found many new and profitable ideas. Like most of those who participated in his country's Romantic Movement, Baader was passionately interested in animal magnetism, and, above all, in the phenomena of extra-sensory perception by which the magnetic trance was sometimes accompanied. He read, and too easily believed, all the contemporary accounts of magnetic marvels and himself carried out experiments on entranced subjects. The metaphysical conclusions which he drew from his findings were set forth in several short treatises on magnetic ecstasy and divination, and took their place as integral constituents of his philosophy.

Baader was of the opinion that "magnetic ecstasy" is a temporary dis-embodiment and unbinding of the psyche, "a state in which the aggregate of body, soul and spirit, which is our personality," is reduced to pure consciousness. Waking trance is superior to normal waking, inasmuch as "in the magnetic state consciousness acquires a broader and deeper foundation." The knowledge we have during trance is "disorganized," in the sense that it is unmediated knowledge, which does not come to us through the bodily organs. In Baader's curious terminology it is "magical knowledge," or knowledge within the sphere of the Magical, which may be defined as the state in which Idea has not yet been realized, not yet undergone the transformation into act.

Ecstasy is of two kinds—a downward ecstasy into coma and catalepsy, and an upward ecstasy into the Magical and beyond the Magical and into the Spiritual. The first is an anticipation of death, the second of the state described by theologians as that of glory and resurrection. In upward ecstasy man returns to the condition he was in before the Fall. He ceases to be the egocentric parody of himself and becomes for a moment tel qu'en Lui-meme enfin I'Eternite le change.-

Between death and magnetic ecstasy there is a difference, not of kind, but only of degree. "If," says Baader, "one reflects that these ecstatic states are more or less anticipations of death, one can easily understand the disquieting impression produced by their occurrence on the average normal and healthy man, endowed with what is called common sense." It is for this same reason that the normal man finds it so hard to conceive such phenomena, that he displays such a strenuous will to disbelieve them. He voluntarily ignores them because, if he did not, they would bewilder and appal him in the same way that physical death bewilders and appals him.

Baader was a Romantic and a Theosophist—in the sense, of course, in which that word was used before the apparition of Mme. Blavatsky. These appellations cannot be applied either to Dr. C. D. Broad or to Professor H. H. Price;- but these two eminent modern philosophers resemble their German predecessor in at least one respect: they have taken account, when writing about man and his place in the universe, of the facts of parapsychology. Having examined the evidence for foreknowledge and telepathy and having found it provisionally convincing, Dr. Broad has shown what must be the nature of a time dimension, in which future events are predictable, and has argued that the "psychic factors" of human personalities must bathe, so to speak, in a psychic medium, out of which they have crystallized, through which they are interconnected and within which they may for a time survive the death of the body.

Like Dr. Broad, Professor Price accepts the evidence for parapsychology. If, he argues, the phenomena of extra-sensory perception and psycho-kinesis are facts, then it is impossible to go on believing in that Cartesian world-picture which has been accepted so long and so universally that, in the West at least, it now seems mere common sense. Descartes divided the universe into matter, having extension as its essence, and into separate, substantial minds, having consciousness as their essence and interacting with the matter in their own body, but not directly with other matter or with other minds. Cartesianism must be dropped and a philosophy more consonant with the facts must take its place. According to this philosophy man would be a tripartite being, composed of body, mind (the "soul" or "psyche" of earlier philosophers), and "spirit" (a word which is used by Professor Price as equivalent to "the pure ego, the Atman of the Hindu philosophers"). Minds, as distinct from spirit or Atman, are "the subject matter of psychical research and of all the psychological sciences," and minds, in spite of Descartes, are not indivisible entities, are not separate from one another, are not necessarily incapable of interacting with all matter except that in their own body and do not have consciousness as their essence. On the contrary, minds carry on many, perhaps most, of their activities on the subconscious or unconscious level; they may, and if the evidence for psycho-kinesis and telepathy is sound, they actually do act directly upon other minds and upon matter outside their respective bodies; and they are not persistent substances, for such unity as they possess is "precarious and unstable."

A philosophical theory capable of "saving the appearances" must take as its primary unit, "not a mind, as Descartes did, but what I shall call an idea." Ideas are the ultimate elements of the mental world and from these elements are built up all kinds of psychological entities "from ghosts and Freudian complexes at one end to the healthily integrated waking human mind at the other." (It is interesting to translate these notions into the language of Buddhist philosophy. According to this philosophy, the human being is anatta, without a substantial and permanent soul and is composed of skandhas, or complexes of subpersonal psychic elements.)

Professor Price assumes that all ideas have their origin in some individual mind. Perhaps he is right; or perhaps, as Biran and von Baader would certainly have maintained, some ideas arise from sources that are not originally human. In any case "once an idea has come into existence it has, so to speak, an independent life of its own." Some ideas exist only for a short time, some outlive the body associated with the mind that has them. They may exist and be operative in an individual consciousness, or in an individual subconscious or unconscious, or perhaps in the no-man's-land of the psychic medium. All ideas have an inherent tendency to realize themselves in some concrete physical form. Some may achieve only a symbolic realization in somebody's imagination. Others may get as far as producing a quasi-public hallucination or apparition. Others may succeed in getting themselves completely embodied through the instrumentality of a nervous system and a body. And if we accept the evidence for psycho-kinesis, we must suppose that an idea sometimes "succeeds in materializing itself in a physical object or event without making use of somebody's brain or muscle."

The familiar sequence of idea, nervous impulse, muscular activity, and embodiment of idea in matter or event is only a particular case of the general tendency of ideas to embody themselves at any price and by fair means or foul, normally or paranormally. "You will observe with suitable horror," says Professor Price, "that this is just one of the fundamental assumptions of primitive magic. I cannot help it; perhaps primitive magic has a little grain of sense in it, after all." And he adds that the more respectable activity of petitionary prayer seems to be based on the same assumption. "The fact that prayer sometimes works does not, of course, compel us to accept the theological theory of how it works."

So much for the conclusions which our philosopher might have drawn from a study of animal magnetism and the phenomena of trance, but which he did not draw because he chose to neglect his opportunities for study. From the facts which he did choose to observe—the facts of his own inner experience—he drew a set of conclusions which, in many important respects, are similar to those reached by his German contemporary and his English successor. In other respects his picture of the mind in its relation to the universe is dissimilar to, and less satisfactory, than theirs. This inadequacy is due to Biran's exclusive reliance on introspection; for ordinary introspection is, by its very nature, incapable of yielding any knowledge of the subconscious and unconscious states which can only be inferred from overt behavior or, if they manifest themselves in trance, can only be observed from outside. That most of the mind's activities go on beneath the level of consciousness; that the soul (as distinct from the pure ego, or Atman) is not a separate substance, but a not too clearly defined aggregate of psychic elements connected with, or even overlapping, other aggregates; that there is, in Baaderian language, a realm of the Magical, in which ideas clamor and fight for physical realization and that this realization can take place not merely through a particular nervous and muscular system, but in other ways as well—such thoughts are, by an exclusively introspective philosopher, hardly thinkable, because the facts which suggest them are hardly within his ken.

In the fragments of the Nouveaux Essais dAnthropologie, Biran sketched the outlines of the general system, into which he hoped to incorporate, and in terms of which he meant to interpret, all his previous findings. "Man," he wrote at the beginning of this, his last, unfinished work, "is intermediate between God and Nature. He belongs to God by his spirit and Nature by his senses. He can identify himself with the latter by allowing hishis personality, his liberty to be absorbed in his senses, and by giving himself up to all his appetites, all the urges of the flesh. He can also, up to a certain point, identify himself with God, by allowing his T to be absorbed through the exercise of a higher faculty, which the school of Aristotle completely misunderstood, which Platonism distinguished and characterized, and which Christianity perfected by bringing it back to its true archetype."

Up to this time our philosopher had spent most of his energies on the task of establishing the existence of the hyper-organic "I," and of defining its relations with the organic not-I and external Nature. In the New Essays he would have another task: to show how Nature, Organism, and "I" are related to the Spirit, and through the Spirit to the divine not-I which tran scends, and is immanent in, all things, all lives, and all minds.

The world-picture into which Maine de Biran now proposed to fit his psychology and his metaphysics of the inner sense was ancient, grand, and majestically simple. Perhaps, indeed, it was a little too majestically simple to be fully adequate to a world of immeasurable complexity or to the life in that world of an amphibious being made up of contradictions and incongruities—a life that modulates continuously from the tragic to the farcical, from the absurd to the divine, from the unintelligibility of necessity to the unintelligibility of grace.

In philosophy, Biran was an existentialist, who knew that man is an incarnate spirit and that it is as an incarnate spirit that he must live and, if possible, be "saved," "liberated," "illumined." But the machine was feeble, Brother Ass irremediably spavined. Hence, for Biran, a standing temptation, that grew stronger as his infirmities multiplied upon him, to retreat from existentialism into a Platonism that equated good with disembodied spirit and evil with matter. Direct experiences of ecstatic detachment from the organism and a second-hand knowledge of some of the phenomena of mystical and magnetic trance tended to confirm him in this Platonic view of things, to make him think of the problems of life in terms of a dualism of mind and matter, and not in terms of the normal datum of experience mind-matter or incarnation. More Christian than our philosopher ever was, and better acquainted with the facts of magnetism and the literature of theosophy and mysticism, Baader was ready to admit that body, soul, and spirit were not inseparable, that they formed an aggregate rather than a completely unified whole; but he insisted that, in this present life, their dissociation was abnormal, that it could not be persisted in without danger and that salvation must be achieved by the aggregate for the aggregate. In theory, and if he had remained consistent with his earlier self, Biran would have agreed with Baader. In practice, as we learn from his Diary during the last years of his life, he found it very difficult not to be a Platonic dualist. When, as he not infrequently did, he experienced a state of what the mystics would call "sensible consolation," he was always tormented by the thought that it might have been due to some happy accident within his body, some casual concordance of organs with one another and with the hyper-organic force. The tacit assumption was that, if this were the case, his mystical (or, to be more accurate, his pre-mystical) experiences would not be genuine, would not come from god and would not, in so far as they were cognitive, have any reference to the divine nature.

In a Platonist this a priori mistrust of the body is right and reasonable. But an existentialist cannot harbor it without being unfaithful to his first principles. To him it is self-evident that, in very many cases, grace must be organically mediated. And he knows, by observation and experience, that there are animal graces which are primarily for the body, and that there are also animal graces which, through the body, are primarily for the mind and spirit. At the same time he infers that there must be, and observes in practice that there are, graces of the mind, intellectual, imaginative, emotional—graces that in some instances are indirectly helpful to the body and that, in others, assist the mind to make itself aware of the spirit. And finally, he knows that there must be, and are, purely spiritual graces, which come when there is a temporary dissociation of the three elements of the human aggregate, and that these spiritual graces are at the same time graces for the mind and the body.

But always there were those disturbing questions. "If magnetism were to produce the same state as that which the mystics reach in the prayer of silence, would not that be a proof that there is a physical element in all these supernatural states?" May not the beatitude, experienced as the result of self-abandonment to the divine will, be related "to some state of the affective sensibility such that, if the organic disposition were to undergo a change, all this inward calm, this heavenly blessedness, would vanish, leaving in the soul nothing but trouble and confusion?" And those sensible consolations which come to him, unsought and of their own accord—"are they of organic origin, or induced by the imagination, or infused by grace? To assure oneself of the reality of one or other of these causes of mystic sentiments is to my mind the greatest and hardest problem of the science of man."

And yet, so long as the human aggregate persists, one cause can never be exclusive of the others; the beatitude which follows self-abandonment, and even the act of self-abandonment itself, must be related to, and conditioned by, certain dispositions of the organs; and in most "supernatural states" there is bound to be a physical element—which means that there must be appropriate psycho-physical methods for creating the conditions most favorable to such states.

Because they are closely knit aggregates rather than completely unified and indissoluble wholes, human beings are capable in some degree of temporary self-transcendence and can therefore come to at least a partial knowledge of the transcendent Spirit. But during most of their existence it is impossible for them to be aware of Spirit except as immanent in themselves and in the minds and lives and things outside them. Divine immanence is possible only because there is divine transcendence. There can be no indwelling of one piece of matter within another piece of matter; and, though they may overlap, minds can never fuse, never wholly possess one another. But Spirit, which is of another order of being, can be completely co-extensive with bodies, co-active and co-conscious with minds. For this reason the realm of nature is always, potentially, the realm of grace. For the potentiality of grace to become actual, or for an actualized gratuitous grace to become permanently effective, there must, of course, be collaboration by the will.

The sick body is rarely in a state of animal grace, and its gracelessness, as Biran knew by the most bitter experience, may make it very hard for even the most passionately aspiring "1" to achieve union with the spiritual not-I. And yet sickness, as Biran had also discovered, may turn the mind inwards upon itself and so make it aware, however obscurely and remotely, of the existence and the infinite desirability of that not-I. The healthy body, on the other hand, lives so continuously in a state of animal grace that its "I" unreflectingly takes this condition for granted and uses the physical energies, made available by health, to multiply distractions until they raise a barrier between itself and the divine not-I even more insurmountable than that created by sickness. The Good Fairy, with her precious gifts, is always potentially the Bad Fairy, who lays a curse upon the cradle.

In the philosophy and practice of any genuinely spiritual religion the significant and decisive dualism is not the Platonic dualism of body and mind, but the mystics' dualism of time and eternity. Mystics belonging to all the great religious traditions have affirmed that salvation is possible here and now, and that it consists in the redemption of time by eternity, the transfiguration, within an individual life, of temporal events and experiences by a moment-to-moment awareness of their timeless ground and eternal significance.

"Time," says Meister Eckhart, "is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time"—or, to be more accurate, than the time-obsessed consciousness which lives in memory and anticipation rather than in the timeless now. Eckhart, in another place, quotes the words of St. Paul, "Rejoice in God all the time," and adds that "he rejoices all the time who rejoices above time and free from time. Three things prevent a man from knowing God. The first is time, the second is corporality, the third is multiplicity. That God may come in, these things must go out—except you have them in a higher and better way: multitude summed up to one within you."

In other words, the Platonic dualism with its practical corollary of escape from the body, through ecstasy or death, into pure spirituality is admissible; but salvation is complete only when time, body, and manifoldness are accepted and transfigured through being apprehended in their relation to eternity. When a man so apprehends them, he can maintain, as Eckhart maintained, "that I already possess all that is granted to me in eternity. For God in the fullness of His Godhead dwells eternally in His image, the soul," and it is, so to speak, with the eyes of God that the soul is now looking at the world. The mind-body dualists are tempted to break out of what they regard as their prison and to sink themselves completely in what they believe to be the One.

But, in the Buddhist terminology of Huang-Po, "when senses and thoughts are annihilated, all the passages to Universal Mind are blocked." Universal Mind is to be recognized in the sense-impressions and thoughts, not as belonging to them, nor yet as independent of them. The true philosophy and the right conduct of life cannot, of course, be based on an unreflecting acceptance of what the sense organs and the discursive reason have to tell us. But at the same time "you must not seek Universal Mind apart from sense and thoughts. Do not try to grasp Reality by rejecting your senses and thoughts. When you are neither attached to them, nor detached from them, then you enjoy freedom and enlightenment." For free and enlightened beings, the external world is no longer what it was for our philosopher, "a world of necessity, in which man is carried away like all the other objects of nature, towards a goal of which he is ignorant, by a series of means which he neither feels nor controls, or which he can feel without being able to control." It is the world which many children inhabit, the world whose loveliness has been expressed (with what incomparable power!) by Wordsworth and Traherne. In that transfigured other-world, which is yet our world, "eternity is manifested in the light of day and something infinite behind everything appears, which talks with my expectation and moves my desire."

Peter Sterry was another who lived in that world. "Didst thou," he asks, "ever descry a glorious eternity in a winged moment of time? Didst thou ever see a bright infinity in the narrow point of an object? Then thou knowest what Spirit is—the spire-top whither all things ascend harmoniously, where they meet and sit contented in an unfathomed Depth of Life."

Such, then, is the mystical conception of true and complete salvation, a conception of which, strangely enough, Biran seems hardly to have been aware. Notwithstanding his growing concern with the subject, he had, so far as we can discover, read very little in the literature of mysticism. Though he might have known them, or at least have known about them, we find in his Journal no reference to Eckhart or Tauler, to Ruysbroeck or St. John of the Cross, to Boehme, Law, or Saint-Martin. With the relevant Oriental literature there was, of course, in Biran's time practically no possibility of acquaintance. In the Nouveaux Essais, it is true, we meet with a reference to the book, in which Abel de Remusat, the first man to occupy a chair of Chinese in any European university, had maintained that the Logos of Pythagoras and Plato was identical with the Tao of Lao-tsu. That is as near as our philosopher ever came to the spiritual positivism of his Oriental predecessors. With the mystical tradition of the West, Biran's main literary link was Fenelon, the Fenelon, above all, of the Spiritual Letters. But though unrivalled as a psychologist, teacher, and essayist of the spiritual life, Fenelon lacked the passion for metaphysical speculation and was not himself overwhelmingly a mystic.

The immediate insights and the theoretical constructions of the great philosopher-contemplatives were beyond his scope. To the extent that Biran had chosen to depend, for his knowledge of mysticism, upon Fenelon (together with Fenelon's old enemy, Bossuet), he was debarred from a knowledge of what those philosopher-contemplatives had written.

What he did not learn from books our philosopher might, of course, have discovered on his own account. But, as we have seen, his constitution, his temperament, and his circumstances conspired to make that discovery exceedingly difficult. His chronically ailing machine almost forced him to equate evil with matter and good with a purely spiritual state of disembodiment. His excessive sensibility caused him to react to music so physiologically, so gluttonously and voluptuously, that it was all but impossible for him to think of art except as a source of mere pleasure. That it might be used as a means for redeeming the squalid chaos of human life, that the aesthetic experience might be an analogue of the mystical experience, bringing with it insight as well as rapture—such ideas did not, perhaps could not, occur to him.

And finally there was Nature. As a boy, as a young man, he had sometimes seen "eternity manifested in the light of day and something infinite behind everything." But then he had become a professional politician and a professional philosopher, dividing his time between the statistical and the abstract, between the merely institutional in the outside world and the merely personal and organic in the world of introspection. And meanwhile he needed constant stimulation, he had to be forever "winding up his machine," lest he should fall into melancholy and a kind of hebephrenic lassitude. Hence his addiction to dinner parties and soirees, to those diversions of high society which he found at once indispensable and unutterably boring, shameful and necessary, tonic and yet utterly destructive to health and happiness. And these diversions could be had only in Paris, far from the nature he had loved and felt himself a part of and apprehended as a manifestation of the divine. Because he was, congenitally, who he was, because of his body, his mind, his character, because of his profession and his social commitments, Biran was destined never to discover the true nature of mystical salvation.

But salvation was what he was looking for; freedom from the burden of his selfhood and a lightening of his darkness were the things he craved. It was easy enough to frame a philosophical system based upon the idea of man's tripartite nature as animal, mind, and spirit; and it would not be too difficult to fit his own earlier writings into this half-Christian, half-Platonic framework. As always, as for everybody, it was only in practice, only in relation to the concrete facts of existence that there was any real difficulty.

Anybody with the requisite wits and learning can write philosophy; the problem is to be a philosopher or lover of wisdom. Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, to name the first that come to mind—all wrote, but none of them was. "A man may stand very high in the intellectual scale, and yet be in complete opposition to the spirit. Pride, self-centredness, attachment to his own particular notions may fill his mind with continual agitations and anxieties." And again: "In my study I think like a spiritual man, outside I behave like a carnal man." From thought to intention, from intention to will, and from will to action and conduct, the road is not smooth, nor even continuous.

With the problem of the will there went, in Biran's mind, the problem of cognition. It was easy enough, if one knew the jargon, the talk about the ultimate nature of things, easy enough on hearsay, or authority, or as the result of specious reasoning from not too closely examined premises, to profess to know something about God. The difficulty, once again, was to pass from theory to practice, from talk to experience, from a superficial and indirect knowledge about to an immediate and concrete acquaintance with.

After 1818 Biran sought a solution to these two problems in the more or less regular practice of prayer. Not, of course, petitionary prayer; for Biran was in search of salvation and enlightenment, and the asking of favors is in no way redeeming, since it makes the petitioner aware, not of the Unknown, the immanent and transcendent Spirit, but merely and yet once more of his own all too familiar wishes. What he refers to in the Diary is always the prayer of meditative silence, the prayer of self-emptying and waiting.

Sometimes he can report "a day of well-being, reason and tranquillity, the effects of prayer." More often he complains that he has no disposition for prayer and that, lacking all desire and facility, he has neglected to pray and lost the habit of it. As usual, it was the law of his members at odds with the law of his mind. He knew what ought to be done, but he could not do it. "The presence of God makes itself felt by an inward state of calm and elevation, which it is not in my power either to initiate or maintain, but which might become more habitual thanks to an intellectual and moral regimen, to which it is high time that I should submit myself by the prayer of silence and recollection." It was high time; but still the submission was only partial and spasmodic.

In its essence nothing could be simpler than the prayer of silence. But since human beings are in their nature manifold and successive, nothing is harder for them than to enter a state of essential simplicity. Biran often neglected to pray, and when he remembered or was able to try, his attempts to silence his mind and organism, and to wait recollectedly for the coming of the divine not-I, were very often unsuccessful, and he would find himself, not contemplating God, but doing yet again the thing he had done innumerable times before—he would find himself peering with a mixture of self-satisfaction and disgust, at the workings of his own mind.

As a younger man, he had been proud of his introversion, had thought of it as a secret and unrevealed title of honor, which placed him, for all his outward inferiority, on a level far above that of the hereditary or self-made bigwigs among whom he moved. Ministers, peers of France, diplomats, men of affairs, all the riff-raff of court and senate and drawing-room and counting-house—in their company he felt like a whipped dog; but at the same time how he despised them! Rich and powerful, they ruled the world in which, with their strong muscles or their big bellies, their extraversion of force or of facile geniality, they were perfectly at home. But he, the scrawny and intimidated fop, the voiceless parliamentarian, the disregarded philosopher, of whom a Third Consul had said (how truly!) that he would never be good for anything, he was the discoverer and monarch of a world infinitely superior to theirs—the inner world, the world of the mind.

Nosce teipsum. By being an introspective psychologist he was obeying the commands of the philosophers. And not only of the philosophers, of the saints as well. All the masters of the spiritual life were agreed that the first, indispensable step on the road to perfection was to transform the mind into a cell of self-knowledge. In a word, the candidate for salvation must be recollected. But "observation in psychology is identical with recollection." Better still, to think about these observations is a peculiarly meritorious form of right action. For "speculation is an exercise of morality; there can be no truly moral beings except those who speculate and so raise themselves above the world of the senses." The introverted thinker is not merely justified, he is exalted above his fellows.

And then, almost suddenly, a doubt crept into our philosopher's mind. This habit of continual introspection—was it, after all, a thing to be proud of? Did it really make him superior to the extraverts?

"I have been/' he says, "the prey of strong and disorderly affections; and instead of trying to resist the tendency to be carried away by them, I let myself go without effort, taking pleasure in observing the impulses and judging their effects, as I might do in regard to someone else—or as a doctor might congratulate himself upon contracting some disease, because this gives him an opportunity of observing it in his own person. ... This habit of paying minute attention to what is going on within oneself—is it perhaps immoral? My experience makes me fear that it is. One must give oneself a goal and a fulcrum outside and above oneself. Only in this way can one react successfully to one's own modifications, even while observing and analysing them." Introspection for its own sake, introspection that fails to go beyond the "I" and the organism, tends inevitably to transform the active conscience into a merely speculative conscience. The habitual introvert is liable to become primarily scientific when he ought to be primarily moral, to think only of facts in situations where he should be thinking of values.

But this is by no means the only danger of introspection. Biran came to be convinced that "the germ of the spiritual life is always present in the depths of the soul." But he also knew that, above those depths, "the soul finds in itself only imperfections, vilenesses, miseries, vice and frivolity." Such moral and religious truths as we know have a source that is "different from that of the truths of psychology, which are limited to man as a sensitive, free and independent being and depend, as Kant has rightly recognized, upon other faculties." Introspection is the process by which the "I" becomes aware of itself and the organic not-I—becomes aware, that is to say, mainly of "imperfections, vilenesses, miseries," and all the rest. The divine not-I lies beyond these products of hyper-organic force and organic resistance, beyond even its own manifestations in good intentions, true insights, and rapturous states of "sensible consolation." It is something which can be known only when the soul is intently abandoned, alertly passive. This condition is a paradox in action, and the words which describe it seem to contain a contradiction in terms. It cannot be otherwise, for our existence is intrinsically contradictory and paradoxical. From the muscular to the spiritual, from sport to contemplation, in all life's workings above the merely physiological, the results we desire are obtained only when we contrive to combine will with effortlessness, action with relaxation. Soul and body must let go; for only thus can they make themselves receptive to animal graces from the realms of the instinctive and the physiological, to intellectual and imaginative graces from the lower levels of the psyche, and to spiritual graces, whose source is beyond those depths in the divine immanence. They must let go; but at the same time they must not completely let go—for the "I" must use its will to bring itself and its body into the condition which, at each successive moment, is most favorable to the influx of animal, mental, or spiritual grace. Towards the end of his life, our philosopher understood very clearly the nature of life's fundamental paradox. "It has occurred to me that the activity which causes the soul to be present to itself and constitutes it a person, or ego, in its own eyes, has been given to it for the sole purpose of raising itself above its sensible nature and directing that nature towards a moral and spiritual end. The T creates nothing, except the animation or feeling which accompanies it; as for the ideas and conceptions which are present to it, these are beheld by a light which is intimately connected with it but which it does not create, a light which is within it, but which is not identical with itself. This is that 'true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,' this too it is which is Deus in nobis, God in us." In other words, the highest function of the personal will is freely to will itself out of existence, so that the divine will may be done, and done not only on the intellectual and spiritual level, as Biran here suggests, but also (an idea which was not too acceptable to a Platonist with an ailing body) on the physiological level, by making possible an irruption of animal grace. "Impose silence on yourself and allow the spirit of God to speak and act in you." But it was a great deal easier to copy these words of Fenelon's into the Diary than to act upon them during his times of meditation. One cannot "impose silence" on oneself, for there is a "Law of Reversed Effort," and the act of imposing silence increases the inward noise. "The soul's bane," says our philosopher, "is not suffering, but agitation. Agitation is doubly an affliction—for it is an affliction which the will rejects and, in rejecting, intensifies."

The introvert's prayer of silence modulates with a fatal facility into self-observation; and selfobservation, even if its purpose be strictly scientific and philosophical, is, in relation to the Spirit, an agitating experience. And if one attempts to suppress this agitation, one merely increases it. The way to silence is not, as it would be logical to suppose, through the imposition of silence; paradoxically as always, it is through an acceptance of noise. If an attempted prayer of silence turns into mere selfobservation, self-observation is the fact of immediate experience which must be accepted. It must, however, be accepted neither as a means to wish-fulfilments and the compensation of imagination and memory, nor even as a means to a scientific classification of facts and the establishment of a philosophical theory; it must be accepted as it is, without preconceptions and without the intention of doing anything with it, accepted passively, and yet alertly, in an act of quasi-aesthetic contemplation which permits the facts to be seen not as they are in relation to the wishing and theorizing "I," but as illumined by the inner light. For it is the light that will impose silence and calm an agitation which the will and the intellect can only increase.

The active introspection, which starts from a set of preconceptions, and which aims at some specific achievement, is not identical with recollection, and the self-knowledge in which it results neither enlightens nor redeems. Redemptive self-knowledge comes when the "I" breaks out of its home-made and second-hand frame of reference and is thus enabled to see itself freshly, from moment to moment, in that light which it finds, but does not create. As always happens, when we leave the sphere of the all too human, we find ourselves in the midst of paradoxes and impossibilities. In order to live effectively in the world, we are compelled to do most of our thinking in terms of the home-made and the second-hand. In order to achieve salvation and enlightenment, we must rely, at each instant, upon insight coming from the divine not-I, by whom we are inhabited. On one level it is cogito, on the other, cogitor. Here the "I" thinks; there it is thought. Here the hyper-organic force is active and independent; there, when at last it finds itself in harmony with divine immanence, its state, in our philosopher's words, is a "kind of sublime passion, which has this advantage over other passions that, for it, all evils are changed into goods." The contradiction would seem to be irreconcilable—but only logically, only in theory. In living practice it is possible for the mind to pass very rapidly from one level to the other, or even to exist simultaneously on both levels so that it preserves a measure of insight even when relying on its home-made notions, of spontaneity even when making use of the secondhand.

Maine de Biran had an inkling of what it was to go beyond himself to divine not-I—but no more than an inkling. His sick body and, above all, his lifelong habit of thinking about the self were too strong for him. Except on the rarest occasions, it was impossible for him to forget his "frail machine," or to relax the ego's possessive hold on everything that concerned itself. He knew that the light was there, and sometimes he could actually see it. But though he longed for it, he could not prevent himself from turning his back to it and looking at other things. "I am," he wrote in 1820, "and I have always been the most personal man that can be imagined. It is an instinct that irresistibly impels me inwards, forcing me to pay attention to everything that is of immediate concern, materially or intellectually, to myself. In my first youth I was preoccupied with my face, with all my externals, all the inward and outward affections pertaining to the organism and to sensuous appearances. Later on I was dominated by my concern with the operations of my own mind. I gave all my attention to its behavior and its modifications just as, in the past, I had given all my attention to my face and the means of charming others or of pleasing myself by reflection from the outside. But in the eyes of his fellows as in the eyes of God, a man has worth only in so far as his constant and immediate goal is not himself, but lies beyond himself."

During the four years that remained to him, Biran came only a very little nearer to this goal beyond himself. In 18 24, a few months only before his death, we find him lamenting that, though he has lost all taste for the things of this world, he has acquired no taste for the things of the spirit. The light is always present; but it was in an enforced night of sickness, in the God-eclipsing contemplation of a self for which he could now feel only disgust, that he found himself advancing towards the final and most strictly private event of his career. On the last page of his Diary we read a passage from the Book of Job:"Cunctis diebus, quibus nunc milito, expecto donee veniat immutatio mea."- All he could now do was to imitate the prophet and "wait in patience until the great change shall come about."

Seven weeks later, on his death-bed, Maine de Biran returned to the fold in which he had been brought up. After having lived first as an agnostic, then as a would-be gnostic, a seeker of a direct experience of the divine, our philosopher ended as a believer. He was dying, he needed support, and belief, as he had remarked long before, is the great source of strength. Whether it does, or can, lead the believer to that knowledge of God in which alone, to use the words of the Anglican Prayer Book, "standeth our eternal life," is another question.

[Themes and Variations, 1950]

6. Francois-Pierre Maine de Biran (1766-1824). French philosopher and statesman.

7. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803). French politician and novelist, author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782).

8. Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757-1808). French philosopher. Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836). French philosopher. Both were associated with the Ideologue group, as was Royer-Collard.

9. Andre Marie Ampere (1775-1836). French mathematician and physicist. George Cuvier (1769-1832). French founder of comparative anatomy. Francois Pierre Guizot (1787-1874). French historian and statesman. Victor Cousin (1792-1867). French philosopher. Joseph Marie, Baron de Gerondo (1772-1842). French philosopher and statesman.

1. Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803). French mystic and author.

2. Charles Fourier (1772-1837). French social philosopher. Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). French author and founder of socialism.

3. Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827). French astronomer and mathematician. Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794). French chemist.

4. The line can be translated as: "The nation needs me; and I don't need it."

5. Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Madame de Stael (1766-1817). French writer and opponent of Napoleon.

6. Gabriel Honore Marcel (1889-1973). French philosopher and dramatist.

7. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872). Italian politician and leader of the Risorgimento.

8. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). Dutch theologian and jurist.

9. Jay Gould (1836-1892). American financier. Sir Basil Zaharoff (1850-1936). Turkish-born French armaments dealer and financier.

1. The lines can be translated as: "I believe that no two mouths—neither her lover nor my mother—have ever drunk from the same dream" ("Surgi du croupe et du bond").

2. Henry Havelock Ellis (1859—1939). English physician and author of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1828). Richard Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902). German psychiatrist and author of Psychop athia Sexualis (1876). Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956). American sexologist.

3. Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976). Russian geneticist and agronomist who believed that good husbandry could alter genetic heredity. Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). Austrian biologist and botanist whose research laid the basis for modern genetics. Thomas Morgan (1866-1945). American geneticist who established the chromosome theory of heredity.

4. Pelagius (c. 360-c. 420). British monk and theologian who rejected the doctrines of original sin and predestination.

5. Claude-Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771). French philosopher of Swiss origin.

6. Francois Fenelon (1651-1715). French writer and prelate.

7. Louis Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald (1754-1840). French writer.

8. The line can be translated as: "I am present at my death with the full force of my life."

9. John Elliotson (1791-1868). English physician and proponent of mesmerism. Harriet Martineau (1802-18 76). English writer and convert to mesmerism.

1. Joseph Philippe Francois Deleuze (1753-1835). French naturalist.

2. Huxley expressed some doubts about the correctness of Orwell's 1984 in comparison with his own dystopia in a letter on October 21,1949, to Orwell. Then he clearly preferred his own vision.

3. Franz von Baader (1765-1841). German theologian and mystic.

4. The line can be translated as: "Such as into himself finally eternity changes him" (Mallarme, "Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe").

5. Charles Dunbar Broad (1887-19 71). English philosopher with an interest in parapsychology. Henry Hobberley Price (1899-1985). Welsh philosopher interested in parapsychology and religion.

6. The line can be translated as: "All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come" (Job 14.4).

The Double Crisis

the human race is passing through a time of crisis, and that crisis exists, so to speak, on two levels— an upper level of political and economic crisis and a lower level of demographic and ecological crisis. That which is discussed at international conferences and in the newspapers is the upper-level crisis—the crisis whose immediate causes are the economic breakdown due to the War and the struggle for power between national groups possessing, or about to possess, the means of mass extermination. Of the low-level crisis, the crisis in population and world resources, hardly anything is heard in the press, on the radio or at the more important international conferences. The Big Threes and Big Fours do not deign to discuss it; leaving the matter to the subaltern and unauthoritative delegations to conferences on health or food, they devote their entire energies to the question of who shall bully whom. And yet the low-level crisis is at least as serious as the crisis in the political and economic field. Moreover, the problems on the upper level cannot be solved without reference to the problems that are shaping up in the cosmic and biological basement. If it is ignored, the low-level crisis is bound to exacerbate the crisis on the political and economic levels. At the same time, a concentration of attention and energy on power politics and power economics will make a solution of the low-level problems not merely difficult, but impossible. In what follows I propose to discuss certain aspects of the low-level crisis and to point out how the obscure happenings in the basement have affected and are likely to go on affecting the lives of private individuals, the policies of statesmen, and the conduct of nations.

It has been fashionable for some time past to talk about "poverty in the midst of plenty." The phrase implies that the planet possesses abundant resources to feed, clothe, house, and provide amenities for its existing population and for any immediately foreseeable increase in that population, and that the present miseries of the human race are due entirely to faulty methods of production and, above all, of distribution. Given currency reform, socialism, communism, unrestricted capitalism, distributism, or whatever the favorite remedy may be, humanity, like the prince and princess in the fairy stories, will be able to live happily ever after. Want and hunger will be transformed into abundance and the whole earth will become one vast Land of Cockayne.

Such are the miracles to be achieved by political and economic planning. But when we pass from these high-level considerations to a study of what is going on at the biological and ecological levels, our optimism is apt to seem a little premature, to say the least of it. Instead of poverty in the midst of plenty, we find that there is poverty in the midst of poverty. World resources are inadequate to world population. At the present time, our planet supports a little less than 2.25 billion human beings, and the area of food-producing land is in the neighborhood of 4 billion acres. It has been calculated that 2.5 acres of land are needed to provide a human being with a diet which nutritionists would regard as adequate. Thus, even if all the available productive land were good—and much of it is of very poor quality—the existing population could not be assured of an adequate diet. Actually, in order to guarantee an adequate diet for all of the world’s 2.25 billion men, women, and children, the present food supply would have to be doubled. But this cannot be accomplished overnight. In the words of Dr. Thomas Tarran, the U.S. Surgeon-General, "the greatest possible increase in food production will not for decades be enough to meet the minimum adequate diet." And meanwhile world population is rising. It is rising at the rate of about 200 million every 10 years. This means that, by the time the food supply is doubled, there will be, not 2.25 billion mouths to feed, but well over 3 billion. In spite of all that may have been achieved in the interval, malnutrition will be just as serious and just as widespread as it is today.

Moreover, while population goes up, the fertility of the soil declines. "Modern man," writes Ward Shepard in his Food or Famine, "has perfected two devices, either of which is capable of annihilating civilization. One is atomic war, the other is world soil-erosion. Of the two, soil-erosion is the more insidiously destructive. War disrupts or destroys the social environment, which is the matrix of civilization. Soil-erosion destroys the natural environment, which is its foundation." In other words, atomic war may destroy one particular civilization—the Western-Industrial variety, for example; soilerosion, if unchecked, can put an end to the possibility of any civilization whatsoever.

The catalogue of man’s crimes against his environment is long and dismal. In Africa the Sahara is advancing; the habitable mountains and tablelands of the equator are rapidly eroding; the southern plains are over-grazed dust-bowls. Central America is in the process of becoming a desert. Much of South America is being washed down unterraced mountain slopes into the sea. With every drought vast areas of Australia and the United States turn into wind-blown dust. In Asia it is the same lamentable story. As population goes up, the fertility of the ever more ruthlessly exploited land goes down. There is spreading and deepening human poverty in the midst of spreading and deepening natural poverty.

In certain respects the European picture is decidedly brighter. Thanks to sound agricultural practices and a climate that is without extremes, the farmers of Western Europe can produce good crops, and go on producing them, without, in the process, ruining their land. But however good these crops may be, they are insufficient to provide the present population of the territory with its minimum food requirements. In relation to the local resources Western Europe is overpopulated. In England, Belgium, Holland, Italy, and the Western zones of Germany, there is less than 1 acre of food-producing land for each inhabitant. And even where the density of population is lower than in these countries the productive land available is still insufficient to provide a full diet (to say nothing of the necessary timber and fibers) for the local inhabitants. According to some competent authorities, even Russia is overpopulated. The short northern summer severely limits the size of crops and the long northern winter severely limits the number of animals that can be kept alive on stored-up fodder. And over the greater part of the country precipitation is low and irregular. In these circumstances even a low population density may be excessive. And the birth-rate is high, modern hygiene and medicine are prolonging the expectation of life, numbers are rapidly increasing. But meanwhile new methods of arctic agriculture have been devised; ambitious schemes of irrigating Central Asia are under study; and, having abolished the laws of "reactionary genetics", Lysenko promises a revolution in plant-breeding. Will the tundras, the deserts, and ideologically correct science be able to feed and clothe the 250 million who will inhabit the USSR in 1970? Let us hope so; for the alternative is a crusade for more lebensraum.

Since 1800 Western Europe has more than trebled its population. This huge increase was made possibly by elementary hygiene and the exploitation of the virgin territories of the New World. Today hygiene and medicine are keeping more Europeans alive; but the New World has a large and rapidly increasing population of its own and, after more than a century of abuse, not a little of its soil has lost or is in process of losing its fertility. In a good year there is still a very large exportable surplus. But not every season is a good season. During the lean years of the thirties, the United States had very little to sell abroad. And here we may remark that the success of the Marshall Plan and, indeed, the whole outcome of the Cold War depend, among other things, on the weather. Consider this by no means impossible contingency: for three years in succession Russia has bumper wheat crops, while the harvests of Western Europe, North America, Australia, and the Argentine are ruined by drought or excessive rains. In these circumstances, who will control the world—the people with the atomic bombs, or the people with bread? Obviously, the people with bread.

Up to the present, Western Europe has contrived to pay for the food imported from the New World by selling manufactured articles and technical services. With the industrialization of the New World, these are becoming less and less acceptable. Europe will find it increasingly difficult to pay for supplies which, as the population pressure on the New World's eroded soils increases, are bound to diminish. And this will happen at a time when Asia, newly industrialized and overcrowded as never before, will be desperately competing for whatever surpluses of food the New World can still make available to the Old.

Food is a renewable commodity. If the soil is not abused, this year's harvest will be succeeded next year by another harvest no less bountiful. But the vein of tin or copper, which was the source of this year's supply of ore, will not be renewed in years to come. When the lode has been worked out, the miner must move on to another deposit of the mineral. And if he can find no other deposits? Apres moi le deluge. Industrialism is the systematic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the things we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation. Such prosperity as we have known up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.

How long can the accelerating dissipation of capital go on? How soon will the wasting assets of the world be exhausted? We do not know. All that is certain is that the supplies of many hitherto essential commodities are limited and that, in many places, very rich and easily available deposits of those commodities have been, or are in the process of being, worked out. And this is happening at a time when a rising population with steadily improving methods of production is calling for ever-increasing quantities of consumer goods—in other words, is making ever heavier demands on the limited reserves of our planetary capital.

Up to this point, I have dealt with world population as a single undifferentiated whole. The problem thus posed is that of increasing pressure upon diminishing resources. But this basic problem of our time is deepened and complicated by the fact that rates of increase are not uniform throughout the world's population. Differential birth-rates as between the various peoples of the earth, and as between classes within a people, are rapidly engendering a host of new problems.

In Western Europe and North America, the over-all birth-rate has sharply declined in the course of the last fifty or sixty years. Because of the lowered death-rate and the relatively large numbers of persons within the reproductive age-groups, this decline in the birth-rate has not yet manifested itself in a net decline of population. But the onset of such a decline is close at hand. For example, by 1970 the population of France and Great Britain will have declined by about four million apiece, and the number of persons over sixty-five will be approximately equal to the number of those under fifteen. Similar declines are due, at a slightly later date, in the other countries of Western Europe and in the New World (except South America). Meanwhile, in spite of much higher death-rates, the population of Eastern Europe and of Asia is destined to go on increasing. By the end of the present century, Asia alone will have a population of about two billion. And in 1970, when Western Europe will have some nine million fewer inhabitants than it possesses today, Russia will have gained upwards of fifty million.

Within any nation whose birth-rate is declining, there is a tendency for the decline to be most rapid among the most accomplished and gifted members of the population, least rapid among those whose hereditary and educational endowment is the lowest. The higher the Intelligence Quotient and the level of education, the smaller the family; and vice versa. The future population of Western Europe and North America will be constituted, in the main, by the descendants of the least intelligent persons now living in those areas. Among the lower animals, biological degeneration, involving the heritable qualities of whole populations, is a slow and gradual process. But human beings differ from other animals in possessing self-consciousness and a measure of free will, and in being the inhabitants of a man-made universe within the greater natural order. Reacting to what goes on in this man-made universe, they use their free will to modify their basic patterns of animal behavior. And when the nature of the human universe is such as to discourage individuals from reproducing their kind, the deterioration of entire societies comes about with an almost explosive rapidity. Thus an eminent English authority, Sir Cyril Burt,2 foresees that by the end of the present century, there will be, in Great Britain, half as many children of

scholarship ability as there are at present, and twice as many defectives; while the average intelligence of the population as a whole will have declined by five IQ points. And the case of Britain is not unique. Throughout Western Europe, and, a little later, in North America, the decline in numbers is destined to be accompanied by a rapid deterioration in the quality of the population.

We have now to consider the ways in which these untoward biological happenings have affected, or are likely in the future to affect, our behavior on the levels of domestic and international politics.

The nature of the low-level crisis is such that it must necessarily take a very long time to remove its underlying causes. The best we can do is to palliate the more dangerous symptoms and to draw up plans for a genuinely etiological treatment.

Differential birth-rates within any national community lead, as we have seen, to a qualitative deterioration of the population as a whole. The effects of such a deterioration have not yet made themselves felt, and it is hard to foresee in detail what they will be. We must be content merely to pose a question. Is it possible for democratic institutions to flourish in a community in which the incidence of outstanding ability is falling, while that of mental defect is rising? Fifty years from now our grandchildren will know the answer. In the interval it will be necessary to develop new types of training designed to get the best out of worsening human material and to find means for inducing the congenitally gifted to reproduce their kind.

Where the birth-rate of an entire nation declines sharply, while that of its neighbors remains high, we must expect, in the world as it is now constituted, a more or less serious threat to peace. Regardless of what faiths may currently be professed, the real and effective religion of twentieth-century man is nationalistic idolatry. Nominally we may be Christians or Buddhists or Hindus or Moslems or Jews; but in actual fact we worship, not one God, but fifty or sixty godlets, each of whom is, by definition, the enemy, actual or potential, of all the rest. In every country where there is no established church, the only religion taught in the public schools is some local variant of Shintoism—a saluting of flags, a cult of the State and, very often, of the men who control its machinery, a glorification of the national prowess, as set forth in the official history books. Entities which are the accidental and transient products of history are treated as -though they were divine, as though they embodied principles of eternal and universal validity. From childhood the citizen is taught that his highest duty is to work for the greater glory of the local idol. But since this glory is expressed mainly in terms of political and military power, it follows that no individual can do his nationalistic duty without inflicting harm on some at least of his fellow men. In the context of nationalistic idolatry, any shift in the balance of power constitutes a temptation to wage war, aggressive on the part of those nations which are becoming stronger, defensive or preventive on the part of those whose situation is changing for the worse. Such a shift will take place wherever the birth-rates of two equally industrialized nations change in such a way that one has an increasing and predominantly youthful population, while the other has a population that is growing smaller, older, and perhaps also less intelligent.

Populations increase and decrease relatively not only to one another, but also to natural resources. In most parts of the world, as we have seen, the relation between population and resources is already unfavorable and will probably become even more unfavorable in the future. This growing poverty in the midst of growing poverty constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty. For overpopulation is not compatible with freedom. An unfavorable relationship between numbers and resources tends to make the earning of a living almost intolerably difficult. Labor is more abundant than goods, and the individual is compelled to work long hours for little pay. No surplus of accumulated purchasing power stands between him and the tyrannies of unfriendly nature or of the equally unfriendly wielders of political and economic power. Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say No to the boss. But a man cannot say No to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss's favor has been withdrawn. And he cannot be certain of his next meal unless he owns the means of producing enough wealth for his family to live on, or has been able to accumulate a surplus out of past wages, or has a chance of moving away to virgin territories, where he can make a fresh start. In an overcrowded country, very few people own enough to make them financially independent; very few are in a position to accumulate purchasing power; and there is no free land. Moreover, in any country where population presses hard upon natural resources, the general economic situation is apt to be so precarious that government control of capital and labor, production and consumption, becomes inevitable. It is no accident that the twentieth century should be the century of highly centralized governments and totalitarian dictatorships; it had to be so for the simple reason that the twentieth century is the century of planetary overcrowding. It is childish to imagine that we can "plant democratic institutions" in India, or China, or "teach the Germans to take their place among the democratic nations of the world." So long as the relationship between population and natural resources remains as hopelessly unfavorable as it now is throughout Asia and in the greater part of Europe, above all in defeated Germany, it will be for all practical purposes impossible for democratic institutions to take root and develop. Wherever Malthus's nightmare has come true, political institutions tend inevitably towards totalitarianism. In Western Europe, where the tradition of democracy is still strong, the new totalitarianism will be for some time benevolent and humane. It remains to be seen how long it will be before their almost absolute power corrupts the politicians who wield it.

In the political field, the greatest enemy to liberty is war. That is why, from time immemorial, all tyrants have been so fond of war, or at least of the preparation for war. Universal military conscription puts every individual at the mercy of the central government. An aggressive foreign policy evokes reactions in kind, and these reactions are then used as an excuse for more militarism and a further curtailment of civil and personal liberties. Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism. Meanwhile, the danger of war is made a pretext for a policy, not of reducing, but actually increasing the birth-rate—a policy which was vigorously pursued by Hitler and Mussolini and is being even more vigorously pursued today by the rulers of Soviet Russia. More babies means more cannon fodder, more colonists for conquered territories, and also more misery, more need for centralized "planning" and more power for the political bosses, less liberty for the masses. Overcrowding and militarism are the guarantees of dictatorship.

In our days war on any considerable scale can be waged only by a highly industrialized nation. There can be no successful aggression without the copious and complicated armaments which are the modern means of aggressions. Lacking these means, the people of an overpopulated country are confronted with only two alternatives. They can either stop breeding, and so reduce the population. Or else they can go on breeding until famine, disease, political unrest, and civil war combine to raise the death-rate to the point where a decreased population can re-establish a favorable relationship with natural resources. But some overpopulated countries are also industrialized; and for these there is a third alternative: to enslave or exterminate their neighbors, and so acquire more land, food, raw materials, and markets.

It should be added that, though they cannot themselves wage large-scale war, industrially weak nations can provoke and assist in the waging of war by industrially powerful nations. An unfavorable relationship between numbers and resources is experienced, by the less fortunate citizens of overpopulated nations, as chronic hunger, low wages, long hours, lack of freedom, and opportunity. The resulting discontent is apt to be expressed in political unrest and revolt against constituted authority. At the present time all political unrest, whatever its cause, tends to be rationalized in terms of Communist theory and organized in terms of Communist power politics. But at this moment of history Communism is, among other things, the instrument of Russian nationalism, and Russia is an industrialized country, capable of waging large-scale war and committed in advance to a permanent crusade against the West.

Let us consider a concrete example. Throughout Asia a misery, whose basic cause is the unfavorable relation between numbers and resources, finds its expression in political unrest. Canalized by professional Communists, this unrest may be expected to result in the setting up of governments which will do everything in their power to aid Russia and to thwart the plans of the Western Powers. Merely by withholding essential raw materials, a communist Asia could delay or even completely prevent European recovery. The West would then find itself confronted by the alternatives of surrender or preventive war. Thus we see that the overpopulation even of industrially feeble nations may constitute a grave threat to world peace.

In the world as we know it nation A will collaborate wholeheartedly with nation B only when both are menaced by C. During a war that is being waged to preserve their national sovereignty, a group of allies will consent to sacrifice a part of that sovereignty for the sake of victory. But as soon as victory has been achieved, the allied nations return to their normal condition of more or less hostile symbiosis, ready, however, to collaborate again, either with the same or with some other partners against the same or another enemy.

On the international level, union here is always the product of disunion somewhere else; there is no unrestricted mutual aid except against a third party. Hence the old despairing jest to the effect that those who desire peace on earth should pray for an invasion from Mars. But, fortunately in one respect, unfortunately in another, we do not have to wait for an attack across interplanetary space. Man is his own Martian, at war against himself. Overbreeding and extractive agriculture are his weapons and, though he may not know it, his war aims are the ravaging of his planet, the destruction of civilization, and the degradation of his species.

That the nations have not yet united against this common enemy within their own ranks is due partly to the distracting influence of nationalistic idolatry, partly to ignorance, and partly to men's habit of thinking about the problem in wholly inappropriate terms. Time, energy, and money that could be better spent are everywhere devoted to power and politics and preparations for war. And meanwhile, throughout the more fortunate regions of the earth, most persons are still unaware of the fact that the general condition of mankind is one of poverty in the midst of growing poverty; and in the less fortunate regions, where the harsh facts are inescapable, there is a tendency to believe that the remedy for such poverty is a violent and radical change of government. The inhabitants of countries, in which there is an unfavorable relationship between numbers and resources, can easily be persuaded that the causes of their misery are political and that, as soon as their present rulers are replaced by others trained in Moscow, all will be well. But one-party government is no cure for overpopulation, and the collectivization of agriculture will not increase the area of productive land.

It has been fashionable for a long time past to maintain that the reformer's primary concern is with questions of ownership and distribution. And, in effect, distribution is often inefficient and unfair, and there can be no moral or utilitarian justification for that outright and irresponsible ownership of land which permits a man to withhold or destroy at his pleasure the natural resources upon which the life of a whole society depends.

We need a new system of money that will deliver us from servitude to the banks and permit people to buy what they are able to produce; and we need a new system of ownership that will check the tendency towards monopoly in land and make it impossible for individuals to lay waste the planetary resources which belong to all mankind. But changes in social and economic organization are not enough, of themselves, to solve our problem. Production is inadequate to present population, and population, over large areas, is rapidly rising. A change in the laws governing the ownership of land will not change its quantity or quality. The equitable distribution of too little may satisfy men's desire for justice; it will not stay their hunger. In a world where population is growing at the rate of about fifty-six thousand a day, and where erosion is daily ruining an equal or perhaps greater number of productive acres, our primary concern must be with reducing numbers and producing more food with less damage to the soil.

Sooner or later mankind will be forced by the pressure of circumstances to take concerted action against its own destructive and suicidal tendencies. The longer such action is postponed, the worse it will be for all concerned. To delay is to risk the spread and intensification of misery, to invite revolution, war, and tyranny. But if we start at once to resolve the low-level crisis, there is at least a chance that we may escape the most disastrous consequences of nationalistic idolatry and power politics.

The history of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Organization proves conclusively that, on the basis of nationalistic idolatry and power politics, there cannot possibly be co-operation between all the world's sovereign states; there can only be co-operation of one group against another group. Overpopulation and erosion constitute a Martian invasion of the planet. Against this invasion the alliance can be worldwide and the fight can be waged without war. This is the first reason why the low-level crisis should take its place at the top of the agenda of every international conference.

Here is another reason. There is nobody who does not wish to have enough to eat. In the face of this universal agreement any government which for merely political or ideological reasons, refuses to join the crusade against the Martian in our midst is likely to become exceedingly unpopular.

A third good reason is to be found in the fact that this crusade is mainly a technological affair. Differences of opinion over technological problems rarely result in bloodshed; differences of opinion over political and ideological problems have been the cause of uncounted murders, feuds, wars, and revolutions. Here violence is in direct proportion to ignorance. About technological problems we either know enough already, or if we do not, we know how to set about acquiring the necessary knowledge. But where politics and ideologies are concerned the case is very different. For example, nobody knows enough to be able to decide whether a certain theory of history is true or false or meaningless. And nobody knows enough to be able to say which among all the possible alternatives is the form of government best suited to human societies. In regard to the theory of history it seems very unlikely that the necessary knowledge will ever be accumulated. And in regard to any given form of government, knowledge can come only with the passage of time. Future events in the material universe can, to some extent, be foreseen; but our ability to predict psychological events is practically non-existent. How will our children and grandchildren react to forms of organizations which, to ourselves, seem the last word in beneficent efficiency? Will they like what we like, or will they detest it? Will an arrangement which works well enough for us, work equally well for them? We do not and we cannot know. That is why we must never take the practical application of a principle as seriously as the principle which is being applied. Thus, we may take very seriously the principle that the State exists in order to make possible the development of individuals as free and responsible persons. But we must not take too seriously any particular plan for applying that principle in political and economic practice. The mere passage of time may demonstrate the unsoundness of any particular application of first principles. To treat political expedients as though they were sacred and inviolable is to commit an idolatry that can only result in totalitarian coercion. Thus, in our ignorance, we do not know whether the Webbs were right in advocating centralized planning as the best means to the desired end, or whether Belloc was right in warning us against the evils of the Servile State. Time alone will show; and when it begins to show, we must be ready, in the name of our principles, to modify the policy which, in our ignorance, we once regarded as the most effective application of those principles. Unfortunately there are very many persons to whom the admission of ignorance is intolerable. Laying claim to certainty in spheres where certainty is impossible, to infallibility concerning matters where even a Pope admits that he can err, they rationalize faith, passion, and self-interest into a simulacrum of knowledge. Hence the wars, the revolutions, the tyrannies, the wholesale enslavement of political heretics. A pseudo-knowledge compounded of faith, passion, and self-interest cannot convince doubters or the exponents of another system of pseudo-knowledge, except by force. Real knowledge is based upon observation and experiment; and those who possess such knowledge are always able to appeal to facts and the tested rules of scientific procedure. In the technological sphere there can be unforced agreement and persuasion without resort to threats or open violence. We should therefore give approval to any international project which may distract the attention of the world's rulers from the insoluble and war-provoking problems of power politics in order to focus it upon problems which, being technological, admit of some solution and do not necessarily commit all those concerned to fratricide and self-destruction. And in the case of a project which cannot be delayed except at grave risk to the entire human species, our approval should be wholehearted and enthusiastic.

That the Russians have been "winning the peace" is due, at least in part, to the fact that they profess and teach, as absolutely true, a clear-cut philosophy of man and nature. This philosophy permits them to predict the future and to affirm (with a confidence which, though unjustified and baseless, is none the less deeply impressive) that, if a certain kind of political and economic revolution is made, general well-being will inevitably follow. In the West we neither impose, nor have we voluntarily accepted, any coherent conception of the world; we lay no claims to understand History from the inside; we do not profess to know in advance what is going to happen fifty or a hundred years from now; and when we are called upon to frame world policies, we find it easier, because of our lack of a philosophy, to be against the Russians than to be for anything which the great masses of suffering humanity are likely to find either plausible or attractive. The Western refusal to assert an infallibility or to impose an orthodoxy is something of which we need not be ashamed. Less creditable, however, is the fact that we have failed to develop a generally acceptable philosophy for ourselves and for those whom we would like to draw to our side; and still more discreditable is our failure to formulate any policy sensible and beneficent enough to seem more attractive than the policies of Communism. The nearest approach to such a positive policy was the Marshall Plan. But the Marshall Plan has now (1949) been overlaid by military alliance, and military alliances seem attractive only to those immediately involved and (in view of the past history of military alliances) not wildly attractive even to them.

The positive, realistic, and universally attractive policy of which the Western Powers are so desperately in need can easily be found. It is a policy aimed at palliating the effects and removing the causes of that low-level crisis through which the entire human species is passing. If the Russians are willing to co-operate in the framing and carrying out of this policy, so much the better. If they refuse and the Cold War is to persist, this policy can be made into a powerful diplomatic and propagandist weapon in the hands of the democracies. Its adoption will not, of course, guarantee peace in our time; but it may perhaps decrease the probabilities of war in the immediate and, still more, in the remoter future. Let us consider in detail the lines along which our policy should be framed.

The world's economic and political crisis has its origin, at least in part, in the underlying demographical crisis. In most countries the relationship between numbers and resources is unfavorable. Nature has her own methods for re-establishing a favorable balance; but, applied to human beings living under twentieth-century conditions, such methods involve not merely intense and widespread misery, but also the gravest threat to civilization. Stated in its most general terms, the problem is to reconcile biological facts with human values.

Our first task is to create a general awareness of the danger. At every opportunity we must insist upon the fact that man is his own Martian, that the invasion of the planet is already underway, and that fresh cohorts are constantly arriving to swell the ranks simultaneously of the enemy and of his victims. At the same time we have to proclaim no less insistently that the miseries resulting from this Martian invasion cannot be removed by any revolution, however radical. Overpopulation and erosion do their destructive work on a plane which is not that of politics. A concerted attempt to cope with events on the demographical and agricultural plane may indirectly exercise a salutary effect upon international politics. But an attempt to impose one kind of political system upon all peoples will do nothing whatever to resolve the low-level crisis, but on the contrary will prevent men from doing anything about it and thereby increase the sum and intensity of preventable misery. The low-level crisis can be resolved in only two ways—by controlling world population and by increasing food production, while restoring and preserving the earth's fertility.

Man cannot live by bread alone; but still less can he live exclusively by idealism. To talk about the Rights of Man and the Four Freedoms in connection, for example, with India is merely a cruel joke. In a country where two-thirds of the people succumb to the consequences of malnutrition before they reach the age of thirty, but where, none the less, the population increases by fifty million every decade, most men possess neither rights nor any kind of freedom. The "giant misery of the world" is only aggravated by mass violence and cannot be mitigated by inspirational twaddle. Misery will yield only to an intelligent attack upon the causes of misery.

It is, of course, a great deal easier to talk about a world population policy than it is to get such a policy accepted by the various national governments; and it will be easier to get the policy accepted than to get it implemented. Moreover, even if it should, by some miracle, come to be accepted and implemented immediately, the beneficent results could not, in the nature of things, be apparent for several generations. Let us elaborate a little on this depressing theme.

So long as idolatrous nationalism remains the effective religion of mankind, and so long as it is taken for granted that war is right, proper and inevitable, no government of a country with a high birth-rate will pledge itself to the reduction of that rate; and no government of a country with a low birth-rate will forgo in advance the privilege of trying to increase that rate with a view to increasing the size of its armed forces.

Assuming now, for the sake of argument, that, in spite of nationalism and militarism, a world population policy should be agreed upon, how easy would it be to get that policy implemented? The answer is that, in the countries where its immediate implementation would be most desirable, it would be exceedingly difficult, indeed almost impossible, to do so. For a variety of reasons, material and psychological, birth control cannot be practiced by persons whose standard of living falls below a level which, for the great majority of Asiatics and even of Eastern Europeans, is unattainably high. To obtain any conscious or deliberate reduction of the high birth-rates prevailing in the East would be a task requiring many years of education and technological advance.

Finally, even if a substantial cut in the present high birth-rates of the world were to be agreed upon and successfully implemented tomorrow, the number of persons in the reproductive age-groups is at present so large that, despite the reduced birth-rate, over-all population would continue to increase until at least the end of the present century. In the most favorable circumstances we can reasonably imagine, world population is bound to rise to at least three billion before it starts to decline. This means that, whatever happens, the next half-century will be a time of the gravest political and economic danger. If a world population policy should be agreed upon and implemented in the near future, this danger may be expected to grow less acute after about the year 2000. If no such policy is adopted, the crisis is likely, unless something startlingly good or something startlingly bad should happen in the interval, to persist for many years thereafter. So far as we can now judge, the human situation is likely to be more than ordinarily difficult and precarious for at least two generations, and perhaps for much longer. The sooner we can get a reasonable population policy adopted and implemented, the shorter will be the period of special danger through which, it would seem, mankind must inevitably pass.

Here a brief parenthesis is in order. In this matter of population we are on the horns of a dilemma. For what is good for us in one way, is bad in another; and what is bad in one way, in another is good. Biologically and historically speaking, the large family is more normal than the small. A woman who has borne five or six children is "nearer to nature" than one who has artificially restricted the number to one or two. In countries where the birth-rate is sharply declining, there has been, during the last forty years, a marked increase in the incidence of neurosis and even insanity. In part this increase is attributable to the industrialization and urbanization with which, in modern times, a falling birth-rate has always been associated; in part, to the fact that birth control has created patterns of sexual and familial life which are in some way profoundly unsatisfactory to adults and children alike. Wherever biologically normal behavior has been sacrificed to modern civilization, we tend to become maladjusted and unbalanced. But wherever biologically normal behavior patterns have not been sacrificed to modern civilization, we find ourselves growing hungrier, less free, and in acute danger of being involved in war and revolution. On which of these two horns shall we choose to be impaled? To my mind, the first is the lesser evil. Overpopulation, with its accompaniments of extractive agriculture, tyranny, and mass murder, can cause irreparable disasters. Of the bad psychological consequences of birth control some perhaps may yield to appropriate medication, others may be prevented, by appropriate social arrangements, from ever arising. Departure from biologically normal behavior is always dangerous; but the dangers involved in birth control are not so great as those which arise when individuals retain their natural breeding habits in a world where hygiene, insecticides, antibiotics, and false teeth have radically changed their natural dying habits. If we interfere with the forces that bring death, we must also interfere with those that bring life. Otherwise we shall have overpopulation, an unfavorable relationship between man and his environment, wholesale destruction of planetary resources, hunger, revolution, war, and wholesale extermination. Given sewage systems, aureomycin, and plastic dentures, contraception becomes a necessity and the adoption of a world population policy a matter of the most urgent importance. Unfortunately, as we have seen, a world population policy cannot be expected to show results for many years to come. But while we are waiting for it to take effect we can set to work immediately on the task of checking erosion, preserving the fertility of the soil, and increasing the production of food.

At the present time most nations are quite incapable of undertaking this task single-handed. They live from hand to mouth; and the mouth is forever growing larger, the hand, as it desperately tries to extract more food from the limited area of exhausted soil, becomes increasingly destructive. For these nations there is no margin of time, or land, or resources. Everything, and more than everything that their territory can produce has to be used up now. Future fertility must be sacrificed to present hunger. In a country where population presses heavily upon resources self-preservation results in self-destruction.

If the Western Powers had a positive instead of a mainly negative international policy, they would come forward with a plan to check this rake’s progress towards human and planetary bankruptcy. Or rather they would come forward with several plans. First, a plan to repair the damage already done to the earth's cultivated lands; second, a plan to replace destructive methods more in harmony with the laws of nature; and, third, a plan to discover and develop new sources of supply.

The cost of carrying out the first two plans would be high—though certainly no higher than the cost of preparing to win the Third World War and crush the First World Revolution. It would be high because, in order to give eroded land a chance to recover its fertility, it would be necessary for a period of years to relieve the pressure imposed upon it by an excessive population. In other words, it would be necessary to provide overcrowded countries with an amount of food equal to the difference between what they might have extracted from the soil by ruinous exploitation and what, under the plan, they are able to extract, while checking erosion and preparing the shift to better agricultural methods. It would also be necessary to subsidize the migration to safer areas of those persons now living on specially vulnerable watersheds. Additional funds would have to be found for supplying experts to technologically backward countries, for training nationals of those countries in sound agriculture and the theory and practice of conservation, and for undertaking a world-wide survey of soils, climates, and natural resources.

The third plan would be in the nature of a vast international project for research and experimentation. To men of science and technicians recruited from every part of the world would be assigned the task of discovering new ways, not of murdering their fellows, but of feeding and clothing them. Let us consider a few of the more obvious possibilities that will have to be explored.

Large areas of the earth’s surface are uninhabited because, under present conditions, they are uninhabitable. But in some of these areas the expenditure of much capital and hard work might render the land productive. At present the development of deserts, tundras, and tropical forests is prohibitively costly; but as population rises and the demand for food and fibers yet further out-strips supply, what is now uneconomic may come to be a "business proposition." It will be the business of our hypothetical board of experts to decide which areas are to be developed, when the development shall take place, and at what expenditure of international funds.

It is desirable that the world's total food supply should be increased, and increased in any way whatsoever. But let us always remember that, from a political point of view, the most satisfactory kind of increase is one which does not involve a natural monopoly by specially favored nations. In the context of nationalism, a natural monopoly in food surpluses can become an instrument by means of which one nation, or group of nations, may coerce other nations less fortunate than themselves. Ideally, the world's food supply should be increased in such a way that the increase shall not strengthen existing natural monopolies, or create new ones, but shall permit every nation to live on supplies grown on its own land or coming from sources equally available to all mankind. Under existing circumstances, international trade is as much of a curse as a blessing. It will become an unmitigated blessing only when nationalistic idolatry shall have ceased to be the effective religion of mankind.

Meanwhile we should do everything in our power to foster national, or at least regional, self-sufficiency in the prime necessities of existence. A step in this direction would be taken if we could develop means for getting more food from the sea. At the present time most of the seas in the neighborhood of densely populated areas are being over-fished. More effort has to be put forth in order to obtain a diminishing harvest of fish—and this at a time when we need more food to satisfy the growing population. Can the oceans be made to yield new sources of supply? Can sea-weeds be processed into fodder and manure? What about plankton? What about the enclosure and fertilizing of landlocked bays and inlets?

But some countries have no access to the sea. Even salt water is a natural monopoly. Our international board of researchers must consider yet other ways of achieving regional self-sufficiency. What about the transformation of poor land into productive fish-ponds? What about the cultivation of fresh-water algae for fodder? What about the conversion of sawdust and vegetable wastes into sugar solutions for the cultivation of edible yeasts? And the bacteria with their tremendous capacity for bringing about chemical transformations—can any of these be domesticated and set to work producing food for man?

Natural monopolies in minerals are perhaps even more dangerous, politically speaking, than natural monopolies in food surpluses. When located in the territory of a strong nation with a culture orientated towards aggressive enterprise, deposits of coal, petroleum and the metals necessary to heavy industry are a standing temptation to imperialist expansion. When located in the territory of a weak nation, they are a standing invitation to aggression from abroad. Research should be systematically directed to the development of universally available surrogates for the present sources of power and industrial production—or example, wind-power and sun-power, in combination with an efficient storage battery, as a supplement and partial substitute for power derived from coal and petroleum; glass, plastics, light metals derived from clay and sea-water as partial substitutes for the capriciously distributed minerals upon which industry at present depends. By these means we might perhaps succeed in breaking the natural monopolies which are so politically dangerous; and at the same time we should be doing something to shift our industrial civilization from its precarious basis in the exploitation of rapidly wasting assets to a more secure, a more nearly permanent foundation.

We now come to the henceforth inescapable fact of nuclear fission. For us the question is simple: how can nuclear fission help us in resolving the low-level crisis? In the immediate future its greatest contribution will probably be made in the field of genetics. By exposing seeds to the gamma rays emanating from an atomic pile, we can produce large numbers of unprecedented mutations. The overwhelming majority of these mutations will be harmful; but a few may result in varieties not merely viable, but even economically useful—varieties yielding more of this or that food element, varieties capable of maturing under climatic conditions which would be fatal to the parent strain, varieties resistant to certain diseases and parasites, and so forth.

Theoretically and ideally, nuclear fission should provide cheap power for developing territories too arid, or too cold, or too rugged, or too remote from the conventional sources of power to be worth exploiting under present conditions. In practice, however, atomic power is likely to remain for some time to come a very expensive luxury. Twenty years from now it may be that the dream of almost costless power will have been realized. It will be none too soon; for 20 years from now the planet will have to support a population greater by 400 million than its population today. And meanwhile every lunatic in a position of power, ever fanatic, every idealist, every patriot will be under chronic temptation to use the new source of energy for political purposes, in a war of aggression, or prevention, or defense. To purchase advantages which, in the short and middle run, are not likely to be very great, we must run risks so enormous as to be incommensurable with a conceivable gain. One is reminded of Pascal's wager. We are betting on a strictly finite good against the far from remote possibility of an evil that, for practical purposes, may be regarded as infinite.

In a world where nationalism is axiomatic and where the differences between politico-religious ideologies are as irreconcilable as they were in the days of the Crusades, an international project for the relief of hunger and the conservation of our planetary resources seems to offer the best and perhaps the only hope for peace and international co-operation. At this point, the sponsors of world federation will object that our project cannot be carried out except by a world government. Political union, they will say, must come first; economic and technological collaboration will then follow as a matter of course. But at the present time, unfortunately, the governments of most nations do not want union. Or, to be more accurate, they want union, but do not want the means to union. For the means to political union entail immediate sacrifices which it would not be pleasant to make. For example, in a politically federated Europe many local industries, which have been fostered and protected by national tariffs, would prove to be redundant and would either have to be suppressed by government fiat, or would find themselves ruined by the competition of industries more efficiently managed or more favorably situated in relation to raw materials and markets. The suppression of redundant industries would cause much hardship among owners, managers, and workers alike. And this is only one of the costs of political union. Enormous advantages in the long run can be secured only by a number of rather painful sacrifices in the short run. Political union can be imposed by force, under a military dictatorship; or under the pressure of circumstances. During periods of "normalcy" the political union of sovereign, democratic states is much harder to achieve. Men and women will not vote for a policy which entails the immediate loss of their jobs and a disturbing change in their habits. As a general rule, it is only in times of crisis that people are willing to make sacrifices now for the sake of a good in the future. All the higher religions are, among other things, devices for convincing human beings that their every moment is a moment of crisis, involving matters of spiritual life and death, and that therefore it is reasonable as well as right to make certain sacrifices. On quite another level every moment in the life of human beings on an overcrowded and eroding planet is also a moment of crisis. To explain the nature of man's Martian aggression against himself and to convince the masses of the necessity of concerted action against the invasion should not be too difficult, all the more so as the immediate sacrifices involved will not be excessive and the advantages to be expected in the long and middle run are so concrete, evident, and appealing. Once established, this primarily technological alliance against the Martian forces of overpopulation and erosion can be expected to develop into a political and economic collaboration which, in its turn, may prove to be the precursor of genuine world federation under a single authority. If, in the meantime, federation can be achieved by purely political means, so much the better. It does not matter which comes first, the political chicken or the technological egg. What is important is that, in some way or other, we should get both, and get them with the least possible delay.

And meanwhile we may hope that the habit of collaboration upon a project that so obviously concerns the whole of mankind may do something to undermine, among rulers as well as ruled, that nationalistic idolatry which is the prime political cause of all our high-level crises. Nationalism is an artificial thing, but an artificial thing which has its roots in the individual’s quasi-instinctive attachment to the environment of his childhood—to a place, to a dietary, to a set of habits, customs, and conventions, to a language and the people who speak that language. Such local patriotism is found on the sub-human level. Birds, for example, will fight for their territory; the sentries at the entrance to a hive will attack and kill any bee belonging to another swarm. The first is an example of rugged individualism—"an Englishman’s home is his castle"; the second, of collective xenophobia—"every Western visitor is a classenemy of the USSR." Among human beings, tribal sentiment is the nearest approach to a natural and unsophisticated expression of the quasi-instinct of local patriotism. Tribes have now given place to nations; and this has happened because rulers found that it was possible, by means of suitable education and propaganda, to transfer the quasi-instinctive sentiment of tribalism from its natural object to a new, artificial object—the nation. The home place and the home people can be touched, seen, directly experienced. It is therefore possible for a man to love them in an almost physiological way. The nation is too large to be an object of immediate acquaintance and, for any given individual within the nation, is hardly more than an abstraction. But the abstraction can be symbolically represented by an object (the flag), by a person (the king, the leader), by a tune and a form of words (the Star-spangled Banner, the Internationale). These symbolic representations can be immediately experienced and loved, not merely with the head, but also with the heart, the yearning bowels. It is by means of symbols that men and women have been educated out of tribal patriotism and into nationalistic idolatry. And symbols, no doubt, will be used when the moment comes to educate them out of nationalistic idolatry and into world-patriotism. In Western Europe it took several centuries for capitalistic thought patterns to replace the thought patterns of feudal society. How many years will pass before humanity at large can be made to forget the nationalistic axioms on which so much of its current thinking and feeling is based and to accept in their place the axioms of a non-nationalistic system? Anyone who would hazard a guess must take into account two facts: first, that we have more effective instruments of propaganda and instruction than were possessed by our ancestors; but, second, that man’s lifespan is three-score years and ten, that we find it hard to change the thought patterns formed in our childhood, and that all governments are at present engaged in implanting nationalistic thought patterns in the minds of their subjects, young and old alike. As soon as we and our rulers desire it, modern methods of propaganda can be used to effect a change of thought patterns within a single lifetime. Meanwhile nationalistic idolatry is likely to remain the religion for which men will lay down their lives in wars which, but for that religion, would never have been declared.

On the ideological level, the best antidote to nationalistic idolatry is a monotheism with its corollary (since God's fatherhood implies men's brotherhood) of monoanthropism. At present we have pentakosiotheism and as many varieties of mutually hostile humans as there are of Heinz’s soups and pickles. That any system of monotheism will come, in the near future, to be generally accepted seems very unlikely. But it should not be impossible to secure the wide and immediate acceptance of a form of what may be called cosmic ethics; and this, perhaps, might serve as a basis for a future monotheism. At present men think and act as though they had no duties towards Nature. The Catholic Church, for example, officially teaches that sub-human lives may be treated as though they were things. But to any realistic observer it is surely obvious that not only do we have no right to treat living beings as things; we have no right to treat even things as mere things. Things must be treated as though they were parts of a complex and beautifully co-ordinated living organism. We are beginning to discover that to treat them in any other way may be to condemn the whole human experiment to failure. The Golden Rule is to be applied to animate and inanimate Nature as well as to our fellow men. Treat Nature with charity and understanding, and Nature will repay you with unfailing gifts. Treat Nature aggressively, with greed and violence and incomprehension: wounded Nature will turn and destroy you. Theoretically, at least, the ancients understood these truths better than ourselves. The Greeks, for example, knew very well that hubris against the essentially divine order of Nature would be followed by its appropriate nemesis. The Chinese taught that the Tao, or indwelling Logos, was present on every level from the physical and the biological up to the spiritual; and they knew that outrages against Tao, in Nature no less than in man, would lead to fatal results. We have to recapture some of this old lost wisdom. If we fail to do this—if, presumptuously imagining that we can "conquer" Nature, we continue to live on our planet like a swarm of destructive parasites—we condemn ourselves and our children to misery and deepening squalor and the despair that finds expression in the frenzies of collective violence.

[Themes and Variations, 1950]

Footnote

7. Sir Cyril Burt (1883-1971). English psychologist.

A Case for ESP, PK» and Psi

MRS. A. woke up one morning during the war—the morning of November 18—sobbing, "Jack is dead.” Jack was her son, a soldier. Her husband, unable to calm her, called the family physician, who gave her a sedative. On the morning of November 23, Mrs. A. again woke up crying. Again her husband was unable to calm her, and again the doctor prescribed a sedative. This time he also advised a psychiatrist. Before Mr. A. got to a psychiatrist, he and his wife received a letter Jack had written on November 15, saying that he was well. Mrs. A. still insisted that the boy was dead. That evening a telegram was delivered, reporting Jack’s death on November 17 in Hawaii. Mrs. A. said, "I knew it all the time, but you wouldn't believe me."

Here is another story, less tragic, but, if anything, even odder. An English lady, Mrs. Aday, the wife of the then Bishop of Heresford, dreamed one night that after reading the family morning prayers, she went into the dining room and saw an enormous pig between the table and the sideboard. The dream amused her and she told it, before prayers, to her children and their governess. After prayers she opened the dining room door and there was a pig exactly where she had dreamed it was. It had escaped from its sty while prayers were being read.

The first of these anecdotes is cited by Dr. Louisa Rhine in The Journal of Parapsychology; the second one is told in the eleventh volume of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Both have been vouched for by reliable witnesses, and there seems to be no good reason for doubting that the events actually occurred. How are they to be explained?

One answer, of course, is pure "coincidence." A mother dreamed that her son had died only a few hours before. A bishop’s wife dreamed she saw a pig in her dining room, and a few hours later it happened that a pig came into her dining room and she saw it. Coincidences like these strike one as only moderately plausible. The alternative answer is more plausible but more disturbing: when the mother said that Jack was dead, she really knew Jack was dead. The bishop’s wife actually could see, in her mind’s eye, what was going to happen on the following morning.

If this hypothesis is correct, we must assume that human beings are endowed, at least potentially, with a paranormal—i.e., besides or beyond the normal—faculty. Modern research workers have given this faculty the blanket name of "psi" (the twenty-third letter of the Greek alphabet) and have shown that it can manifest itself in a variety of ways—as telepathy, the direct awareness of events taking place in other people's minds; as clairvoyance, the direct awareness, with no help from sense impressions, of events taking place in the outside world; and as precognition, or fore-knowledge, the direct awareness, apart from rational forecasting and logical inference, of future events. These are the three types of what is called extrasensory perception, or ESP.

But psi is not exclusively a form of knowing. There is some evidence that it is also a form of doing. There may be paranormal ways of action as well as paranormal ways of being aware.

Here, on the borderline between the normal and the paranormal, is a case reported by Dr. J. A. Hadfield, an English psychiatrist who treated large numbers of shell-shock patients during and immediately after World War I. The doctor hypnotized a young sailor, Leading Seaman H. P., and then told him that his arm was being seared with a red-hot iron and that a blister would form at the point of contact. Actually Dr. Hadfield merely touched H. P. with his finger and bandaged the arm. When the bandage was removed six hours later, a small blister had formed. By the next day, Dr. Hadfield said, "there was a large quantity of fluid, giving the exact appearance of a blister produced by heat." The body had acted—with no physical reason for it to act.

From experimental medicine we pass to anthropology, specifically to a fire-walking rite in India observed by Mr. R. V. Sayce in 1929. Some of the Indian participants had worn shoes all their lives and had feet as tender as the average Westerner's, but they walked over glowing ashes without being burned. They were followed by two Europeans. One got through with a few small blisters. The other European, whose attention was distracted by friends in the crowd, was badly burned.

It should be noted that fire walking in India is undertaken not for fun or as an experiment but for religious reasons. Perhaps the religious motive creates a kind of protective field within which the walker, if he remains confident and undistracted, finds himself safe.

Many persons who are prepared to accept the reality of ESP (extrasensory perception) find it impossible to swallow PK, or psycho-kinesis, the direct action of mind on matter. Along with ESP, PK is the subject matter of modern parapsychology, which investigates these forms of doing and knowing with all the resources of contemporary science.

Perhaps the world's most distinguished parapsychologist is Dr. J. B. Rhine of Duke University, who for twenty-five years has been investigating psi in general and ESP and PK in particular. His latest book, published this winter, is called New World of the Mind. This new world, as he points out, is new only to modern science. To mankind at large it is as old as human experience. Prophets and oracles, ghosts and hauntings, poltergeists and apparitions, thought reading and second sight-we find them everywhere and at every period of history, in the Atomic Age and in the Bronze Age, in great cities and in the jungle and the tundra, among the most highly civilized as well as the most primitive of peoples. Up to about 1650 practically everyone in the Christian world accepted the reality of psi, and practically everyone attributed its manifestations to the intervention of supernatural agencies, in the main diabolic.

By the early eighteenth century most educated people had begun to doubt the very existence of psi. Not all, however. Samuel Wesley and his family, including the future founder of the Methodist Church, were besieged for more than a year by poltergeists, which are noisy ghosts. Swedenborg based the whole of his elaborate theology on psi experiences and was believed by many of his contemporaries to have a genuine gift of clairvoyance.

Before the turn of the nineteenth century, Mesmer and his followers discovered what we now call hypnosis and were investigating the properties, including psi, of what we now call the subconscious. Their work was fundamental to the development of modern psychology, but unfortunately Mesmerism, or animal magnetism as it was generally called, was appropriated by the cult of Spiritualism, which burst upon the world in the 1840s. A scientific discipline was engulfed in a form of revivalism and came, in the popular mind, to be largely identified with it. As a result, for many years no British physician could use hypnotism without running the risk of being expelled from the British Medical Association. And not only hypnotism but psi phenomena in general were for decades the special reserve of a fringe commonly regarded as lunatic.

This situation came to an end in 1882 when a group of eminent men from the English academic world came together and, in the teeth of orthodox science and orthodox spiritualism, founded the Society for Psychical Research. Its journal, now in its seventy-second year of publication, contains records of a prodigious quantity of careful work in the field of parapsychology. Hardly anybody bothers to read these records or the records of the similar societies in the U.S. and on the continent of Europe. This, I think, is a great misfortune. Nowadays, of course, for most people it goes without proving that mental events are caused by physical events, that they are indeed merely aspects of physical events. If this is the case, the incidents recorded in the proceedings of the SPR cannot have taken place and it is only a waste of time to look at the evidence.

Another reason for the neglect, especially in academic quarters, of parapsychology is that much of the early evidence was biographical or anecdotal. It is not the sort of evidence by which one validates a scientific hypothesis. It relates, that is to say, to unique unrepeatable incidents in which psi was manifested in a particularly striking and dramatic manner. Now, unique, unrepeatable events are the very substance of human experience; but they are not, and they cannot be, the substance of a science, for science is (to borrow a phrase from Emile Meyerson) the systematic "reduction of diversity to identity." In human life unique and unrepeatable events are of cardinal importance. When we try to reduce men's diversities to identities, we run the risk of gross oversimplification in theory and the even worse risk of totalitarian dictatorship in practice.

We had better admit, then, that there will probably never be a completely adequate Science of Man. There are all sorts of useful partial sciences, dealing with generalities and averages—such as economics and actuarial statistics, sociology and comparative religion, and various brands of psychology. But there is no genuine anthropology, no full Science of Man, in which the uniqueness of human beings takes its place along with their likeness, the irreducible diversities along with the unities. The art of living is still an art and is likely to remain one indefinitely.

The early investigators of psi collected a great mass of anecdotal material and published as much of it as could stand up to a searching examination. Juries are prepared, in good conscience, to send men to the gallows on less convincing evidence. And historians stoutly maintain the reality of past events for which the evidence is incomparably worse.

A second phase in the history of psi research began in 1930 with the foundation of the parapsychology laboratory at Duke University under Dr. Rhine. It was he and his co-workers who first developed fully controlled experimental conditions and subjected all results to statistical appraisal. The work has not been especially spectacular and its results do not make particularly interesting reading, but it has achieved what no collecting of anecdotal material could achieve. It has established the case for psi on a basis too solid to be explained away.

The new methods are beautifully simple. To test ESP the people at Duke invented a deck of twenty-five cards. There are five kinds in the deck, each with a simple symbol: circle, square, star, cross, and waves. A subject is asked to guess the order of the cards—purely by extrasensory perception. He is separated from the experimenter by an opaque screen, or he sits in another room, perhaps even in a distant building. Sometimes, the experimenter turns up the card before the subject makes his call, other times he does not look at the cards until afterward.

To test PK, Dr. Rhine and his aides use dice. The subject wills that a certain combination of faces turn up. The dice are then thrown, often by machine. With both dice and cards more and more elaborate precautions are constantly being taken against unconscious cues, improper shuffling, faulty observation, and the like. It is doubtful whether any psychological experiments have been carried out under conditions so stringent.

The results of these simple tests are recorded and analyzed by standard statistical procedures. Statistical analysis cannot, of course, tell us anything about the laboratory conditions or about the causes of the observed results. It can and does state a degree of probability. It can say that some results were very likely due to pure chance. In other cases it can rule out pure chance as rather improbable, very improbable, or overwhelmingly improbable.

If you try to guess the order of the cards in Dr. Rhine's deck, your chance of guessing correctly is one in five. In any one short run you may do better or worse and it will not signify much. But the more runs or throws, the more nearly will your score come to the expected average. (This is the reason why Las Vegas and Monte Carlo are still in business.)

If over a long series of runs or throws, the score deviates markedly and consistently from the expected average, the deviation is called "significant," another way of saying that it was probably not due to chance alone but to some other factor. In most scientific experiments, odds of 140 to 1 or better are considered significant, odds of a few thousand to 1 are regarded as equivalent to a proof that some other factor than pure chance has been present.

In psi research, as in every other field of human or animal endeavor, some subjects are better and some circumstances more favorable than others. In one card experiment carried out in London by a mathematician, Dr. S. G. Saal, the subject, Mr. Basil Shackleton, was remarkably gifted. In more than r 1,000 trials, carried out under elaborately controlled conditions, Mr. Shackleton scored so high that the odds against the results' being due to chance alone were of the order of 1 to 1,035 (100,000,000,000,000,004,400,000,000,040,400,000). But if chance were out of the question (as it obviously was) and if all other "normal" explanations were ruled out by the stringency of the experimental conditions (as they were), how could Mr. Shackleton have managed it? Only by some form of ESP.

The first reports of the Duke experiments made their appearance in the early and middle thirties. (Dr. Rhine's book, Extra-Sensory Perception, appeared in 1934.) Orthodox psychologists immediately questioned the soundness of the statistical methods used. This matter was quickly cleared up in 1937 at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Mathematical Statisticians, which reached these conclusions: "Dr. Rhine's investigations have two aspects, experimental and statistical. On the experimental side, mathematicians of course have nothing to say. On the statistical side, however, recent mathematical work has established the fact that, assuming the experiments have been properly performed, the statistical analysis is essentially valid. If the Rhine Investigation is to be fairly attacked, it must be on other than statistical grounds."

The critics took the hint and proceeded to attack on other grounds-the experimental setup. It did not take long to clear up this point either. Much of the early work at Duke had been of a somewhat free and easy nature—an exploratory foray into unknown territory, not intended to provide conclusive evidence. Later on, however, every conceivable precaution was taken to rule out in advance any "normal" explanation of the results. In 1938, at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, the experimenters gave an account of how they conducted their experiments. Even the most hostile critics had to admit that their precautions were satisfactory. "There has been," says Dr. Rhine, "very little criticism of any kind since the ESP symposium in 1938."

Very little criticism—but also, we must add, very little interest. In 1952 Dr. Lucien Warner framed a questionnaire on ESP and sent it to 515 Fellows of the American Psychological Association. About one sixth of the 360 Fellows who bothered to reply were of the opinion that ESP was either an established fact or a likely one; but only 14 had done any personal experimentation in the field. Two thirds of all the scientists answering the questionnaire had never, by their own admission, read an original scientific paper on the subject. Most of these are convinced, in the words of Psychologist D.O. Hebb, that "we have no choice but to physiologize psychology." Psi phenomena do not lend themselves to being physiologized.

Therefore they do not exist. "Personally," writes Dr. Hebb, "I do not accept ESP for a moment, because it does not make sense.... Rhine may still turn out to be right, improbable as I think that is; and my own rejection of his views is—in a literal sense—prejudice."

That a man of science should allow prejudice to outweigh evidence seems strange enough. It is even stranger to find a psychologist rejecting a psychological discovery simply because it cannot be explained. Psi is intrinsically no more inexplicable than, say, perception or memory; it is merely less common. We do not have the faintest idea how certain chemical and electrical events in the brain make us aware of a rose as being pink and perfumed. Nor are we any less ignorant of the way in which a mind recalls events in the past, of why some events in the nervous system should reappear in consciousness while others do not.

And how can events in a mind affect the fall of dice? We cannot say. But can we say how events in the mind can raise a blister on the arm of a hypnotized sailor? Can we say what hypnotism is? The mental state of a hypnotized person is very different from that of the same person unhypnotized. As far as the brain's activity can be measured by an encephalogram, the states are just about the same. Does this "make sense"? Not much more than anything else in the fascinating and bewildering field of our human nature. To refuse to accept psi because it does not conform to a hypothesis which is admittedly incapable of explaining the facts even of our everyday experience seems, to say the least of it, a little captious.

A hundred years ago, when Biblical fundamentalism was wrestling with geology, Philip Gosse, the British naturalist, found himself in a position not unlike that now occupied by the anti-psi psychologists. The geologists could prove that life had existed upon the earth for millions of years and that every existing plant and animal species had undergone far-reaching changes in the course of its evolution. But to Gosse, as to millions of other intelligent people, Genesis was literally true, and the instantaneous creation of the world in 4004 B.C. was an unassailable fact. The evidence of geology had to be ignored or explained away. Gosse chose the latter course. The earth, he still maintained, had been created in a single instant, but it had been created in its present form, with, all the appearances of having slowly evolved. In other words, "God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity." Today, it would seem, God is hiding Mind in the ESP cards to tempt psychologists into infidelity towards another brand of fundamentalism—the faith in Universal Matter.

This temptation is of considerable potency, even for the professional physiologizers of the soul and for the academicians generally. At least one great European university has established a Chair of Parapsychology. Others have accepted endowments for parapsychological research and teaching and have allowed young men and women in pursuit of their Ph.D.s to write their theses on parapsychological subjects. Last summer an International Conference on Parapsychology was held at the University of Utrecht in Holland, and some sixty psychologists, psychiatrists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians, and philosophers from fourteen countries attended, exchanged views, listened to papers, and laid plans for future investigations. The heretics are more numerous and more articulate than they were twenty years ago.

For those who do not wish to ignore it on a priori grounds, the evidence would seem to point to the following conclusions: Some people can become directly aware of events taking place in other people's minds. Some people can become directly aware of events taking place remotely from them. Some people can become aware of events, either mental or physical, which have not yet taken place. Some people can influence the behavior of matter with which they are not in contact.

If psi is a reality, what is its significance? How does it fit into our scheme of things? What does it mean to us as thinkers and as doers, as individuals and as members of society, as political and moral beings, as believers and disbelievers?

Let us start with thinking. One of the most eminent of living philosophers, Dr. C. D. Broad of Cambridge, has remarked on "the extraordinary indifference of almost all professional philosophers to the subject of psychical research." Natural scientists, he says, "are not to be blamed if they confine themselves to their subjects of investigation, provided they do not dogmatize ignorantly about what they have never investigated." No such excuse is open to philosophers. Their business is to understand the world as a whole and they have no right to ignore any aspect of it. Philosophers may answer that, after all, psi is only an anomaly, a queer little exception to the majestic rule. But this will not do. "The odd, exceptional, inexplicable facts, however trivial in themselves, are always the point from which the next great and fundamental advances in human knowledge may be made," writes Dr. Broad. "It is for this reason that I, as a philosopher, attach so much importance to psychical research and deplore the indifference of my colleagues to the subject."

There is as yet no satisfactory philosophical theory about psi. Perhaps William James was on the right track when he suggested that we live immersed, so to speak, in "a continuum of cosmic consciousness," a World Mind, a little of which filters into every particular brain and is experienced by the owner of that brain as his private mind, or consciousness. Henri Bergson went a little further. Mind in itself, he said, is aware of everything, everywhere, without regard to space or time, but the function of our brains is to shut out most of this (to us, irrelevant) knowledge, just in the interests of biological efficiency. (In this hypothesis, psi would represent a leakage into personal consciousness of some of the mental material which the brain normally either excludes or directs into utilitarian channels.)

From philosophy we return to psychology. The oddest thing about the orthodox physiologizers of psychology is their dual personality. As academic Dr. Jekylls they believe that all mental events depend on physical events and can be explained in physical terms. As common-sense Mr. Hydes they know that their will is, to some extent, free and that practically all their effective thinking about themselves and other people is done in mental terms. Dr. J. B. Watson, the founder of Behaviorism, once proclaimed that "no Behaviorist had ever observed anything that he can call consciousness, sensation, perception, imagery or will." But I would suppose that even Dr. Watson must have had moments of aberration when he made the appalling discovery that he was thinking, that he was making a moral choice or that he was remembering, with a wealth of that nonexistent imagery, the scenes of his childhood.

Most of our experiences are mental. The physiologizers of psychology regard this fact as dangerously "mystical" (a favorite word with them) and try to explain it away. They say we may think we are thinking, but what is really happening is something electrical, something reassuringly chemical. The electrical, chemical, and physiological facts should, of course, be investigated. But they should be investigated with an open mind (if the physiologizers will pardon the expression), it is surely significant that no educator or psychiatrist in his senses would ever dream of considering his problems exclusively, or even mainly, in terms of physics and chemistry. Indeed, many doctors believe that only by psychologizing physiology can they find cures for those innumerable psychosomatic diseases that plague the twentieth century.

Psychiatrists are apparently more ready to accept psi than are academic psychologists. Of some 700 psychiatrists who replied to a recent questionnaire, more than 200 stated that they were familiar with the current research in parapsychology, twice that number thought such research should be continued and extended, and about r 60 reported that they had observed what appeared to be psi phenomena in the course of their practice.

What does psi mean to biology? A good deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that the lower animals may possess psi. This evidence has recently been supplemented by systematic experimentation with homing pigeons, carried out between 1949 and 1952 by Dr. G. V. T. Matthews in England and Dr. G. Kramer in Germany. In Matthews's experiments young birds were trained to "home" from one direction only, the north. When all the birds had homed at least twice from distances of about one hundred miles due north, they were taken in light-proof boxes to a point eighty miles west of the loft. With almost no hesitation the birds started to fly east. On their next test they were taken to a release point ninety miles south of the loft. Most of them at once headed north.

Kramer's birds, who had never homed from more than ten miles, were taken two hundred miles away in light-proof boxes and released. Within a very short space of time (in some cases ro seconds) most were flying towards home. Of twenty-seven birds, with no previous experience of long-distance flights, fourteen were back in the loft on the day of the release. Ten more arrived the following day. Only three were lost.

How does a pigeon know which direction to take? A number of physical and physiological hypotheses have been put forward. There is, for example, the kinesthetic hypothesis: the bird always knows where it is, thanks to the semicircular canals of its inner ear. Thanks to the same remarkable canals, it is also supposed to be aware of what is called the Coriolis force, the force that results from the revolution of the earth on its axis. The hypothesis is ingenious, but it has failed to stand up under experiment. Birds were divided into two groups, one of which traveled to the release point in stationary cages, the other in cages placed on turntables that revolved at changing speeds through the whole outward journey. The most stupendous imaginable semicircular canals could not tell a revolving pigeon where it was in relation to loft or to the equator. Consequently the revolving pigeons ought, when released, to have lost their way. But they got home just as well as the non-revolving pigeons.

Then there is the magnetic theory. This assumes that pigeons are sensitive to terrestrial magnetism. The birds find their way home by combining the assumed awareness of the Coriolis force with the assumed awareness of the earth’s magnetic field, which is different at different points of the planet's surface. This hypothesis can also be tested experimentally. Once again the birds are divided into two groups. Small magnets are attached to the wings of one, nonmagnetized objects of equal weight to the wings of the other. The birds with magnets fly in a home-made field so strong that terrestrial magnetism could not possibly be detected, but they do not lose their way any more often than the others do.

Finally there is the hypothesis that pigeons navigate by the sun. If they do, they must possess, built into their nervous system, the equivalents of a chronometer, a sextant, navigational tables, and a calculating machine for correlating the solar data observed at the release point with those observed at the loft. In Dr. Kramer's experiments the birds were given 30 seconds, after a nocturnal journey in the canvas-covered cages, to adapt themselves to light. They were then released. Within 10 seconds most of them were flying homeward. If they were using the sun to guide them, they must have made all their observations and calculations in 40 seconds. All in all, solar navigation seems just as untenable as the canal theory or the magnetic theory. How, then, do the pigeons find their way home? We do not know. All we can say is that psi seems a likely possibility. That possibility is now being tested in this country by Dr. J. G. Pratt, Dr. Rhine's associate at Duke. Several zoologists have recently begun to consider psi as a possible explanation for the equally extraordinary and hitherto inexplicable performances of migratory birds and fish, as well as the well-known ability of cats to find their way home from long distances. In Dr. Rhine's own North Carolina is one Fluffy, which took 2 years to find its way back over a 3 50-mile journey. One biologist, Professor A. C. Hardy of Oxford, is prepared to go a step further and to consider psi as one of the factors, along with individual variation and environment, in animal evolution.

In New World of the Mind Dr. Rhine has some interesting chapters on the significance of psi for religion and ethics. Psi research, he points out, has led "by the application of strict scientific method" to the conclusion that "there is something operative in man that transcends the laws of matter.... The universe differs, therefore, from what the prevailing materialistic concept indicates. It is one about which it is possible to be religious."

It is interesting to read what an eminent Catholic theologian, Father Victor White, O.P., has to say on the subject of psi. Scholastic philosophy recognizes the existence of "natural prophecy"—in our vocabulary, psi—which is sometimes used as the vehicle of divine revelation. "It is through the sub-rational [the deep Unconscious] that the super-rational is brought into human consciousness," writes Father White, or, in other words, psi is of interest to theology because its source in the Unconscious is very close to the door through which divine inspiration enters the human mind. But psi is not always spiritually and ethically desirable, or even neutral; the anecdotal evidence indicates that there are sometimes inspirations of pure unreason and radical evil. That was why Plato would have no truck with what he called "enthusiasts"—what we should call psychics, sensitives, automatists. "Though Plato could expel the inspired and the possessed from the Republic, they can never," Father White insists, "be expelled from the Church, which is built on the foundations of the prophets and the apostles."

We are supposed to be waging a crusade against the godless materialism of the Communists. In actual fact our prevailing world differs from theirs only in degree and consistency, not in kind. On both sides of the Iron Curtain the effective religion of twentieth-century man, the only faith for which all are prepared to kill and die, is nationalism. The last few centuries have witnessed a general retreat from the beginnings of universalist monotheism to a new version of the parochial polytheism current in classical times, when every city had its own tutelary deities. Our gods are not the gods of cities but of nations. Associated with the worship of the fifty-seven varieties of national gods is a philosophy compounded of physicalism and cultural determinism, seasoned, this side of the Iron Curtain, with a dash of Freud. In Russia, to be sure, this philosophy has been worked out more systematically and applied with a stricter logic than in the West. We have been saved—insofar as we have been saved—by our inconsistency.

Our philosophy has no place for free will or for anything which might be described as the soul. And yet, with a blessed absence of logic, we go on behaving as though we believe in the uniqueness, the paramount value of human personality. Habit and the fact that our fundamental institutions were framed by men who were firmly convinced of the existence of all the things that "no Behaviorist has ever observed" make it quite easy for us to think one way while acting in another, incompatible way. How much longer can we continue to perform this curious feat? One fine day some dangerously logical demagogue may ask us why, if men and women are merely the by-products of physical and social processes, they should not be treated as such. After which we may expect to see the fiction of George Orwell's 1984 turn into appalling fact.

In the immediate future the most urgent task confronting the psi researcher is to discover, if possible, some way of bringing psi into consciousness, of using it consciously and controlling it. We already know a good deal about the conditions favoring the manifestation of psi. Certain mental attitudes militate against high scoring; certain personality traits tend to be associated with success in one kind of test, other traits with success in other kinds of tests. Boredom and monotony are as bad for psi as for every other kind of work. Scoring rates tend to fall off towards the end of each run of twenty-five calls and toward the end of every long series of runs. Similar declines appear in tests for learning and memory. The regularity with which they appear in the records of psi testing is another powerful proof that the results are due to psychological causes.

All this knowledge is valuable, but it is still woefully insufficient. Somehow or other we must learn to catch psi on the wing, to track it to its lair deep in the unconscious. But how? We may never find out, but that is no excuse for not trying.

Another problem for the psi researchers of the future will be that of human survival after death. If all mental events depend completely on physical events, survival is out of the question. But if there are some mental events that do not depend completely on physical events, survival certainly becomes a possibility.

The recipients of "spirit messages" are often convinced (and, may be, quite rightly convinced) that they come from personalities known to them on earth, but this conviction is rarely shared by others. Perhaps no evidence of personal identity conveyed through a medium will ever be completely and universally accepted. Even in ordinary life our sense of the personal identity of other human beings is based on hearsay and intuition rather than on scientifically coercive evidence. Disquieting cases of mistaken identity turn up from time to time in the law courts. Mothers accept impostors as their long-lost sons, as in the famous Titchborne case. Wives, as in the more recent case of a returned Italian war prisoner, welcome smooth-talking strangers as their husbands. Passports, social security cards, and even fingerprints can be faked. And somewhere in the world practically everybody has his or her double. (Stalin and Hitler are said to have employed half a dozen or more.) If it is so difficult, even here and now, to prove scientifically that I am I and you are you, how much harder must it be to demonstrate that the person speaking through the mouth of a medium is in fact the person he says he is, and not a projection of information acquired by means of ESP and dramatized, more or less convincingly, by a dissociated part of the medium's subconscious mind.

For this reason it seems unlikely that future research into the problem of survival will follow the lines laid down by the earlier workers in the field. How it will be conducted I do not pretend to know. We can only work at what lies immediately before us in the hope that new findings may suggest new ways of dealing with the old and still unsolved problems.

[Life, January 11, 1954]

The Doors of Perception

it was in 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin, published the first systematic study of the cactus, to which his own name was subsequently given. Anhalonium lewinii was new to science. To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing. Indeed, it was much more than a friend. In the words of one of the early Spanish visitors to the New World, "they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity.”

Why they should have venerated it as a deity became apparent when such eminent psychologists as Jaensch, Havelock Ellis, and Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the active principle of peyote. True, they stopped short at a point well this side of idolatry; but all concurred in assigning to mescalin a position among drugs of unique distinction. Administered in suitable doses, it changes the quality of consciousness more profoundly and yet is less toxic than any other substance in the pharmacologist's repertory.

Mescalin research has been going on sporadically ever since the days of Lewin and Havelock Ellis. Chemists have not merely isolated the alkaloid; they have learned how to synthesize it, so that the supply no longer depends on the sparse and intermittent crop of a desert cactus. Alienists have dosed themselves with mescalin in the hope thereby of coming to a better, a first-hand, understanding of their patients' mental processes. Working unfortunately upon too few subjects within too narrow a range of circumstances, psychologists have observed and catalogued some of the drug’s more striking effects. Neurologists and physiologists have found out something about the mechanism of its action upon the central nervous system. And at least one professional philosopher has taken mescalin for the light it may throw on such ancient, unsolved riddles as the place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness.

There matters rested until, two or three years ago, a new and perhaps highly significant fact was observed.- Actually the fact had been staring everyone in the face for several decades; but nobody, as it happened, had noticed it until a young English psychiatrist, at present working in Canada, was struck by the close similarity, in chemical composition, between mescalin and adrenalin. Further research revealed that lysergic acid, an extremely potent hallucinogen derived from ergot, has a structural biochemical relationship to the others. Then came the discovery that adrenochrome, which is a product of the decomposition of adrenalin, can produce many of the symptoms observed in mescalin intoxication. But adrenochrome probably occurs spontaneously in the human body. In other words, each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which are known to cause profound changes in consciousness. Certain of these changes are similar to those which occur in that most characteristic plague of the twentieth century, schizophrenia. Is the mental disorder due to a chemical disorder? And is the chemical disorder due, in its turn, to psychological distresses affecting the adrenals? It would be rash and premature to affirm it. The most we can say is that some kind of a prima facie case has been made out. Meanwhile the clue is being systematically followed, the sleuths— biochemists, psychiatrists, psychologists—are on the trail.

By a series of, for me, extremely fortunate circumstances I found myself, in the spring of 1953, squarely athwart that trail. One of the sleuths had come on business to California. In spite of seventy years of mescalin research, the psychological material at his disposal was still absurdly inadequate, and he was anxious to add to it. I was on the spot and willing, indeed eager, to be a guinea pig. Thus it came about that, one bright May morning, I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a radically alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be mad? Or, short of being born again as a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit the worlds which, to Blake, to Swedenborg,- to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home? And how can a man at the extreme limits of ectomorphy and cerebrotonia ever put himself in the place of one at the limits of endomorphy and viscerotonia, or, except within certain circumscribed areas, share the feelings of one who stands at the limits of mesomorphy and somatotonia? To the unmitigated behaviorist such questions, I suppose, are meaningless. But for those who theoretically believe what in practice they know to be true—namely, that there is an inside to experience as well as an outside—the problems posed are real problems, all the more grave for being, some completely insoluble, some soluble only in exceptional circumstances and by methods not available to everyone. Thus, it seems virtually certain that I shall never know what it feels like to be Sir John Falstaff or Joe Louis. On the other hand, it had always seemed to me possible that, through hypnosis, for example, or auto-hypnosis, by means of systematic meditation, or else by taking the appropriate drug, I might so change my ordinary mode of consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic were talking about.

From what I had read of the mescalin experience I was convinced in advance that the drug would admit me, at least for a few hours, into the kind of inner world described by Blake and A. E.¹ But what I had expected did not happen. I had expected to lie with my eyes shut, looking at visions of many-colored geometries, of animated architectures, rich with gems and fabulously lovely, of landscapes with heroic figures, of symbolic dramas trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation. But I had not reckoned, it was evident, with the idiosyncrasies of my mental make-up, the facts of my temperament, training, and habits.

I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon, of how the Lungarno used to look before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater Road when the only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at 3.5 miles an hour. But such images have little substance and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand to real, perceived objects in the same relation as Homer's ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood, who came to visit them in the shades. Only when I have a high temperature do my mental images come to independent life. To those in whom the faculty of visualization is strong my inner world must seem curiously drab, limited, and uninteresting. This was the world—a poor thing but my own—which I expected to see transformed into something completely unlike itself.

The change which actually took place in that world was in no sense revolutionary. Half an hour after swallowing the drug I became aware of a slow dance of golden lights. A little later there were sumptuous red surfaces swelling and expanding from bright nodes of energy that vibrated with a continuously changing, patterned life. At another time the closing of my eyes revealed a complex of gray structures, within which pale bluish spheres kept emerging into intense solidity and, having emerged, would slide noiselessly upwards, out of sight. But at no time were there faces or forms of men or animals. I saw no landscapes, no enormous spaces, no magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings, nothing remotely like a drama or a parable. The other world to which mescalin admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective universe was relatively unimportant.

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers—a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

"Is it agreeable?" somebody asked. (During this part of the experiment, all conversations were recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of what was said.)

"Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered, "it just is." Istigkeit—wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Isness." The Being of Platonic philosophy—except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all hut quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were—a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.

I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing—but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss—for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's- essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ("The Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden." "And the man who realizes this truth," the novice dubiously inquires, "what, may I ask, is he?" Groucho gives him a whack over the shoulders with his staff and answers, "A golden-haired lion."

It had been, when I read it, only a vaguely pregnant piece of nonsense. Now it was all as clear as day, as evident as Euclid. Of course the Dharma-Body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I—or rather the blessed Not-I, released for a moment from my throttling embrace—cared to look at. The books, for example, with which my study walls were lined. Like the flowers, they glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colors, a profounder significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald books; books bound in white jade; books of agate; of aquamarine, of yellow topaz; lapis lazuli books whose color was so intense, so intrinsically meaningful, that they seemed to be on the point of leaving the shelves to thrust themselves more insistently on my attention.

"What about spatial relationships?" the investigator inquired, as I was looking at the books.

It was difficult to answer. True, the perspective looked rather odd, and the walls of the room no longer seemed to meet in right angles. But these were not the really important facts. The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as Where?—How far? How situated in relation to what? In the mescalin experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern. I saw the books, but was not at all concerned with their positions in space. What I noticed, what impressed itself upon my mind was the fact that all of them glowed with living light and that in some the glory was more manifest than in others. In this context position and the three dimensions were beside the point. Not, of course, that the category of space had been abolished. When I got up and walked about, I could do so quite normally, without misjudging the whereabouts of objects. Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.

And along with indifference to space there went an even more complete indifference to time.

"There seems to be plenty of it," was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time.

Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch; but my watch, I knew, was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration or alternatively of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.

From the books the investigator directed my attention to the furniture. A small typing table stood in the center of the room; beyond it, from my point of view, was a wicker chair and beyond that a desk. The three pieces formed an intricate pattern of horizontals, uprights, and diagonals—a pattern all the more interesting for not being interpreted in terms of spatial relationships. Table, chair, and desk came together in a composition that was like something by Braque or Juan Gris, a still life recognizably related to the objective world, but rendered without depth, without any attempt at photographic realism. I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist's-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers—back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance. The legs, for example, of that chair—how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes—or was it several centuries?—not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them—or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for "I" was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.

Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, "that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be tunneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various "other worlds," with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate "spiritual exercises," or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception "of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe" (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.

The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When mescalin reduces the brain’s normal ration of sugar what happens? Too few cases have been observed, and there fore a comprehensive answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to the majority of the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be summarized as follows.

(1) The ability to remember and to "think straight" is little if at all reduced. (Listening to the recordings of my conversation under the influence of the drug, I cannot discover that I was then any stupider than I am at ordinary times.)

(2) Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.

(3) Though the intellect remains unimpaired and though perception is enormously improved, the will suffers a profound change for the worse. The mescalin taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular and finds most of the causes for which, at ordinary times, he was prepared to act and suffer, profoundly uninteresting. He can’t be bothered with them, for the good reason that he has better things to think about.

(4) These better things may be experienced (as I experienced them) "out there," or "in here," or in both worlds, the inner and the outer, simultaneously or successively. That they are better seems to be self-evident to all mescalin takers who come to the drug with a sound liver and an untroubled mind.

These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. In some cases there may be extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event. In the final stage of egolessness there is an "obscure knowledge" that All is in all—that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to "perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe."

In this context, how significant is the enormous heightening, under mescalin, of the perception of color! For certain animals it is biologically very important to be able to distinguish certain hues. But beyond the limits of their utilitarian spectrum, most creatures are completely color blind. Bees, for example, spend most of their time "deflowering the fresh virgins of the spring"; but, as Von Frisch has shown, they can recognize only a very few colors. Man's highly developed color sense is a biological luxury—inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal. To judge by the adjectives which Homer puts into their mouths, the heroes of the Trojan War hardly excelled the bees in their capacity to distinguish colors. In this respect, at least, mankind's advance has been prodigious.

Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind. It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary. Unlike Locke, it evidently feels that colors are more important, better worth attending to, than masses, positions, and dimensions. Like mescalin takers, many mystics perceive supernaturally brilliant colors, not only with the inward eye, but even in the objective world around them. Similar reports are made by psychics and sensitives. There are certain mediums to whom the mescalin taker's brief revelation is a matter, during long periods, of daily and hourly experience.

From this long but indispensable excursion into the realm of theory, we may now return to the miraculous facts—four bamboo chair legs in the middle of a room. Like Wordsworth's daffodils, they brought all manner of wealth—the gift, beyond price, of a new direct insight into the very Nature of Things, together with a more modest treasure of understanding in the field, especially, of the arts.

A rose is a rose is a rose. But these chair legs were chair legs were St. Michael and all angels. Four or five hours after the event, when the effects of a cerebral sugar shortage were wearing off, I was taken for a little tour of the city, which included a visit, towards sundown, to what is modestly claimed to be the World's Biggest Drug Store. At the back of the W.B.D.S., among the toys, the greeting cards, and the comics, stood a row, surprisingly enough, of art books. I picked up the first volume that came to hand. It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was "The Chair"—that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen. But, though incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact. The fact had been manifested Suchness; this was only an emblem. Such emblems are sources of true knowledge about the Nature of Things, and this true knowledge may serve to prepare the mind which accepts it for immediate insights on its own account. But that is all. However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.

It would be interesting, in this context, to make a study of the works of art available to the great knowers of Suchness. What sort of pictures did Eckhart look at? What sculptures and paintings played a part in the religious experience of St. John of the Cross, of Hakuin, of Hui-neng, of William Law? The questions are beyond my power to answer; but I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art—some refusing to have anything to do with it at all, others being content with what a critical eye would regard as second-rate, or even, tenth-rate, works. (To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rareness or tenth-rareness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.) Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

I returned the Van Gogh to its rack and picked up the volume standing next to it. It was a book on Botticelli. I turned the pages. "The Birth of Venus"—never one of my favorites. "Mars and Venus," that loveliness so passionately denounced by poor Ruskin at the height of his long-drawn sexual tragedy. The marvelously rich and intricate "Calumny of Apelles." And then a somewhat less familiar and not very good picture, "Judith." My attention was arrested and I gazed in fascination, not at the pale neurotic heroine or her attendant, not at the victim’s hairy head or the vernal landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of Judith's pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts.

This was something I had seen before—seen that very morning, between the flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers—what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel—how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli's picture.

Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no portraiture, no mythological or historical storytelling without representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for the origins, mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant development of drapery as a major theme of all the plastic arts. Artists, it is obvious, have always loved drapery for its own sake—or, rather, for their own. When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are non-representational—the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly human, fully representational element accounts for about ro percent of the whole. All the rest consists of many colored variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these non-representational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist. Stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth surfaces, the broad untortured folds of Piero's draperies. Torn between fact and wish, between cynicism and idealism, Bernini tempers the all but caricatural verisimilitude of his faces with enormous sartorial abstractions, which are the embodiment, in stone or bronze, of the everlasting commonplaces of rhetoric—the heroism, the holiness, the sublimity to which mankind perpetually aspires, for the most part in vain. And here are El Greco's disquietingly visceral skirts and mantles; here are the sharp, twisting, flame-like folds in which Cosimo Tura clothes his figures: in the first, traditional spirituality breaks down into a nameless physiological yearning; in the second, there writhes an agonized sense of the world's essential strangeness and hostility. Or consider Watteau; his men and women play lutes, get ready for balls and harlequinades, embark, on velvet lawns and under noble trees, for the Cythera of every lover's dream; their enormous melancholy and the flayed, excruciating sensibility of their creator find expression, not in the actions recorded, not in the gestures and the faces portrayed, but in the relief and texture of their taffeta skirts, their satin capes and doublets. Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an incessant modulation—inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand—of tone into tone, of one indeterminate color into another. In life, man proposes, God disposes. In the plastic arts the proposing is done by the subject matter; that which disposes is ultimately the artist's temperament, proximately (at least in portraiture, history, and genre) the carved or painted drapery. Between them, these two may decree that a fetegalante shall move to tears, that a crucifixion shall be serene to the point of cheerfulness, that a stigmatization shall be almost intolerably sexy, that the likeness of a prodigy of female brainlessness (I am thinking now of Ingres' incomparable Mme. Moitessier) shall express the austere st, the most uncompromising intellectuality.

But this is not the whole story. Draperies, as I had now discovered, are much more than devices for the introduction of non-representational forms into naturalistic paintings and sculptures. What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness. It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being.

More even than the chair, though less perhaps than those wholly supernatural flowers, the folds of my grey flannel trousers were charged with "isness." To what they owed this privileged status, I cannot say. Is it, perhaps, because the forms of folded drapery are so strange and dramatic that they catch the eye and in this way force the miraculous fact of sheer existence upon the attention? Who knows? What is important is less the reason for the experience than the experience itself. Poring over Judith's skirts, there in the World's Biggest Drug Store, I knew that Botticelli—and not Botticelli alone, but many others too—had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been mine that morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the Power of even the highest art to express. But in Judith's skirt I could clearly see what, if I had been a painter of genius, I might have made of my old grey flannels. Not much, heaven knows, in comparison with the reality, but enough to delight generation after generation of beholders, enough to make them understand at least a little of the true significance of what, in our pathetic imbecility, we call "mere things" and disregard in favor of television.

"This is how one ought to see," I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers, or glanced at the jeweled books in the shelves, at the legs of my infinitely more than Van-Goghian chair. "This is how one ought to see, how things really are." And yet there were reservations. For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else. Just looking, just being the divine Not-self of flower, of book, of chair, of flannel. That would be enough. But in that case what about other people? What about human relations? In the recording of that morning's conversations I find the question constantly repeated, "What about human relations?" How could one reconcile this timeless bliss of seeing as one ought to see with the temporal duties of doing what one ought to do and feeling as one ought to feel? "One ought to be able," I said, "to see these trousers as infinitely important and human beings as still more infinitely important." One ought—but in practice it seemed to be impossible. This participation in the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, the necessary concerns of human existence, above all for concerns involving persons. For persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and of other selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distasteful-ness was not one of the categories in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant. Compelled by the investigator to analyze and report on what I was doing (and how I longed to be left alone with Eternity in a flower, Infinity in four chair legs and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers!), I realized that I was deliberately avoiding the eyes of those who were with me in the room, deliberately refraining from being too much aware of them. One was my wife, the other a man I respected and greatly liked; but both belonged to the world from which, for the moment, mescalin had delivered me—the world of selves, of time, of moral judgments and utilitarian considerations, the world (and it was this aspect of human life which I wished, above all else, to forget) of self-assertion, of cocksureness, of overvalued words and idolatrously worshipped notions.

At this stage of the proceedings I was handed a large colored reproduction of the well-known selfportrait by Cezanne—the head and shoulders of a man in a large straw hat, red-cheeked, red-lipped, with rich black whiskers and a dark unfriendly eye. It is a magnificent painting; but it was not as a painting that I now saw it. For the head promptly took on a third dimension and came to life as a small goblinlike man looking out through a window in the page before me. I started to laugh. And when they asked me why, "What pretensions!" I kept repeating. "Who on earth does he think he is?" The question was not addressed to Cezanne in particular, but to the human species at large. Who did they all think they were?

"It's like Arnold Bennett- in the Dolomites," I said, suddenly remembering a scene, happily immortalized in a snapshot, of A. B., some four or five years before his death, toddling along a wintry road at Cortina d'Ampezzo. Around him lay the virgin snow; in the background was a more than gothic aspiration of red crags. And there was dear, kind, unhappy A. B., consciously overacting the role of his favorite character in fiction, himself, the Card in person. There he went, toddling slowly in the bright Alpine sunshine, his thumbs in the armholes of a yellow waistcoat which bulged, a little lower down, with the graceful curve of a Regency bow window at Brighton—his head thrown back as though to aim some stammered utterance, howitzer-like, at the blue dome of heaven. What he actually said, I have forgotten; but what his whole manner, air, and posture fairly shouted was, "I'm as good as those damned mountains." And in some ways, of course, he was infinitely better; but not, as he knew very well, in the way his favorite character in fiction liked to imagine.

Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all over-act the part of our favorite character in fiction. And the fact, the almost infinitely unlikely fact, of actually being Cezanne makes no difference. For the consummate painter, with his little pipeline to Mind at Large bypassing the brain valve and ego-filter, was also and just as genuinely this whiskered goblin with the unfriendly eye.

For relief I turned back to the folds in my trousers. "This is how one ought to see," I repeated yet again. And I might have added, "These are the sort of things one ought to look at." Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their Suchness, not acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-Body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of god.

"The nearest approach to this," I said, "would be a Vermeer."

Yes, a Vermeer. For that mysterious artist was truly gifted—with the vision that perceives the Dharma-Body as the hedge at the bottom of the garden, with the talent to render as much of that vision as the limitations of human capacity permit, and with the prudence to confine himself in his paintings to the more manageable aspects of reality; for though Vermeer represented human beings, he was always a painter of still life. Cezanne, who told his female sitters to do their best to look like apples, tried to paint portraits in the same spirit. But his pippin-like women are more nearly related to Plato's Ideas than to the Dharma-Body in the hedge. They are Eternity and Infinity seen, not in sand or flower, but in the abstractions of some very superior brand of geometry. Vermeer never asked his girls to look like apples. On the contrary, he insisted on their being girls to the very limit—but always with the proviso that they refrain from behaving girlishly. They might sit or quietly stand but never giggle, never display selfconsciousness, never say their prayers or pine for absent sweethearts, never gossip, never gaze enviously at other women's babies, never love or hate or work. In the act of doing any of these things they would doubtless become more intensely themselves, but would cease, for that very reason, to manifest their divine essential Not-self. In Blake's phrase, the doors of Vermeer's perception were only partially cleansed. A single panel had become almost perfectly transparent; the rest of the door was still muddy. The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in living creatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were in repose, their minds untroubled, their bodies motionless. In these circumstances Vermeer could see Suchness in all its heavenly beauty— could see and, in some small measure, render it—in a subtle and sumptuous still life. Vermeer is undoubtedly the greatest painter of human still lives. But there have been others, for example, Vermeer's French contemporaries, the Le Nain brothers. They set out, I suppose, to be genre painters; but what they actually produced was a series of human still lives, in which their cleansed perception of the infinite significance of all things is rendered not, as with Vermeer, by subtle enrichment of color and texture, but by a heightened clarity, an obsessive distinctness of form, within an austere, almost monochromatic tonality. In our own day we have had Vuillard, the painter, at his best, of unforgettably splendid pictures of the Dharma-Body manifested in a bourgeois bedroom, of the Absolute blazing away in the midst of some stockbroker's family in a suburban garden, taking tea.

Ce qui fait que 1'ancien bandagiste renie

Le comptoir dont le faste allechait les passants,

Cest son jardin d'Auteuil, ou, veufs de tout encens, Les Zinnias Ont 1'air d'etre en tole vernie.

For Laurent Taillade the spectacle was merely obscene. But if the retired rubber goods merchant had sat still enough, Vuillard would have seen in him only the Dharma-Body, would have painted, in the zinnias, the goldfish pool, the villa's Moorish tower and Chinese lanterns, a corner of Eden before the Fall.

But meanwhile my question remained unanswered. How was this cleansed perception to be reconciled with a proper concern with human relations, with the necessary chores and duties, to say nothing of charity and practical compassion? The age-old debate between the actives and the contemplative was being renewed—renewed, so far as I was concerned, with an unprecedented poignancy. For until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms—as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music; as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses, in Nature, of Wordsworth’s "something far more deeply interfused"; as systematic silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an "obscure knowledge." But now I knew contemplation at its height. At its height, but not yet in its fullness. For in its fullness the way of Mary includes the way of Martha and raises it, so to speak, to its own higher power. Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that of Martha. It gives access to contemplation—but to a contemplation that is incompatible with action and even with the will to action, the very thought of action. In the intervals between his revelations the mescalin taker is apt to feel that, though in one way everything is supremely as it should be, in another there is something wrong. His problem is essentially the same as that which confronts the quietist, the arhat and, on another level, the landscape painter and the painter of human still lives. Mescalin can never solve that problem; it can only pose it, apocalyptically, for those to whom it had never before presented itself. The full and final solution can be found only by those who are prepared to implement the right kind of Weltanschauung by means of the right kind of behavior and the right kind of constant and unstrained alertness. Over against the quietist stands the active-contemplative, the saint, the man who, in Eckhart's phrase, is ready to come down from the seventh heaven in order to bring a cup of water to his sick brother. Over against the arhat, retreating from appearances into an entirely transcendental Nirvana, stands the Bodhisattva, for whom Suchness and the world of contingencies are one, and for whose boundless compassion every one of those contingencies is an occasion not only for transfiguring insight, but also for the most practical charity. And in the universe of art, over against Vermeer and the other Painters of human still lives, over against the masters of Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, over against Constable and Turner, against Sisley and Seurat and Cezanne, stands the all-inclusive art of Rembrandt. These are enormous names, inaccessible eminences. For myself, on this memorable May morning, I could only be grateful for an experience which had shown me, more clearly than I had ever seen it before, the true nature of the challenge and the completely liberating response.

Let me add, before we leave this subject, that there is no form of contemplation, even the most quietistic, which is without its ethical values. Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The Lord's Prayer is less than fifty words long, and six of those words are devoted to asking God not to lead us into temptation. The one-sided contemplative leaves undone many things that he ought to do; but to make up for it, he refrains from doing a host of things he ought not to do. The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms. The contemplative whose perception has been cleansed does not have to stay in his room. He can go about his business, so completely satisfied to see and be a part of the divine Order of Things that he will never even be tempted to indulge in what Traherne called "the dirty Devices of the world." When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when "the sea flows in our veins ... and the stars are our jewels," when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure? Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle, or grind the faces of the poor. And to these enormous negative virtues we may add another which, though hard to define, is both positive and important. The arhat and the quietist may not practice contemplation in its fullness; but if they practice it at all, they may bring back enlightening reports of another, a transcendent country of the mind; and if they practice it in the height, they will become conduits through which some beneficent influence can flow out of that other country into a world of darkened selves, chronically dying for lack of it.

Meanwhile I had turned, at the investigator's request, from the portrait of Cezanne to what was going on, inside my head, when I shut my eyes. This time, the inscape was curiously unrewarding. The field of vision was filled with brightly colored, constantly changing structures that seemed to be made of plastic or enameled tin.

"Cheap," I commented. "Trivial. Like things in a five-and-ten." And all this shoddiness existed in a closed, cramped universe. "It's as though one were below decks in a ship," I said. "A five-and-ten-cent ship."

And as I looked, it became very clear that this five-and-ten-cent ship was in some way connected with human pretensions, with the portrait of Cezanne, with A. B. among the Dolomites overacting his favorite character in fiction. This suffocating interior of a dime-store ship was my own personal self; these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal contributions to the universe.

I felt the lesson to be salutary, but was sorry, none the less, that it had had to be administered at this moment and in this form. As a rule the mescalin taker discovers an inner world as manifestly a datum, as self-evidently "infinite and holy," as that transfigured outer world which I had seen with my eyes open. From the first, my own case had been different. Mescalin had endowed me temporarily with the power to see things with my eyes shut; but it could not, or at least on this occasion did not, reveal an inscape remotely comparable to my flowers or chair or flannels "out there." What it had allowed me to perceive inside was not the Dharma-Body, in images, but my own mind; not Suchness, but a set of symbols—in other words, a home-made substitute for Suchness.

Most visualizers are transformed by mescalin into visionaries. Some of them—and they are perhaps more numerous than is generally supposed—require no transformation; they are visionaries all the time. The mental species to which Blake belonged is fairly widely distributed even in the urban-industrial societies of the present day. The poet-artist's uniqueness does not consist in the fact that (to quote from his Descriptive Catalogue) he actually saw "those wonderful originals called in the Sacred Scriptures the Cherubim." It does not consist in the fact that "these wonderful originals seen in my visions, were some of them one hundred feet in height... all containing mythological and recondite meaning." It consists solely in his ability to render, in words or (somewhat less successfully) in line and color, some hint at least of a not excessively uncommon experience. The untalented visionary may perceive an inner reality no less tremendous, beautiful, and significant than the world beheld by Blake; but he lacks altogether the ability to express, in literary or plastic symbols, what he has seen.

From the records of religion and the surviving monuments of poetry and the plastic arts it is very plain that, at most times and in most places, men have attached more importance to the inscape than to objective existents, have felt that what they saw with their eyes shut possessed a spiritually higher significance than what they saw with their eyes open. The reason? Familiarity breeds contempt, and how to survive is a problem ranging in urgency from the chronically tedious to the excruciating. The outer world is what we wake up to every morning of our lives, is the place where, willy-nilly, we must try to make our living. In the inner world there is neither work nor monotony. We visit it only in dreams and musings, and its strangeness is such that we never find the same world on two successive occasions. What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within! Generally, but not always. In their art no less than in their religion, the Taoists and the Zen Buddhists looked beyond visions to the Void, and through the Void at "the ten thousand things" of objective reality. Because of their doctrine of the Word made flesh, Christians should have been able, from the first, to adopt a similar attitude towards the universe around them. But because of the doctrine of the Fall, they found it very hard to do so. As recently as three hundred years ago an expression of thoroughgoing world denial and even world condemnation was both orthodox and comprehensible. "We should feel wonder at nothing at all in Nature except only the Incarnation of Christ." In the seventeenth century, Lallemant's phrase seemed to make sense. Today it has the ring of madness.

In China the rise of landscape painting to the rank of a major art form took place about a thousand, in Japan about six hundred, and in Europe about three hundred, years ago. The equation of Dharma-Body with hedge was made by those Zen Masters, who wedded Taoist naturalism with Buddhist transcendentalism. It was, therefore, only in the Far East that landscape painters consciously regarded their art as religious. In the West religious painting was a matter of portraying sacred personages, of illustrating hallowed texts. Landscape painters regarded themselves as secularists. Today we recognize in Seurat one of the supreme masters of what may be called mystical landscape painting. And yet this man who was able, more effectively than any other, to render the One in the many, became quite indignant when somebody praised him for the "poetry" of his work. "I merely apply the System," he protested. In other words he was merely a pointilliste and, in his own eyes, nothing else. A similar anecdote is told of John Constable. One day towards the end of his life, Blake met Constable at Hampstead and was shown one of the younger artist's sketches. In spite of his contempt for naturalistic art, the old visionary knew a good thing when be saw it—except of course, when it was by Rubens. "This is not drawing/' he cried, "this is inspiration!" "I had meant it to be drawing," was Constable's characteristic answer. Both men were right. It was drawing, precise and veracious, and at the same time it was inspiration—inspiration of an order at least as high as Blake's. The pine trees on the Heath had actually been seen as identical with the Dharma-Body. The sketch was a rendering, necessarily imperfect but still profoundly impressive, of what a cleansed perception had revealed to the open eyes of a great painter. From a contemplation, in the tradition of Wordsworth and Whitman, of the Dharma-Body as hedge, and from visions, such as Blake's, of the "wonderful originals" within the mind, contemporary poets have retreated into an investigation of the personal, as opposed to the more than personal, subconscious and to a rendering, in highly abstract terms, not of the given, objective fact, but of mere scientific and theological notions. And something similar has happened in the field of painting, where we have witnessed a general retreat from landscape, the predominant art form of the nineteenth century. This retreat from landscape has not been into that other, inner divine Datum, with which most of the traditional schools of the past were concerned, that Archetypal World, where men have always found the raw materials of myth and religion. No, it has been a retreat from the outward Datum into the personal subconscious, into a mental world more squalid and more tightly closed than even the world of conscious personality. These contraptions of tin and highly colored plastic—where had I seen them before? In every picture gallery that exhibits the latest in nonrepresentational art.

And now someone produced a phonograph and put a record on the turntable. I listened with pleasure, but experienced nothing comparable to my seen apocalypses of flowers or flannel. Would a naturally gifted musician hear the revelations which, for me, had been exclusively visual? It would be interesting to make the experiment. Meanwhile, though not transfigured, though retaining its normal quality and intensity, the music contributed not a little to my understanding of what had happened to me and of the wider problems which those happenings had raised.

Instrumental music, oddly enough, left me rather cold. Mozart's C-Minor Piano Concerto was interrupted after the first movement, and a recording of some madrigals by Gesualdo took its place.

"These voices," I said appreciatively, "these voices—they're a kind of bridge back to the human world." And a bridge they remained even while singing the most startlingly chromatic of the mad prince's compositions. Through the uneven phrases of the madrigals, the music pursued its course, never sticking to the same key for two bars together. In Gesualdo, that fantastic character out of a Webster melodrama, psychological disintegration had exaggerated, had pushed to the extreme limit, a tendency inherent in modal as opposed to fully tonal music. The resulting works sounded as though they might have been written by the later Schoenberg.

"And yet," I felt myself constrained to say, as I listened to these strange products of a CounterReformation psychosis working upon a late medieval art form, "and yet it does not matter that he's all in bits. The whole is disorganized. But each individual fragment is in order, is a representative of a Higher

Order. The Highest Order prevails even in the disintegration. The totality is present even in the broken pieces. More clearly present, perhaps, than in a completely coherent work. At least you aren't lulled into a sense of false security by some merely human, merely fabricated order. You have to rely on your immediate perception of the ultimate order. So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages. But of course it's dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn't get back, out of the chaos..."

From Gesualdo's madrigals we jumped, across a gulf of three centuries, to Alban Berg and the Lyric Suite.

"This" I announced in advance, "is going to be hell."

But, as it turned out, I was wrong. Actually the music sounded rather funny. Dredged up from the personal subconscious, agony succeeded twelve-tone agony; but what struck me was only the essential incongruity between a psychological disintegration even completer than Gesualdo's and the prodigious resources, in talent and technique, employed in its expression.

"Isn't he sorry for himself!" I commented with a derisive lack of sympathy. And then, "Katzenmusik— learned Katzenmusik." And finally, after a few more minutes of the anguish, "Who cares what his feelings are? Why can't he pay attention to something else?"

As a criticism of what is undoubtedly a very remarkable work, it was unfair and inadequate—but not, I think, irrelevant. I cite it for what it is worth and because that is how, in a state of pure contemplation, I reacted to the Lyric Suite.

When it was over, the investigator suggested a walk in the garden. I was willing; and though my body seemed to have dissociated itself almost completely from my mind—or, to be more accurate, though my awareness of the transfigured outer world was no longer accompanied by an awareness of my physical organism—I found myself able to get up, open the French window and walk out with only a minimum of hesitation. It was odd, of course, to feel that "I" was not the same as these arms and legs "out there," as this wholly objective trunk and neck and even head. It was odd; but one soon got used to it. And anyhow the body seemed perfectly well able to look after itself. In reality, of course, it always does look after itself. All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all. When it does anything more—when it tries too hard, for example, when it worries, when it becomes apprehensive about the future—it lowers the effectiveness of those forces and may even cause the devitalized body to fall ill. In my present state, awareness was not referred to as ego; it was, so to speak, on its own. This meant that the physiological intelligence controlling the body was also on its own. For the moment that interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way.

From the French window I walked out under a kind of pergola covered in part by a climbing rose tree, in part by laths, one inch wide with half an inch of space between them. The sun was shining and the shadows of the laths made a zebra-like pattern on the ground and across the seat and back of a garden chair, which was standing at this end of the pergola. That chair—shall I ever forget it? Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes of an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that they could be made of anything but blue fire. For what seemed an immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to know, what it was that confronted me. At any other time I would have seen a chair barred with alternate light and shade. Today the percept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else. Garden furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow—these were no more than names and notions, mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event. The event was this succession of azure furnace doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad. Schizophrenia has its heavens as well as its hells and purgatories. I remember what an old friend, dead these many years, told me about his mad wife. One day in the early stages of the disease, when she still had her lucid intervals he had gone to talk to her about their children. She listened for a time, then cut him short. How could he bear to waste his time on a couple of absent children, when all that really mattered, here and now, was the unspeakable beauty of the patterns he made, in this brown tweed jacket, every time he moved his arms? Alas, this Paradise of cleansed perception, of pure one-sided contemplation, was not to endure. The blissful intermissions became rarer, became briefer, until finally there were no more of them; there was only horror.

Most takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of schizophrenia. The drug brings hell and purgatory only to those who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical depressions or a chronic anxiety. If, like the other drugs of remotely comparable power, mescalin were notoriously toxic, the taking of it would be enough, of itself, to cause anxiety. But the reasonably healthy person knows in advance that, so far as he is concerned, mescalin is completely innocuous, that its effects will pass off after eight or ten hours, leaving no hangover and consequently no craving for a renewal of the dose. Fortified by this knowledge, he embarks upon the experiment without fear—in other words, without any disposition to convert an unprecedentedly strange and other than human experience into something appalling, something actually diabolical.

Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgment—or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair—I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cozy world of symbols, could possibly bear. The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the incompatibility between man's egotism and the divine purity, between man's selfaggravated separateness and the infinity of God. Following Boehme and William Law, we may say that, by unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze can be apprehended only as a burning, purgatorial fire. An almost identical doctrine is to be found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Pure Light of the Void, and even from the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated Reality—anything!

The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick into the bargain. His sickness consists in the inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality (as the sane person habitually does) in the home-made universe of common sense—the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols, and socially acceptable conventions. The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts, and which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate countermeasures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other. And once embarked upon the downward, the infernal road, one would never be able to stop. That, now, was only too obvious.

"If you started in the wrong way," I said in answer to the investigator's questions, "everything that happened would be a proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be self-validating, You couldn't draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot."

"So you think you know where madness lies?"

My answer was a convinced and heartfelt, "Yes."

"And you couldn't control it?"

"No, I couldn't control it. If one began with fear and hate as the major premise, one would have to go on to the conclusion."

"Would you be able," my wife asked, "to fix your attention on what The Tibetan Book of The Dead calls the Clear Light?"

I was doubtful.

"Would it keep the evil away, if you could hold it? Or would you not be able to hold it?"

I considered the question for some time. "Perhaps/' I answered at last, "perhaps I could—hut only if there were somebody there to tell me about the Clear Light. One couldn't do it by oneself. That's the point, I suppose, of the Tibetan ritual-someone sitting there all the time and telling you what's what."

After listening to the record of this part of the experiment, I took down my copy of Evans-Wentz's edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and opened at random. "O nobly born, let not thy mind be distracted." That was the problem—to remain undistracted. Undistracted by the memory of past sins, by imagined pleasure, by the bitter aftertaste of old wrongs and humiliations, by all the fears and hates and cravings that ordinarily eclipse the Light. What those Buddhist monks did for the dying and the dead, might not the modern psychiatrist do for the insane? Let there be a voice to assure them, by day and even while they are asleep, that in spite of all the terror, all the bewilderment and confusion, the ultimate Reality remains unshakably itself and is of the same substance as the inner light of even the most cruelly tormented mind. By means of such devices as recorders, clock-controlled switches, public address systems, and pillow speakers it should be very easy to keep the inmates of even an understaffed institution constantly reminded of this primordial fact. Perhaps a few of the lost souls might in this way be helped to win some measure of control over the universe—at once beautiful and appalling, but always other than human, always totally incomprehensible—in which they find themselves condemned to live.

None too soon, I was steered away from the disquieting splendors of my garden chair. Drooping in green parabolas from the hedge, the ivy fronds shone with a kind of glassy, jade-like radiance. A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision. So passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance, the flowers strained upwards into the blue. Like the chair under the laths, they protected too much. I looked down at the leaves and discovered a cavernous intricacy of the most delicate green lights and shadows, pulsing with undecipherable mystery.

Roses:

The flowers are easy to paint, The leaves difficult.

Shiki's haiku (which I quote in R. H. Bly th's translation) expresses, by indirection, exactly what I then felt—the excessive, the too obvious glory of the flowers, as contrasted with the subtler miracle of their foliage.

We walked out into the street. A large pale blue automobile was standing at the curb. At the sight of it, I was suddenly overcome by enormous merriment. What complacency, what an absurd self-satisfaction beamed from those bulging surfaces of glossiest enamel! Man had created the thing in his own image— or rather in the image of his favorite character in fiction. I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks.

We re-entered the house. A meal had been prepared. Somebody, who was not yet identical with myself, fell to with ravenous appetite. From a considerable distance and without much interest, I looked on.

When the meal had been eaten, we got into the car and went for a drive. The effects of the mescalin were already on the decline: but the flowers in the gardens still trembled on the brink of being supernatural, the pepper trees and carobs along the side streets still manifestly belonged to some sacred grove. Eden alternated with Dodona. Yggdrasil with the mystic Rose. And then, abruptly, we were at an intersection, waiting to cross Sunset Boulevard. Before us the cars were rolling by in a steady stream— thousands of them, all bright and shiny like an advertiser's dream and each more ludicrous than the last. Once again I was convulsed with laughter.

The Red Sea of traffic parted at last, and we crossed into another oasis of trees and lawns and roses. In a few minutes we had climbed to a vantage point in the hills, and there was the city spread out beneath us. Rather disappointingly, it looked very like the city I had seen on other occasions. So far as I was concerned, transfiguration was proportional to distance. The nearer, the more divinely other. This vast, dim panorama was hardly different from itself.

We drove on, and so long as we remained in the hills, with view succeeding distant view, significance was at its everyday level, well below transfiguration point. The magic began to work again only when we turned down into a new suburb and were gliding between two rows of houses. Here, in spite of the peculiar hideousness of the architecture, there were renewals of transcendental otherness, hints of the morning's heaven. Brick chimneys and green composition roofs glowed in the sunshine, like fragments of the New Jerusalem. And all at once I saw what Guardi had seen and (with what incomparable skill) had so often rendered in his paintings—a stucco wall with a shadow slanting across it, blank but un-forgettably beautiful, empty but charged with all the meaning and the mystery of existence. The revelation dawned and was gone again within a fraction of a second. The car had moved on; time was uncovering another manifestation of the eternal Suchness. "Within sameness there is difference. But that difference should be different from sameness is in no wise the intention of all the Buddhas. Their intention is both totality and differentiation." This bank of red and white geraniums, for example—it was entirely different from that stucco wall a hundred yards up the road. But the "is-ness" of both was the same, the eternal quality of their transience was the same.

An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World's Biggest Drug Store safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as "being in one's right mind."

That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor, and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory—all these have served, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for private, for everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots—all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial. And to these natural modifiers of consciousness modern science has added its quota of synthetics—chloral, for example, and benzedrine, the bromides and the barbiturates.

Most of these modifiers of consciousness cannot now be taken except under doctor’s orders, or else illegally and at considerable risk. For unrestricted use the West has permitted only alcohol and tobacco. All the other chemical Doors in the Wall are labeled Dope, and their unauthorized takers are Fiends.

We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time. The urge to do something for the young is strong only in parents, and in them only for the few years during which their children go to school. Equally unsurprising is the current attitude towards drink and smoke. In spite of the growing army of hopeless alcoholics, in spite of the hundreds of thousands of persons annually maimed or killed by drunken drivers, popular comedians still crack jokes about alcohol and its addicts. And in spite of the evidence linking cigarettes with lung cancer, practically everybody regards tobacco smoking as being hardly less normal and natural than eating. From the point of view of the rationalist utilitarian this may seem odd. For the historian, it is exactly what you would expect. A firm conviction of the material reality of Hell never prevented medieval Christians from doing what their ambition, lust, or covetousness suggested. Lung cancer, traffic accidents, and the millions of miserable and misery-creating alcoholics are facts even more certain than was, in Dante’s day, the fact of the Inferno. But all such facts are remote and unsubstantial compared with the near, felt fact of a craving, here and now, for release or sedation, for a drink or a smoke.

Ours is the age, among other things, of the automobile and of rocketing population. Alcohol is incompatible with safety on the roads, and its production, like that of tobacco, condemns to virtual sterility many millions of acres of the most fertile soil. The problems raised by alcohol and tobacco cannot, it goes without saying, be solved by prohibition. The universal and ever-present urge to selftranscendence is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful ones. Some of these other, better doors will be social and technological in nature, others religious or psychological, others dietetic, educational, athletic. But the need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain. What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the short. Such a drug must be potent in minute doses and synthesizable. If it does not possess these qualities, its production, like that of wine, beer, spirits, and tobacco will interfere with the raising of indispensable food and fibers. It must be less toxic than opium or cocaine, less likely to produce undesirable social consequences than alcohol or the barbiturates, less inimical to heart and lungs than the tars and nicotine of cigarettes. And, on the positive side, it should produce changes in consciousness more interesting, more intrinsically valuable than mere sedation or dreaminess, delusions of omnipotence or release from inhibition.

To most people, mescalin is almost completely innocuous. Unlike alcohol, it does not drive the taker into the kind of uninhibited action which results in brawls, crimes of violence, and traffic accidents. A man under the influence of mescalin quietly minds his own business. Moreover, the business he minds is an experience of the most enlightening kind, which does not have to be paid for (and this is surely important) by a compensatory hangover. Of the long-range consequences of regular mescalin taking we know very little. The Indians who consume peyote buttons do not seem to be physically or morally degraded by the habit. However, the available evidence is still scarce and sketchy.- Although obviously superior to cocaine, opium, alcohol, and tobacco, mescalin is not yet the ideal drug. Along with the happily transfigured majority of mescalin takers there is a minority that finds in the drug only hell or purgatory. Moreover, for a drug that is to be used, like alcohol, for general consumption, its effects last for an inconveniently long time. But chemistry and physiology are capable nowadays of practically anything. If the psychologists and sociologists will define the ideal, the neurologists and pharmacologists can be relied upon to discover the means whereby that ideal can be realized or at least (for perhaps this kind of ideal can never, in the very nature of things, be fully realized) more nearly approached than in the wine-bibbing past, the whisky-drinking, marijuana-smoking, and barbiturateswallowing present.

The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul. When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works, and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion's chemical surrogates—alcohol and "goof pills" in the modern West, alcohol and opium in the East, hashish in the Mohammedan world, alcohol and marijuana in Central America, alcohol and coca in the Andes, alcohol and the barbiturates in the more up-to-date regions of South America. In Poisons Sacres, Ivresses Divines, Philippe de Felice has written at length and with a wealth of documentation on the immemorial connection between religion and the taking of drugs. Here, in summary or in direct quotation, are his conclusions. The employment for religious purposes of toxic substances is "extraordinarily widespread.... The practices studied in this volume can be observed in every region of the earth, among primitives no less than among those who have reached a high pitch of civilization. We are therefore dealing not with exceptional facts, which might justifiably be overlooked, but with a general and, in the widest sense of the word, a human phenomenon, the kind of phenomenon which cannot be disregarded by anyone who is trying to discover what religion is, and what are the deep needs which it must satisfy."

Ideally, everyone should be able to find self-transcendence in some form of pure or applied religion. In practice it seems very unlikely that this hoped for consummation will ever be realized. There are, and doubtless there always will be, good churchmen and good churchwomen for whom, unfortunately, piety is not enough. The late G. K. Chesterton, who wrote at least as lyrically of drink as of devotion, may serve as their eloquent spokesman.

The modern churches, with some exceptions among the Protestant denominations, tolerate alcohol; but even the most tolerant have made no attempt to convert the drug to Christianity, or to sacramentalize its use. The pious drinker is forced to take his religion in one compartment, his religionsurrogate in another. And perhaps this is inevitable. Drinking cannot be sacramentalized except in religions which set no store on decorum. The worship of Dionysos or the Celtic god of beer was a loud and disorderly affair. The rites of Christianity are incompatible with even religious drunkenness. This does no harm to the distillers, but is very bad for Christianity. Countless persons desire self-transcendence and would be glad to find it in church. But, alas, "the hungry sheep look up and are not fed." They take part in rites, they listen to sermons, they repeat prayers; but their thirst remains unassuaged. Disappointed, they turn to the bottle. For a time at least and in a kind of way, it works. Church may still be attended; but it is no more than the Musical Bank of Butler's Erewhon. God may still be acknowledged; but He is God only on the verbal level, only in a strictly Pick-wickian sense. The effective object of worship is the bottle and the sole religious experience is that state of uninhibited and belligerent euphoria which follows the ingestion of the third cocktail.

We see, then, that Christianity and alcohol do not and cannot mix. Christianity and mescalin seem to be much more compatible. This has been demonstrated by many tribes of Indians, from Texas to as far north as Wisconsin. Among these tribes are to be found groups affiliated with the Native American Church, a sect whose principal rite is a kind of Early Christian agape, or love feast, where slices of peyote take the place of the sacramental bread and wine. These Native Americans regard the cactus as God's special gift to the Indians, and equate its effects with the workings of the divine Spirit.

Professor J. S. Slotkin,- one of the very few white men ever to have participated in the rites of a Peyotist congregation, says of his fellow worship-pers that they are "certainly not stupefied or drunk. ... They never get out of rhythm or fumble their words, as a drunken or stupefied man would do. ... They are all quiet, courteous and considerate of one another. I have never been in any white man's house of worship where there is either so much religious feeling or decorum." And what, we may ask, are these devout and well-behaved Peyotists experiencing? Not the mild sense of virtue which sustains the average Sunday churchgoer through ninety minutes of boredom. Not even those high feelings, inspired by thoughts of the Creator and the Redeemer, the Judge and the Comforter, which animate the pious. For these Native Americans, religious experience is something more direct and illuminating, more spontaneous, less the home-made product of the superficial, self-conscious mind. Sometimes (according to the reports collected by Dr. Slotkin) they see visions, which may be of Christ Himself. Sometimes they hear the voice of the Great Spirit. Sometimes they become aware of the presence of God and of those personal shortcomings which must be corrected if they are to do His will. The practical consequences of these chemical openings of doors into the Other World seem to be wholly good. Dr. Slotkin reports that habitual Peyotists are on the whole more industrious, more temperate (many of them abstain altogether from alcohol), more peaceable than non-Peyotists. A tree with such satisfactory fruits cannot be condemned out of hand as evil.

In sacramentalizing the use of peyote, the Indians of the Native American Church have done something which is at once psychologically sound and historically respectable. In the early centuries of Christianity many pagan rites and festivals were baptized, so to say, and made to serve the purposes of the Church. These jollifications were not particularly edifying; but they assuaged a certain psychological hunger and, instead of trying to suppress them, the earlier missionaries had the sense to accept them for what they were, soul-satisfying expressions of fundamental urges, and to incorporate them into the fabric of the new religion. What the Native Americans have done is essentially similar. They have taken a pagan custom (a custom, incidentally, far more elevating and enlightening than most of the rather brutish carousals and mummeries adopted from European paganism) and given it a Christian significance.

Though but recently introduced into the northern United States, peyote-eating and the religion based upon it have become important symbols of the red man's right to spiritual independence. Some Indians have reacted to white supremacy by becoming Americanized, others by retreating into traditional Indianism. But some have tried to make the best of both worlds, indeed of all the worlds—the best of Indianism, the best of Christianity, and the best of those Other Worlds of transcendental experience, where the soul knows itself as unconditioned and of like nature with the divine. Hence the Native American Church. In it two great appetites of the soul—the urge to independence and self-determination and the urge to self-transcendence—were fused with, and interpreted in the light of, a third—the urge to worship, to justify the ways of God to man, to explain the universe by means of a coherent theology.

Lo, the poor Indian, whose untutored mind

Clothes him in front, but leaves him bare behind.

But actually it is we, the rich and highly educated whites, who have left ourselves bare behind. We cover our anterior nakedness with some philosophy—Christian, Marxian, Freudo-Physicalist—but abaft we remain uncovered, at the mercy of all the winds of circumstance. The poor Indian, on the other hand, has had the wit to protect his rear by supplementing the fig leaf of a theology with the breechclout of transcendental experience.

I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe's phrase, "the word is essentially fruitful." He is the man who feels that "what we perceive by the eye is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply." And yet, though himself an intellectual and one of the supreme masters of language, Goethe did not always agree with his own evaluation of the word. "We talk," he wrote in middle life, "far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future—all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills." We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s.

Gestalt psychologists, such as Samuel Renshaw, have devised methods for widening the range and increasing the acuity of human perceptions. But do our educators apply them? The answer is, No.

Teachers in every field of psyche-physical skill, from seeing to tennis, from tightrope walking to prayer, have discovered, by trial and error, the conditions of optimum functioning within their special fields. But have any of the great Foundations financed a project for coordinating these empirical findings into a general theory and practice of heightened creativeness? Again, so far as I am aware, the answer is, No.

All sorts of cultists and queer fish teach all kinds of techniques for achieving health, contentment, peace of mind; and for many of their hearers many of these techniques are demonstrably effective. But do we see respectable psychologists, philosophers, and clergymen boldly descending into those odd and sometimes malodorous wells, at the bottom of which poor Truth is so often condemned to sit? Yet once more the answer is, No.

And now look at the history of mescalin research. Seventy years ago men of first-rate ability described the transcendental experiences which come to those who, in good health, under proper conditions and in the right spirit, take the drug. How many philosophers, how many theologians, how many professional educators have had the curiosity to open this Door in the Wall? The answer, for all practical purposes, is, None.

In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honored. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored. A catalogue, a bibliography, a definitive edition of a third-rate versifier's ipsissima verba, a stupendous index to end all indexes—any genuinely Alexandrian project is sure of approval and financial support: But when it comes to finding out how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill, and more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system—when it comes to any form of non-verbal education more fundamental (and more likely to be of some practical use) than Swedish drill, no really respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do anything about it. Verbalists are suspicious of the non-verbal; rationalists fear the given, non-rational fact; intellectuals feel that "what we perceive by the eye (or in any other way) is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply." Besides, this matter of education in the non-verbal humanities will not fit into any of the established pigeonholes. It is not religion, not neurology, not gymnastics, not morality or civics, not even experimental psychology. This being so the subject is, for academic and ecclesiastical purposes, non-existent and may safely be ignored altogether or left, with a patronizing smile, to those whom the Pharisees of verbal orthodoxy call cranks, quacks, charlatans, and unqualified amateurs.

"I have always found," Blake wrote rather bitterly, "that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise. This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning."

Systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species or as individuals, possibly do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended. It is a transcendence belonging to another order than the human, and yet it may be present to us as a felt immanence, an experienced participation. To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves. Meanwhile, however, there are gratuitous graces in the form of partial and fleeting realizations. Under a more realistic, a less exclusively verbal system of education than ours, every Angel (in Blake's sense of that word) would be permitted as a sabbatical treat, would be urged and even, if necessary, compelled to take an occasional trip through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world of transcendental experience. If it terrified him, it would be unfortunate but probably salutary. If it brought him a brief but timeless illumination, so much the better. In either case the Angel might lose a little of the confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning and the consciousness of having read all the books.

Near the end of his life Aquinas experienced Infused Contemplation. Thereafter he refused to go back to work on his unfinished book. Compared with this, everything he had read and argued about and written-Aristotle and the Sentences, the Questions, the Propositions, the majestic Summas—was no better than chaff or straw. For most intellectuals such a sit-down strike would be inadvisable, even morally wrong. But the Angelic Doctor had done more systematic reasoning than any twelve ordinary Angels, and was already ripe for death. He had earned the right, in those last months of his mortality, to turn away from merely symbolic straw and chaff to the bread of actual and substantial Fact. For Angels of a lower order and with better prospects of longevity, there must be a return to the straw. But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

[The Doors of Perception, 1954]

8. See the following papers: Humphry Osmond and John Smythies, "Schizophrenia: A New Approach," The journal of Mental Science Vol. XCVIII (April 1952); Humphrey Osmond, "On Being Mad," Saskatchewan Psychwtric Services Journal Vol. 1. No. 2 (Sept. 1952); John Smythies, "The Mescalin Phenomena," The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Vol. Ill (Feh. 1953); Abram Hoffer, Humphry Osmond, and John Smythies, "Schizophrenia: A New Approach," The Journal of Mental Science Vol. C. No. 418 (Jan. 1954). Numerous other papers on the biochemistry, pharmacology, psychology, and neuro-physiology of schizophrenia and the mescalin phenomena are in preparation.

9. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). Swedish author and mystic.

1. George William Russell, pseud. A. E. (1867-1935). Irish poet, painter, economist, and writer on mysticism.

2. Daisetz Tei taro Suzuki (1870-1966). Japanese Buddhist scholar.

3. Arnold Bennett (1867-1931). English novelist.

4. In his monograph, "Menomini Peyotism," published (Dec. 1952.) in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Professor J. S. Slotkin has written that "the habitual use of Peyote does not seem to produce any increased tolerance or dependence. I know many people who have been Peyotists for forty to fifty years. The amount of Peyote they use depends upon the solemnity of the occasion; in general they do not take any more Peyote now than they did years ago. Also, there is sometimes an interval of a month or more between rites, and they go without Peyote during this period without feeling any craving for it. Personally, even after a series of rites occurring on four successive weekends, I neither increased the amount of Peyote consumed nor felt any continued need for it." It is evidently with good reason that "Peyote has never been legally declared a narcotic, or its use prohibited by the federal government." However, "during the long history of Indian-white contact, white officials have usually tried to suppress the use of Peyote, because it has been conceived to violate their own mores. But these attempts have always failed." In a footnote Dr. Slotkin adds that "it is amazing to hear the fantastic stories about the effects of Peyote and the nature of the ritual, which are told by the white and Catholic Indian officials in the Menomini Reservation. None of them have had the slightest first-hand experience with the plant or with the religion, yet some fancy themselves to be authorities and write official reports on the subject."

5. James Sydney Slotkin (1913-1958). American anthropologist.

The Education of an Amphibian

every human being 18 an amphibian—or, to be more accurate, every human being is five or six amphibians rolled into one. Simultaneously or alternately, we inhabit many different and even incommensurable universes. To begin with, man is an embodied spirit. As such, he finds himself infesting this particular planet, while being free at the same time to explore the whole spaceless, timeless world of universal Mind. This is bad enough; but it is only the beginning of our troubles. For, besides being an embodied spirit, each of us is also a highly self-conscious and self-centered member of a sociable species. We live in and for ourselves; but at the same time we live in and, somewhat reluctantly, for the social group surrounding us. Again, we are both the products of evolution and a race of self-made men. In other words, we are simultaneously the subjects of Nature and the citizens of a strictly human republic, which may be anything from what St. Paul called "no mean city" to the most squalid of material and moral slums.

Below the human level amphibiousness presents no difficulties. The tadpole knows precisely when to get rid of its tail and gills, and become a frog. The turtle browses under water, comes up every now and then for a breath of fresh air, crawls ashore when the mating season rolls around. And it repeats this performance with effortless punctuality for years, sometimes for centuries. With us, alas, the case is painfully different. Our human amphibiousness—the multiple double life of creatures indigenous to half a dozen incompatible worlds—is a chronic embarrassment, a source of endless errors and delinquencies, of crimes and imbecilities without number. Each field of our amphibious existence has its own peculiar problems, and to discuss them all would be an enormous task. Here I shall confine myself to one small corner of one of the fields. I shall talk about the troubles of an ape that has learned to talk—of an immortal spirit that has not yet learned to dispense with words.

The official name of our species is homo sapiens; but there are many anthropologists who prefer to think of man as homo faber—the smith, the maker of tools. It would be possible, I think, to reconcile these two definitions in a third. If man is a knower and an efficient doer, it is only because he is also a talker. In order to be faber and sapiens, homo must first be loquax, the loquacious one. Without language we should merely be hairless chimpanzees. Indeed, we should be something much worse. Possessed of a high IQ but no language, we should be like the Yahoos of Gulliver's Travels—creatures too clever to be guided by instinct, too self-centered to live in a state of animal grace, and therefore condemned to remain forever, frustrated and malignant, between contented apehood and aspiring humanity. It was language that made possible the accumulation of knowledge and the broadcasting of information. It was language that permitted the expression of religious insight, the formulation of ethical ideals, the codification of laws. It was language, in a word, that turned us into human beings and gave birth to civilization.

Every existing language is an implied theory of man and the universe, a virtual philosophy. And the virtual philosophies of many primitive peoples are at least as subtle, at least as adequate to inner and outer reality, as were the great classical languages of Europe and Asia, before they were supplemented by mathematics and the special vocabularies of science. Without exception, all languages are stupendous works of genius. But these works of genius were created by people just as stupid as we are. One is almost forced to believe in the existence, within each one of us, of something other and much more intelligent than the conscious self.

In any case, however originated and however developed, language is now one of the primary facts of every human experience. It is the medium in which we live and move and have about 50 percent of our being. We are like icebergs, floating in the given reality of our physiology, of our intuitions and perceptions, our pains and pleasures, but projecting at the same time into the airy world of words and notions. Compared with the oceanic depths, that world is a world of light, a world in which one can see and understand. We rejoice in the verbal sunshine; we feel as free in it as birds or even angels. But, alas, this universe of ours is a place where nobody ever gets anything for nothing. Its gifts are like those so generously distributed by the makers of breakfast foods. To get them, you have to send in a box top. Take language, for example, that greatest of all our gifts. It admits us into a conceptual world of light and air. But only at a price. For this world of light and air is also a world where the winds of doctrine howl destructively; where delusive mock-suns keep popping up over the horizon, where all kinds of poison comes pouring out of the propaganda factories and the tripe mills. Living amphibiously, half in fact and half in words, half immediate experience and half in abstract notions, we contrive most of the time to make the worst of both worlds. We use language so badly that we became the slaves of our cliches and are turned either into conforming Babbitts or into fanatics and doctrinaires. And we use immediate experience so badly that we become blind to the realities of our own nature and insensitive to the universe around us. The abstract knowledge which words bring us is paid for by concrete ignorance. In his classical Remembering, F. C. Bartlett- has recorded the results of a number of experiments designed to test the influence of language upon the memories of various kinds of experience. In one of the tests, photographs of soldiers and sailors of different ranks were shown to a group of subjects, who were then asked to describe the faces and answer questions about them at intervals from half an hour to a week or more later. "A particular face often at once aroused a more or less conventional attitude appropriate to the given type. There-upon, the attitude actively affected the detail of representation. Even in immediate memory the features of the face often tended to be made more conventional, while in subsequent recall they tended to approach yet more closely to conventional patterns." Other experiments were made with literary material. The subjects were asked to read a passage from one of Emerson's essays, and an American Indian folk-tale. When they reproduced this material immediately after reading, and again at longer intervals, all that was fresh and original in the essay and the story tended to disappear. Slaves to the cliches in which they habitually expressed themselves, the subjects changed what they had read into the likeness of their own familiar notions as embodied in the language of their class and culture. Summing up the results of these experiments with literary material Bartlett concludes that, when reproduced from memory, "all the stories tend to be shorn of their individualizing features, the descriptive passages lose most of their peculiarities of style and matter ... the arguments tend to be reduced to a bald expression of conventional opinion," or, if they express an original point of view, "tend to pass over into opposed conventional views. Where the epithets are original, they tend to become current, commonplace terms. The style gets flattened out and loses any pretensions it may have had to forcefulness and beauty." All of which merely confirms what every writer painfully discovers for himself —that full communication with a large audience is impossible, that most people read into literature the standardized notions with which they set out, that the author’s laborious efforts to find an adequate verbal equivalent for experience are simply not noticed by the majority of his readers, who automatically transform what Mallarme calls the sens plus pur of the artist's language into the soiled and shopworn mots de la tribu. Language, it is evident, has its Gresham's Law. Bad words tend to drive out good words, and words in general, the good as well as the bad, tend to drive out immediate experience and our memories of immediate experience. And yet without words, there would be precious little memory of any kind. The "wolf children" who have been brought up by animals find it impossible to remember their wordless life among the brutes. And how complete, in every one of us, is the amnesia for all the novel and immensely exciting experiences of infancy—the age of the non-talker!

We ought, said St. Paul, to "serve in the newness of the spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter." For "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." In other words,

Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,

Und gruen des Lebens goldner Baum.

"Grey is all theory, green life’s golden tree."

And in another context Walt Whitman expresses the same idea.

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide and measure them,

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture

room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Too much theorizing, as we all know, is fatal to the soul. Too many lectures will cause the green tree to wither, will turn its golden fruits to dust. Life flows back into us when we turn from the stale oldness of theological notions to the newness of spiritual experience; when we exchange the learn'd astronomers' proofs and figures for nocturnal silence and the stars. St. Paul and the poets are talking about some of the most obvious facts of experience. But these facts are not the only facts. Theory is grey and diagrams have no nourishment in them. And yet without scientific theories, without philosophy and theology and law, we should be nothing but Yahoos. The letter condemns us to spiritual death; but the absence of the letter condemns us to something just as bad. Whether we like it or not, we are amphibians, living simultaneously in the world of experience and the world of notions, in the world of direct apprehension of Nature, God and ourselves, and the world of abstract, verbalized knowledge about these primary facts. Our business as human beings is to make the best of both these worlds.

Unfortunately, organized education has done very little, hitherto, to help us in this task. For organized education is predominantly verbal education. In the Middle Ages the liberal arts were seven in number. The first three—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—concerned themselves with the language of common speech, philosophy, and literature respectively. The fourth, arithmetic, was the art of handling the special language of numbers. Geometry was the fifth art, and included Natural History; but this Natural History was studied almost exclusively in encyclopedias composed by men who had studied it in other encyclopedias. The sixth of the liberal arts was astronomy, and its study entailed some observation of the non-verbal universe. In music, the seventh and last of the arts, a non-verbal aspect of the human mind was studied. (We should remember, however, that medieval educators always treated music as a science, and concerned themselves hardly at all with music as a mode of expression, a source of pleasure or of insight.)

In modern practice a course in the liberal arts is less overwhelmingly verbal than it was in the past. Words are still the medium in which teachers and pupils carry on most of their activities. But they are not the only medium. Modern education provides for numerous excursions into external nature and even into that given inner world, in which the non-verbal side of our amphibious nature has its being. Students are now required to observe non-verbal facts and make experiments with them; they are encouraged to cultivate their artistic skills, to refine their tastes and sharpen their sensibilities. All this is

greatly to the good. But it is not yet enough. We must do more for the non-verbal part of our amphibious nature, we must do better than we are doing now.

Exponents of Progressive Education probably think that they are already doing everything that can be done. Under the influence of John Dewey, they have stressed the importance of non-verbal activity as a means of learning. History, for example, is now often taught in a series of ’’projects." Stonehenge is reconstructed with brickbats in the back yard. Life in the Middle Ages is dramatically reproduced— minus, of course, the dirt, the violence, and the theology which were the essence of that life. Whether children learn more through these mud-pie techniques of education than they would learn by being shown pictures and reading an intelligent book, I do not profess to know. The important point, in our present context, is that the "doing," through which the children are supposed to learn, is left unanalyzed by the progressive educators who advocate it. So far as they are concerned, doing is doing; there is nothing to choose between one kind of doing and another. John Dewey himself knew better; but his followers have chosen to ignore his qualifications of the learning-by-doing doctrine and to plunge headlong and with unquestioning enthusiasm into their mud pies.

But before I pursue this subject any further, let me return for a moment to our amphibian. To my earlier list of man’s double lives I would like to add yet another item. Every human being is a conscious self; but, below the threshold of consciousness every human being is also a not-self—or, more precisely, he is five or six merging but clearly distinguishable not-selves. There is, first of all, the personal, homemade not-self—the not-self of habits and conditioned reflexes, the not-self of impulses repressed but still obscurely active, the not-self of buried-alive reactions to remote events and forgotten words, the not-self of fossil infancy and the festering remains of a past that refuses to die. This personal not-self is that region of the subconscious with which psychiatry mainly deals. Next comes the not-self that used to be called the vegetative soul or the entelechy. This is the not-self in charge of the body—the not-self who, when we wish to walk, actually does the walking, the not-self that controls our breathing, our heartbeat, our glandular secretions; the not-self that is prepared to digest even doughnuts; the not-self that heals wounds and brings us back to health when we have been ill. Next, there is the not-self who inhabits the world from which we derive our insights and inspirations. This is the not-self who spoke to Socrates through his daimon, who dreamed the text of Kubla Khan, who dictated King Lear and the Agamemnon and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the not-self who is responsible in all of us for every enhancement of wisdom, every sudden accession of vital or intellectual power. Beyond this world of inspiration lies the world of what Jung has called the Archetypes—those great shared symbols which stand for man's deepest tendencies, his perennial conflicts and ubiquitous problems. Next comes the world of visionary experience, where a mysterious not-self lives in the midst, not of shared human symbols, but of shared non-human facts—facts from which the theologians of the various religions have derived their notions of the Other World, of Heaven and Hell. And finally, beyond all the rest but immanent in every mental or material event, is that universal Not-Self, which men have called the Holy Spirit, the Atman-Brahman, the Clear Light, Suchness.

A self can affect and be affected by its associated not-selves in many different ways. Here for example is a conscious self which responds inappropriately to circumstances. In the process it is apt to fill the personal not-self with all manner of fears, greeds, hates, and wrong judgments. Thus distorted, the personal not-self reacts upon the conscious self, forcing it to behave even more inappropriately than before. And so the game goes on, each party contributing to the delinquency of the other. Self and personal not-self have set up a mutual deterioration society.

For the not-self in charge of bodily functions the consequences of this are disastrous. Left to its own devices, this physiological intelligence is almost incapable of making a mistake. Interfered with by a delinquent ego and an insane personal subconscious, it loses its native infallibility, and the organism at once falls prey to psycho-somatic disease. Health is a state of harmony between conscious self, personal not-self, and vegetative soul.

The last three not-selves constitute the very essence of our being, and yet are so transcendently other as to be beyond our power to affect them. The ego and the personal not-self can poison one another and play havoc with the vegetative soul. They can do nothing to hurt the indwelling Spirit. What they can do, what for most people, most of the time, they actually succeed in doing, is to eclipse these inner lights. They set up a more or less completely opaque screen between our consciousness and the transcendental not-selves with which every self is associated. What is called Enlightenment is simply the removal of this eclipsing barrier.

The foregoing account of man's double life as a self associated with a group of not-selves has been, of necessity, very brief and schematic. But I hope, none the less, that it may serve to illuminate our problem: How can we educate the psycho-physical instrument, by means of which we learn and live?

The psycho-physical instrument is one and indivisible; but for practical purposes we may regard it as being made up of several distinct components. Accordingly, the curriculum of our hypothetical course in what may be called the non-verbal humanities will include the following items. Training of the kinesthetic sense. Training of the special senses. Training of memory. Training in control of the autonomic nervous system. Training for spiritual insight.

The most fundamental of our awareness is the kinesthetic sense. This is the sense which registers muscular tension within the body, and which tells us about the changes in muscular tension that accompany physical movement and variations in our mental state. The kinesthetic sense is the main line of communication between the conscious self and the personal subconscious on the one hand and the vegetative soul on the other. When this sense is debauched—and in our urban-industrial civilization it seems to get debauched very easily—two things happen. First, the individual develops a habit of using his psycho-physical instrument improperly. And, second, he loses his sense of what we may call muscular morality, his basic standard of physical right and wrong. Habit is second nature; and when we have gone on doing an unnatural thing long enough, it comes, by mere familiarity, to seem completely right and proper. What is needed, at this basic level of psycho-physical education, is some way of unlearning our habits of improper use, some method by which the debauched kinesthetic sense may be restored to its pristine integrity.

Such a method exists. It has been developed in more than fifty years of experimentation and teaching by Mr. F. M. Alexander, an Australian by birth who has worked for most of his long life in England and the United States. The importance of Alexander's work was early recognized by John Dewey, who contributed valuable prefaces to three of his books. Alexander's fundamental discovery (since confirmed by physiologists and zoologists working in other fields) is that there are, in Dewey's words, "certain basic, central organic habits and attitudes, which condition every act we perform, every use we make of ourselves." When we lose these natural good habits and impose upon ourselves improper habits of use, everything goes wrong, not merely in the body, but also (insofar as physical events condition mental events) in the mind. The degree of wrongness may be great or small; but since all bad habits tend to become worse with time, it is in the highest degree desirable that they should be corrected at the earliest opportunity. Alexander's technique, writes John Dewey, "gives the educator a standard of psycho-physical health—in which what we call morality is included. It also supplies the means whereby that standard may be progressively and endlessly achieved. It provides therefore the conditions for the central direction of all educational processes. It bears the same relation to education that education itself bears to all other human activities." These are strong words; for Dewey was convinced that man's only hope lies in education. But just as education is absolutely necessary to the world at large, so Alexander's methods of training the psycho-physical instrument are absolutely necessary to education. Schooling without proper training of the psycho-physical instrument cannot, in the very nature of things, do more than a limited amount of good and may, in the process of doing that limited amount of good, do the child a great deal of harm by systematically engraining his habits of improper use. Learning by doing is a sound principle only if the doing is good doing. If it is bad doing (and in the vast majority of cases it is bad), learning by doing is hopelessly unsound.

It is a most curious fact that of the literally millions of educators who, for two generations, have so constantly appealed to Dewey's authority, only an infinitesimal handful has ever bothered to look into the method which Dewey himself regarded as absolutely fundamental to any effective system of education. The reason for this neglect is simple enough. Like everyone else, educators have a debauched kinesthetic sense; and, like everyone else, they do not know that their standards of physical right and wrong have been perverted. Long-standing habits of improper use lead them to believe that what they feel to be right and natural actually is right and natural. In fact, of course, it is wrong and unnatural, and feels right only because they are used to it. They cannot persuade themselves that anything is fundamentally wrong with their own psycho-physical instrument or with the psychophysical instruments of their pupils. The disappointing results of education are attributed by them to various combinations of subsidiary and superficial causes, never to the fundamental cause of causes—improper use and loss of the natural standard of psycho-physical health.

Most of us, as Alexander is never tired of insisting, are inveterate "end-gainers." We are so anxious to achieve some particular end that we never pay attention to the psycho-physical means whereby that end is to be gained. So far as we are concerned, any old means is good enough. But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end. Thus, the end proposed by the Allies in the First World War was "to make the world safe for democracy." But the means employed were unrestricted violence, and unrestricted violence is incapable of producing worldwide democracy. Unrestricted violence produces such things as fear, hatred, and social chaos. Chaos is followed by dictatorship, and dictatorship combined with general fear and hatred leads once more to unrestricted violence. This is an extreme case; but the principle it illustrates is universally valid. In the field of education, for example, a child is assigned a project. The end proposed is the learning of a set of facts and the acquisition of certain skills and certain morally desirable attitudes. But among the means employed to achieve this end is the child's psycho-physical instrument. If (as is probably the case) this psycho-physical instrument has lost its standard of physical right and wrong and is a prey to bad habits, and if (as is virtually certain) nothing effective is being done to restore the standard and get rid of the bad habits, the ends proposed by well-meaning educators will not be achieved in their entirety. This failure to do anything effective about the psycho-physical instrument is surely one of the reasons why education has never justified the hopes of the idealists and reformers. Four generations ago James Mill expressed the belief that, if everybody could read and write, everything would be well, forever. Personal liberty and democratic government would be assured, wars would cease, reason would everywhere prevail. Today everybody can read and write, and we find ourselves living in a world where war is incessant, liberty on the decline, democracy in peril, a world moreover where most of the beneficiaries of universal education read only the tabloids, the comics, and murder mysteries.

Man, as we have seen, is a self associated with not-selves. By developing bad habits, the conscious ego and the personal subconscious interfere with the normal functioning of the deeper not-selves, from which we receive the animal grace of physical health and the spiritual grace of insight. If we wish to educate the psycho-physical instrument, we must train people in the art of getting out of their own light. This truth has been discovered and rediscovered, again and again, by all the teachers of psychophysical skills. In all the activities of life, from the most trivial to the most important, the secret of proficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states—a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation. The fact that these incompatibles can actually coexist is due, of course, to the amphibious nature of the human being. That which must be relaxed is the ego and the personal subconscious, that which must be active is the vegetative soul and the not-selves which lie beyond it. The physiological and spiritual not-selves with which we are associated cannot do their work effectively until the ego and personal subconscious learn to let go.

Descartes based the whole of his philosophy on the affirmation, Cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. This sounds good, but unfortunately it doesn't happen to be true. The truth, as von Baader pointed out, is not Cogito ergo sum but Cogitor ergo sum. My existence does not depend on the fact that I am thinking; it depends on the fact that, whether I know it or not, I am being thought—being thought by a mind much greater than the consciousness which I ordinarily identify with myself. This fact is recognized by the tennis pro as it is recognized by the mystic, by the piano teacher as by the yogin, by the vocal coach as by the Zen master and the exponent of mental prayer. If I get out of my not-selves' light, I shall be illumined. If I stop anxiously cogito-ing, I shall give myself a chance of being cogitor-ed by a committee of indwelling intelligences that can deal with my problems a great deal better than I can. We must use our conscious will—but use it for the purpose of preventing our ego from succumbing to its old bad habits or in any other way eclipsing the inner lights. This does not mean, of course, that the conscious self can ever abdicate its position as knower, reasoner, and maker of moral judgments. What it does mean is that we must give up the insane illusion that a conscious self, however virtuous and however intelligent, can do its work single-handed and without assistance. Health is the harmony between self and not-selves, and proficiency in any field comes to those who have learned how to place the resources of their consciousness at the disposal of the Unconscious. Genius is simultaneously inspiration and perspiration. It is no use inhaling unless we are prepared to sweat. And it is no use sweating unless we know how to inhale the life-giving airs that blow from worlds beyond our conscious selfhood.

The art of combining relaxation with activity has been invented and reinvented by the teachers of every kind of psycho-physical skill. Unfortunately these teachers have generally worked in isolation, each within the narrow field of his or her particular specialty. The activity for which they train their pupils is not the unregenerate activity for activity's sake, permitted and even encouraged by the Progressive Educationists. It is activity along the right lines, activity according to essentially sound principles. For this reason it will never do the harm which is done by unregenerate end-gaining. But though more or less harmless, it will be less beneficial than it would have been if it had been taught, not as an isolated special skill, but in conjunction with a general education of the kinesthetic sense, a total training in the use of the self, along the lines laid down by Alexander and so warmly recommended by John Dewey.

How much the indwelling not-selves can do for us, if we give them a chance, has been set forth in two remarkable little books published within the last few years. The first is entitled New Pathways to Piano Technique by the late Luigi Bonpensiere. The second, Zen and the Art of Archery, has as its author a German psychologist, long resident in Japan, Dr. Eugen Herrigel. Each of these books bears witness to the same fundamental truth. When the conscious will is used to inhibit indulgence in the bad habits which have come to seem natural, when the ego has been induced to refrain from "straining every nerve," from desperately trying to "do something," when the personal subconscious has been induced to release its clutching tensions, the vegetative soul and the intelligences which lie beyond the vegetative soul can be relied upon to perform miracles.

As naturalists, we are familiar with the miracles performed by the indwelling intelligence of animals —miracles all the more remarkable because of the lack of intelligence displayed on the conscious level by the creatures concerned. I am not referring, of course, to the miracles of instinct; I am speaking of what may be called the ad hoc intelligence which animals sometimes display in situations never previously encountered in the evolutionary history of the species. For example, when a parrot uses its noise-making apparatus to imitate the articulate sounds produced by the radically dissimilar noise-making apparatus of a human being, some indwelling intelligence is performing a miraculous feat of ad hoc intelligence. Or consider the extraordinary performance of the shearwater that was taken in a box from Wales to Venice (far beyond the normal range of the species), was released and turned up, in due course, at its original home. Something other, something far more intelligent than the conscious bird performed the miracle of imitation for the parrot, and the still more astounding miracle of homing for the shearwater. Our business as educators is to discover how human beings can make the best of both worlds—the world of self-conscious, verbalized intelligence and the world of the unconscious intelligences immanent in the mind-body, and always ready, if we give them half a chance, to do what, for the unaided ego, is the impossible.

The kinesthetic sense tells us what is happening within our psychophysical organisms. The other senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell—give us information about the outer world. Modern education does nothing to train the kinesthetic sense, and very little in regard to the other senses. Most children, it is true, receive some kind of musical education, which entails a training in auditory discrimination. But the other senses are left to educate themselves as best they may. Thus, in regard to vision—a subject in which I have been forced by circumstances to take a special and often a painful interest—nothing is done to improve the acuity, speed, or accuracy of perception. And what is still more surprising, next to nothing is done to prevent the onset, so distressingly frequent in our schools, of visual defects. The lighting of most schoolrooms and libraries runs the entire gamut from bad to abominable; and in these unfavorable conditions children are made to read, write, and cipher without the least guidance as to the proper means whereby the proposed end should be achieved. In the circumstances it is surprising that any child should emerge from the educational ordeal with normal vision.

The preventive and remedial training of visual perception is based on the same principles as those which guide the teachers of other psychophysical skills. To learn the art of seeing, we must learn to combine relaxation with activity—relaxation of the self and personal subconscious, activity of the vegetative soul and the deeper not-selves. The great pioneer in the field of visual education was a New York oculist, Dr. W. H. Bates, who developed his training methods during the first three decades of the present century. Bates was condemned by orthodox ophthalmologists. For orthodox ophthalmologists were and, in all too many cases, still are dedicated to the proposition that eyes are optical systems which can be treated in isolation, without regard to the person they belong to, and without reference to the mind which interprets the messages transmitted by the eyes and which actually does the seeing. For having written a book about the theory and practice of visual education, I have been treated by professional critics as a mixture between an imbecile and a charlatan. It is therefore with a certain amusement that I now find most of Dr. Bates's and my own ideas being advocated by a group of professionals of the highest respectability. This group publishes a journal called Psychological Optics— a name which implies a whole new philosophy and revolutionary methodology. Credit for the recent change in attitude towards the problem of visual education must be given, in the main, to Professor Samuel Renshaw, the eminent exponent of Gestalt Psychology, who teaches at the University of Ohio. Renshaw’s work in the training of the special senses and of memory is of outstanding importance to all educators. He has shown that it is possible to take any group of unselected undergraduates and to train them, by suitable methods, to see with enormously increased rapidity and precision, to develop taste perception as fine as that of professional whiskey blenders, and to perform feats of memory comparable to those exhibited by so-called prodigies.

In training vision, Renshaw makes extensive use of the tachysto-scope—a magic lantern fitted with a shutter that permits the projection of images for a period ranging from a tenth to a thousandth of a second or less. Most training is done with exposures of one hundredth of a second.

Tachystoscopic training is essentially a method for bypassing the bad habits acquired by the conscious self. In ordinary seeing we are hardly ever directly aware of our immediate impressions. For these immediate impressions are more or less profoundly modified by a mind that does most of its thinking in terms of words. Every perception is promptly conceptualized and generalized, so that we do not see the particular thing or event in its naked immediacy; we see only the objective illustration of some generic notion, only the concretion of an abstract word. Our ordinary habits of perception cause us to see the world as Platonists. The tachystoscope transforms us into Nominalists and Impressionists.

To our normal tendency to see the world through the refracting medium of language must be added the various aberrations occasioned by improper use of the psycho-physical instrument. The tachystoscope gives us no time either to conceptualize or to bring our bad habits into play. "If you want to see, stop trying." This is a favorite aphorism of the practitioners of visual education. Indeed, it may be said that Bates's method of training was designed for the express purpose of preventing the pupil from trying and so leaving the field clear for his vegetative soul and the deeper not-selves. Similarly the tachystoscope makes it impossible for the ego to stand in its own light. You cannot try to see anything in a hundredth of a second. The seeing either comes to you—or it doesn't. You don't do anything about it.

The tachystoscope has also been used in the training of art students. This novel and highly successful method has been described by Professor Hoyt Sherman in an interesting little book, Drawing Through Seeing. Here again old bad habits of distorted and conceptualized seeing are by passed by means of the flashing magic lantern. The student recaptures his visual innocence; for a hundredth of a second he sees only the datum, not his self-dimmed and verbalized notion of what the datum ought to be. At the beginning of Sherman's art course the data consist of abstract forms arranged in a variety of patterns. The student learns to see these forms and their relationships, and proceeds, in the half minute of darkness that follows every flash, to reproduce each successive composition, freehand, on large sheets of paper.

The tachystoscope may prove to be as valuable in general education as it has proved to be in the training of art students. In one large-scale experiment children in the first grade were given two fifteen-minute periods of tachystoscopic training each week. At the end of the school year they were markedly ahead of the control group. They read better, they understood more about arithmetic, and were altogether more interested in learning and consequently better behaved than comparable children brought up in the ordinary way. Moreover, the beneficial effects persisted during the next five years, despite the fact that tachystoscopic training was not continued after the first year. In the tachystoscope, it would seem, we possess a most effective instrument for the training, not only of vision, but also of that part of the mind which makes use of vision in the learning process.

From the special senses we now pass to the autonomic nervous system—that physiological not-self on which the self depends for its well-being and indeed its very life. When this physiological not-self has become delinquent, when (as happens only too frequently) our best friend has turned into our worst enemy, how can it be induced to behave itself?

Orthodox medicine makes use of a number of drugs, and in extreme cases resorts to surgery, unorthodox medicine tries to influence the autonomic system by direct mechanical action in the form of osteopathy, chiropractic, reflex therapy, and acupuncture. But, orthodox or unorthodox, medical treatment lies outside the field of education. In the present context we are concerned only with what a child or an adult can be taught to do for himself.

Let us begin with the various techniques of relaxation. By letting go of the muscles which are subject to the will, we are able, at one remove, to release some at least of the tensions in regions of the body beyond our voluntary control. Dr. Jacobson's work in this field is well known. Still more valuable are the methods developed by Mr. L. E. Eeman and described in his illuminating book, Cooperative Healing. Systematic relaxation is one of the means whereby the conscious ego and the personal subconscious can be induced to stop interfering with the action of the not-selves associated with them.

For those who have the desire and the necessary aptitudes, there are the much more elaborate training methods whose purpose is to establish the closest possible working partnership between conscious will and autonomic nervous system and, by so doing, to increase the range of psychophysical capacity. I myself have an oriental friend—a doctor by profession, a dervish by avocation who likes to say that "pain is merely an opinion," and who is ready to prove the truth of what he says by sticking skewers through his flesh and lying on beds of nails. The action of his heart is also a matter of opinion. He can slow it down, if he thinks of it beating slowly, to forty beats a minute, or speed it up, if he thinks of acceleration, to a hundred and fifty. Even his metabolism and respiration are matters of opinion; for he can go into a state of hibernation, when breathing appears to cease completely and the pulse is imperceptible, and remain in this condition for hours or even days.

The training of the dervish or the hatha-yogin is a long laborious affair; and whether it is really worth a man's while to spend several years of his life acquiring the arts of going into catalepsy, swallowing his tongue, and reversing the peristalsis of his intestine, is debatable. On the other hand, it would be extremely convenient to be able to treat neuralgia or lumbago as opinions, to calm the heart, to take the cramps out of one's viscera in moments of emotional stress, to plunge at will into profound and restorative sleep. These are accomplishments which many people can acquire without too much difficulty. For in these fields suggestion and auto-suggestion—especially when reinforced by hypnosis and the post-hypnotic suggestions which make possible the induction of auto-hypnosis—can perform the kind of wonders which, until only a few centuries ago, our ancestors unhesitatingly attributed to divine or (more probably) diabolic intervention. As an example of what can be done without the least difficulty, I will cite the case of a dentist of my acquaintance who teaches all his child patients, and many of their elders too, to suggest themselves into local insensibility. His methods are absurdly simple and, in the great majority of cases, work like a charm.

The last and most important branch of non-verbal education is training in the art of spiritual insight. Dr. Suzuki, the great Japanese scholar to whom the West owes most of its knowledge of Zen Buddhism, has defined spiritual insight, or enlightenment, as "becoming conscious of the Unconscious." And a Roman Catholic theologian, Fr. Victor White, expresses the same idea when he writes that "it is through the sub-rational that the super-rational enters human consciousness." To know the ultimate Not-Self, which transcends the other not-selves and the ego, but which is yet closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet—this is the consummation of human life, the end and ultimate purpose of individual existence.

The aim of the psychiatrist is to teach the (statistically) abnormal to adjust themselves to the behavior patterns of a society composed of the (statistically) normal. The aim of the educator in spiritual insight is to teach the (statistically) normal that they are in fact insane and should do something about it. The problem, as usual, is how to get out of one's own light. Our business is to free ourselves from eclipsing bad habits—bad habits not merely on the moral level but also, and more fundamentally, on the cognitive, intellectual, and emotional levels. For it is these bad habits of unrealistic thinking, inappropriate feeling, and debauched perception which incite the ego to behave as it does. We must, in Krishnamurti's phrase, achieve "freedom from the known—freedom from the unanalyzed postulates in terms of which we do our second-hand experiencing, freedom from our conventional thoughts and sentiments, freedom from our stereotyped notions about inner and outer reality.

"Whatever you say about God," Eckhart declares, "is untrue." Shopworn theological and devotional cliches are not only not the same as experience of life in its immanent and transcendent fullness; they are actually obstacles in the way of such experience. It is a case of grey theory and green reality; of the letter killing the spirit; of dogma falsifying the facts to which it is supposed to refer; of rituals and rhetoric substituting emotional thrills for the insight which is vouchsafed only to the poor in spirit, the "virgins" as Eckhart calls them.

In Zen the virgin consciousness was called Wu-nien or Wuh-sin—no-mind or no-thought. "Taking hold of the not-thought which lies in thought," says Hakuin in his Song of Meditation, "they (the men of insight) hear in every act they perform the voice of truth." No-thought not-thinks about the world in terms of no-things. "Seeing into no-thingness," says Shen-hui, "this is true seeing and eternal seeing." Words and notions are convenient, are indeed indispensable; for our humanity depends upon their use. The virgin not-thinker makes use of words and notions; but he is careful not to take them too seriously, he never permits them to re-create the world of immediate experience in their drearily human image, he is on his guard against the condemnation and the odious comparisons, the assertions of craving and aversion, which language, by its very nature, forces upon the users of language, "The perfect Way refuses to make preferences. Only when freed from love and hate does it reveal itself without disguise. To set up what you like against what you dislike, this is the disease of the mind!" And so "judge not, that ye be not judged." For "God gives to everything alike," says Eckhart, "and as flowing forth from God things are all equal; angels, men and creatures proceed from God alike in their first emanation. To take things in their primal emanation" (to not-think experience with a virgin mind in non-verbal terms, as nothingness) "is to take them all alike.... Any flea as it is in God is nobler than the highest of the angels in himself. Things are all the same in God; they are God Himself." Accordingly, the man "to whom God is different in one thing from another and to whom God is dearer in one thing than another, that man is a barbarian, still in the wilds, a child. He to whom God is the same in everything has come to man's estate."

The end proposed is the rediscovery within ourselves of a virgin not-mind capable of non-verbally not-thinking in response to immediate experience. But the ends we actually achieve are always determined by the means we employ. Perfect freedom will not be achieved by means of systematic limitation. Virginity of mind will not be discovered in a context of predetermined beliefs and dogmas. The unitive not-thought which experiences life in its totality will never emerge from concentrated thinking, in terms of words or visual images, about some particular aspect of life, isolated from the rest. Dr. Suzuki, in his Zen Doctrine of No-Mind, has translated part of a dialogue between a Zen Master, Shen-hui, and a member of one of the more orthodox schools of Mahayana.

The Master asked Teng, "What exercise do you recommend in order to see into one's self-nature?"

Teng answered: "First of all it is necessary to practice meditation by quietly sitting cross-legged. When this exercise is fully mastered, Prajna (intuitive understanding) grows out of it, and by virtue of this Prajna seeing into one's self-nature is attained."

Shen-hui enquired: "When one is engaged in meditation, is not this a specifically contrived exercise?" "'Yes, it is."

"If so, this specific contrivance is an act of limited consciousness, and how could it lead to the seeing of one's self-nature?"

The answer is that it can't. For what is ordinarily called meditation is merely, in Krishnamurti's words, "the cultivation of resistance, of exclusive concentration on an idea of our choice." Yoga is the process of "building a wall of resistance" against every thought except that which you have chosen. But what makes you choose? "Obviously the choice is based on pleasure, reward or achievement; or it is merely a reaction to one's conditioning or tradition." Then why choose?

"Instead of creating resistance, why not go into each interest as it arises and not merely concentrate on one idea, one interest?" Constant and intense self-awareness, free from preconceptions, comparisons, condemnations—this will result in what Krishnamurti calls "clarity," what Eckhart calls "virginity," what the Zen masters describe as "No-mind." "This clarity is not to be organized, for it cannot be exchanged with another. Organized group thought is merely repetitive. ... Without understanding yourself, you have no basis for thought; without self-knowledge, what you say is not true." Truth repeated is no longer truth; it becomes truth again only when it has been realized by the speaker as an immediate experience. Organized religion has done much good; it has also done much harm. Whether the good outweighs the harm it is difficult, as one reads history, to compute. What is quite certain, however, is that those who now so eloquently assure us that mankind will be saved by a great revival of organized religion are guilty of oversimplification. Organized religion is like the Indian goddess, Kali—the Great Destroyer as well as the Great Mother and Creatrix. And the destructive side of organized religion is certain to be prominent in a world where the loudest appeals for a revival are made by men whose deepest loyalty is not to their professed Christianity or Judaism or Islam, but to Nationalism, and whose aim is to use the local faith as a weapon in the armory of power politics. But all this is by the way, for organized religion has very little to do with the subject we have been discussing—the non-verbal education of individuals for spiritual insight.

In the preceding pages I have described very briefly and very briefly discussed some of the ways in which our psycho-physical instrument might be educated to a higher pitch of efficiency. Two questions now propound themselves. First, is this kind of education in the non-verbal humanities desirable? And, second, is it practicable? Can it be made available to everyone?

To the first question my answer is an emphatic yes. The notion that one can educate young people without making any serious attempt to educate the psycho-physical instrument, by means of which they do all their learning and living, seems on the face of it radically absurd. Looking back over my own years of schooling, I can see the enormous deficiencies of a system which could do nothing better for my body than Swedish drill and compulsory football, nothing better for my character than prizes, punishments, sermons, and pep talks, and nothing better for my soul than a hymn before bed-time, to the accompaniment of the harmonium. Like everyone else, I am functioning at only a fraction of my potential. How grateful I should feel if someone had taught me to be, say, 30 percent efficient instead of 15 or maybe 20 percent!

To the second question—the question of practicability—I can give no answer. The problem of incorporating a decent education in the non-verbal humanities into the current curriculum is a task for professional educators and administrators. What is needed at the present stage is research-intensive, extensive, and long-drawn research. Some Foundation with a few scores of millions to get rid of should finance a ten- or fifteen-year plan of observation and experiment. At the end of this period, we should know which are the most important items in a program of psychophysical training, how they can best be taught in primary schools, secondary schools, and colleges, and what benefits may be expected to follow such a course of training. My own expectation is that the benefits would be considerable. However, we should not forget that, though the child is father of the man, the man lives a great deal longer than the child, and that his forty or fifty years of existence in the world are incomparably more educative, for evil as well as for good, than are his ten to sixteen years in school. It is always possible that the disintegrative effects of the kind of civilization, under which our technology compels us to live, may completely cancel out the constructive effects of even the best and complete st system of formal education. Time alone will show. Meanwhile, we can only hope for the best.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

Footnote

6. Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett (1886-1969). English psychologist.

Knowledge and Understanding

knowledge is acquired when we succeed in fitting a new experience into the system of concepts based upon our old experiences. Understanding comes when we liberate ourselves from the old and so make possible a direct, unmediated contact with the new, the mystery, moment by moment, of our existence.

The new is the given on every level of experience—given perceptions, given emotions and thoughts, given states of unstructured awareness, given relationships with things and persons. The old is our home-made system of ideas and word patterns. It is the stock of finished articles fabricated out of the given mystery by memory and analytical reasoning, by habit and the automatic associations of accepted notions. Knowledge is primarily a knowledge of these finished articles. Understanding is primarily direct awareness of the raw material.

Knowledge is always in terms of concepts and can be passed on by means of words or other symbols. Understanding is not conceptual, and therefore cannot be passed on. It is an immediate experience, and immediate experience can only be talked about (very inadequately), never shared. Nobody can actually feel another's pain or grief, another's love or joy or hunger. And similarly nobody can experience another's understanding of a given event or situation. There can, of course, be knowledge of such an understanding, and this knowledge may be passed on in speech or writing, or by means of other symbols. Such communicable knowledge is useful as a reminder that there have been specific understandings in the past, and that understanding is at all times possible. But we must always remember that knowledge of understanding is not the same thing as the understanding, which is the raw material of that knowledge. It is as different from understanding as the doctor's prescription for penicillin is different from penicillin.

Understanding is not inherited, nor can it be laboriously acquired. It is something which, when circumstances are favorable, comes to us, so to say, of its own accord. All of us are knowers, all the time; it is only occasionally and in spite of ourselves that we directly understand the mystery of given reality. Consequently we are very seldom tempted to equate understanding with knowledge. Of the exceptional men and women, who have understanding in every situation, most are intelligent enough to see that understanding is different from knowledge and that conceptual systems based upon past experience are as necessary to the conduct of life as are spontaneous insights into new experiences. For these reasons the mistake of identifying understanding with knowledge is rarely perpetrated and therefore poses no serious problem.

How different is the case with the opposite mistake, the mistake of supposing that knowledge is the same as understanding and interchangeable with it! All adults possess vast stocks of knowledge. Some of it is correct knowledge, some of it is incorrect knowledge, and some of it only looks like knowledge and is neither correct nor incorrect; it is merely meaningless. That which gives meaning to a proposition is not (to use the words of an eminent contemporary philosopher, Rudolf Carnap²) "the attendant images or thoughts, but the possibility of deducing from it perceptive propositions, in other words the possibility of verification. To give sense to a proposition, the presence of images is not sufficient, it is not even necessary. We have no image of the electro-magnetic field, nor even, I should say, of the gravitational field; nevertheless the propositions which physicists assert about these fields have a perfect sense, because perceptive propositions are deducible from them." Metaphysical doctrines are propositions which cannot be operationally verified, at least on the level of ordinary experience. They may be expressive of a state of mind, in the way that lyrical poetry is expressive; but they have no assignable meaning. The information they convey is only pseudo-knowledge. But the formulators of metaphysical doctrines and the believers in such doctrines have always mistaken this pseudo-knowledge for knowledge and have proceeded to modify their behavior accordingly. Meaningless pseudo-knowledge has at all times been one of the principal motivators of individual and collective action. And that is one of the reasons why the course of human history has been so tragic and at the same time so strangely grotesque. Action based upon meaningless pseudo-knowledge is always inappropriate, always beside the point, and consequently always results in the kind of mess mankind has always lived in—the kind of mess that makes the angels weep and the satirists laugh aloud.

Correct or incorrect, relevant or meaningless, knowledge and pseudo-knowledge are as common as dirt and are therefore taken for granted. Understanding, on the contrary, is as rare, very nearly, as emeralds, and so is highly prized. The knowers would dearly love to be understanders; but either their stock of knowledge does not include the knowledge of what to do in order to be understanders; or else they know theoretically what they ought to do, but go on doing the opposite all the same. In either case they cherish the comforting delusion that knowledge and, above all, pseudo-knowledge are understanding. Along with the closely related errors of over-abstraction, over-generalization, and oversimplification, this is the commonest of all intellectual sins and the most dangerous.

Of the vast sum of human misery about one-third, I would guess, is unavoidable misery. This is the price we must pay for being embodied, and for inheriting genes which are subject to deleterious mutations. This is the rent extorted by Nature for the privilege of living on the surface of a planet whose soil is mostly poor, whose climates are capricious and inclement, and whose inhabitants include a countless number of microorganisms capable of causing in man himself, in his domestic animals and cultivated plants, an immense variety of deadly or debilitating diseases. To these miseries of cosmic origin must be added the much larger group of those avoidable disasters we bring upon ourselves. For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism, and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols. But zeal, dogmatism, and idealism exist only because we are forever committing intellectual sins. We sin by attributing concrete significance to meaningless pseudo-knowledge; we sin in being too lazy to think in terms of multiple causation and indulging instead in over-simplification, over-generalization, and over-abstraction; and we sin by cherishing the false but agreeable notion that conceptual knowledge and, above all, conceptual pseudo-knowledge are the same as understanding.

Consider a few obvious examples. The atrocities of organized religion (and organized religion, let us never forget, has done about as much harm as it has done good) are all due, in the last analysis, to "mistaking the pointing finger for the moon" —in other words to mistaking the verbalized notion for the given mystery to which it refers or, more often, only seems to refer.

This, as I have said, is one of the original sins of the intellect, and it is a sin in which, with a rationalistic bumptiousness as grotesque as it is distasteful, theologians have systematically wallowed. From indulgence in this kind of delinquency there has arisen, in most of the great religious traditions of the world, a fantastic over-valuation of words. Over-valuation of words leads all too frequently to the fabrication and idolatrous worship of dogmas, to the insistence on uniformity of belief, the demand for assent by all and sundry to a set of propositions which, though meaningless, are to be regarded as sacred. Those who do not consent to this idolatrous worship of words are to be "converted" and, if that should prove impossible, either persecuted or, if the dogmatizers lack political power, ostracized and denounced. Immediate experience of reality unites men. Conceptualized beliefs, including even the belief in a God of love and righteousness, divides them and, as the dismal record of religious history bears witness, sets them for centuries on end at each other's throats.

Over-simplification, over-generalization, and over-abstraction are three other sins closely related to the sin of imagining that knowledge and pseudo-knowledge are the same as understanding. The overgeneralizing oversimplifier is the man who asserts, without producing evidence, that "All X's are Y," or, "All As have a single cause, which is B." The over-abstracter is the one who cannot be bothered to deal with Jones and Smith, with Jane and Mary, as individuals, but enjoys being eloquent on the subject of Humanity, of Progress, of God and History and the Future. This brand of intellectual delinquency is indulged in by every demagogue, every crusader. In the Middle Ages the favorite over-generalization was "All infidels are damned." (For the Moslems, "all infidels" meant "all Christians"; for the Christians, "all Moslems.") Almost as popular was the nonsensical proposition, "All heretics are inspired by the devil" and "All eccentric old women are witches." In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the wars and persecutions were justified by the luminously clear and simple belief that "All Roman Catholics (or if you happened to be on the Pope's side) all Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans are God's enemies." In our own day Hitler proclaimed that all the ills of the world had one cause, namely Jews, and that all Jews were sub-human enemies of mankind. For the Communists, all the ills of the world have one cause, namely capitalists, and all capitalists and their middle-class supporters are sub-human enemies of mankind. It is perfectly obvious, on the face of it, that none of these over-generalized statements can possibly be true. But the urge to intellectual sin is fearfully strong. All are subject to temptation and few are able to resist.

There are in the lives of human beings very many situations in which only knowledge, conceptualized, accumulated, and passed on by means of words, is of any practical use. For example, if I want to manufacture sulphuric acid or to keep accounts for a banker, I do not start at the beginnings of chemistry or economics; I start at what is now the end of these sciences. In other words, I go to a school where the relevant knowledge is taught, I read books in which the accumulations of past experience in these particular fields are set forth. I can learn the functions of an accountant or a chemical engineer on the basis of knowledge alone. For this particular purpose it is not necessary for me to have much understanding of concrete situations as they arise, moment by moment, from the depths of the given mystery of our existence. What is important for me as a professional man is that I should be familiar with all the conceptual knowledge in my field. Ours is an industrial civilization, in which no society can prosper unless it possesses an elite of highly trained scientists and a considerable army of engineers and technicians. The possession and wide dissemination of a great deal of correct, specialized knowledge has become a prime condition of national survival. In the United States, during the last twenty or thirty years, this fact seems to have been forgotten. Professional educationists have taken John Dewey's theories of "learning through doing" and of "education as life adjustment," and have applied them in such a way that, in many American schools, there is now doing without learning, along with courses in adjustment to everything except the basic twentieth-century fact that we live in a world where ignorance of science and its methods is the surest, shortest road to national disaster. During the past half-century every other nation has made great efforts to impart more knowledge to more young people. In the United States professional educationists have chosen the opposite course. At the turn of the century 56 percent of the pupils in American high schools studied algebra; today less than a quarter of them are so much as introduced to the subject. In 1955 11 percent of American boys and girls were studying geometry; fifty years ago the figure was 27 percent. Four percent of them now take physics, as against 19 percent in 1900. Fifty percent of American high schools offer no courses in chemistry, 53 percent no courses in physics. This headlong decline in knowledge has not been accompanied by any increase in understanding; for it goes without saying that high school courses in life adjustment do not teach understanding. They teach only conformity to current conventions of personal and collective behavior. There is no substitute for correct knowledge, and in the process of acquiring correct knowledge there is no substitute for concentration and prolonged practice. Except for the unusually gifted, learning, by whatever method, must always be hard work. Unfortunately there are many professional educationists who seem to think that children should never be required to work hard. Wherever educational methods are based on this assumption, children will not in fact acquire much knowledge; and if the methods are followed for a generation or two, the society which tolerates them will find itself in full decline. In theory, deficiencies in knowledge can be made good by simply changing the curriculum. In practice, a change in the curriculum will do little good, unless there is a corresponding change in the point of view of professional educationists. For the trouble with American educationists, writes a distinguished member of their profession, Dr. H. L. Dodge, is that they "regard any subject from personal grooming to philosophy as equally important or interchangeable in furthering the process of self-realization. This anarchy of values has led to the displacement of the established disciplines of science and the humanities by these new subjects." Whether professional educationists can be induced to change their current attitudes is uncertain. Should it prove impossible, we must fall back on the comforting thought that time never stands still and that nobody is immortal. What persuasion and the threat of national decline fail to accomplish, retirement, high blood pressure, and death will bring to pass, more slowly, it is true, but much more surely.

The dissemination of correct knowledge is one of the essential functions of education, and we neglect it at our peril. But, obviously, education should be more than a device for passing on correct knowledge. It should also teach what Dewey called life adjustment and self-realization. But precisely how should self-realization and life adjustment be promoted? To this question modern educators have given many answers. Most of these answers belong to one or other of two main educational families, the Progressive and the Classical. Answers of the Progressive type find expression in the provision of courses in such subjects as "family living, consumer economics, job information, physical and mental health, training for world citizenship and statesmanship and last, and we are afraid least" (I quote again the words of Dr. Dodge) "training in fundamentals." Where answers of the classical type are preferred, educators provide courses in Latin, Greek, and modern European literature, in world history, and in philosophy— exclusively, for some odd reason, of the Western brand. Shakespeare and Chaucer, Virgil and Homer— how far away they seem, how irrevocably dead! Why, then, should we bother to teach the classics? The reasons have been stated a thousand times, but seldom with more force and lucidity than by Albert Jay Nock- in his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. "The literatures of Greece and Rome provide the longest, the most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual, and social activity. Hence the mind that has canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind; it is an experienced mind. It has come, as Emerson says, into a feeling of immense longevity, and it instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound and weighty experience. Our studies were properly called formative, because, beyond all others, their effect was powerfully maturing. Cicero told the unvarnished truth in saying that those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children. And if one wished to characterize the collective mind of this period, or indeed of any period, the use it makes of its powers of observation, reflection, logical inference, one would best do it by the word "immaturity."

The Progressive and the Classical approaches to education are not incompatible. It is perfectly possible to combine a schooling in the local cultural tradition with a training, half vocational, half psychological, in adaptation to the current conventions of social life, and then to combine this combination with training in the sciences, in other words with the inculcation of correct knowledge. But is this enough? Can such an education result in the self-realization which is its aim? The question deserves our closest scrutiny. Nobody, of course, can doubt the importance of accumulated experience as a guide for individual and social conduct. We are human because, at a very early stage in the history of the species, our ancestors discovered a way of preserving and disseminating the results of experience. They learned to speak and were thus enabled to translate what they had perceived, what they had inferred from given fact and home-grown phantasy, into a set of concepts, which could be added to by each generation and bequeathed, a treasure of mingled sense and nonsense, to posterity. In Mr. Nock's words, "the mind that has canvassed this record is an experienced mind." The only trouble, so far as we are concerned, is that the vicarious experience derived from a study of the classics is, in certain respects, completely irrelevant to twentieth-century facts. In many ways, of course, the modern world resembles the world inhabited by the men of antiquity. In many other ways, however, it is radically different. For example, in their world the rate of change was exceedingly slow; in ours advancing technology produces a state of chronic revolution. They took infanticide for granted (Thebes was the only Hellenic city which forbade the exposure of babies) and regarded slavery as not only necessary to the Greek way of life, but as intrinsically natural and right; we are the heirs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century humanitarianism and must solve our economic and demographic problems by methods less dreadfully reminiscent of recent totalitarian practice. Because all the dirty work was done by slaves, they regarded every form of manual activity as essentially unworthy of a gentleman and in consequence never subjected their overabstract, over-rational theories to the test of experiment; we have learned, or at least are learning, to think operationally. They despised "barbarians," never bothered to learn a foreign language and could therefore na ively regard the rules of Greek grammar and syntax as the Laws of Thought; we have begun to understand the nature of language, the danger of taking words too seriously, the ever-present need for linguistic analysis. They knew nothing about the past and therefore, in Cicero’s words, were like children. (Thucydides, the greatest historian of antiquity, prefaces his account of the Peloponnesian War by airily asserting that nothing of great importance had happened before his own time.) We, in the course of the last five generations, have acquired a knowledge of man's past extending back to more than half a million years and covering the activities of tribes and nations in every continent. They developed political institutions which, in the case of Greece, were hopelessly unstable and, in the case of Rome, were only too firmly fixed in a pattern of aggressiveness and brutality; but what we need is a few hints on the art of creating an entirely new kind of society, durable but adventurous, strong but humane, highly organized but liberty-loving, elastic, and adaptable. In this matter Greece and Rome can teach us only negatively— by demonstrating, in their divergent ways, what not to do.

From all this it is clear that a classical education in the humanities of two thousand years ago requires to be supplemented by some kind of training in the humanities of today and, tomorrow. The Progressives profess to give such a training; hut surely we need something a little more informative, a little more useful in this vertiginously changing world of ours, than courses in present-day consumer economics and current job information. But even if a completely adequate schooling in the humanities of the past, the present, and the foreseeable future could be devised and made available to all, would the aims of education, as distinct from factual and theoretical instruction, be thereby achieved? Would the recipients of such an education be any nearer to the goal of self-realization? The answer, I am afraid, is No. For at this point we find ourselves confronted by one of those paradoxes, which are of the very essence of our strange existence as amphibians inhabiting, without being completely at home in, half a dozen almost incommensurable worlds—the world of concepts and the world of data, the objective world and the subjective, the small bright world of personal consciousness and the vast, mysterious world of the unconscious. Where education is concerned, the paradox may be expressed in the statement that the medium of education, which is language, is absolutely necessary, but also fatal; that the subject matter of education, which is conceptualized accumulation of past experiences, is indispensable, but also an obstacle to be circumvented. "Existence is prior to essence!" Unlike most metaphysical propositions, this slogan of the existentialists can actually be verified. "Wolf children," adopted by animal mothers and brought up in animal surroundings, have the form of human beings, but are not human. The essence of humanity, it is evident, is not something we are born with; it is something we make or grow into. We learn to speak, we accumulate conceptualized knowledge and pseudo-knowledge, we imitate our elders, we build up fixed patterns of thought and feeling and behavior, and in the process we become human, we turn into persons. But the things which make us human are precisely the things which interfere with self-realization and prevent understanding. We are humanized by imitating others, by learning their speech and by acquiring the accumulated knowledge which language makes available. But we understand only when, by liberating ourselves from the tyranny of words, conditioned reflexes, and social conventions, we establish direct, unmediated contact with experience. The greatest paradox of our existence consists in this: that, in order to understand, we must first encumber ourselves with all the intellectual and emotional baggage which is an impediment to understanding. Except in a dim, pre-conscious way, animals do not understand a situation, even though, by inherited instinct or by an ad hoc act of intelligence, they may be reacting to it with complete appropriateness, as though they understood it. Conscious understanding is the privilege of men and women, and it is a privilege which they have earned, strangely enough, by acquiring the useful or delinquent habits, the stereotypes of perception, thought, and feeling, the rituals of behavior, the stock of second-hand knowledge and pseudoknowledge, whose possession is the greatest obstacle to understanding. "Learning," says Lao-tsu,-"consists in adding to one's stock day by day. The practice of the Tao consists in subtracting." This does not mean, of course, that we can live by subtraction alone. Learning is as necessary as unlearning. Wherever technical proficiency is needed, learning is indispensable. From youth to old age, from generation to generation, we must go on adding to our stock of useful and relevant knowledge. Only in this way can we hope to deal effectively with the physical environment, and with the abstract ideas which make it possible for men to find their way through the complexities of civilization and technology. But this is not the right way to deal with our personal reactions to ourselves or to other human beings. In such situations there must be an unlearning of accumulated concepts; we must respond to each new challenge, not with our old conditioning, not in the light of a conceptual knowledge based on the memory of past and different events, not by consulting the law of averages, but with a consciousness stripped naked and as though new born. Once more we are confronted by the great paradox of human life. It is our conditioning which develops our consciousness; but in order to make full use of this developed consciousness, we must start by getting rid of the conditioning which developed it. By adding conceptual knowledge to conceptual knowledge, we make conscious understanding possible; but this potential understanding can be actualized only when we have subtracted all that we have added.

It is because we have memories that we are convinced of our self-identity as persons and as members of a given society.

The child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

What Wordsworth called "natural piety" a teacher of understanding would describe as indulgence in emotionally charged memories, associated with childhood and youth. Factual memory—the memory, for example, of the best way of making sulphuric acid or of casting up accounts—is an unmixed blessing. But psychological memory (to use Krishnamurti's¹ term), memory carrying an emotional charge, whether positive or negative, is a source at the worst of neurosis and insanity (psychiatry is largely the art of ridding patients of the incubus of their negatively charged memories), at the best of distractions from the task of understanding—distractions which, though socially useful, are none the less obstacles to be climbed over or avoided. Emotionally charged memories cement the ties of family life (or sometimes make family life impossible!) and serve, when conceptualized and taught as a cultural tradition, to hold communities together. On the level of understanding, on the level of charity, and on the level, to some extent, of artistic expression, an individual has it in his power to transcend his social tradition, to overstep the bounds of the culture in which he has been brought up. On the level of knowledge, manners, and custom, he can never get very far away from the persona created for him by his family and his society. The culture within which he lives is a prison—but a prison which makes it possible for any prisoner who so desires to achieve freedom, a prison to which, for this and a host of other reasons, its inmates owe an enormous debt of gratitude and loyalty. But though it is our duty to "honor our father and our mother," it is also our duty "to hate our father and our mother, our brethren and our sisters, yea and our own life"—that socially conditioned life we take for granted. Though it is necessary for us to add to our cultural stock day by day, it is also necessary to subtract and subtract. There is, to quote the title of Simone Weil's posthumous essay, a great "Need for Roots"; but there is an equally urgent need, on occasion, for total rootlessness.

In our present context this book by Simone Weil and the preface which Mr. T. S. Eliot contributes to the English edition are particularly instructive. Simone Weil was a woman of great ability, heroic virtue, and boundless spiritual aspiration. But unfortunately for herself, as well as for her readers, she was weighed down by a burden of knowledge and pseudo-knowledge which her own almost maniacal overvaluation of words and notions rendered intolerably heavy. A clerical friend reports of her that he did not "ever remember Simone Weil, in spite of her virtuous desire for objectivity, give way in the course of a discussion." She was so deeply rooted in her culture that she came to believe that words were supremely important. Hence her love of argument and the obstinacy with which she clung to her opinions. Hence too her strange inability, on so many occasions, to distinguish the pointing finger from the indicated moon. "But why do you prate of God?" Meister Eckhart asked: and out of the depth of his understanding of given reality, he added, "Whatever you say of Him is untrue." Necessarily so; for "the saving truth was never preached by the Buddha," or by anyone else.

Truth can be defined in many ways. But if you define it as understanding (and this is how all the masters of the spiritual life have defined it), then it is clear that "truth must be lived and there is nothing to argue about in this teaching; any arguing is sure to go against the intent of it." This was something which Emerson knew and consistently acted upon. To the almost frenzied exasperation of that pugnacious manipulator of religious notions, the elder Henry James, he refused to argue about anything. And the same was true of William Law. "Away, then, with the fictions and workings of discursive reason, either for or against Christianity! They are only the wanton spirit of the mind, whilst ignorant of God and insensible of its own nature and condition. ... For neither God, nor heaven, nor hell, nor the devil, nor the flesh, can be any other way knowable in you or by you, but by their own existence and manifestation in you. And any pretended knowledge of any of those things, beyond and without this self-evident sensibility of their birth within you, is only such knowledge of them as the blind man hath of the light that has never entered into him." This does not mean, of course, that discursive reason and argument are without value. Where knowledge is concerned, they are not only valuable; they are indispensable.

But knowledge is not the same thing as understanding. If we want to understand, we must uproot ourselves from our culture, by-pass language, get rid of emotionally charged memories, hate our fathers and mothers, subtract and subtract from our stock of notions. "Needs must it be a virgin," writes Meister Eckhart, "by whom Jesus is received. Virgin, in other words, is a person void of alien images, free as he was when he existed not."

Simone Weil- must have known, theoretically, about this need for cultural virginity, of total rootlessness. But, alas, she was too deeply embedded in her own and other people's ideas, too superstitious a believer in the magic of the words she handled with so much skill, to be able to act upon this knowledge. "The food," she wrote, "that a collectivity supplies to those who form part of it has no equivalent in the universe." (Thank God! we may add, after sniffing the spiritual nourishment provided by many of the vanished collectivities of the past.) Furthermore, the food provided by a collectivity is food "not only for the souls of the living, but also for souls yet unborn." Finally, "the collectivity constitutes the sole agency for preserving the spiritual treasures accumulated by the dead, the sole transmitting agency by means of which the dead can speak to the living. And the sole earthly reality which is connected with the eternal destiny of man is the irradiating light of those who have managed to become fully conscious of this destiny, transmitted from generation to generation." This last sentence could only have been penned by one who systematically mistook knowledge for understanding, home-made concepts for given reality. It is, of course, desirable that there should be knowledge of what men now dead have said about their understanding of reality. But to maintain that a knowledge of other people's understanding is the same, for us, as understanding, or can even directly lead us to understanding, is a mistake against which all the masters of the spiritual life have always warned us. The letter, in St. Paul's phrase, is full of "oldness." It has therefore no relevance to the ever novel reality, which can be understood only in the "newness of the spirit." As for the dead, let them bury their dead. For even the most exalted of past seers and avatars "never taught the saving truth." We should not, it goes without saying, neglect the records of dead men's understandings. On the contrary, we ought to know all about them. But we must know all about them without taking them too seriously. We must know all about them, while remaining acutely aware that such knowledge is not the same as understanding and that understanding will come to us only when we have subtracted what we know and made ourselves void and virgin, free as we were when we were not.

Turning from the body of the book to the preface, we find an even more striking example of that literally preposterous over-valuation of words and notions to which the cultured and the learned are so fatally prone. "I do not know," Mr. Eliot writes, "whether she [Simone Weil] could read the Upanishads in Sanskrit—or, if so, how great was her mastery of what is not only a highly developed language, but a way of thought, the difficulties of which become more formidable to a European student the more diligently he applies himself to it." But like all the other great works of oriental philosophy, the Upanishads are not systems of pure speculation, in which the niceties of language are all important. They were written by Transcendental Pragmatists, as we may call them, whose concern was to teach a doctrine which could be made to "work," a metaphysical theory which could be operationally tested, not through perception only, but by a direct experience of the whole man on every level of his being. To understand the meaning of tat tvam asi, "thou art That," it is not necessary to be a profound Sanskrit scholar. (Similarly, it is not necessary to be a profound Hebrew scholar in order to understand the meaning of, "thou shalt not kill.") Understanding of the doctrine (as opposed to conceptualized knowledge about the doctrine) will come only to those who choose to perform the operations that permit tat tvam asi to become a given fact of direct, unmediated experience, or in Law’s words "a self-evident sensibility of its birth within them." Did Simone Weil know Sanskrit—or didn't she? The question is entirely beside the point—is just a particularly smelly cultural red herring dragged across the trail that leads from selfhood to more-than-selfhood, from notionally conditioned ego to unconditioned spirit. In relation to the Upanishads or any other work of Hindu or Buddhist philosophy, only one question deserves to be taken with complete seriousness. It is this. How can a form of words, tat tvam asi, a metaphysical proposition such as Nirvana and samsara are one, be converted into the direct, unmediated experience of a given fact? How can language and the learned foolery of scholars (for, in this vital context, that is all it is) be circumvented, so that the individual soul may finally understand the That which, in spite of all its efforts to deny the primordial fact, is identical with the thou? Specifically, should we follow the methods inculcated by Patanjali, or those of the Hinayana monks, those of the Tantriks of northern India and Tibet, those of the Far Eastern Taoists or the followers of Zen, those described by St. John of the Cross and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing? If the European student wishes to remain shut up in the prison created by his private cravings and the thought patterns inherited from his predecessors, then by all means let him plunge, through Sanskrit, or Pali, or Chinese, or Tibetan, into the verbal study of "a way of thought, the difficulties of which become more formidable the more diligently he applies himself to it." If, on the other hand, he wishes to transcend himself by actually understanding the primordial fact described or hinted at in the Upanishads and the other scriptures of what, for lack of a better phrase, we will call "spiritual religion," then he must ignore the problems of language and speculative philosophy, or at least relegate them to a secondary posmon, and concentrate his attention on the practical means whereby the advance from knowledge to understanding may best be made.

From the positively charged collective memories, which are organized into a cultural or religious tradition, let us now return to the positively charged private memories, which individuals organize into a system of "natural piety." We have no more right to wallow in natural piety—that is to say, in emotionally charged memories of past happiness and vanished loves—than to bemoan earlier miseries and torment ourselves with remorse for old offenses. And we have no more right to waste the present instant in relishing future and entirely hypothetical pleasures than to waste it in the apprehension of possible disasters to come. "There is no greater pain," says Dante, "than, in misery, to remember happy times." "Then stop remembering happy times and accept the fact of your present misery," would be the seemingly unsympathetic answer of all those who have had understanding. The emptying of memory is classed by St. John of the Cross as a good second only to the state of union with God, and an indispensable condition of such union. The word Buddha may be translated as "awakened." Those who merely know about things, or only think they know, live in a state of self-conditioned and culturally conditioned somnambulism. Those who understand given reality as it presents itself, moment by moment, are wide awake. Memory charged with pleasant emotions is a soporific or, more accurately, an inducer of trance. This was discovered empirically by an American hypnotist, Dr. W. B. Fahnestock, whose book Statuvolism, or Artificial Somnambulism, was published in 1871. "When persons are desirous of entering into this state [of artificial somnambulism] I place them in a chair, where they may be at perfect ease. They are next instructed to throw their minds to some familiar place—it matters not where, so that they have been there before and seem desirous of going there again, even in thought. When they have thrown the mind to the place, or upon the desired object, I endeavor by speaking to them frequently to keep their mind upon it. ... This must be persisted in for some time." In the end, "clairvoyancy will be induced." Anyone who has experimented with hypnosis, or who has watched an experienced operator inducing trance in a difficult subject, knows how effective Fahnestock's method can be. Incidentally, the relaxing power of positively charged memory was rediscovered, in another medical context, by an oculist, Dr. W. H. Bates, who used to make his patients cover their eyes and revisit in memory the scenes of their happiest experiences. By this means muscular and mental tensions were reduced and it became possible for the patients to use their eyes and minds in a relaxed and therefore efficient way. From all this it is clear that, while positively charged memories can and should be used for specific therapeutic purposes, there must be no indiscriminate indulgence in "natural piety"; for such indulgence may result in a condition akin to trance—a condition at the opposite pole from the wakefulness that is understanding. Those who live with unpleasant memories become neurotic and those who live with pleasant ones become somnambulistic. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof—and the good thereof.

The Muses, in Greek mythology, were the daughters of Memory, and every writer is embarked, like Marcel Proust, on a hopeless search for time lost. But a good writer is one who knows how to "donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.'- Thanks to this purer sense, his readers will react to his words with a degree of understanding much greater than they would have had, if they had reacted, in their ordinary self-conditioned or culture-conditioned way, to the events to which the words refer. A great poet must do too much remembering to be more than a sporadic understander; but he knows how to express himself in words which cause other people to understand. Time lost can never be regained; but in his search for it he may reveal to his readers glimpses of timeless reality.

Unlike the poet, the mystic is "a son of time present." "Past and present veil God from our sight," says Jalal-ud din Rumi, who was a Sufi first and only secondarily a great poet. "Burn both of them with fire. How long will you let yourself be partitioned by these segments like a reed? So long as it remains partitioned, a reed is not privy to secrets, neither is it vocal in response to lips or breathing." Along with its mirror image in anticipation, emotionally charged memory is a barrier that shuts us out from understanding.

Natural piety can very easily be transformed into artificial piety; for some emotionally charged memories are common to all the members of a given society and lend themselves to being organized into religious, political, or cultural traditions. These traditions are systematically drummed into the young of each successive generation and play an important part in the long drama of their conditioning for citizenship. Since the memories common to one group are different from the memories shared by other groups, the social solidarity created by tradition is always partial and exclusive. There is natural and artificial piety in relation to everything belonging to us, coupled with suspicion, dislike, and contempt in relation to everything belonging to them.

Artificial piety may be fabricated, organized, and fostered in two ways—by the repetition of verbal formulas of belief and worship, and by the performance of symbolic acts and rituals. As might be expected, the second is the more effective method. What is the easiest way for a skeptic to achieve faith? The question was answered three hundred years ago by Pascal. The unbeliever must act "as though he believed, take holy water, have masses said, etc. This will naturally cause you to believe and will besot you." (Cela vous abetira—literally, will make you stupid.) We have to be made stupid, insists Professor Jacques Chevalier, defending his hero against the critics who have been shocked by Pascal's blunt language; we have to stultify our intelligence, because intellectual pride deprives us of God and debases us to the level of animals." Which is, of course, perfectly true. But it does not follow from this truth that we ought to besot ourselves in the manner prescribed by Pascal and all the propagandists of all the religions. Intellectual pride can be cured only by devaluating pretentious words, only by getting rid of conceptualized pseudo-knowledge and opening ourselves to reality. Artificial piety based on conditioned reflexes merely transfers intellectual pride from the bumptious individual to his even more bumptious Church. At one remove, the pride remains intact. For the convinced believer, understanding or direct contact with reality is exceedingly difficult. Moreover the mere fact of having a strong reverential feeling about some hallowed thing, person, or proposition is no guarantee of the existence of the thing, the infallibility of the person, or the truth of the proposition. In this context, how instructive is the account of an experiment undertaken by that most imaginative and versatile of the Eminent Victorians, Sir Francis Galton!- The aim of the experiment, he writes in his Autobiography, was to "gain an insight into the abject feelings of barbarians and others concerning the power of images which they know to be of human handiwork. I wanted if possible to enter into these feelings. ... It was difficult to find a suitable object for trial, because it ought to be in itself quite unfitted to arouse devout feelings. I fixed on a comic picture, it was that of Punch, and made believe in its possession of divine attributes. I addressed it with much quasi-reverence as possessing a mighty power to reward or punish the behavior of men towards it, and found little difficulty in ignoring the impossibilities of what I professed. The experiment succeeded. I began to feel and long retained for the picture a large share of the feelings that a barbarian entertains towards his idols, and learned to appreciate the enormous potency they might have over him."

The nature of a conditioned reflex is such that, when the bell rings, the dog salivates, when the much worshipped image is seen, or the much repeated credo, litany, or mantram is pronounced, the heart of the believer is filled with reverence and his mind with faith. And this happens, regardless of the content of the phrase repeated, the nature of the image to which obeisance has been made. He is not responding spontaneously to given reality, he is responding to some thing, or word, or gesture, which automatically brings into play a previously installed post-hypnotic suggestion. Meister Eckhart, that acute st of religious psychologists, clearly recognized this fact. "He who fondly imagines to get more of God in thoughts, prayers, pious offices and so forth than by the fireside or in the stall, in sooth he does but take God, as it were, and swaddle His head in a cloak and hide Him under the table. For he who seeks God in settled forms lays hold of the form, while missing the God concealed in it. But he who seeks God in no special guise lays hold of Him as He is in Himself, and such an one lives with the Son and is the life itself.

"If you look for the Buddha, you will not see the Buddha." "If you deliberately try to become a Buddha, your Buddha is samsara." "If a person seeks the Tao, that person loses the Tao." "By intending to bring yourself into accord with Suchness, you instantly deviate." "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it." There is a Law of Reversed Effort. The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of simultaneously doing and not doing, of combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent Unknown Quantity may take hold. We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind in which understanding may come to us. What is this state? Clearly it is not any state of limited consciousness. Reality as it is given moment by moment cannot be understood by a mind acting in obedience to posthypnotic suggestions, or so conditioned by its emotionally charged memories that it responds to the living now as though it were the dead then. Nor is the mind that has been trained in concentration any better equipped to understand reality. For concentration is merely systematic exclusion, the shutting away from consciousness of all but one thought, one ideal, one image, or one negation of all thoughts, ideals, and images. But however true, however lofty, however holy, no thought or ideal or image can contain reality or lead to the understanding of reality. Nor can the negation of awareness result in that completer awareness necessary to understanding. At the best these things can lead only to a state of ecstatic dissociation, in which one particular aspect of reality, the so-called "spiritual" aspect, may be apprehended. If reality is to be understood in its fullness, as it is given moment by moment, there must be an awareness which is not limited, either deliberately by piety or concentration, or involuntarily by mere thoughtlessness and the force of habit. Understanding comes when we are totally aware—aware to the limits of our mental and physical potentialities. This, of course, is a very ancient doctrine. "Know thyself" is a piece of advice which is as old as civilization, and probably a great deal older. To follow that advice, a man must do more than indulge in introspection. If I would know myself, I must know my environment; for, as a body, I am part of the environment, a natural object among other natural objects; and, as a mind, I consist to a great extent of my immediate reactions to the environment and of my secondary reactions to those primary reactions. In practice "know thyself" is a call to total awareness. To those who practice it, what does total awareness reveal? It reveals, first of all, the limitations of the thing which each of us calls "I," and the enormity, the utter absurdity of its pretensions. "I am the master of my fate," poor Henley wrote at the end of a celebrated morsel of rhetoric, "I am the captain of my soul." Nothing could be further from the truth. My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger— a passenger who is not sufficiently important to sit at the captain's table and does not know, even by report, what the soul-ship looks like, how it works or where it is going. Total awareness starts, in a word, with the realization of my ignorance and my impotence. How do electro-chemical events in my brain turn into the perception of a quartet by Haydn or a thought, let us say, of Joan of Arc? I haven't the faintest idea—nor has anyone else. Or consider a seemingly much simpler problem. Can I lift my right hand? The answer is, No, I can't. I can only give the order; the actual lifting is done by somebody else. Who? I don't know. How? I don't know. And when I have eaten, who digests the bread and cheese? When I have cut myself, who heals the wound? While I am sleeping, who restores the tired body to strength, the neurotic mind to sanity? All I can say is that "I" cannot do any of these things. The catalogue of what I do not know and am incapable of achieving could be lengthened almost indefinitely. Even my claim to think is only partially justified by the observable facts. Descartes' primal certainty, "I think, therefore I am," turns out, on closer examination, to be a most dubious proposition. In actual fact is it I who do the thinking? Would it not be truer to say, "Thoughts come into existence, and sometimes I am aware of them?" Language, that treasure house of fossil observations and latent philosophy, suggests that this is in fact what happens. Whenever I find myself thinking more than ordinarily well, I am apt to say, "An idea has occurred to me," or, "It came into my head," or, "I see it clearly." In each case the phrase implies that thoughts have their origin "out there," in something analogous, on the mental level, to the external world. Awareness confirms the hints of idiomatic speech. In relation to the subjective "I," most of the mind is out there. My thoughts are a set of mental, but still external facts. I do not invent my best thoughts; I find them. Total awareness, then, reveals the following facts: that I am profoundly ignorant, that I am impotent to the point of helplessness and that the most valuable elements in my personality are unknown quantities existing "out there," as mental objects more or less completely independent of my control. This discovery may seem at first rather humiliating and even depressing. But if I wholeheartedly accept them, the facts become a source of peace, a reason for serenity and cheerfulness. I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am—unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied, but alive and kicking. In spite of everything, I survive, I get by, sometimes I even get on. From these two sets of facts—my survival on the one hand and my ignorance and impotence on the other—I can only infer that the not-I, which looks after my body and gives me my best ideas, must be amazingly intelligent, knowledgeable, and strong. As a self-centered ego, I do my best to interfere with the beneficent workings of this not-I. But in spite of my likes and dislikes, in spite of my malice, my infatuations, my gnawing anxieties, in spite of all my over-valuation of words, in spite of my selfstultifying insistence on living, not in present reality, but in memory and anticipation, this not-I, with whom I am associated, sustains me, preserves me, gives me a long succession of second chances. We know very little and can achieve very little; but we are at liberty, if we so choose, to co-operate with a greater power and a completer knowledge, an unknown quantity at once immanent and transcendent, at once physical and mental, at once subjective and objective. If we cooperate, we shall be all right, even if the worst should happen. If we refuse to co-operate, we shall be all wrong, even in the most propitious of circumstances.

These conclusions are only the first-fruits of total awareness. Yet richer harvests are to follow. In my ignorance I am sure that I am eternally I. This conviction is rooted in emotionally charged memory. Only when, in the words of St. John of the Cross, the memory has been emptied, can I escape from the sense of my watertight separateness and so prepare myself for the understanding, moment by moment, of reality on all its levels. But the memory cannot be emptied by an act of will, or by systematic discipline or by concentration—even by concentration on the idea of emptiness. It can be emptied only by total awareness. Thus, if I am aware of my distractions—which are mostly emotionally charged memories or fantasies based upon such memories—the mental whirligig will automatically come to a stop and the memory will be emptied, at least for a moment or two. Again, if I become totally aware of my envy, my resentment, my uncharitableness, these feelings will be replaced, during the time of my awareness, by a more realistic reaction to the events taking place around me. My awareness, of course, must be uncontaminated by approval or condemnation. Value judgments are conditioned, verbalized reactions to primary reactions. Total awareness is a primary, choiceless, impartial response to the present situation as a whole. There are in it no limiting conditioned reactions to the primary reaction, to the pure cognitive apprehension of the situation. If memories of verbal formulas of praise or blame should make their appearance in consciousness, they are to be examined impartially as any other present datum is examined. Professional moralists have confidence in the surface will, believe in punishments and rewards, and are adrenalin addicts who like nothing better than a good orgy of righteous indignation.

The masters of the spiritual life have little faith in the surface will or the utility, for their particular purposes, of rewards or punishments, and do not indulge in righteous indignation. Experience has taught them that the highest good can never, in the very nature of things, be achieved by moralizing. "Judge not that ye be not judged" is their watchword and total awareness is their method.

Two or three thousand years behind the times, a few contemporary psychiatrists have now discovered this method. "Socrates," writes Professor Carl Rogers, "developed novel ideas, which have proven to be socially constructive." Why? Because he was "notably non-defensive and open to experience. The reasoning behind this is based primarily upon the discovery in psychotherapy that if we can add to the sensory and visceral experiencing, characteristic of the whole animal kingdom, the gift of a free undirected awareness, of which only the human animal seems fully capable, we have an organism which is as aware of the demands of the culture as it is of its own physiological demands for food and sex, which is just as aware of its desire for friendly relationships as it is aware of its desire to aggrandize itself; which is just as aware of its delicate and sensitive tenderness towards others as it is of its hostilities towards others. When man is less than fully man, when he denies to awareness various aspects of his experience, then indeed we have all too often reason to fear him and his behavior, as the present world situation testifies. But when he is most fully man, when he is his complete organism, when awareness of experience, that peculiarly human attribute, is fully operating, then his behavior is to be trusted." Better late than never! It is comforting to find the immemorial commonplaces of mystical wisdom turning up as a brand new discovery in psycho-therapy. Gnosce teipsum—know yourself. Know yourself in relation to your overt intentions and your hidden motives, in relation to your thinking, your physical functioning, and to those greater not-selves, who see to it that, despite all the ego's attempts at sabotage, the thinking shall be tolerably relevant and the functioning not too abnormal. Be totally aware of what you do and think and of the persons with whom you are in relationship, the events which prompt you at every moment of your existence. Be aware impartially, realistically, without judging, without reacting in terms of remembered words to your present cognitive reactions. If you do this, the memory will be emptied, knowledge and pseudo-knowledge will be relegated to their proper place, and you will have understanding—in other words, you will be in direct contact with reality at every instant. Better still, you will discover what Carl Rogers calls your "delicate and sensitive tenderness towards others." And not only your tenderness, the cosmic tenderness, the fundamental all-rightness of the universe—in spite of death, in spite of suffering. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him." This is the utterance of someone who is totally aware. And another such utterance is, "God is love." From the standpoint of common sense, the first is the raving of a lunatic, the second flies in the face of all experience, and is obviously untrue. But common sense is not based on total awareness; it is a product of convention, of organized memories of other people’s words, of personal experiences limited by passion and value judgments, of hallowed notions and naked self-interest. Total awareness opens the way to understanding, and when any given situation is understood, the nature of all reality is made manifest, and the nonsensical utterances of the mystics are seen to be true, or at least as nearly true as it is possible for a verbal expression of the ineffable to be. One in all and all in One; samsara and nirvana are the same; multiplicity is unity, and unity is not so much one as not-two; all things are void, and yet all things are the Dharma-Body of the Buddha—and so on. So far as conceptual knowledge is concerned, such phrases are completely meaningless. It is only when there is understanding that they make sense. For when there is understanding, there is an experienced fusion of the End with the Means, of the Wisdom, which is the timeless realization of Suchness, with the compassion which is Wisdom in action. Of all the worn, smudged, dog's-eared words in our vocabulary, "love" is surely the grubbiest, smelliest, slimiest. Bawled from a million pulpits, lasciviously crooned through hundreds of millions of loudspeakers, it has become an outrage to good taste and decent feeling, an obscenity which one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced; for, after all, Love is the last word.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

7. Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970). German-born American philosopher.

8. Albert Jay Nock (c. 1870-1945). American author and editor of The Freeman (1920-1924).

9. Lao-tsu (6th century B.C.). Chinese philosopher.

1. Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986). Indian theosophist.

2. Simone Weil (1909-1943). French religious writer and philosopher.

3. The line can he translated as: "To give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe" (Mallarme, "'Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe").

4. Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911). English scientist, eugenicist, and African explorer.

Adonis and the Alphabet

TWENTY MILES NORTH of Beirut we crossed a river. Not much of a river, in terms of size and water; but what a volume of myth, what a length of history! The bridge on which we had halted spanned the River Adonis. We looked over the parapet and were a little disappointed to find the water pellucid, unstained, at this late season, by the red earth of the Lebanon, the blood, if you prefer, of the dying god. To the east, high up in a gorge among the mountains, at the very place where Adonis lost his life, had stood the temple to which uncounted thousands of his worshippers climbed every year on arduous pilgrimage. And at Byblos, a few miles beyond the river, was the sanctuary of Adonis's lover. For the Greeks she was Aphrodite; for Solomon, who built a high place for her at Jerusalem, Ashtaroth; she was Ishtar in Babylonia, Astarte in Phoenicia, Atargatis for the Syrians—and, for Shakespeare, the heroine of his earliest poem.

"Fondling," she saith, "since I have hemm'd thee here

Within the circuit of this ivory pale,

I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;

Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:

Graze on my lips, or if those hills be dry,

Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie."

We have come a long way, in this rococo Venus and her reluctant boy, from the Dea Syria and the Corn Spirit, from the drama of death and resurrection acted out, symbolically, to the accompaniment of ritual couplings and sacred prostitution, of the wailings of half-naked women and the self-castrations of frenzied youths. "Graze on my lips, stray lower.... " The cosmic has become the comic; an enormous mystery has been transformed into a charming piece of near impropriety. This is the way a world ends, the old, dark world of chthonic deities and fertility cults—not (to parody Mr. Eliot) with a bang, but a simper. And a good thing, too, on the whole. Bang may be impressive; but what a bore in the long run, how crude and brutal! Those denunciatory rumblings of Hebrew prophets, those endless persecutions, those noisy revivals of what each revivalist regards as True Religion, those ham preachers with their thrilling voices and their all too noble gestures, those tragedians eloquently gloating over disaster, those Carlylean moralists, Christian or Stoic, bellowing away about the wickedness of being happy and the abominableness of nature—surely, surely we have had enough of them. Shakespeare’s way of dealing with the fertility religions is humaner than the Inquisition's and at least as effective. Both as literature and as morals, Venus and Adonis is better than the Malleus Maleficarum. As for grazing on lips and straying lower—even at their most depraved these amusements are a thousand times less wicked than torturing people, and even burning them alive, because they prefer an older conception of God to the one that is currently fashionable among clergymen. But even so, Shakespeare’s is not the final answer. We have had enough, and more than enough, of prophets, revivalists, and tragedians. But we have also had enough of the satirists and debunkers, of the writers of farces and the tellers of bawdy stories, to whom long-suffering humanity has turned for an antidote to all those Jeremiahs and Savonarolas, and portentous Dantes, those preachers of crusades and heresy hunters, ancient and modern. Heads implies tails; simper is merely the obverse of bang, Felicia of Laura, Bouvard et Pecuchet of Paradise Lost. There is no escape except into the divine equanimity, which reconciles all the opposites and so transfigures the world.

We got into the car again and drove on between the sea and the mountains. A few minutes later the coastal highway had become the main street of a small town. We were in Jebeil, with the monuments of the Crusades towering ruinously overhead and the remains of Byblos—of half a dozen Bybloses, Roman, Greek, Phoenician, Colonial-Egyptian, Chalcolithic, Neolithic—emerging, under the spades of the archaeologists, from the earth beneath our feet.

There is no description of ancient Byblos. Lucian in The Syrian Goddess, tells us that he visited the temple, but not what it looked like, nor what were the rites of Adonis in which he took part. And did he really think that the annual arrival of the Holy Head was a miracle? It is hard in the light of his later, total skepticism, to believe it. And yet the fact remains that, in The Syrian Goddess, he called it a miracle. The Holy Head belonged, presumably, to Osiris and came all the way from Egypt, floating on the waves and driven by mysteriously purposeful winds, which brought it punctually, after a seven-day crossing, to the land of Osiris's counterpart, Adonis. "I saw it," Lucian affirms; and there is no reason to doubt his word. After all, Chaucer and his contemporaries had all seen the pigges bones in the Pardoner's crystal reliquary.

Byblos, of course, was much more than a place of pilgrimage. It was a port, the oldest in Phoenicia, and a clearing house for trade between Egypt, Syria, and the further East on the one hand and Europe and Asia Minor on the other. The proof of this lies embedded in two Greek words, byblos and biblion. Byblos was the common name for papyrus. We find it in Herodotus and, much earlier, in Homer, who has Odysseus make fast the doors of his house with "byblian tackle," in other words, ropes of papyrus fiber. To the Greeks of Ionia and, later, of Europe, string and paper were brought by Phoenician traders, whose home port gave its name to the finished article as well as to the Egyptian plant which supplied the raw material. A Greek would call for a sheet of byblos or a ball of byblian twine, just as, centuries later, an Englishman would ask for a yard of damask or a pound of damsons. And when the byblos came in rolls and had writing on it, the thing was a biblion, a bible or, as we should say (since we used to do our writing on tablets of beechwood), a book. And this Phoenician city, I reflected as we strolled through its narrow spaces and enormous times, had had another, more than merely etymological connection with literature. For it was here, about thirty-five centuries ago, that some nameless genius invented, or at least perfected, the ABC.

The discovery of this fact was due to a happy accident. In 1922 a land-slide revealed an underground chamber and a huge sarcophagus. The archaeologists went to work and had soon unearthed a whole cemetery of royal tombs. One of these contained the sarcophagus of King Ahiram, who reigned in the thirteenth century before our era. On it had been carved an inscription in Phoenician characters. The alphabet, it was clear, had been in use hundreds of years earlier than had previously been supposed. King Ahiram's coffin is now in the Beirut Museum—that fascinating repository of perhaps the ugliest works of art ever created by man; for the Phoenicians (heavens knows why) seem to have been incapable of producing anything but monstrosities. No, I exaggerate; they were capable sometimes of producing cutenesses. Their figurines of hippopotami, for example, might have been modeled by Walt Disney. But if art was not their strong point, commerce undoubtedly was; and it must have been in the interests of commercial efficiency that one of them invented the new and enormously simpler system of writing which was destined to replace cuneiform and hieroglyphics throughout the Near East and Europe. As a man of letters, I felt I ought to lay a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Letter-Maker of Byblos.

It was Sunday, and in the Crusader's elegant little church a Maronite service was in progress. The words of an incomprehensible liturgy reverberated under the vaults, and above the heads of the congregation a family of sparrows was going unconcernedly about its business. Nobody paid any attention to their noisy impudence. The little creatures were taken for granted. Along with the ancient stones, the altar, the intoning priest, they were an accepted feature of the Sunday landscape, an element in the sacred situation. In this part of the world, birds seem to be perfectly compatible with monotheism. These Maronite sparrows are matched by the Mohammedan pigeons in the Omayyad Mosque at Damascus. That splendid sanctuary is alive with wings and cooing, and when droppings fall on the head of some grave and bearded worshipper—we actually saw it happen—there is no indignation, only a tolerant smile. Birds, after all, are God's creatures; and if Allah chooses not to provide them with a colon and a capacity for prolonged retention, who are we that we should dare to complain? Let us rather give thanks that dogs were not allowed to fly.

The dove was sacred in ancient Syria, and Atargatis was, among many other things, a Fish Goddess and the patroness of every animal except the pig. Within the precincts of her temple at Hierapolis, in northern Syria, there was a lake with an altar in it, and a congregation of carp; also a kind of holy zoo, where eagles, oxen, lions, and bears wandered harmlessly and at liberty among the worshippers. Ancient traditions die hard, and perhaps the birds we had seen owed their immunity, in mosque and church, to the buried memories of a religion far older than either Islam or Christianity. Animals, say the theologians, have no souls. Having no souls, they have no rights, and may be treated by human beings as though they were mere things. In certain circumstances, indeed, they deserve a treatment even worse than that which we usually accord to things. Blessed Cecilia, a thirteenth-century Roman nun, has told how St. Dominic came one evening to preach, from behind the grille, to the Sisters of her convent. His theme was Devils; and hardly had he begun his sermon, when "the enemy of mankind came on the scene in the shape of a sparrow and began to fly through the air, hopping even on the Sisters' heads, so that they could have handled him had they been so minded, and all this to hinder the preaching. St. Dominic, observing this, called Sister Maximilia and said: 'Get up and catch him, and bring him here to me.' She got up and, putting out her hand, had no difficulty in seizing hold of him, and handed him out through the window to St. Dominic. St. Dominic held him fast in one hand, and commenced plucking off his feathers with the other, saying the while: 'You wretch, you rogue!' When he had plucked him clean of all his feathers, amidst much laughter from the Brothers and Sisters, and awful shrieks of the sparrow, he pitched him out, saying: 'Fly now if you can, enemy of mankind! You can cry out and trouble us, but you cannot hurt us.'"

What an ugly little picture it is! An intelligent and highly educated man wallowing in the voluntary ignorance of the lowest kind of superstition; a saint indulging his paranoid fancies to the point where they justified him in behaving like a sadist; a group of devout monks and nuns laughing full-throatedly at the shrieks and writhings of a tortured bird. Our own age is certainly bad; but in many respects the Age of Faith was even worse. Take, for example, this matter of humanitarianism towards animals. There were a few humanitarians in the Middle Ages. Chaucer's Prioress, who could not bear to see a dog being beaten, was one of them. St. Hugh of Avalon was another. This older contemporary of St. Dominic had a pet swan and, instead of plucking birds alive, used to feed and tame them. And then, of course, there was St. Francis—though not St. Francis's followers. His rustic disciple, Brother Juniper, once heard a sick man express a desire for fried pig's trotters, and immediately rushed out of the house and hacked the feet off a living hog. When the saint rebuked him, it was not, as one might have expected, for an act of barbarous cruelty, but because he had damaged a valuable piece of private property. There were other early humanitarians—but not many. In Mme. de Rambure's anthology, L'Eglise et la Pitie envers les Animaux, the exploits of medieval animal-lovers fill no more than a hundred pages. English Common Law took no cognizance of acts of cruelty towards the brute creation; and to judge from Hogarth's gruesome picture of children tormenting, with every refinement of sadistic beastliness, their dogs, cats, and birds, popular morality was as blind, in this respect, as the law. It was not until 1822 that the first piece of legislation on behalf of animals was enacted by Parliament. By 1876, the Royal Commission on Vivisection could state in its report that "the infliction upon animals of any unnecessary pain is justly abhorrent to the moral sense of Your Majesty's subjects generally." This was a far cry from Ho-garth and St. Dominic, a change of heart and thought that marked perhaps the beginning of a religious revolution. The old, all too human bumptiousness which had been consecrated by verse twenty-six of the first chapter of Genesis, the doctrine that man is a being apart from the rest of creation and may do with it what he pleases, was giving place, under the influence of scientific knowledge, to a view of the world at once more realistic and more charitable. That which the theologians and the philosophers had been at such pains to divide was coming together again in a system of thought and feeling that bore, at last, some resemblance to the system of facts in nature.

Spiritual progress is always in an ascending spiral. Animal instinct gives place to human will and then to grace, guidance, inspiration, which are simply instinct on a higher level. Or consider the progress of consciousness. First there is the infant's undifferentiated awareness, next comes discrimination and discursive reasoning, and finally (if the individual wishes to transcend himself) there is a rise which is also a return towards an obscure knowledge of the whole, a realization of the timeless and the non-dual in time and multiplicity. Similarly, in religion, there is the primitive worship of the god who is immanent in nature, next the worship of divine transcendence, and then, on the intellectual level, the philosophy of scientific monism and, on the existential level, the mystical experience of the One, which corresponds, two stories higher up, to the felt pantheism of the origins. St. Dominic was the preacher and, at the same time, the victim of a theological system which, in spite of the doctrine of the Incarnation, stressed the transcendence of God, the hatefulness of nature, the alienation of man from the rest of the creation. This fact explains his behavior, but does not completely excuse it. Tradition is strong, but not irresistible. Some measure of moral, intellectual, and spiritual independence is always possible—though it may, of course, be exceedingly dangerous, as the Albigensians found in St. Dominic's day and as ideological heretics discover in ours, to assert one's right to such independence. In this particular case, however, neither life nor conscience was in danger. There was no dogma equating sparrows with devils. If the saint behaved as he did, it was, I suppose, because he enjoyed being superstitious (superstition equals concupiscence, says Pascal), and also, no doubt, because twelve years of medieval higher education— twelve years, that is to say, of memorizing dead men's words and playing logical games with them—had left him with a notion of reality even more distorted, in some respects, than that of the ignorant peasant or artisan.

And this brings us back to the Unknown Letter-Maker; for we live, each one of us, immersed in language, and our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are, to a much greater extent than we care to admit, determined by the words and syntax of our native tongue and even by the signs through which those words and that syntax are made visible in writing. In the West it is only recently that, thanks to the logicians, the semanticists, the students of linguistics and metalinguistics, we have become fully aware of the part played by language as a virtual philosophy, a source of ontological postulates, a conditioner of thought and even perception, a molder of sentiments, a creator of behavior-patterns. To the Indians, these ideas have been familiar for centuries. In every system of Hindu philosophy the phenomenal world is called namarupa, "name-and-form." This, at first glance, strikes us as odd. But after all (to quote the words of Heinrich Zimmer), "the possibilities for thought, practical or otherwise, at any given period are rigidly limited by the range and wealth of the available linguistic coinage.... The totality of this currency is called, in Indian philosophy, naman (Latin nomen, our word 'name'). The very substance, on and by which the mind operates when thinking, consists of this name-treasury of notions. Naman is the internal realm of concepts, which corresponds to the external realm of perceived forms, the Sanskrit term for the latter being rupa.... Rupa is the outer counterpart of naman; naman the interior of rupa. Nama-rupa therefore denotes, on the one hand, man, the experiencing and thinking individual, man as endowed with mind and senses; and, on the other, all the means and objects of thought and perception. Nama-rupa is the whole world, subjective and objective, as observed and known." But no language is perfect, no vocabulary is adequate to the wealth of the given universe, no pattern of words and sentences, however rich, however subtle, can do justice to the interconnected Gestalts, with which experience presents us. Consequently the phenomenal forms of our name-conditioned universe are "by nature delusory and fallacious." Wisdom comes only to those who have learned how to talk and read and write without taking language more seriously than it deserves. As the only begetter of civilization and even of our humanity, language must be taken very seriously. Seriously, too, as an instrument (when used with due caution) for thinking about the relationship between phenomena. But it must never be taken seriously when it is used, as in the old credal religions and their modern political counterparts, as being in any way the equivalents of immediate experience or as being a source of true knowledge about the nature of things. In an unsystematic way, the great medieval mystics, such as Eckhart and Tauler and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, were acutely aware of the danger of taking language as seriously as it was taken by most of their contemporaries. But their warnings were couched in general terms, and their ignorance of any language but Latin and their native dialect made it impossible for them to formulate any effective criticism. For example, they did not, and could not, see that Aristotle's logic was a systematization of Greek grammar, which makes a certain amount of sense for those who speak an Inda-European language, but not for those who speak Chinese or for those who have learned the artificial languages of mathematics and modern logic; and that, therefore, it cannot be regarded (as it was regarded for so many centuries) as Logic with a large L, the final and definitive formulation of the laws of thought. Similarly, they did not, and could not, know that the age-old preoccupation of Western philosophers with the notion of substance was the natural consequence of their speaking a language, in which there were clearly distinguishable parts of speech, a verb "to be," and sentences containing subjects and predicates. "Substance," says Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy, "is a metaphysical mistake due to transference to the world-structure of the structure of sentences composed of a subject and a predicate." And what about "essence"? The question is relevant only in the domain of language. "A word may have an essence, a thing cannot.” In Chinese there are no fixed parts of speech, sentences do not take the subject-predicate form, and there is no verb meaning "to be.” Consequently, except under foreign influence, Chinese philosophers have never formulated the idea of substance, and never projected the word into the universe.

Their concern has always been with the relationships between things, not with their "essences"; with the "how" of experience rather than the inferred "what." If the Arian controversy had reached China, one can imagine the native theologians speculating about the simultaneous threeness and oneness of the Persons, but never dividing, or not dividing, the Substance.

Western science began with the ideas of essence and substance, which were implicit in the Inda-European languages and had been made explicit in Greek philosophy and Latin theology; but it has been compelled, by the inner logic of the scientific process, to get rid of these notions and adopt instead an up-to-date, critical version of the Chinese view of things.

Language exists in two forms, the spoken and the written. As knowledge accumulated, and formal education was made more widely available, written language became progressively more and more important. Littera scripta manet, volat irrevocable verbum; writing abides, the spoken word flies off and cannot be recalled. Socrates, who is remembered solely because Xenophon and Plato wrote about him, was himself an enemy of writing. Wisdom and a knowledge of metaphysical and moral truth cannot, he maintained, be conveyed in books, but only by means of rhetoric and dialectic. The Chinese sages, it may be remarked, were of a diametrically opposite opinion. For them, rhetoric and dialectic were beneath contempt. Serious philosophical ideas could be conveyed only in writing—and only, of course, in the kind of writing current in China, where language is rendered visible by means of a complicated system of signs, some of which (the pictograms) are actually representations of the things denoted, others (the ideograms) are compound symbols standing for ideas, and yet others (the phonograms) represent certain of the sounds which occur most commonly in the spoken language. Before the invention of the alphabet, the civilized peoples of the Near East employed one or other of two very ancient systems of writing—the hieroglyphic writing of Egypt and the cuneiform of Sumeria, and, later, of Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia. Both systems were fundamentally similar to the Chinese, inasmuch as both made use of hundreds of signs, some pictographic, some ideographic, and some phonographic. The inventors of the alphabet performed the extraordinary feat of reducing these hundreds of signs to less than thirty. These twenty-odd consonants and vowels were so judiciously chosen that, by means of them, every word in every language could be rendered, not indeed perfectly, but well enough for most practical purposes— and rendered, what was more, in a form which indicated, more or less, how the word was to be pronounced. Efficiency in business and government; universal education; encyclopedias and dictionaries; the possibility of expressing one's meaning unequivocally and with the maximum of precision—these are a few of the benefits for which we have to thank the Unknown Letter-Maker. The A B C has been an enormous blessing, but like most blessings, not entirely unmixed. Rendered alphabetically, a word remains strictly itself. Rendered by means of pictograms, ideograms, and phonograms a word becomes something else as well as itself. The Chinese interest in relations rather than substance is due in part, as we have seen, to the idiosyncrasies of a language in which there are no fixed parts of speech and no word for "to be"; in part to the nature of Chinese writing. "Chinese thought," says Professor Chang Tun-Sun, "is not based upon the law of identity, but takes as its starting point relative orientation, or rather the relation of opposites." (For example, "non-resistance means strength." "fluency stutters," "yin entails yang." This last pair of correlated opposites is fundamental in Chinese thought, which regards the positive principle as dependent, for its existence, upon the negative and the negative upon the positive. Brought up on Latin grammar and the ABC, St. Dominic could see only the differences between things, not their togetherness. God was one thing and Nature, since the Fall something other and alien, something which willingly lent itself to the Enemy of Mankind, so that a sparrow was really the Devil in disguise and must be tortured, just as the Albigensians must be tortured for going one stage further and affirming that the Devil had actually created the material world.) The Chinese system of thought is "probably related to the nature of Chinese characters. Being ideographic, Chinese characters put emphasis on the signs and symbols of objects. The Chinese are interested in the inter-relation between the different signs, without being bothered by the substance underlying them.... The characteristic of Chinese thought lies in its exclusive attention to the correlational implications between different signs."

When words are alphabetically rendered, they remain, as I have said, merely themselves. Spelled out, a name is still that particular name, and the corresponding form is still that particular form. The ABC confirms the phenomenal world of nama-rupa. In English, for example, the notion of "good" is rendered by the four letters, g-o-o-d. In Chinese, the same idea is represented by a combination of the sign for "woman" with the sign for "child." How touching! But now consider the Chinese word fang. Fang has many different meanings, hut is represented by only one character, originally applied to fang, signifying "square"—a character which is a kind of picture or diagram of two boats tied together. When this sign stands for fang in any of its other meanings, it is used as a phonogram and has to be combined with another sign, so as to be distinguishable from "square." Thus, the sign for "woman" plus the phonogram for fang means "hinder." Woman plus child equals good. But this good has its price; for a man who has a wife and children has given hostages to fortune. The good of one context is the hindrance of another. What a wealth of ideas is implicit in the writing of these two common words! No wonder if the Chinese paid so much attention to "the correlational implications between different signs."

The universe is a many-dimensional pattern, infinite in extent, infinite in duration, infinite in significance and infinitely aware, we may surmise of its own infinities. Within the cosmic order, every component pattern, every object and event, is related to every other; there is a co-varying togetherness of all things. But, by creatures like ourselves, most of the interconnections within the general Gestalt are, and will always be unrecognized. We tend to think of our environment as consisting of great numbers of self-sufficient things. And we are confirmed in this tendency by alphabetic writing. For alphabetic writing creates an illusion of clarity and separateness. The words we read are written in such a way that they seem to be exclusively themselves, and this makes us believe that we know what's what, that a rose is a rose is a rose. But in fact a rose is a rose-plus is a rose-minus is a rose to the nth. The what we think we know is never only what. Besides, what, as an underlying substance, is unknowable and nonexistent. What exists only when it is known by the liberated and transfigured consciousness, which experiences the paradox of the absoluteness of relationships, the infinity and universality of particulars. This experience is what Eckhart calls the experience of "isness"—which is entirely different from the notion of being or the dogma of substance. For the unliberated, untransfigured mind, all that is knowable is the how of relationships. The characters employed in the older systems of writing helped men to remember this all-important fact. That woman plus a certain phonogram (which was originally a pictogram, representing two boats tied together, and stood for "square") should actually mean "hinder," is a most salutary reminder that the universe is bottomlessly odd. Lucian, Astarte, the alphabet, sparrows in church, St. Dominic, the Albigenses—what a rich mixed bag of disparate items! But, ultimately, nothing is irrelevant to anything else. There is a togetherness of all things in an endless hierarchy of living and interacting patterns.

Conditioned by their culture, their language, their position in time, their temperament, character, and intelligence, men have paid attention now to one set of patterns, now to another. Today we have it in our power to perceive, infer, and understand a far wider area of reality than was open to our ancestors.

Nature, language, history, human behavior—our knowledge of these things is incomparably wider than that which was available in the past. But width, unfortunately, is all too often the enemy of depth. Clear knowledge of the Whole outside us requires to be supplemented by an obscure knowledge of the Whole within. Moreover, the clear external knowledge must be carried inwards, as far as analysis and introspection can take it, while the obscure knowledge within must be projected outwards, so that our theoretical conviction of the world's unity may be transformed into an intuition, a constant realization. How easy it is to say what ought to be done! And how difficult, alas, to do it and, therefore, how unlikely that, except by very few, it will ever be done!

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

Miracle in Lebanon

in one of the northern suburbs of Beirut there stands an ugly little Armenian church, to which, in the ordinary course of events, no tourist would ever dream of going. But in this month of May, 1954, the course of events had not been ordinary. The sight we had come to see was a miracle.

It had happened two or three days before. In the niche where, between services, the communion chalice was kept, a patch of light had appeared on the stone. There was no sunbeam to account for it, no indication, so we were assured, that the stone contained any phosphorescent or fluorescent substance. And yet the fact remained that, for the last few days, a soft glow had appeared every morning, persisted all day and faded out at night. For the Armenians, I suppose, the miracle clearly demonstrated how right their fathers had been to reject the competing orthodoxies of Rome and Byzantium in favor of the doctrine that, after his baptism (but not before), Christ's flesh consisted of ethereal fire and "was not subject to the ordinary phenomena of digestion, secretions and evacuations." For the rest of us, it was either a hoax, or an ordinary event in an unusual context, or else one of those delightful anomalies which distress the right-thinking scientist by actually turning up, every now and then, in all their mysterious pointlessness, and refusing to be explained away.

The church, when we arrived, was thronged, I was going to say, with pilgrims—but the word (at least in this present age of unfaith and, therefore, religious earnestness) calls up ideas of devotion; and of devotion, or even of decorum, there were no signs. But if these people were no pilgrims, in our non-Chaucerian sense of the term, neither were they mere sight-seers. Curiosity was certainly one of their motives, but not, it was clear, the only or strongest one. What had brought most of them to the church was a form of self-interest. They had come there, as the forty-niners came to California, in search of sudden profit—a horde of spiritual prospectors looking for nuggets of mana, veins of twenty-two carat good luck, something, in a word, for nothing.

Something for nothing—but, concretely, what? When crowds close in on a movie star, they can beg autographs, steal handkerchiefs and fountain pens, tear off pieces of his or her garments as relics. Similarly, in the Middle Ages persons dying in the odor of sanctity ran the risk, when their bodies lay in state, of being stripped naked or even dismembered by the faithful. Clothing would be cut to ribbons, ears cropped, hair pulled out, toes and fingers amputated, nipples snipped off and carried home as amulets. But here, unfortunately, there was no corpse; there was only light, and light is intangible. You cannot slice off an inch of the spectrum and put it in your pocket. The people who had come to exploit this Comstock Lode of the miraculous found themselves painfully frustrated: there was nothing here that they could take away with them. For all practical purposes, the glow in the niche was immaterial. Then, happily for all concerned, a young woman noticed that, for some reason or other, one of the chandeliers, suspended from the ceiling of the church, was wet. Drops of rather dirty water were slowly forming and, at lengthening intervals, falling. Nobody supposed that there was anything supernatural about the phenomenon; but at least it was taking place in a supernatural context. Moreover the water on the chandelier possessed one immense advantage over the light in the niche: it was tangible as well as merely visible. A boy was hoisted onto the shoulders of a tall man. Handkerchiefs were passed up to him, moistened in the oozings of the lamp and then returned to their owners, made happy now by the possession of a charged fetish, capable, no doubt, of curing minor ailments, restoring lost potency, and mediating prayers for success in love or business.

But "the search for the miraculous" (to use Ouspensky's phrase) is not invariably motivated by selfinterest. There are people who love truth for its own sake and are ready, like the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, to seek it at the bottom of even the muddiest, smelliest wells. Much more widespread than the love of truth is the appetite for marvels, the love of the Phony an sich, in itself and for its own sweet sake. There is also a curious psychological derangement, a kind of neurosis, sometimes mild, sometimes severe, which might be called "The Cryptogram-Secret Society Syndrome." What fun to be an initiate! How delicious to feel the paranoid glow which accompanies the consciousness of belonging to the innermost circle, of being one of the superior and privileged few who know, for example, that all history, past, present, and future, is written into the stones of the Great Pyramid; that Jesus, like Madame Blavatsky, spent seven years in Tibet; that Bacon wrote all the works of Shakespeare and never died, merely vanished, to reappear a century later as the Comte de Saint-Germain, who is still living either (as Mrs. Annie Besant- was convinced) in a Central European castle, or else, more probably, in a cave, with a large party of lemurians, near the top of Mount Shasta; alternatively, that Bacon did die and was buried, not (needless to say) in what the vulgar regard as his tomb, but at Williamsburg, Virginia, or, better still, on an island off the coast of California, near Santa Barbara. To be privy to such secrets is a high, rare privilege, a distinction equivalent to that of being Mr. Rockefeller or a Knight of the Garter.

Esoteric fantasies about Fourth Dynasty monuments, sixteenth-century lawyers, and eighteenthcentury adventurers are harmless. But when practical politicians and power seekers go in for esotericism, the results are apt to be dangerous. Whether fascist or revolutionary, every conspiratorial group has its quota of men and women afflicted by the Cryptogram-Secret Society Syndrome. Nor is this all. The intelligence services of every government are largely staffed by persons who (in happier circumstances or if their temperament were a little different), would be inoffensively engaged in hunting for Tibetan Masters, proving that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes, celebrating Black Masses, or (the favorite occupation of Charles Williams’s more eccentric characters) intoning the Tetragrammaton backwards. If these neurotics could be content to play the cloak-and-dagger game according to the rules of patriotism, all would be, relatively speaking, well. But the history of espionage demonstrates very clearly that many compulsive esotericists are not content to belong to only one Secret Society. To intensify their strange fun, they surreptitiously work for the enemy as well as their own gang, and end, in a delirium of duplicity, by double-crossing everyone. The born secret agent, the man who positively enjoys spying, can never, because he is a neurotic, be relied upon. It may well be that a nation's actual security is in inverse ratio to the size of its security forces. The greater the number of its secret agents and hush-hush men, the more chances there are of betrayal.

But let us get back to our miracle. "What do you think of it?" I asked our Lebanese companion. He stroked his black beard, he smiled, he shrugged his shoulders in expressive silence. Being himself a professional thaumaturge—trained by the dervishes to lie on beds of nails, to go into catalepsy, to perform feats of telepathy, to send people into hypnotic trance by simply touching a point on the neck or back-he knew how hard a man must work if he would acquire even the most trifling of paranormal powers. His skepticism in regard to amateur wonder-workers and spontaneous miracles was complete and unshakable.

A queue had formed at the foot of the altar steps. We got into line and shuffled slowly forward to get our peep, in due course, into the niche. That I personally saw nothing was the fault, not of the chalice, but of my own poor eyesight. To my companions and everyone else the glow was manifest. It was an Armenian miracle; but even Maronites, even Uniats, even Moslems and Druses had to admit that something had happened.

We made our way towards the door. Perched on the tall man's shoulders, the boy was still busy at his task of turning handkerchiefs into relics. In the sacristy picture postcards of the chalice and the illuminated niche were already on sale.

In Edward Conze's admirable account of Buddhism there is a striking passage on the historical, and perhaps psychologically inevitable relationship between spirituality and superstition, between the highest form of religion and the lowest. "Historically," Conze notes, "the display of supernatural powers and the working of miracles were among the most potent causes of the conversion of tribes and individuals to Buddhism." Even the most "refined and intellectual" of Buddhists "would be inclined to think that a belief in miracles is indispensable to the survival of any spiritual life. In Europe, from the eighteenth century onwards, the conviction that spiritual forces can act on material events has given way to a belief in the inexorable rule of natural law. The result is that the experience of the spiritual has become more and more inaccessible to modern society. No known religion has become mature without embracing both the spiritual and the magical. If it rejects the spiritual, religion becomes a mere weapon to dominate the world.... Such was the case in Nazism and in modern Japan. If, however, religion rejects the magical side of life, it cuts itself off from the living forces of the world to such an extent that it cannot bring even the spiritual side of man to maturity." Buddhism (like Christianity in its heyday) has combined "lofty metaphysics with adherence to the most commonly accepted superstitions of mankind. The Prajnaparamita text tells us that 'perfect wisdom can be attained only by the complete and total extinction of self-interest.' And yet, in the same text, this supreme spiritual wisdom is 'recommended as a sort of magical talisman or lucky amulet....' Among all the paradoxes with which the history of Buddhism presents us this combination of spiritual negation of self-interest with magical subservience to self-interest is perhaps one of the most striking."

The same paradox is to be found in Christianity. The mystical spirituality of the fourteenth century had as its background and context the system of ideas which called into existence such men as Chaucer's Pardoner and the preacher who, in the Decameron, tours the country exhibiting a tail feather of the Holy Ghost. Or consider the flowering, three centuries later, of French spirituality in Charles de Condren and Olier, in Lallemant and Surin and Mme. de Chantal. These worshippers in spirit of a God who is Spirit were contemporary with and, in Surin's case, deeply involved in the most hideous manifestations of devil-centered superstition. White sand is clean, but sterile. If you want a herbaceous border, you must mulch your soil with dead leaves and, if possible, dig in a load of dung. Shall we ever see, in religion, the equivalent of "hydroponics—spiritual flowers growing without benefit of excrement or decay, in a solution of pure love and understanding? I devoutly hope so, but, alas, have my doubts. Like dirtless farming, dirtless spirituality is likely to remain, for a long time, an exception. The rule will be dirt and plenty of it. Occult dirt, bringing forth, as usual, a few mystical flowers and a whole crop of magicians, priests, and fanatics. Anti-occult dirt—the dirt of ideological and technological superstition—in which personal frustrations grow like toadstools in the dark thickets of political tyranny. Or else (and this will be the ultimate horror) a mixture of both kinds of dirt, fertile in such monstrosities as mediumistic commissars, clairvoyant engineers, NKVD's, and FBI's equipped with ESP as well as walky-talkies and concealed microphones.

This last possibility is not nearly so remote as it may sound. Hitler was an occultist as well as an ideologist, and, in their search for weapons, with which to fight the Cold War, certain governmental agencies even in the democratic countries are showing a most unwholesome interest in parapsychology. We reproach the Victorian men of science with having been blind to the facts of psychology; we laugh at them for their absurd attempts to explain the universe in terms, exclusively, of miniature billiard balls in motion. Fifty years from now the human mind will have been thoroughly explored and the results of that research applied systematically. With what nostalgic regret our children's children will look back to those dear little Victorian billiard balls! Ignorance and inefficiency are among the strongest bulwarks of liberty. The Victorians knew very little about the brain and even less about the mind, and were therefore in no position to do anything to control them. Pure and applied psychology, neurology, bio-chemistry, and pharmacology have made enormous advances during the last few years. By the beginning of the twenty-first century the theorists in these fields will possess enormous stores of knowledge, and the technicians will have developed innumerable ways of applying that knowledge in the interests of those who can command or buy their services. Every government, by then, will be employing as many psychologists and parapsychologists, as many neurologists and pharmacologists and sociologists and hatha-yogins, as it now employs chemists, physicists, metallurgists, and engineers. There will be Psychic Energy Commissions operating huge secret laboratories dedicated, not to our hopelessly old-fashioned ideals of mass murder and collective suicide, but to the more constructive task of man's definitive domestication and total enslavement. Our present, ludicrously crude methods of propaganda and brainwashing will have given place to a number of really effective psycho-pharmaco-occult techniques for inculcating and maintaining conformity. Meanwhile new drugs for heightening psi faculties will have been developed. Pills will be used to reinforce the effects of intensive training, and the spies and informers of the future will operate with a degree of efficiency now scarcely imaginable. Under whatever name—CIA, CID, NKVD, FBI—the secret police will be virtually omniscient and therefore omnipotent. We have had religious revolutions, we have had political, industrial, economic, and nationalistic revolutions. All of them, as our descendants will discover, were but ripples in an ocean of conservatism—trivial by comparison with the psychological revolution towards which we are now so rapidly moving. That will really be a revolution. When it is over, the human race will give no further trouble.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

Footnote

5. Annie Besant (1847-1933). English theosophist and author.

II.

History, Politics, Social Criticism

War and Peace

enduring peace is a future and hypothetical condition. All past history has been a history of enduring war. Sorokin¹ has shown that, during the last seven centuries, the Spaniards have spent, on the average, seventy years out of every hundred in foreign or civil war; the English, fifty-six; the French, fifty; the Germans, twenty-eight. What is true of recent European history is true, as De Ligt and others have shown, of earlier periods and other parts of the world. For as long as our records go back, war has been one of the principal occupations of civilized human beings.

How have art and letters reacted to this state of affairs? In relatively simple societies, war is described and glorified in ballads and, more ambitiously, in epics, while such important works of art as are made are reserved for the adornment of the houses and burial places of the warrior king and his nobles. In more complex societies, literature and art enjoy a wider range; but war still remains an important pretext for aesthetic activity and a favorite subject. In the event of victory, writers have chanted paeans in praise of their country’s warriors, and artists have carved statues, raised triumphal arches, and painted grandiose battle pictures of the most wildly unrealistic nature. After defeats, on the contrary, writers have composed dirges and called for revenge; or, if of a philosophical temper, have described war's horrors, tried to unravel its causes, and worked out schemes for the establishment of enduring peace. In similar circumstances, artists have built tombs and war memorials, and created such denunciations of war as Callot's- Les Miseres de la Guerre or Goya's Desastres.

The recent history of Western art and letters in their relation to war and peace is in the highest degree significant. During the opening years of the First World War there was an outburst in all the belligerent countries, of romantic war literature and war art. These gave place, after about two years of fighting, to poems, novels, paintings, and sculpture of a different kind. In them, war was represented realistically and evaluated as utterly senseless and criminal. The same mood persisted for some years after the close of the conflict. Books such as All Quiet on the Western Front achieved a fabulous circulation in every part of the civilized world. The causes of war were investigated and exhaustively set forth by scores of writers, blue prints for a better world appeared by the hundred, and a whole literature of uplift, tinged by sociology and political economy, crystallized round such peace-making institutions as the League of Nations. In all history no generation of men has been more fully or more effectively informed about war and its consequences than was the generation which flourished between 1918 and 1939. Never, at any rate, during the earlier part of this period, have there been fewer chauvinistic writers of talent, or more brilliant advocates of internationalism. Never has so much learning and industry been expended upon the analysis of war's causes and the elaboration of preventives. It was with their eyes wide open and with the warning voices of their favorite authors ringing in their ears, that the peoples of Europe marched once again over the precipice.

In the light of the foregoing facts we may venture a few generalizations. First. The propagandist effect of art and letters is strongly felt only when non-aesthetic circumstances conspire to make it widely acceptable. Lucian was almost as brilliant a writer as Voltaire; but whereas the circumstances of the eighteenth century were such as to make Voltaire widely and deeply influential, those of the second were unpropitious to anti-religious satire; and the writings of Lucian did nothing to check the spread of Christianity and other proselytizing faiths.

Second. Some artists and writers are, in Sheldon's phrase, predominantly "somatotonic," which means that they are temperamentally bellicose and un-squeamish; others are able to find the satisfaction of their highest aspirations in the idolatry of nationalism. All these will always be on the side of enduring war rather than of enduring peace.

Third. The human mind seems to be so constituted that no one set of ideas or pattern of sentiments can inspire conviction or respect for very long at a stretch. Periods of classicism alternate with periods of romanticism, periods of devotion with periods of unbelief, periods of pacifism and internationalism with periods of nationalism and militarism. In a self-conscious civilization such as ours, the young men and women of each generation almost always react against the doctrines, and the aesthetic, moral, and political values, accepted by their parents.

From all this we may conclude that art and letters cannot do much by direct propaganda for the cause of enduring peace. For even if artists and writers were at any time unanimous in denouncing war, deploring imperialism, and actively preaching international good will (and in practice there will always be a good supply of Kiplings, Barreses, D'Annunzios, and Houston Stewart Chamberlains-), their propaganda would not be equally acceptable at all periods and, by a kind of automatic reflex, their children would be moved to turn against them and exalt values of militarism, racialism, and the mailed fist.

According to Sorokin the periods of relative orderliness and peaceableness are those in which most of the members of society accept a philosophy of life based upon transcendental values. If Sorokin's thesis is correct-and incidentally he is merely stating in sociological terms, and supporting by historical evidence, a doctrine which has been set forth by every great religious teacher, every exponent of

the philosophia perennis—artists and writers can do most for the cause of enduring peace, not by painting pictures or writing poems and novels about the horrors of war or the iniquities of aggressive imperialism, not by drawing up Utopian blueprints for better worlds, but by genuinely believing in transcendental values and by giving effective expression to their beliefs in plastic or literary forms. As usual, it is a case of "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all the rest shall be added." Our current civilization is committed to first seeking all the rest, in the touching faith that, in the time of our great-great-grandchildren, Progress will somehow add the kingdom of God.

[Art News, November 15, 1943]

1. Pitirim Alexandrovitch Sorokin (1889-1968). Russian-born American sociologist.

2. Jacques Callot (c. 1592-1635). French engraver and etcher.

3. Maurice Barres (1862-1923). French patriotic novelist and nationalistic politician. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927). English-born German propagandist and Aryan racist.

Science, Liberty, and Peace

"If the arrangement of society is bad (as ours is), and a small number of people have power over the majority and oppress it, every victory over Nature will inevitably serve only to increase that power and that oppression. This is what is actually happening."

It is nearly half a century since Tolstoy wrote these words, and what was happening then has gone on happening ever since. Science and technology have made notable advances in the intervening years —and so has the centralization of political and economic power, so have oligarchy and despotism. It need hardly be added that science is not the only causative factor involved in this process. No social evil can possibly have only one cause. Hence the difficulty, in any given case, of finding a complete cure. All that is being maintained here is that progressive science is one of the causative factors involved in the progressive decline of liberty and the progressive centralization of power, which have occurred during the twentieth century.

Applied science touches the lives of individuals and societies at many different points and in a great variety of contexts, and therefore the ways in which it has increased the power of the few over the majority are correspondingly many and various. In the paragraphs that follow I shall enumerate the more obviously significant of these ways, shall indicate how and by what means applied science has contributed hitherto towards the centralization of power in the hands of a small ruling minority, and also how and by what means such tendencies may be resisted and ultimately, perhaps, reversed.

1. In the course of the past two or three generations science and technology have equipped the political bosses who control the various national states with unprecedentedly efficient instruments of coercion. The tank, the flame-thrower, and the bomber—to mention but a few of these instruments— have made nonsense of the old techniques of popular revolt. At the same time the recent revolutionary improvements in the means of transport and communications have vastly strengthened the hands of the police. In his own peculiar way, Fouche was a man of first-rate abilities; but compared with the secret police force at the disposal of a modern dictatorship or even of a modem democracy, the instrument of oppression, which he was able to forge for Napoleon, was an absurdly clumsy piece of machinery. In the past, personal and political liberty depended to a considerable extent upon governmental inefficiency.

The spirit of tyranny was always more than willing; but its organization and material equipment were generally weak. Progressive science and technology have changed all this completely. Today, if the central executive wishes to act oppressively, it finds an almost miraculously efficient machine of coercion standing ready to be set in motion. Thanks to the genius and co-operative industry of highly trained physicists, chemists, metallurgists, and mechanical inventors, tyrants are able to dragoon larger numbers of people more effectively, and strategists can kill and destroy more indiscriminately and at greater distances, than ever before. On many fronts nature has been conquered; but, as Tolstoy foresaw, man and his liberties have sustained a succession of defeats.

Overwhelming scientific and technological superiority cannot be resisted on their own plane. In 1848 the sporting gun was a match for the muskets of the soldiery, and a barricade made of overturned carts, sandbags, and paving stones was a sufficient protection again muzzle-loading cannon. After a century of scientific and technological progress no weapons available to the masses of the people can compete with those in the arsenals controlled by the ruling minority. Consequently, if any resistance is to be offered by the many to the few, it must be offered in a field in which technological superiority does not count. In countries where democratic institutions exist and the executive is prepared to abide by the rules of the democratic game, the many can protect themselves against the ruling few by using their right to vote, to strike, to organize pressure groups, to petition the legislature, to hold meetings and conduct press campaigns in favor of reform. But where there are no democratic institutions, or where a hitherto democratic government declines any longer to abide by the rules of the game, a majority which feels itself oppressed may be driven to resort to direct action. But since science and technology, in conquering nature have thereby enormously increased the military and police power of the ruling few, this direct action cannot hope for a successful outcome, if it is violent; for in any armed conflict, the side which has the tanks, planes, and flame-throwers cannot fail to defeat the side which is armed at the very best only with small arms and hand grenades.

Is there any way out of the unfavorable political situation in which, thanks to applied science, the masses now find themselves? So far only one hopeful issue has been discovered. In South Africa and, later, in India, Gandhi and his followers were confronted by an oppressive government armed with overwhelming military might. Gandhi, who is not only an idealist and a man of principle, but also an intensely practical politician, attempted to cope with this seemingly desperate situation by organizing a non-violent form of direct action, which he called satyagraha. For a full account of the methods and results of satyagraha the reader is referred to War -without Violence by Krishnalal Shridharani (New York, 1939). Here it is only necessary to state that the method achieved a number of striking successes against odds which, from a military point of view, were overwhelmingly great. To those who think that the record of Gandhi's achievements is irrelevant to the historical and psychological situation of the industrial West, Mr. Shridharani makes the following answer:

"My contact with the Western world has led me to think that, contrary to popular belief, satyagraha, once consciously and deliberately adopted, has more fertile fields in which to grow and flourish in the West than in the Orient. Like war, satyagraha demands public spirit, self-sacrifice, organization and discipline for its successful operation, and I have found these qualities displayed in Western communities more than in my own." Perhaps the best craftsmen in the art of violence may still be the most effective wielders of non-violent direct action. It is but a question, in the words of William James, of "opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities."

It is often argued that satyagraha cannot work against an organization whose leaders are prepared to exploit their military superiority without qualm or scruple. And of course this may very well be the case. No more than any other form of political action, violent or otherwise, can satyagraha guarantee success. But even though, against an entirely ruthless and fanatical co-operation and what Thoreau called "civil disobedience" coupled with a disciplined willingness to accept and even to court sacrificial suffering, may prove unavailing, the resulting situation could not be, materially, any worse than it would have been if the intolerable oppression had been passively accepted or else resisted unavailingly by force; while, psychologically and morally, it would in all probability be very much better—better for those participating in the satyagraha, and better in the eyes of spectators and of those who merely heard of the achievement at second hand.

In the years ahead it seems possible that satyagraha may take root in the West—not primarily as the result of any "change of heart," but simply because it provides the masses, especially in the conquered countries, with their only practicable form of political action. The Germans of the Ruhr and the Palatinate resorted to satyagraha against the French in 1923. The movement was spontaneous; philosophically, ethically, and organizationally, it had not been prepared for. It was for this reason that it finally broke down. But it lasted long enough to prove that a Western people—and a people more thoroughly indoctrinated with militarism than any other—was perfectly capable of non-violent direct action, involving the cheerful acceptance of sacrificial suffering. Similar movements of satyagraha (more conscious of themselves this time, and better prepared for) may again be initiated among the masses of conquered Germany. The impracticability of any other kind of political action makes it very possible that this will happen sooner or later. It would be one of the happier ironies of history if the nation which produced Klausewitz and Bernhardi and Hitler were to be forced by circumstances to become the first large-scale exponent in the West of that non-violent direct action which has become, in this age of scientific progress, humanity’s only practical substitute for hopeless revolution and self-stultifying or suicidal war.

2. The pen and the voice are at least as mighty as the sword; for the sword is wielded in obedience to the spoken or the written word. Progressive technology has strengthened the powers that be by providing them not only with bigger and better instruments of coercion, but also with instruments of persuasion incomparably superior to those at the disposal of earlier rulers. The rotary press and, more recently, the radio have contributed greatly to the concentration of political and economic power. James Mill believed that, when everybody had learned to read, the reign of reason and democracy would be assured for ever. But in actual historical fact the spread of free compulsory education, and, along with it, the cheapening and acceleration of the older methods of printing, have almost everywhere been followed by an increase in the power of ruling oligarchies at the expense of the masses. The reasons for this are obvious. A newspaper combining attractiveness with cheapness cannot be produced unless it is subsidized either by advertisers (that is to say, the people who control centralized finance and large-scale, mass-producing and mass-distributing industry), or by some organization desirous, for its own purposes, of influencing public opinion, or by the central government. In countries where the press is said to be free, newspapers are subsidized primarily by advertisers, and to a lesser extent by political parties, financial, or professional groups. In countries where the press is not free, newspapers are subsidized by the central government. The man who pays the piper always calls the tune. In capitalist democracies the popular press supports its advertisers by inculcating the benefits of centralized industry and finance, coupled with as much centralized government as will enable these institutions to function at a profit. In totalitarian states all newspapers preach the virtues of governmental omnipotence, one-party politics, and state control of everything. In both cases progressive technology has strengthened the hands of the local bosses by providing them with the means of persuading the many that concentration of political and economic power is for the general benefit.

What is true of the press is equally true of the radio. Spoken words are more exciting than words printed on wood pulp. In the past a great orator could reach, at the most, only a few thousand listeners. Today, thanks to applied science, a dictator with a gift of the gah is ahle to pour his emotionally charged evangel into the ears of tens of millions. What Mark Antony could do to the mob assembled round Caesar's corpse, his modern counterpart can do to entire nations. Never have so many been so much at the mercy of so few.

Undesirable propaganda will not cease until the persons who pay for propaganda either change their minds, or are replaced by other persons willing to pay for something else. Meanwhile there is no remedy for the evil except personal self-denial. Reading newspapers and listening to the radio are psychological addictions; and psychological addictions, like the physiological addictions to drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, can only be put to an end to by a voluntary effort on the part of the addict. So long as people yield to the craving to read about murders and divorces and to look at the comic strips, or listen to soap operas and swing music, they must expect to be influenced by the propaganda which always accompanies these habit-forming stimuli. A questionnaire on reading habits was recently addressed by the heads of a New York labor union to its membership. Among the questions asked were: What newspaper do you regularly read? and what newspaper do you consider the least trustworthy and most untruthful? Sixty percent of the membership agreed that newspaper X was the most untruthful sheet in the New York area, but over 40 percent admitted to making it their daily reading—because of its superior comic strips and more violent sensationalism. As usual, it is a case of video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor—I see the better and I approve; but the worse is what I pursue. Under the present dispensation, nothing but self-denial on the part of readers can diminish the influence of newspaper X. Continued indulgence in psychological addictions has to be paid for, and the price is undesirable propaganda.

3. By supplying the ruling oligarchy with more effective instruments of coercion and persuasion, applied science has contributed directly to the centralization of power in the hands of the few. But it has also made important indirect contributions to the same end. It has done this in two ways; first, by introducing over ever larger areas of the industrial and agricultural economy the methods of large-scale mass production and mass distribution; second, by creating, through its very progressiveness, an economic and social insecurity which drives all those concerned, owners and managers no less than workers, to seek the assistance of the national state. Let us now consider these two power-centralizing factors in greater detail.

(a) In applying the results of disinterested scientific research, inventors and technicians have paid more attention to the problem of equipping large concerns with the expensive machinery of mass distribution than to that of providing individuals, or co-operating groups with cheap and simple, but effective, means of production for their own subsistence and for the needs of a local market. The reason for this is that there has been more money in working for the mass producers and mass distributors; and the mass producers and the mass distributors have had more money because financiers have seen that there was more profit for them, and more power, in a centralized than in a decentralized system of production.

Here, in parenthesis, let us note that concentration of financial power preceded the scientific revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was largely responsible for making our industrial civilization the hateful thing it was and, for the most part, still is. Throughout Europe, land and natural resources were not owned outright by the people, represented by a multitude of smallholders; nor were they the property of a sovereign, leasing to small tenants and spending the rent (which is the monetary expression of the social value of land) for social purposes. The best part of the land and its natural resources was the monopoly of a small class of landlords, who appropriated the social values of what should, quite obviously, have been everybody’s property, to their own private use. Hence the early centralization of financial power—a power that was used to exploit the new technological discoveries for the benefit, not of individual small producers or co-operating groups, but for that of the class which alone possessed accumulations of money. Centralized finance begot centralized industry, and in due course the profits of centralized industry increased the power of centralized finance, so that it was able to proceed ever further in the direction of completely centralized production and distribution.

The centralizing of industrial capacity in big mass-producing factories has resulted in the centralization of a large part of the population in cities and in the reduction of ever-increasing numbers of individuals to complete dependence upon a few private capitalists and their managers, or upon the one public capitalist, the state, represented by politicians and working through civil servants. So far as liberty is concerned, there is little to choose between the two types of boss. Up to the present, state-controlled enterprises have been closely modeled upon those of capitalist big business. Nationalization has not stopped short at land and natural resources, nor have the land and natural resources been nationalized with the purpose of giving individuals or co-operating groups free access to the means of small-scale production, personal liberty, and self-government. On the contrary, the objects nationalized include, besides land and natural resources, the tools of production, and that nationalization has been undertaken with a view to strengthening the state (that is to say, the politicians momentarily in power) against its subjects and not at all with the purpose of liberating individual men and women from economic dependence upon bosses. But economic dependence upon bosses is always bad, because, quite obviously, it is not easily reconcilable with local and professional self-government or with civil and personal liberty. Democratic institutions are likely to work best at times and in places where at least a good part of the citizens have access to enough land and possess sufficient tools and professional skill to be able to provide for their subsistence without recourse to financially potent private capitalists or to the government. Where, as in the contemporary Western world, great numbers of the citizens own nothing (not even, in many cases, a skill, since the operation of semi-automatic machines does not require a skill), personal liberty and political and civil rights are to a more or less considerable extent dependent upon the grace of the capitalistic or national owners and managers of the means of production and distribution, and upon their willingness to abide by the rules of the democratic game. To forward their interests and to protect themselves against oppression, propertyless workers combine in trade unions. These have done much to bridle the ambition and covetousness of capitalists and to improve the conditions of labor. But trade unions are as subject to giganticism and centralization as are the industries to which they are related. Consequently it happens all too frequently that the masses of unionized workers find themselves dependent upon, and subordinated to, two governing oligarchies—that of the bosses and that of the union leaders. Over the first they have no control at all, except by strike and the threat of strike; over the second their control is at best remote and rather shadowy. Self-government, which is the very essence of democratic freedom, is more or less completely absent from their professional lives. This is ultimately due, as we have seen, to propertylessness and consequent dependence upon the private or public owners and managers of the means of mass production and mass distribution; and propertylessness is due in its turn to (among other things) the progress of applied science—a progress which, under the auspices of centralized finance, has hitherto favored mass production at the expense of production on a small scale for personal or co-operative use, or to supply a local market.

In the most highly industrialized countries, applied science and its ally, and master, centralized finance, have profoundly changed the traditional pattern of agricultural life. Thus, in the United States, the percentage of the population making its living from the land has been reduced in recent years to only a fifth of the total. Meanwhile the size of individual holdings of land has tended to increase, as powerful corporations add field to field in the effort to exploit mechanized farming to its economic limit. Small-scale farmers, who used to be primarily concerned with subsistence, secondarily with a cash crop, have been largely replaced by men whose primary concern is with cash crops and who use the cash so earned to buy "nationally advertised," processed and denatured foods at the grocer's.

In Russia the process of centralizing and consolidating the control of land and of industrializing agricultural production has been carried out by government decree and by means of the liquidation of a whole class of society. It would appear, however, that a measure of small-scale private ownership, or quasi-ownership, has had to be reintroduced in order to increase agricultural efficiency by improving the morale of the workers.

Among the ordinary results of the rapid progress of applied science are technological unemployment and the sudden and unexpected necessity of changing long-established habits of agricultural and industrial production. When too rapid, changes of position or state are very disturbing to living organisms, sometimes even fatal. That is why, when we get out of a plane in mid-air, we use a parachute, why, when we take a Turkish bath, we do not plunge immediately into the hottest chamber. Analogously, social, economic, and political changes can take place too rapidly and too frequently for human wellbeing. A highly progressive technology entails incessant and often very rapid and startling changes of economic, political, and ethical state; and such changes tend to keep the societies subjected to them in a chronologically uncomfortable and unstable condition. Some day, perhaps, social scientists will be able to tell us what is the optimum rate of change, and what the optimum amount of it at any one time. For the present, Western societies remain at the mercy of their progressive technologies, to the intense discomfort of everybody concerned. Man as a moral, social, and political being is sacrificed to homofaber, or man the smith, the inventor and forger of new gadgets.

And meanwhile, of course, technological unemployment is always with us; for every labor-saving device, every substitution of a new and more efficient technique for an older and less efficient one, results in temporary diminution of the labor force. In the long run the persons displaced, as the - result of technological advance, may find themselves reabsorbed by the other industries or even (since increased efficiency results in lowered prices, greater demand, and an expansion of production (sufficient, in some cases, to offset the original technological unemployment) by the industry from which they were discharged. But what may happen in the long run is of little interest to propertyless persons who are compelled by hunger and the elements to do their living exclusively in the short run. For such persons the chief consequence of progressive science is a chronic social and economic insecurity.

Here, as in an earlier paragraph, it is necessary to stress the fact that the progress of applied science is not the only causative factor involved. Mass unemployment and periodical slumps have a variety of interlocking causes—meteorological, financial, and psychological causes as well as those connected with science and technology. Concerning the relative importance of these factors the experts are not yet agreed. Many theories of slumps and unemployment have been formulated, each of which emphasizes one of the known causative factors at the expense of all the rest. None of these theories is universally accepted; but all of them—and this, for our present purpose, is the important point—are agreed that technological unemployment is a reality and that the progress of applied science does in fact play an important part in creating the economic and social insecurity which is the plague of modern industrial societies.

In the capitalist countries the nature of the monetary and financial systems has been such that, whenever a boom gets under way, the issuers of credit are compelled by the traditional rules of banking to withdraw credit and so to convert the boom into a slump. At the same time the owners of mass-producing industry are compelled by the rules of the game of profit-making to practice what Thorstein Veblen used to call "capitalist sabotage"—in other words, they are compelled by the necessity of making profits to prevent their managers from producing as many goods and at as cheap a rate as they are technically equipped to do. In both cases the result of following the traditional rules is an accentuation of the social and economic insecurity normally resulting from technological progress. State socialists hold that the remedy for these evils can be found only in the nationalization of banking, land, and industry —in other words, in the complete and final centralization of economic as well as political power in the hands of the currently ruling politicians and their managers. But power is in its essence expansive, and cannot be curbed except by other powers of equal or at least comparable magnitude. Under a regime of state socialism there would be no power systems within a community capable of opposing any serious resistance to the politically and economically almighty executive. The political bosses and civil servants in control of the state would themselves be controlled by nothing stronger than a paper constitution. In cases where state socialism succeeds capitalist democracy by non-violent, constitutional means, the rules of the political game are likely to remain, in many respects, identical with those of the older regime. For as long as the new system is administered by men brought up under democratic traditions, the constitutional rules will probably be observed. But when these men are succeeded by a new generation, born and brought up in a society dominated by the omnipotent state, what then? Only the most ingenuously optimistic, the most willfully blind to the facts of history and psychology, can believe that paper guarantees of liberty—guarantees wholly unsupported by the realities of political and economic power—will be scrupulously respected by those who have known only the fact of governmental omnipotence on the one hand and, on the other, of mass dependence upon, and subservience to, the state and its representatives.

We see, then, that technological progress results in economic and social insecurity, and that this insecurity is greatly aggravated, in the capitalist countries, by the necessity of abiding by the traditional rules of private banking, financing, and mass production. By nationalizing, or at the least by rigidly controlling, industry, agriculture, and banking, the state could probably get rid of periodical depressions and would be in a position to mitigate, by financial and political measures, the worst consequences of scientific progress. In this way the advantages of centralized finance, mass-producing industry, and quasi-industrial agriculture could be reconciled with social and economic security for the masses. But everything has its price, and it seems unlikely that security achieved in this way could for long co-exist with that liberty under law which, as Acton was never tired of insisting, is the end of all political action, all social and economic arrangements.

At the present time the horrors of insecurity, as exemplified above all in mass unemployment, have impressed themselves so deeply upon the popular mind that, if offered the choice between liberty and security, most people would almost unhesitatingly vote for security. Similar situations have occurred at other periods of history. Thus, in the years which witnessed the final disintegration of the Roman Empire, the insecurity of life and property was such that many hitherto free peasants and yeomen voluntarily made over their land and even their persons to the nearest great lord, in exchange for his protection. It was better, they felt, to be the serf or even the domestic slave of a powerful noble than to be free, but at the mercy of bandits, barbarians, and the men-at-arms of other hereditary magnates. The sources of our present insecurity are not the same as were the sources of the insecurity of fifteen hundred years ago; but in both cases the reaction to insecurity is identical—namely, a general wish to exchange freedom for protection, independence for guaranteed subsistence in the holders of great power. But great power invariably exercises a corrupting influence on those who wield it; and when, in due course, the tyranny of the bosses in control of the omnipotent state becomes unbearable, the masses who now pine for security will begin to pine even more ardently for liberty. That they will be able to extort liberty from a ruling minority equipped by science with the very latest in self-propelled flame-throwers and atomic missiles seems in the highest degree unlikely. It is in satyagraha, or non-violent direct action, that the only hope of future revolutions resides. Meanwhile there is no question, in the contemporary world, of any popular movement in favor of liberty. On the contrary, the masses are everywhere clamoring for ever greater governmental control of everything. Nor are these demands exclusively confined to the masses. The owners and managers of the various capitalist systems are also victims of the general insecurity. They too would like a measure of government control—enough control to guarantee profits, but not so much, of course, as to constitute expropriation or nationalization.

Is there any way in which the material advantages of progressive technology can be combined not only with security, but also with freedom? My own view, which is essentially that of the Decentralists, is that, so long as the results of pure science are applied for the purpose of making our system of mass-producing and mass-distributing industry more expensively elaborate and more highly specialized, there can be nothing but ever greater centralization of power in ever fewer hands. And the corollary of this centralization of economic and political power is the progressive loss by the masses of their civil liberties, their personal independence, and their opportunities for self-government. But here we must note that there is nothing in the results of disinterested scientific research which makes it inevitable that they should be applied for the benefit of centralized finance, industry, and government. If inventors and technicians so chose, they could just as well apply the results of pure science for the purpose of increasing the economic self-sufficiency and consequently the political independence of small owners, working either on their own or in co-operative groups, concerned not with mass distribution, but with subsistence and the supply of a local market. The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath; and the same is true of applied science. Human beings have certain physical and psychological wants. They require food, clothing, and shelter; and, for moral and mental health, they need to be given the opportunity to develop their latent potentialities to the fullest degree compatible with the freedom and well-being of others. And beyond these primary psychological needs lies man’s spiritual need—the need, in theological language, to achieve his Final End, which is the unitive knowledge of ultimate Reality, the realization that Atman and Brahman are one, that the body is a temple of the Holy Ghost, that Tao or the Logos is at once transcendent and immanent.

Now it seems pretty obvious that man's psychological, to say nothing of his spiritual, needs cannot be fulfilled unless, first, he has a fair measure of personal independence and personal responsibility within and toward a self-governing group, unless, secondly, his work possesses a certain aesthetic value and human significance, and unless, in the third place, he is related to his natural environment in some organic, rooted, and symbiotic way. But in modern industrial societies vast numbers of men and women pass their whole lives in hideous cities, are wholly dependent for their livelihood upon a capitalistic or governmental boss, have to perform manual or clerical work that is repetitive, mechanical, and intrinsically meaningless, are rootless, propertyless, and entirely divorced from the world of nature, to which, as animals, they still belong and in which, as human beings, they might (if they were sufficiently humble and docile) discover the spiritual Reality in which the whole world, animate or inanimate, has its being. The reason for this dismal state of things is the progressive application of the results of pure science for the benefit of mass-producing and mass-distributing industry, and with the unconscious or conscious purpose of furthering centralization of power in finance, manufacture, and government.

But now let us suppose that those who make it their business to apply the results of pure science to economic ends should elect to do so, not primarily for the benefit of big business, big cities and big government, but with the conscious aim of providing individuals with the means of doing profitable and intrinsically significant work, of helping men and women to achieve independence from bosses, so that they may become their own employers, or members of a self-governing, co-operative group working for subsistence and a local market. Suppose, I repeat, that this were henceforward to become the acknowledged purpose guiding the labors of inventors and engineers. Seconded by appropriate legislation, this differently orientated technological progress would result, not as at present in the further concentration of power and the completer subordination of the many to the few, but in a progressive decentralization of population, of accessibility of land, of ownership of the means of production, of political and economic power. Ralph Borsodi's studies have shown that mass-producing and mass-distributing methods are technologically justified in about one-third of the total production of goods. In regard to the remaining two-thirds, the economies effected by mass-production are offset by the increased costs involved in mass distribution over great areas, so that local production by individuals or co-operating groups, working for subsistence and a neighborhood market, is more economical than mass production in vast centralized factories. And to these economic advantages of decentralization must be added the social advantages of a more humanly satisfying life for more people, a greater measure of genuine self-governing democracy and a blessed freedom from the silly or pernicious adult education provided by the mass producers of consumer goods through the medium of advertisements.

4. The continuous advance of science and technology has profoundly affected the prevailing mental climate. The basic postulates of thought have been changed, so that what to our fathers seemed obviously true and important strikes us as either false or negligible and beside the point. Let us consider a few of the more significant of these changes and their effects upon the social and political life of our times.

(a) Unlike art, science is genuinely progressive. Achievement in the fields of research and technology is cumulative; each generation begins at the point where its predecessor left off. Furthermore, the results of disinterested research were from the first applied in such a way that the upper and middle classes of all industrialized societies found themselves becoming steadily richer and richer. It was, therefore, only to be expected that the professional thinkers who sprang from these classes, and who were familiar with the methods and achievements of science, should have based upon the facts of technological and economic progress a general theory of human life. The world, they affirmed, was becoming materially, intellectually, and morally better and better, and this amelioration was in some way inevitable. The theory of progress—a theory that soon became a dogma, indeed an axiom of popular thought—was novel and, from an orthodox Christian point of view, heretical. For orthodoxy, man was a fallen being. Humanity if not actively deteriorating, was statically bad, with a badness which only grace in cooperation with the individual’s free will could possibly mitigate. In illustration of this, let us consider how the thirteenth century was regarded by those who lived through it, and how it is regarded by modern historians. For the latter it seems one of the most glorious periods in European history; the former were unanimous (as Professor Coulton has shown) in regarding it as an age of peculiar wickedness and manifest degeneracy. Even in the age of Queen Elizabeth thoughtful men were still talking of humanity's decline. It was not until the late seventeenth century (the age of the rise of modern science) that the note of bumptious self-congratulation began to be sounded, not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the dogma of inevitable progress became an unquestioned article of popular faith.

The belief in all-round progress is based upon the wishful dream that one can get something for nothing. Its underlying assumption is that gains in one field do not have to be paid for by losses in other fields. For the ancient Greeks, hubris, or overweening insolence, whether directed against the gods, or one's fellow-men, or nature, was sure to be followed, sooner or later, in one way or another, by avenging Nemesis. Unlike the Greeks, we of the twentieth century believe that we can be insolent with impunity.

So intense is our faith in the dogma of inevitable progress that it has survived two world wars and still remains flourishing in spite of totalitarianism and the revival of slavery, concentration camps, and saturation bombing.

Faith in progress has affected contemporary political life by reviving and popularizing, in an up-to-date, pseudo-scientific, and this-worldly form, the old Jewish and Christian apocalypticism. A glorious destiny awaits mankind, a coming Golden Age, in which more ingenious gadgets, more grandiose plans, and more elaborate social institutions, will somehow have created a race of better and brighter human beings. Man's Final End is not in the eternal timeless Now, but in a not too distant utopian future. In order to secure the peace and happiness of their great-great-grandchildren, the masses ought to accept and their rulers need feel no qualms in imposing, any amount of war and slavery, of suffering and moral evil, in the present. It is a highly significant fact that all modern dictators, whether of the Right or of the left, talk incessantly about the golden Future, and justify the most atrocious acts here and now, on the ground that they are means to that glorious end. But the one thing we all know about the future is that we are completely ignorant of what is going to happen, and that what does in fact happen is often very different from what we anticipated. Consequently any faith based upon hypothetical occurrences a long time hence must always, in the very nature of things, be hopelessly unrealistic. In practice, faith in the bigger and better future is one of the most potent enemies to present liberty; for rulers feel themselves justified in imposing the most monstrous tyrannies on their subjects for the sake of the wholly imaginary fruits which these tyrannies are expected (only an implicit faith in progress can say why) to bear some time, let us say, in the twenty-first or twenty-second century.

As theory, pure science is concerned with the reduction of diversity to identity. As a praxis, scientific research proceeds by simplification. These habits of scientific thought and action have, to a certain extent, been carried over into the theory and practice of contemporary politics. Where a centralized authority undertakes to make plans for an entire society, it is compelled by the bewildering complexity of the given facts to follow the example of the scientific experimenter, who arbitrarily simplifies his problem in order to make it manageable. In the laboratory this is a sound and entirely justifiable procedure. But when applied to the problems of human society, the process of simplification is a process, inevitably, of restraint and regimentation, of curtailment of liberty and denial of individual rights. This reduction of human diversity to a military and quasi-mechanical identity is achieved by propaganda, by legal enactments and, if necessary, by brute force—by the imprisonment, exile, or liquidation of those persons, or those classes, who persist in their perverse desire to remain themselves and are obstinate in their reluctance to conform to the pattern which the political and economic bosses find it, at the moment most convenient to impose. Philosophically this ironing out of individual idiosyncrasies is held to be respectable, because it is analogous to what is done by scientists, when they arbitrarily simplify an all too complex reality, so as to make nature comprehensible in terms of a few general laws. A highly organized and regimented society, whose members exhibit a minimum of personal peculiarities, and whose collective behavior is governed by a single master plan imposed from above, is felt by the planners and even (such is the power of propaganda) by the plannees to be more "scientific," and therefore better, than a society of independent, freely cooperating and self-governing individuals.

The first step in this simplification of reality, without which (since human minds are finite and nature is infinite) scientific thought and action would be impossible, is a process of abstraction. Confronted by the data of experience, men of science begin by leaving out of account all those aspects of the facts which do not lend themselves to measurement and to explanation in terms of antecedent causes rather than of purpose, intention, and values. Pragmatically they are justified in acting in this odd and extremely arbitrary way; for by concentrating exclusively on the measurable aspects of such elements of experience as can be explained in terms of a causal system they have been able to achieve a great and ever increasing control over the energies of nature. But power is not the same thing as insight and, as a representation of reality, the scientific picture of the world is inadequate, for the simple reason that science does not even profess to deal with experience as a whole, but only with certain aspects of it in certain contexts. All this is quite clearly understood by the more philosophically minded men of science. But unfortunately some scientists, many technicians, and most consumers of gadgets have lacked the time and the inclination to examine the philosophical foundations and background of the sciences. Consequently, they tend to accept the world picture implicit in the theories as a complete and exhaustive account of reality; they tend to regard those aspects of experience which scientists leave out of account, because they are incompetent to deal with them, as being somehow less real than the aspects which science has arbitrarily chosen to abstract from out of the infinitely rich totality of given facts. Because of the prestige of science as a source of power, and because of the general neglect of philosophy, the popular Weltanschauung of our times contains a large element of what may be called "nothing-but" thinking. Human beings, it is more or less tacitly assumed, are nothing but bodies, animals, even machines; the only really real elements of reality are matter and energy in their measurable aspects; values are nothing but illusions that have somehow got themselves mixed up with our experience of the world; mental happenings are nothing but epiphenomena, produced by and entirely dependent upon physiology; spirituality is nothing but wish fulfillment and misdirected sex; and so on. The political consequences of this "nothing-but" philosophy are clearly apparent in that widespread indifference to the values of human personality and human life which are so characteristic of the present age. Within the past thirty years, this indifference has expressed itself in a number of dangerous and disquieting ways. We have witnessed, first of all, the wholesale revival of slavery in its worst and most inhuman forms-slavery imposed upon political heretics living under the various dictatorships, slavery imposed upon whole classes of conquered populations, slavery imposed upon prisoners of war. Next, we note the increasing indiscriminateness of slaughter during war time. Area bombing, saturation bombing, rocket bombing, bombing by atomic missiles-the indiscriminateness has steadily increased throughout the Second World War, until now no nation even makes a pretence of observing the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants, innocent and guilty, but all devote themselves methodically and scientifically to general massacre and wholesale destruction. Other practical consequences of our "nothing-but" philosophies of life are the employment by civilized people, with a high standard of scientific and technological training, of torture, human vivi-section, and the systematic starvation of entire populations. And finally there is the phenomenon of forced migration—the removal at the point of the bayonet of millions of men, women, and children from their homes to other places, where most of them will die of hunger, exposure, and disease.

Unrealistic beliefs tend to result in foolish or morally evil actions; and such wrong beliefs cannot be got rid of, except by teaching right, or at least less erroneous, beliefs. If the ministers of the various sects and religions would abandon sentimentality and superstition, and devote themselves to teaching their flocks that the Final End of man is not in the unknowable utopian future, but in the timeless eternity of the Inner Light, which every human being is capable, if he so desires, of realizing here and now, then the myth of progress would lose its harmfulness as a justifier of present tyranny and wrongdoing. If scientists and technicians could be persuaded to read, for example, the essays in Edward Carpenter’s Civilization, Its Cause and Cure, together with Professor Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science and the speculative writings of Sir Arthur Eddington, the disastrous notion that the contemporary scientific world picture is a complete representation of reality and the no less disastrous habit of "nothing-but" evaluations of social and psychological facts, might perhaps be eliminated, to the great advantage of suffering humanity. But quis custodiet custodesl—who is going to guard the guardians of our civilization, and who is going to teach its teachers? Our basic trouble is that, in spite of everything that has happened, everybody thinks he is right. In the past, despots committed the crimes that despots always do commit—but committed them with a conscience that was sometimes distinctly uneasy. They

had been brought up as Christians, as Hindus, as Moslems, or Buddhists, and in the depths of their being they knew that they were doing wrong, because what they were doing was contrary to the teachings of their religion. Today the political boss has been brought up in our more enlightened and scientific environment. Consequently he is able to perpetrate his outrages with a perfectly clear conscience, convinced that he is acting for humanity's highest good—for is he not expediting the coming of the glorious future promised by Progress? is he not tidying up a messily individualistic society? is he not doing his utmost to substitute the wisdom of experts for the foolishness of men and women who want to do what they think (how erroneously, since of course they are not experts!) is best for them? And then there are the pastors and the schoolmasters. They have their Ph.D.s and their D.D.s, their academic positions and their cures of souls, their habits of authority and their high perches in the pulpit or on the lecture platform. Why should they change their long-established habits and the hallowed traditions of the organizations of which they are the living pillars? The most important lesson of history, it has been said, is that nobody ever learns history's lessons. The enormous catastrophes of recent years have left the survivors thinking very much as they thought before. A horde of Bourbons, we return to what we call peace, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing-forgotten nothing, except, of course, the causes of war, which (whatever our intentions and our well-worded ideals) we do everything in our power to perpetuate.

II

In a world where the concentration of economic power is advantageous to the ruling minority, it is only natural that the results of disinterested scientific research should be applied in such a way as to foster large-scale mass production and mass distribution. And in a world where nationalism is taken for granted, and where the values of nationalism are held to be supreme, it is only natural that these same results should be applied to the end of producing and continually improving the instruments of war. Because it paid them to do so, men of science, inventors, and engineers have worked to build up a system of centralized industry; and because, as nationalists, they thought it was their duty (and also, it must be added, because the duty was often a very profitable one), they have worked to produce such marvels of technological ingenuity as tanks, bombers, flamethrowers, and atomic missiles.

"Nationality," wrote Lord Acton- in 1862, "does not aim either at liberty or prosperity, both of which it sacrifices to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the state. Its course will be marked with material as well as moral ruin." Acton's prophecy is still in the terrible process of fulfilment. The material havoc wrought by applied science in the service of nationalism is such that it will take a generation to repair the damage. For many millions of men, women, and especially children, the moral ruin caused by the war is irreparable; to the end of their lives they are doomed to remain psychologically warped, crippled, and stunted. And these, of course, are not the only gifts of the nationalism which (having repudiated all belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man) we have set up as our idolatrous religion. The world is parceled out into some fifty-odd administrative units, calling themselves nations. In each of these nations there is a state religion—namely, the worship of the nation regarded as the supreme value, or God. To be a wor-shipper of one of the fifty-odd national Molochs is, necessarily and automatically, to be a crusader against the worshippers of all the other national Molochs. Nationalism leads to moral ruin because it denies universality, denies the existence of a single God, denies the value of the human being as a human being; and because, at the same time, it affirms exclusiveness, encourages vanity, pride, and self-satisfaction, stimulates hatred, and proclaims the necessity and the rightness of war. The fatal consequences of nationalism have been demonstrated again and again in the course of history. Consider, for example, the civilization of ancient Greece—the highest, in many respects, ever achieved in the Western world. After only a brief life it perished, selfdestroyed by nationalism. Each city-state worshipped itself and consequently hated and despised its neighbors. The Greek world of the great poets, artists, and philosophers was chronically in a state of civil war. In the end it bled to death, the victim of idolatrous and separatist patriotism. Fortunately, the Macedonians were at hand to take over.

The modern world differs from that of ancient Greece in degree and scale, not in kind. What separatist patriotism did for the inhabitants of a few thousand square miles in the eastern Mediterranean, it is doing today for the population of the entire planet. As Athens and Sparta died of idolatry and flag-waving and jingoism, so we shall die of idolatry and flag-waving and jingoism. But whereas the technologists at the service of the various Greek nationalisms had got no further than chariots and javelins, the technologists at the service of our fifty-odd self-worshipping administrative units have given us bombers that can fly non-stop for eight thousand miles, incendiaries that nobody can put out, and atomic missiles that are guaranteed to do to whole cities what a quart of boiling water does to an ants' nest.

"Lead us not into temptation." The presence of this phrase in the Lord's Prayer reveals its author's profoundly realistic appreciation of human nature. Why should we pray that we may not be led into temptation? For the excellent reason that, as all experience proves, whenever temptations to evil are sufficiently strong and sufficiently frequent, men and women generally succumb to them. The existence of powerful armaments constitutes for their possessors a standing temptation to resort to violence. Si vis helium, para helium: and when the preparations for war are carried on with all the resources of progressive science and technology, the temptation to aggression, to the defense or consolidation of legitimate interests, to the realization of a manifest destiny (the names and justifications vary, but the nature of the consequent war remains the same), becomes progressively more intense, until at some critical moment—the moment when nation X feels certain of being, in some strategically significant way, better armed than nations Y and Z—it turns into a categorical imperative, a divine command to go to war for the greater glory of the nation-god. Nor is this the only temptation to present itself. Recent progress in the applied science of armament-making has been a progress in the development of weapons that will destroy more indiscriminately at greater distances. High explosives and incendiaries, the heavy bomber and the jet-propelled robot plane, the rocket and finally the atomic missile—taken together these constitute a powerful temptation to ignore the traditional rules of war and to obliterate wholesale entire civilian populations and their dwellings. To this temptation all the belligerents in the Second World War succumbed. And so long as governments and manufacturers continue to subsidize research into the science and technology of armaments, these temptations will remain, irresistibly beckoning to nationalistic power lovers, just as drink and sex and money beckon to their respective addicts.

In recent months many persons have optimistically argued that the harnessing of atomic energy must (because that energy is so destructive) put an end to men’s inveterate habit of making war. Similar arguments have been set forth in the past. Whenever progressive applied science has produced some strikingly more efficient instrument of slaughter, hopes have been voiced, and facts and figures marshalled to prove, that henceforward war would be too expensive in life, suffering, and money to be worth waging. Nevertheless wars have still been fought. Methods of defense against the new destructive weapon are devised and yet more efficient instruments of counterattack are invented. Advances in technology do not abolish the institution of war; they merely modify its manifestations. In the present instance it seems quite possible that there may be no defense against atomic missiles. But this does not necessarily presage the end of warfare. The collective mentality of nations-the mentality which reasonable adults have to adopt, when making important decisions in the field of international politics-is that of a delinquent boy of fourteen, at once cunning and childish, malevolent and silly, maniacally egotistical, touchy and acquisitive, and at the same time ludicrously boastful and vain. When the issues involved are of no great weight, the adults in control of a nation's policy are permitted, by the rules of the curious game they are playing, to behave like adults. But as soon as important economic interests or national prestige is involved, this grown-up Jekyll retires and his place is taken by an adolescent Hyde, whose ethical standards are those of a boy-gangster and whose Weltanshauung seems to have been formed by a study of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the more sanguinary comic strips. And let us remember that this same delinquent boy who, concealed in the middle-aged body of a politician, decrees that millions shall do and suffer the utmost in scientifically organized malice, resides within us all, ready and waiting, whenever some crisis makes us forget our surface rationality and idealism, to come out into the open. To this boy gangster in our midst, the natural reaction to the atom bomb is not an impulse to put an end to war by getting rid of its causes in nationalism, economic rivalry, and the craving for power. Rather it is an impulse to make use of the new powers provided by science for the purpose of establishing world dominion for his particular gang. It is a highly significant fact that people love to talk about a war to end war, or a war to preserve democracy; they do not love to talk about peace to end war, or self-governing democracy (which is the polar antithesis of militarism) to preserve democracy. Like the adult, with whom he is associated, the nationalistic boy-gangster is frightened of what atomic power may do to him and the world. Nevertheless he continues to think in terms of gang rivalry and his own supremacy. "If," he argues, "our gang can get its scientists to perfect the rocket and the atom bomb, if it can get its manufacturers to produce enough plutonium and uranium 235, to build enough launching ramps and robot planes and V2's, then all that need be done is to press a few buttons and bang! the war to end war will be over, and I shall be the boss of the whole planet." Because of the boy-gangster in every Foreign Office, every war department, and every private home, we may expect that, in the years immediately ahead of us, all the (technologically speaking) advanced nations will spend vast sums upon armament research and the manufacture of new weapons capable of more indiscriminate destruction at ever greater distances. This research will be secret—an affair of "Manhattan Projects" and "Tube Alloys"— and much of the manufacture will be carried on at the bottom of mines and caverns. And at some moment-unless, by a miracle, Jekyll should contrive to get the upper hand—the temptation to press those buttons will become irresistible; the juvenile delinquent in some Ministry for Foreign Affairs will call up his colleague at the Ministry of National Defense and bang! the war to make the world yet safer for delinquency will have begun.

In discussing the possibility of abolishing war, another important point to be remembered is that the preparation for war and sometimes even war itself are things which a highly centralized government finds very useful for its own totalitarian purposes. Thus, peacetime conscription is always justified on the ground that it constitutes an insurance against war, or at least against defeat in war. In actual fact, of course, nations which have adopted peacetime conscription have fought just as many wars as they fought before adopting it, and have suffered just as many defeats. The real, the unavowed reason for peacetime conscription must be sought in the all too natural desire of a powerful centralized government to regiment and control its subjects by placing them, actually or potentially, under martial law and by arrogating to itself the right, whenever it so desires (as, for example, during an inconvenient strike) to call them to the colors. In these days of atomic weapons, mass armies would seem to have become somewhat of an anachronism. Nevertheless, no country which imposed peacetime conscription in the past shows any inclination to relax its grip upon the masses of its people. Moreover, in countries where peacetime conscription was previously unheard of, there are many high military and civilian officials who advocate the imposition of permanent military servitude upon the masses.

There is also another way in which the preparation for war is useful to the holders of centralized political power. When things go badly at home, when popular discontent becomes inconveniently articulate, it is always possible, in a world where war-making remains an almost sacred habit, to shift the people's attention away from domestic to foreign and military affairs. A flood of xenophobic or imperialistic propaganda is released by the government-controlled instruments of persuasion, a "strong policy" is adopted towards some foreign power, an appeal for "national unity" (in other words, unquestioning obedience to the ruling oligarchy) is launched, and at once it becomes unpatriotic for anybody to voice even the most justifiable complaints against mismanagement or oppression. It is difficult to see how any highly centralized government could afford to dispense with militarism and the threat of foreign war. This constitutes yet another argument for the division and dispersal of power, the de-institutionalizing of politics and economics and the substitution, wherever possible, of regional cooperative self-help for centralized mass production and mass distribution, and of regional, co-operative self-government for state intervention and state control.

Finally, we have to consider the part played by militarism in solving those problems of economic and social insecurity, which, as we have seen, are the curse of a technologically progressive society. The great depression of the 1930s was accompanied, in all industrialized countries, by mass unemployment. This fearful social sickness was treated in a variety of ways. Thus, in Great Britain an ambitious housing program was launched; in the United States the Roosevelt administration resorted to public works, "pump priming," and restriction of agricultural output with a view to raising prices. These measures were only partially successful. The numbers of the unemployed were reduced, but unemployment was by no means eliminated. Complete success came only when Hitler embarked upon large-scale rearmament. As though by magic, unemployment was banished-first from Germany and, later, as other countries took fright and joined the armament race, throughout the rest of the industrialized world. A cure had been found for the insecurity which is the fruit of scientific and technological progress when it is at the service of centralized finance. But the price of the temporary cure was death and destruction, and the last state of all the nations concerned was incomparably worse than the first. Nevertheless it seems quite possible that wholesale rearmament may, at some future date, again be used to palliate the symptoms of unemployment.

It should be remarked that under the present dispensation, armaments are the only goods that are given away without consideration of costs or profits. Modern war is, among other things, a competition among nations as to which can hand out, free, gratis and for nothing, the largest amount of capital goods in the shortest time. These capital goods are all maleficent and unproductive; but the thought occurs to one that something resembling wartime prosperity might be made permanent if there were more giving away at cost, or even for nothing, and less selling at a profit and paying of interest. Were this to happen, we should have a centralized financing, mass production and mass distribution, combined with a political system approximating state socialism. That this arrangement would in some ways be preferable to the present dispensation seems likely enough. But we must remember that any government enjoying a monopoly of political and economic power is exposed to almost irresistible temptations to tyranny. There has never been a time when too much power did not corrupt its possessors, and there is absolutely no reason to suppose that, in this respect, the future behavior of human beings will be in any way different from their behavior in the past and at the present time. The arguments for the limitation and decentralization of power remain valid, even when that power is concentrated in the hands of an oligarchy of socialists—a phrase which is actually a contradiction in terms; for, to quote Mr. Middleton Murry: "Socialism by autocracy or oligarchy is not socialism, or anything like it." It is just benevolent despotism; and there is nothing in the record of history to justify us in the belief that any benevolent despotism will for long retain its benevolence. The appetite for power grows with every successive satisfaction of that most alluring and pernicious of all the lusts. Against the temptations to abuse power there is no armor except sanctity. But since very few human beings are prepared to pay the price of sanctity and very few saints desire power, mere common sense demands that the amount of power wielded by any individual or organization of individuals should be strictly limited and that the principle of self-government (which is the principle of the division of power, the balancing and compromise of independent forces) should be applied, and applied to the extreme practicable limit, in every field of human activity. This entails the de-institutionalization of many political and economic procedures, which are at present planned from above by the functionaries of private capitalism or the national state. In present circumstances it is most unlikely that this highly desirable process of decentralization and deinstitutionalization will be carried out. By the education they have received in schools and, later, at the hands of the writers of advertising copy and political propaganda, the great majority of men and women have been conditioned to believe that progressive institutionalization, controlled by private capitalists, or the state, or both together, is an intrinsically beneficent thing and at the same time an inevitable and quasi-natural development. Those who have a reasoned belief in the current centralist philosophy and those, much more numerous, who take it for granted by an act of implicit faith, cannot be expected to look with anything but suspicion on the ideas of de-institutionalization, self-help, and self-government. What is needed is a restatement of the Emersonian doctrine of self-reliance—a restatement, not abstract and general, but fully documented with an account of all the presently available techniques for achieving independence within a localized, co-operative community. These techniques are of many kinds— agricultural techniques designed to supply the basic social unit, the family, with its staple food supply; mechanical techniques for the production of many consumer goods for a local market; financial techniques, such as those of the credit union by means of which individuals can borrow money without increasing the power of the state or of commercial banks; legal techniques, through which a community can protect itself against the profiteer who speculates in land values, which he has done nothing whatever to increase. At present this documented and practical restatement of an old doctrine is being made by such men as Wilfred Wellock in England, as Ralph Borsodi and the writers who contribute to Free America in the United States. In the enormous bellowing chorus of advertisers singing the praises of centralized mass-producing and mass-distributing industry, and of Left-wing propagandists singing the praises of the omnipotent state, these few isolated voices have some difficulty in making themselves heard. If it were not for the fact that, in the past, apparently negligible movements, originating among individuals without any political power, have yet exercised a prodigious influence over mankind, there would be reason for discouragement. But fortunately it is not impossible that the presently tiny piece of decentralist leaven may end by leavening the whole huge lump of contemporary society.

It is not impossible, I repeat; but it must be added that, so long as the nations stick to their ancient habit of war-making, it is highly improbable. For the nature of modern war is such that it cannot be successfully waged by any nation which does not possess a highly developed, not to say hypertrophied, capital-goods industry supplemented by a mass-producing consumer-goods industry capable of rapid expansion and conversion for wartime needs. Furthermore it cannot he waged successfully, except by nations which can mobilize their entire manpower and woman-power in universal military or industrial conscription. But universal conscription is most easily imposed where large numbers of the population are rootless, propertyless, and entirely dependent for their livelihood upon the state or upon large-scale private employers. Such persons constitute that dream of every militaristic dictator—a "fluid labor force," which can be shifted at will from one place or one unskilled job to another place or job. Again, big centralized corporations and their wage-earning employees can be taxed much more easily and profitably than small-scale farmers working primarily for subsistence and only secondarily for cash, or than independent or co-operative producers of commodities for a localized market. For this reason anything like a popular movement in the direction of decentralization could hardly be tolerated by any government desirous of becoming or remaining a "great power." It may be argued that the bomber and the rocket may force all nations to undertake a geographical dispersion of industries; but such dispersion can take place without any real decentralization of political and economic power, any real increase of individual independence from governmental or capitalist control, or any expansion of the present area of voluntary co-operation, self-government, and de-institutionalized activity.

"Science" is an abstract word, and when we are trying to think about concrete political and economic problems, it is best to talk concretely, not of science but of the people who work in the various scientific fields from the fields of uncontaminated theory and disinterested research into basic problems to those of applied science and technology. Assuming that the abolition of war is desirable, we proceed to ask ourselves how scientific workers can help to achieve this end.

1. As individuals or in organized groups scientific workers can take three kinds of action against war. There is, first, the possibility of negative action in the form of a refusal, on conscientious grounds, to participate in work having as its purpose the killing, torture, or enslavement of human beings. Christianity once insisted, and Buddhism still insists, upon the importance of "right livelihood." There are certain professions so intrinsically harmful that no individual ought to practice them. In the eyes of medieval Catholic theologians for example, the profession of a moneylender or of a speculator was beyond the pale: they held that a man could not live by usury and the manipulation of the commodity markets, and still be regarded as a Christian. Similarly, for Buddha and his followers, a man could not be regarded as a Buddhist, if he made his living by the manufacture of arms or intoxicants. Men of science and technologists would do well, as individuals and in their national and international organizations, to consider the problem of right livelihood in its relation to their own contemporary activities. Is it possible to work on the development of instruments of ever more indiscriminate slaughter and to remain—not a good Christian or a good Buddhist; for in scientific and technological circles religion is now out of fashion—but a good human being? Is it possible to go on believing that one is working for the good of mankind, while applying the results of disinterested research in ways which demonstrably increase the power of the ruling capitalist or governmental minority at the expense of personal liberty and local and professional self-government? These and similar questions need to be asked and carefully answered by scientific workers—asked and answered, if possible, on the level of their international organizations. Meanwhile it is to be hoped and perhaps expected that a certain number of individual scientists and technicians will take the negative stand against war and the centralization of power which is war's inevitable accompaniment, by refusing to collaborate in any project whose purpose is the destruction or enslavement of human beings.

2. Negative action is good so far as it goes, but it needs to be supplemented by action of a positive and constructive kind. Such positive action may be classified under two heads: (a) action which takes its start in politics, to end in the field of science: and (b) action which takes its start in science, to end in politics.

(a) Several suggestions have recently been made for the political control, in the interests of humanity, of the activities of scientists and technologists. Thus, in the course of an interesting two-day debate in the House of Lords (May 29 and 30, 1945) Lord Vansittart- urged the necessity of subjecting all German laboratories, whether attached to universities or supported by the state or by private industrialists, to strict supervision over a long term of years. Only in this way, he claimed, could the danger of a war of revenge, waged with new "secret weapons," be avoided. More realistically, Lord Brabazon- proposed that this supervision of scientific developments should not be confined exclusively to the defeated nations —nations whose opportunities for the large-scale manufacture of new weapons would, for many years at least, be small. His suggestion was that, under the final peace treaties, an international committee of inspection should be constituted, having authority to enter laboratories and factories in any part of the world. In Lord Brabazon's view, the only alternative to such a scheme of international inspection would be an armament race between Britain and the United States on the one hand and the rest of the world on the other. By intensive research the Anglo-Saxon group might hope to obtain the lead in such a race, and so discourage attack by other powers. Lord Brabazon's speech was made before the dropping of the first atomic bomb. As things now stand, the United States and Britain already possess an enormous lead in the post-war armament race. For a few years they may keep that lead. Then other nations (unless, of course, they are previously blown to bits by the present possessors of the bomb, or unless reason, surrender of absolute sovereignty, and world government come to replace nationalism) will be supplied by their scientists with the same or even better methods for manufacturing atomic missiles. Meanwhile the desirability of an international inspectorate charged with preserving humanity from the triumphs of science is even greater now than it was before Hiroshima. The existence of an international inspectorate would involve the adoption of another security measure, advocated in the course of the same debate by Lord Strabolgi—namely, the pooling of all scientific discoveries considered by competent experts to be actually or potentially a danger to mankind.

Similar suggestions have been made on the other side of the Atlantic, and it now remains to be seen whether, and to what extent the United Nations will act upon them. Meanwhile Messrs. Truman, Attlee, and King² have decided to keep such secrets as their scientists and engineers still possess until "enforceable safeguards" against their use for destructive purposes can be devised.

What is to be the nature of those "enforceable safeguards"? As yet, it would seem, nobody has any very clear idea. In principle, the proposals for a pooling of dangerous knowledge and for an international inspectorate are excellent; and, to some, the theory of an "international police force" seems attractive and even workable. But, alas, from principle to application and from theory to practice the road is long and hard. Two disturbing questions inevitably propound themselves. First, will the various national governments concerned agree to act upon these suggestions? Second, if they do agree, will they and the men of science they employ consent to play the game according to the internationally imposed rules? In attempting to answer these questions one must weigh the power of enlightened self-interest against the power of nationalistic passions and prejudices. Enlightened self-interest will unquestioningly vote for world government, international inspection, and the pooling of information. But unfortunately, in some of the most important issues of life, human beings do not act from considerations of enlightened selfinterest. If they did, we should now be living in something very like paradise. In the field of international politics, as we have seen, the gravest decisions are always taken, not by reasonable adults but by boygangsters. Despite the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is quite possible that some national governments will refuse to allow their laboratories and factories to be inspected—and, of course, the refusal of even one government will entail the general abandonment of the scheme. Alternatively, the principle of international inspection will be accepted; but at first some and then (when suspicion has been aroused) all the governments concerned will conspire with the scientists in their employ to carry on research in the caves or forests or mountain fastnesses where no prying eye can see what they are up to. It may perhaps seem unlikely that workers trained in the methods of science should support their political bosses in machinations so manifestly senseless, as well as immoral. But it is not because men have learned to behave rationally in the laboratory that they can be trusted to behave rationally towards foreigners and unpopular minorities, or even towards their own wives and children. Until a very few years ago the best scientific and technological education available was given in Germany; but most of the persons who received that education not only worked for the Nazi bosses, but believed their doctrines and were swayed by the nationalistic passions which they so skillfully employed. The case of Germany is not unique. In all countries nationalistic passions (of the same kind as were manifested in Germany, but at a somewhat lower level of intensity) are almost as common among scientists and technicians as in other classes of society. In spite of their training (perhaps, indeed, owing to the narrowly specialized character of that training, because of it), scientists and technicians are perfectly capable of the most dangerously irrational prejudice, nor are they immune to deceitful propaganda. The same men who reject as superstitious the belief in a transcendent and immanent spiritual Reality beyond and within phenomena, prove by their actions that they find no difficulty in worshipping as a supreme god whichever one of the world's fifty-odd nations they happen to belong to, and in accepting the infallibility of the local Foreign Office and the quasi-divinity of the local political boss. In view of all this we need not be surprised if the plans for an international inspectorate and the pooling of scientific knowledge should fail in practice to produce the good results expected of them.

(b) We must now consider the specifically scientific action which might be taken by men of science and technicians with a view to diminishing the probability of war and so to increasing the sum of human liberty. Such action can only be taken on the plane of applied science. Basic research is essentially disinterested. Men undertake it because, in the words used by the boy Clerk Maxwell,- they want to find out "what's the go" of things—to discover how nature works and how its parts are related within a causal system. What is subsequently done with the results of disinterested research is something which the researcher cannot foresee, and for which he is not responsible. Thus, Clerk Maxwell's own adult curiosity to find out the go of such things as light and magnetism led him to certain conclusions, and these conclusions have since been utilized by technicians for the development of instruments, which are now used, in the main, for the dissemination of maudlin drama, cigarette advertising, bad music, and government-sponsored or capitalist-sponsored propaganda. Clerk Maxwell would probably have been horrified by all these uses of the radio, and he is, of course, in no way to blame for them. In practice, it would seem, basic research cannot be planned, except perhaps to the extent of subsidizing inquiry into branches of knowledge which, for whatever reason, appear to have been unduly neglected. If the facilities for research are supplied, men and women with an overpowering desire to find out the go of things will always be forthcoming to make use of them. The planning of scientific activity with a view to achieving certain predetermined political, social, and economic ends must begin at the point where the results of disinterested research are applied to the solution of practical problems. Individually and through their professional organizations, scientists and technicians could do a great deal to direct the planning towards humane and reasonable ends.

In theory everyone agreed that applied science was made for man and not man for applied science. In practice great masses of human beings have again and again been sacrificed to applied science. The conflict between science, as it has been applied up to the present, and human interests was clearly stated by Thorstein Veblen in his Science in the Modern World, In this essay Veblen distinguishes between what he calls the pragmatic and the scientific point of view. Pragmatically human beings know pretty well what is good for them, and have developed myths and fairy tales, proverbs and popular philosophies, behavior-patterns and moralities, in order to illustrate and embody their findings about life. The findings of science—especially of science as applied for the benefit of the holders of centralized economic and political power—are frequently in conflict with humanity's pragmatic values, and this conflict has been and still is the source of much unhappiness, frustration, and bitterness. The enormous practical importance of the clash between scientific (or rather applied-scientific) values and pragmatic human values is stressed in an editorial which appeared in a recent issue (July 22, 1945) of the leading British scientific journal Nature. In maintaining industrial morals "the central difficulty," writes the author of this article, "is essentially the inevitable opposition which develops between the scientific approach to the human problems of production and the political approach of the administrator, trained in the method of accommodation and compromise. The balancing of opinion and the compromise of different points of view, which is the essence of the political process, may be totally at odds with the scientific approach to questions of industrial management. What is required is not the surrender of scientific principles of established accuracy, or the ignoring of accepted fact, but the combination or integration of both the political and scientific approach in a solution which satisfies both the scientific and the psychological or political requirements."

Let us begin by noting that in any discussion of economic or political problems, the word "integration" is always a danger signal; for it is always tacitly assumed that the work of integration is carried out by somebody standing above the processes and persons to be integrated. In other words, whenever people call for "integration" they are always calling for the exercise of centralized governmental power and for yet another extension of the process of institutionalization. But power is always corrupting, and no human being or group of human beings is to be trusted with too much of it for too long. When science is applied in such a way as to create a form of production, which cannot be run efficiently without coming into sharp conflict with fundamental human values, and which therefore continually calls for the intervention of a governmental authority having power to "integrate" the conflicting persons and points of view, it may be fairly presumed that the application of the results of disinterested research has been, humanly speaking, misguided and undesirable. Up to the present time applied science has not been used mainly or primarily for the benefit of humanity at large, or (to put the matter less abstractly) for the benefit of individual men and women, considered as personalities each one of which is capable, given suitable material and social conditions, of a moral and spiritual development amounting, in some cases, to a total transfiguration; rather man has been used for applied science, for the technicians who enjoy designing more and more complicated gadgets, and for the financial and governmental interests which profit by the centralization of power. If applied science is henceforward to be used for man, technicians and scientists will have to adopt a professional policy, consciously and deliberately designed to serve fundamental human needs and to forward the causes of peace and personal liberty. Such a policy could not be worked out in detail except by an international organization of scientific workers, highly trained in their respective fields, so that each could contribute his or her share of skill or information towards the realization of the common end-namely, the welfare, liberty, and peace of the individuals composing the human race. It would be absurd for me to try to anticipate the findings of this hypothetical group of experts; but it is possible, without too much presumption, to indicate in a general way a few of the lines which their discussion would have to follow.

Humanity's primary requirement is a sufficiency of food; but it is primarily by considerations of power that the policies of national governments are at present dictated. The ruling minorities of the world invariably contrive to have enough, and (to judge by the disgusting descriptions of recent diplomatic banquets) more than enough to eat; consequently they tend to take food for granted and to think first, and at times almost exclusively, in terms of the questions: Who shall bully whom? But the great majority of the men, women, and children on this planet are in no position to take food for granted. Their first and often their exclusive concern is the next meal. The question as to who shall bully whom is of hardly more than academic interest to them. They would like, of course, to be left in peace to go their own way; but they know by bitter experience that, under the present dispensation, there will always be a ruling minority to order them about, to bully and badger them in the name of the divine Nation, the omniscient Party, the sacred Principles of this or that political doctrine. They are therefore unable to take much interest in the national and international policies, which are the prime concern of the well-fed power lovers at the top of the social pyramid.

At the San Francisco Conference the only problems discussed were problems of power. The basic problem of mankind—the problem of getting enough to eat—was relegated to an obscure international committee on agriculture. And yet it is surely obvious that if genuine international agreement is ever to be reached and preserved, it must be an agreement with regard to problems which, first, are of vital interests to the great masses of humanity and which, second, are capable of solution without resort to war or the threat of war. The problems of power are primarily the concern of the ruling few, and the nature of power is essentially expansive, so that there is not the least prospect of power problems being solved, when one expanding system collides with another expanding system, except by means of organized, scientific violence or war. But war on the modern scale shatters the thin, precarious crust of civilization and precipitates vast numbers of human beings into an abyss of misery and slow death, of moral apathy or positive and frenzied diabolism. If politicians were sincere in their loudly expressed desire for peace, they would do all they could to by-pass the absolutely insoluble problems of power by concentrating all their attention, during international conferences and diplomatic discussion, on the one great problem which every member of the human race is concerned to solve—the one great problem which not only does not require military violence for its solution, but which, for the world at large, is wholly insoluble so long as the old games of militarism and power politics continue to be played. The first item on the agenda of every meeting between the representatives of the various nations should be: How are all men, women, and children to get enough to eat?

It is fashionable nowadays to say that Malthus was wrong, because he did not foresee that improved methods of transportation can now guarantee that food surpluses produced in one area shall be quickly and cheaply transferred to another, where there is a shortage. But first of all, modern transportation methods break down whenever the power politicians resort to modern war, and even when the fighting stops they are apt to remain disrupted long enough to guarantee the starvation of millions of persons. And, secondly, no country in which population has outstripped the local food supply can, under present conditions, establish a claim on the surpluses of other countries without paying for them in cash or exports. Great Britain and the other counties in western Europe, which cannot feed their dense populations, have been able, in times of peace, to pay for the food they imported by means of the export of manufactured goods. But industrially backward India and China—countries in which Malthus' nightmare has come true with a vengeance and on the largest scale—produce few manufactured goods, consequently lack the means to buy from under-populated areas the food they need. But when and if they develop mass-producing industries to the point at which they are able to export enough to pay for the food their rapidly expanding populations require, what will be the effect upon world trade and international politics? Japan had to export manufactured goods in order to pay for the food that could not be produced on the overcrowded home islands. Goods produced by workers with a low standard of living came into competition with goods produced by the better paid workers of the West, and undersold them. The West's retort was political and consisted of the imposition of high tariffs, quotas, and embargoes. To these restrictions on her trade Japan's answer was the plan for creating a vast Asiatic empire at the expense of China and of the Western imperialist powers. The result was war. What will happen when India and China are as highly industrialized as pre-war Japan and seek to exchange their low-priced manufactured goods for food, in competition with Western powers, whose standard of living is a great deal higher than theirs? Nobody can foretell the future; but undoubtedly the rapid industrialization of Asia (with equipment, let it he remembered, of the very latest and best post-war design) is pregnant with the most dangerous possibilities.

It is at this point that internationally organized scientists and technicians might contribute greatly to the cause of peace by planning a worldwide campaign, not merely for greater food production, but also (and this is the really important point) for regional self-sufficiency in food production. Greater food production can be obtained relatively easily by the opening up of the earth's vast subarctic regions at present almost completely sterile. Spectacular progress has recently been made in this direction by the agricultural scientists of the Soviet Union; and presumably what can be done in Siberia can also be done in northern Canada. Powerful ice-breakers are already being used to solve the problems of transportation by sea and river; and perhaps commercial submarines, specially equipped for travelling under the ice, may in the future ensure a regular service between Arctic ports and the rest of the world. Any increase of the world's too scanty food supply is to be welcomed. But our rejoicings must be tempered by two considerations. First, the surpluses of food produced by the still hypothetical Arctic granaries of Siberia and Canada will have to be transferred by ship, plane, and rail to the overpopulated areas of the world. This means that no supplies would be available in wartime. Second, possession of food-producing Arctic areas constitutes a natural monopoly, and this natural monopoly will not, as in the past, be in the hands of politically weak nations, such as Argentina and Australia, but will be controlled by the two great power systems of the post-war period—the Russian power system and the Anglo-American power system. That their monopolies of food surpluses will be used as weapons in the game of power politics seems more than probable. "Lead us not into temptation." The opening up of the Arctic will be undoubtedly a great good. But it will also be a great temptation for the power politicians—a temptation to exploit a natural monopoly in order to gain influence and finally control over hitherto independent countries, in which population has outstripped the food supply.

It would seem, then, that any scientific and technological campaign aimed at the fostering of international peace and political and personal liberty must, if it is to succeed, increase the total planetary food supply by increasing the various regional supplies to the point of self-sufficiency. Recent history makes it abundantly clear that nations, as at present constituted, are quite unfit to have extensive commercial dealings with one another. International trade has always, hitherto, gone hand in hand with war, imperialism, and the ruthless exploitation of industrially backward peoples by the highly industrialized powers. Hence the desirability of reducing international trade to a minimum, until such time as nationalist passions lose their intensity and it becomes possible to establish some form of world government. As a first step in this direction, scientific and technical means must be found for making it possible for even the most densely populated countries to feed their inhabitants. The improvement of existing food plants and domestic animals; the acclimatization in hitherto inhospitable regions of plants that have proved useful elsewhere; the reduction of the present enormous waste of food by the improvement of insect controls and the multiplication of refrigerating units; the more systematic exploitation of seas and lakes as sources of food; the development of entirely new foods, such as edible yeasts; the synthesizing of chlorophyll so as to make direct use of solar energy in food production—these are a few of the lines along which important advances might be made in a relatively short time.

Hardly less important than regional self-sufficiency in food is self-sufficiency in power for industry, agriculture, and transportation. One of the contributing causes of recent wars has been international competition for the world's strictly localized sources of petroleum, and the current jockeying for position in the Middle East, where all the surviving great powers have staked out claims to Persian, Mesopotamian, and Arabian oil, bodes ill for the future. Organized science could diminish these temptations to armed conflict by finding means for providing all countries, whatever their natural resources, with a sufficiency of power. Water power has already been pretty well exploited. Besides, over large areas of the earth's surface there are no mountains and therefore no sources of hydroelectric power. But across the plains where water stands almost still, the air often moves in strong and regular currents. Small windmills have been turning for centuries; but the use of large-scale wind turbines is still, strangely enough, only in the experimental stages. Until recently the direct use of solar power has been impracticable, owing to the technical difficulty of constructing suitable reflectors. A few months ago, however, it was announced that Russian engineers had developed a cheap and simple method for constructing paraboloid mirrors of large size, capable of producing superheated steam and even of melting iron. This discovery could be made to contribute very greatly to the decentralization of production and population and the creation of a new type of agrarian society making use of cheap and inexhaustible power for the benefit of individual smallholders or self-governing, co-operative groups. For the peoples of such tropical countries as India and Africa the new device for directly harnessing solar power should be of enormous and enduring benefits—unless, of course, those at present possessing economic and political power should choose to build mass-producing factories around enormous mirrors, thus perverting the invention to their own centralistic purposes, instead of encouraging its small-scale use for the benefit of individuals and village communities. The technicians of solar power will be confronted with a clear-cut choice. They can work either for the completer enslavement of the industrially backward peoples of the tropics, or for their progressive liberation from the twin curses of poverty and servitude to political and economic bosses.

The storage of the potentialities of power is almost as important as the production of power. One of the most urgent tasks before applied science is the development of some portable source of power to replace petroleum-a most undesirable fuel from the political point of view, since deposits of it are rare and unevenly distributed over the earth's surface, thus constituting natural monopolies which, when in the hands of strong nations, are used to increase their strength at the expense of their neighbors and, when possessed by weak ones, are coveted by the strong and constitute almost irresistible temptations to imperialism and war. From the political and human point of view, the most desirable substitute for petroleum would be an efficient battery for storing the electric power produced by water, wind, or the sun. Further research into atomic structure may perhaps suggest new methods for the construction of such a battery.

Meanwhile it is possible that means may be devised, within the next few years, for applying atomic energy to the purposes of peace, as it is now being applied to those of war. Would not this technological development solve the whole problem of power for industry and transportation? The answer to this question may turn out to be simultaneously affirmative and negative. The problems of power may indeed be solved—but solved in the wrong way, by which I mean in a way favorable to centralization and the ruling minority, not for the benefit of individuals and co-operative, self-governing groups. If the raw material of atomic energy must be sought in radioactive deposits, occurring sporadically, here and there, over the earth's surface, then we have natural monopoly with all its undesirable political consequences, all its temptations to power politics, war, imperialistic aggression, and exploitation. But of course it is always possible that other methods of releasing atomic energy may be discovered—methods that will not involve the use of uranium. In this case there will be no natural monopoly. But the process of releasing atomic energy will always be a very difficult and complicated affair, to be accomplished only on the largest scale and in the most elaborately equipped factories. Furthermore, whatever political agreements may be made, the fact that atomic energy possesses unique destructive potentialities will always constitute a temptation to the boy-gangster who lurks within every patriotic nationalist. And even if a world government should be set up within a fairly short space of time, this will not necessarily guarantee peace. The Pax Romana was a very uneasy affair, troubled at almost every imperial death by civil strife over the question of succession. So long as the lust for power persists as a human trait—and in persons of a certain kind of physique and temperament this lust is overmasteringly strong—no political arrangement, however well contrived, can guarantee peace. For such men the instruments of violence are as fearfully tempting as are, to others, the bodies of women. Of all instruments of violence, those powered by atomic energy are the most decisively destructive; and for power lovers, even under a system of world government, the temptation to resort to these all too simple and effective means of gratifying their lust will be great indeed. In view of all this, we must conclude that atomic energy is, and for a long time is likely to remain, a source of industrial power that is, politically and humanly speaking, in the highest degree undesirable.

It is not necessary in this place, nor am I competent, to enter any further into the hypothetical policy of internationally organized science. If that policy is to make a real contribution towards the maintenance of peace and the spread of political and personal liberty, it must be patterned throughout along the decentralist lines laid down in the preceding discussion of the two basic problems of food and power. Will scientists and technicians collaborate to formulate and pursue some such policy as that which has been adumbrated here? Or will they permit themselves, as they have done only too often in the past, to become the conscious or unconscious instruments of militarists, imperialists, and a ruling oligarchy of capitalistic or governmental bosses? Time alone will show. Meanwhile, it is to be hoped that all concerned will carefully consider a suggestion made by Dr. Gene Weltfish in the September, 1945,

issue of the Scientific Monthly. Before embarking upon practice, all physicians swear a professional oath —the oath of Hippocrates—that they will not take improper advantage of their position, but always remember their responsibilities towards suffering humanity. Technicians and scientists, proposes Dr. Welt-fish, should take a similar oath in some such words as the following: "I pledge myself that I will use my knowledge for the good of humanity and against the destructive forces of the world and the ruthless intent of men; and that I will work together with my fellow scientists of whatever nation, creed or colour for these our common ends."

[Science, Liberty, and Peace, 1946]

4. John Emerich Dal berg (1834-1902). English historian.

5. Robert Gilbert, Baron Vansittart (1881-1957). English diplomat. Head of the Foreign Office from 1930-1938.

6. John Theodore Moore, first Baron Brabazon (1884-1964). Politician and aviator.

7. Clement Richard Attlee (1883-1967). English Labour statesman. William Mackenzie King (1874-1950). Canadian Liberal statesman and prime minister.

8. James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). Scottish physicist.

The French of Paris

And Frensh she spak ful fair and fetisly

After the scale of Stratford atte Bowe

For Frensh of Paris was to hir unknowe. (Chaucer)

IT IS just fifty years since I was in Paris for the first time, and all that remains to me of that childhood excursion is a memory of something which I am now inclined to believe I never saw, and of something else which, at that time, was unmentionable in polite Anglo-Saxon society.

The thing I remember without having seen it—or did I see it?—was a gigantic tramcar, three stories high and driven by steam. Two-decker steam trams—these are antecedently probable, these I am prepared to accept. But what I remember, what I can still see with my mind’s eye, is a green, puffing skyscraper on rails. Such a thing is beyond belief; but perhaps, none the less, it really existed. One of the greatest charms of this queer universe of ours, and one of its greatest horrors, is the actuality of the infinitely unlikely—that actuality, for example, of swallow-tail butterflies and the actuality of Adolf Hitler, the actuality of elephantiasis and Mongolian idiots and the actuality (as I still nostalgically hope) of three-story tramcars driven by steam.

Of the reality of those other things I so vividly remember, but was not allowed to talk about, there is no shadow of doubt. The things are there to this day, and Mr. Roth, in his picture of Place Pigalle, has given us irrefutable evidence of the fact. The Parisian vespasienne is Functional Architecture at its austere best. But, in 1901, what impressed the diminutive tourist was not the stark beauty of the design, but the conspicuousness and the ubiquity of the unspeakable object. There seemed to be a public convenience at practically every corner. On the infant Anglo-Saxon the impact of this particular aspect of Parisian life was powerful in exact proportion to the elaboration and rigidity of the Late-Victorian code of manners. In London the comfort stations were all safely below ground, hidden away like repressed memories of a disgraceful action. But, oddly enough, when you descended into one of these emblems of a guilty conscience, you found a positively Neronian splendor of marble, of porcelain, of copper piping, of mosaic floors, of crystal cisterns automatically discharging themselves five times an hour.

And in many of those cisterns, as I remember, a nature-loving Borough Council had placed gold-fish. Theirs, poor things, was a nightmarish existence. Punctually every twelve minutes, their universe would start to rush down the drain. As the water level sank, the terror mounted. There was a frenzied darting to and fro, a panic flapping of fins and tails. And then, within half an inch of the Last Judgment, the drain would close as inexplicably as it had opened. Hissing and bubbling, life flowed back into the fishes' dying world. For a fifth of an hour there was peace and a precarious, apprehensive happiness. Then, with a diluvian roar, yet another Golden Age was over, yet another Time of Troubles had begun. I did not know it at the time; but what I was watching there, underground, was an animated cartoon of human history.

In Paris, at the street corners, there were none of London's secret amenities. The functionalism was without trimmings, uncompromising, absolute. “Man,” the vespasiennes mutely proclaimed, "man is merely the highest of animals. All pretensions abandon, ye who enter here!" To the heir of two generations of Victorian make-believe, this Gallic realism was at once appalling and exhilarating.

Children do most of their living either in fantasy, or in the timeless present. For them, as for the late Henry Ford, history is bunk. No, not even bunk—just non-existent. I must have done the museums with the rest of my family, I must have visited Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle and the Palace of Versailles; but nothing remains to me of all this sightseeing. The Paris of my earliest recollections consists only of the things that evoked my childish wonder—vespasiennes and three-decker tramcars. It was not until several years later that I began to be aware of Paris as a city of monuments, Paris as the embodied summary of European history. How many sermons in its stones! What books in its fountains and its muddy river! Consider, for example, the matter of vistas. Paris, as every tourist knows, is a city of vistas. From the windows of the Louvre you look up the Champs-Elysees, through two miles of geometrical and atmospheric perspective, to the Arc de Triomphe; and this same Arc de Triomphe stands at the vanishing point of eleven other prospects, only a little less grandiose than the first. Then there is the vista from the Place de la Concorde down the whole length of the T uileries Gardens. The vista up the rue Royale to the Madeleine. The vistas which end in the Invalides and the Observatory. The upward vistas, from a thousand noisy intersections, of the balloon-like domes of the Sacre-Coeur. The vast and preposterous vista that links the Palais de Chaillot, through the straddling legs of the Eiffel Tower, with the Ecole Militaire. (This last vista was still more charmingly absurd in the good old days, before the conventionally "modern" Palais de Chaillot had replaced the Trocadero. That earlier conjunction of Mid-Victorian fantasy, Late-Victorian technology, and eighteenth-century classicism was unforgettably odd.) Historically, these Parisian vistas have one thing in common; they are all relatively recent. The earliest of them dates from the time of the absolute monarchy; the most grandiose are Napoleonic. Before the seventeenth-century—before Henri IV and Richelieu and Mazarin—nobody was interested in vistas. The fact that, from certain points on the embankment of the Seine, one can see Notre-Dame at a distance of a mile or more is due, not to human design, but to an accident of nature. One cannot build houses on a river. That is why there are vistas ending in Notre-Dame. Like most of the Greek temples before them, most Gothic churches were built where it was impossible to see them as architectural wholes. Within the circuit of their walls, ancient and medieval cities were horribly overcrowded. There was no room for vistas. There was also—and this is more important—no interest in vistas. For ancient Greeks and medieval Europeans, the important thing about a temple or a church was its sacredness, not its appearance. What they wanted primarily was a religious, not an aesthetic, emotion. There is, of course, a "beauty of holiness"; but there is also a holiness without beauty, or at least without conscious attention to beauty. At one end of the spiritual scale we find the primitively superstitious, kneeling before sacred objects possessed, in all too many cases, of no aesthetic value whatever; at the other end stand the mystics, for whom infinity and eternity are present at every point of space-time, the ridiculous no less than the sublime. The Paris of the vistas was created by secularist governments. Nominally Christian, the religion of these governments was actually an idolatry of the national state, and their purpose in cutting these theatrically grandiose vistas was to astound the public into believing that a man-made organization was somehow divine. The most super-colossal of the French capital’s permanent movie sets was designed by Napoleon. This was only to be expected. The usurper, the military dictator could not rely on the time-hallowed loyalties which had shored up the legitimate monarchy. The old kings had ruled by a right which was regarded as divine. In order to fabricate a divinity of his own, the parvenu Emperor resorted to all the tricks of the theater and the motion picture studio. Out-Reinhardting Max Reinhardt,-out-Cecilling B. de Mille, he dedicated the Arc de Triomphe and its systems of vistas to the greater glory of himself, his army, and France. To the philosophical eye, the Etoile is not merely a splendidly elective piece of town-planning; it is also the most perfect symbol of that nationalistic idolatry which has replaced Christianity and Judaism, Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism, as the effective religion of modern man. The Etoile is what the Indians call a mandala—a symbolic diagram that expresses or suggests the nature of cosmic reality. In Indian mandalas the design radiates out from a central area, which is always empty. This signifies that the divine Reality underlying appearances is beyond our understanding and cannot be expressed except in negative terms as neither this nor that. In the Napoleonic mandala the central reality is not the Void, which symbolizes the immanent and transcendent Spirit; it is the Arc de Triomphe. The god we are invited to worship is not God, but the State, the armed and aggressive Nation.

But happily there is much more in Paris than Napoleonic vistas and symbols of nationalistic idolatry. There are charming little country houses completely surrounded by modern business. There are whole quarters which look like the capital of some quiet subprefecture in Burgundy or Poitou. There are ancient streets, originally laid out for pack horses and pedestrians, and incompatible not merely with the automobile, but even with that newfangled invention, the carriage and pair. In a score of brilliant and often amusing photographs, Mr. Roth has expressed the very spirit of these islands of provincialism, these deposits of fossil history. He shows us a life that continues to be lived, in spite of two World Wars, very much as it was lived in the days of President Lauber. The artisan is not extinct, and commerce is still predominantly an affair of small-scale shopkeeping. The customer is not confronted across the counter by the representative of a giant corporation. He is a person dealing with independent persons—with persons and, in very many cases, with their pets. Minou purrs among the vegetables or bottles, Medor dozes by the door, or trots out to smell the news of passing friends and leave a visiting card of his own.

These dealings of persons with persons are made smooth by the lubricant of a formal politeness. There are two ways of showing that one is a democrat. In America the cowhand addresses his millionaire boss as Joe or Charlie. In France the fourteenth duke addresses his concierge as madame. Both ways are good, and of both it is possible to grow a little tired. Too much protocol can be a bore. But so can too much familiarity from strangers, too much backslapping and first-name calling by half-baked adolescents. In France one sometimes pines for the Far, the Free and Easy West. And in the West one sometimes pines for the impersonal Monsieurs and Madames of the other democratic tradition.

As a child, as a schoolboy, I knew only the physical appearance of Paris and the Parisians. But as my knowledge of French increased, I became aware of other, less immediately obvious aspects of the city. By the time I was eighteen I had developed a passion for French literature. But literature implies books, and books imply bookshops, and in Paris there are more bookshops to the square mile than in any other city with which I am acquainted.

These bookshops! What an immense profusion! And what a blessed cheapness! In those early days there were reprints of practically everything at ninety-five centimes. And even the latest novel or volume of essays cost only three francs fifty. Except for collectors' items—and I never felt the desire or had the money to become a collector—the price of second-hand books was no less reasonable. In their brown calfskin, if they were of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, in paper or in mottled boards, if they had been published after 1820, they stood there in the deliciously smelly twilight, shelf above shelf, from floor to ceiling. Those dim caverns of forgotten literature, of dead philosophy and superannuated science were earthly paradises. And when their darkness became a little oppressive, there were always the open-air markets on the Quais. Half a mile of books and old engravings, with the river immediately behind and below them, and the Louvre rising majestically in the background. Could one ask, could one reasonably hope, for anything better?

Then came the Deluge. When the tide of blood had withdrawn, when, in 1919, it became possible once more to travel on the continent, the franc was a thing of paper, worth only a fifth of its gold-based predecessor. But the bookstalls along the river, the second-hand shops around Saint-Sulpice, the huge emporium under the arcades of the Odeon, the specialists in erudition of the Boulevard Saint-Michel— they were all there, as though nothing had happened. They are still there, thank heaven!—but under increasing difficulties. The costs of production go up faster than do the incomes of book-lovers. In France, as in every other country, it is becoming more and more difficult to publish a worst-seller or a highbrow magazine. The direct censorship of the totalitarian states has its counterpart, among the democracies, in the indirect censorship of mounting costs. In the fields of literature and learning, of critical journalism, of the theater and the cinema, this new democratic censorship is making steady and insidious headway. In a few years it should work almost as effectively as the dictators' system of licensing before publication and (if heresy should still rear its ugly head) of shooting and forced labor afterwards.

Meanwhile, though the economic handicaps are daily increasing, a torrent of new volumes still continues to pour from the presses of France. The book-shops, hundreds and thousands of them, are still in business. And they are in business not merely in Paris, but throughout the provinces, in the most somnolent of market towns, the dreariest of industrial cities. Travelling through the United States, I have found myself in cities of as many as forty or fifty thousand inhabitants where it was impossible to buy a book. The local drug store and newsstands carried only pulp magazines and twenty-five-cent murder mysteries. Any other kind of literature was simply unobtainable. In France, astonishing as it may seem, you can buy Andre Gide at most railway stations and Paul Valery practically everywhere.

Even before 19141 knew something of French books and of the places where they were sold. But it was not until after the war that I began to know some of the makers of those books. Paris now became, as well as everything else, a place where one met people whose interests were the same as one's own, and talked literary shop. But, in France at least, one cannot talk literary shop without sitting in cafes. Founded for the encouragement, impartially, of alcoholism and good conversation, of political discussion and idleness, of extra-conjugal love and the development, through impassioned dialectic, of new theories of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics—the Parisian cafe is one of those institutions whose appeal is universal. It is for all tastes and for all purposes. My own tastes and purposes are mainly literary and, over the years, I have indulged the one and fulfilled the other at iron tables all over Paris. In 19 20 the meeting place was generally a little cafe in the Passage du Panorama. Then it moved to Montparnasse, then to Chez Francis, near the Pont de I' Alma—the setting chosen by Jean Giraudoux¹ for one of the acts of his La Folle de Chaillot. More recently it has shifted to Saint-Germain des Pres, where the Cafe des Deux Magots and the Cafe de Flore, on one side of the Boulevard, confront the Royal Saint-Germain on the other. Across all these table-tops, over innumerable cups of coffee and glasses of vermouth and soda, the talk reverberated back and forth. Talk, in those earliest days of my acquaintance with Parisian talkers, about Cubism (then only some ten years old) and about Dadaism (which was brand new and most satisfyingly iconoclastic). A little later one talked about the successive volumes of Proust's enormous novel—so fascinating then, but now, on a re-reading in another context and by a different "me," so curiously unsatisfying. And then there was talk about Paul Valery—or, much better, talk with Paul Valery; talk which, for a foreigner, was no less fatiguing than rewarding; for Valery spoke faster than anyone I have ever listened to and with an indistinctness of utterance most unusual in a Frenchman. His conversation was like that of an oracle— marvelous but enigmatic, illuminating but not entirely comprehensible. The thirties saw the rise of Surrealism. The German Romantics came into fashion; Lautreamont was hailed as the greatest of French authors. It was the best of fun. But unfortunately the real has a most unpleasant way of eclipsing the super-real, and the real, at that particular moment of history, was Fascism, was Marxist theory and Communist practice. The talk about these things was as lively as the talk about Surrealism. But, unfortunately for everyone concerned, French politics have tended, for some time now, to be more brilliant in theory than in practice. The conversations about statecraft were first-rate; the governments of the Third Republic were not. What was the reason for this melancholy state of affairs? The answer is to be found, by implication, in Mr. Roth's admirable photograph of the statue of Henri IV. He sits there, the Vert Galant, mutely reminding the deputies, as they go in and out of the Chamber, that even in France good, strong government is not impossible. Not impossible—but, oh, how difficult! Just how difficult the plaque attached to the pedestal of good King Henry's statue plainly reveals. DeFENSE D'URINER. We read and suddenly, in a flash, we understand the whole problem. French governments find it so hard to rule because French citizens believe so passionately, so intransigently, in individual liberty. Thus, Paris is full of vespasiennes; but if a descendant of the men who stormed the Bastille should feel inclined to make use of the base of the statue of France's best king, he can see no valid reason for refraining. True, the Collective Will forbids, and the cops are on hand to enforce the prohibition. But let the cops turn their backs for even a moment: the descendant of the men who stormed the Bastille claims his inalienable right to do as he damn well pleases. Liberty triumphs over public spirit, and triumphs not merely in this little matter of committing a nuisance, but also in such far graver matters as black-marketeering and cheating the tax collector. There can be too much even of a very good thing. One of these days too much individualism may bring a dictator to the Elysee Palace. The very thought of such a thing is unutterably horrible; but for that very reason it has to be entertained, bitterly ruminated and, let us hope, sensibly and appropriately acted upon. King Henry's statue and the inscription on its pedestal are worth a whole treatise on politics. Tempering excessive individualism, public spirit will have to make that cop-enforced prohibition unnecessary. When that happens, and only when that happens, French democracy will find itself at once effective and secure.

[Esquire, December 1953]

9. Max Reinhardt (1873-1943). Austrian theater manager.

1. Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944). French dramatist and novelist.

The Desert

boundlessness and emptiness—these are the two most expressive symbols of that attributeless Godhead, of whom all that can be said is St. Bernard’s Nescio nescio or the Vedantist’s "not this, not this!" The Godhead, says Meister Eckhart, must be loved "as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image, must be loved as He is, a sheer pure absolute One, sundered from all twoness, and in whom we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness!" In the scriptures of Northern and Far Eastern Buddhism the spatial metaphors recur again and again. At the moment of death, writes the author of the Bardo Thodol, "all things are like the cloudless sky; and the naked immaculate Intellect is like unto a translucent void without circumference or center!" "The great Way," in Sosan's words, "is perfect, like unto vast space, with nothing wanting, nothing superfluous!" "Mind," says Hui-neng (and he is speaking of that universal ground of consciousness, from which all beings, the unenlightened no less than the enlightened, take their source), "mind is like emptiness of space.... Space contains sun, moon, stars, the great earth, with its mountains and rivers.... Good men and bad men, good things and bad things, heaven and hell—they are all in empty space. The emptiness of Self-nature is in all people just like this!" The theologians argue, the dogmatists declaim their credos; but their propositions "stand in no intrinsic relation to my inner light. This Inner Light" (I quote from Yoka Daishi's "Song of Enlightenment") "can be likened to space; he knows no boundaries; yet it is always here, is always with us, always retains its serenity and fullness.... You cannot take hold of it, and you cannot get rid of it; it goes on its own way. You speak and it is silent; you remain silent, and it speaks."

Silence is the cloudless heaven perceived by another sense. Like space and emptiness, it is a natural symbol of the divine. In the Mithraic mysteries, the candidate for initiation was told to lay a finger to his lips and whisper. "Silence! Silence! Silence—symbol of the living imperishable God!" And long before the coming of Christianity to the Thebaid, there had been Egyptian mystery religions, for whose followers God was a well of life, "Closed to him who speaks, but open to the silent." The Hebrew scriptures are eloquent almost to excess; but even here, among the splendid rumblings of prophetic praise and impetration and anathema, there are occasional references to the spiritual meaning and the therapeutic virtues of silence. "Be still, and know that I am God." "The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the world keep silence before him." "Keep thou silence at the presence of the Lord God." "Praise is silent for thee, 0 God." The desert, after all, began within a few miles of the gates of Jerusalem.

The facts of silence and emptiness are traditionally the symbols of divine immanence—but not, of course, for everyone, and not in all circumstances. "Until one has crossed a barren desert, without food or water, under a burning tropical sun, at three miles an hour, one can form no conception of what misery is." These are the words of a gold-seeker, who took the southern route to California in 1849. Even when one is crossing it at seventy miles an hour on a four-lane highway, the desert can seem formidable enough. To the forty-niners it was unmitigated hell. Men and women who are at her mercy find it hard to see in Nature and her works any symbols but those of brute power at the best and, at the worst, of an obscure and mindless malice. The desert’s emptiness and the desert's silence reveal what we may call their spiritual meanings only to those who enjoy some measure of physiological security. The security may amount to no more than St. Anthony's hut and daily ration of bread and vegetables, no more than Milarepa's cave and barley meal and boiled nettles—less than what any sane economist would regard as the indispensable minimum, but still security, still a guarantee of organic life and, along with life, of the possibility of spiritual liberty and transcendental happiness.

But even for those who enjoy security against the assaults of the environment, the desert does not always or inevitably reveal its spiritual meanings. The early Christian hermits retired to the Thebaid because its air was purer, because there were fewer distractions, because God seemed nearer there than in the world of men. But, alas, dry places are notoriously the abode of unclean spirits, seeking rest and finding it not. If the immanence of God was sometimes more easily discoverable in the desert, so also, and all too frequently, was the immanence of the devil. St. Anthony's temptations have become a legend, and Cassian speaks of "the tempests of imagination" through which every newcomer to the eremitic life had to pass. Solitude, he writes, makes men feel "the many-winged folly of their souls ...; they find the perpetual silence intolerable, and those whom no labour on the land could weary, are vanquished by doing nothing, and worn out by the long duration of their peace." Be still, and know that I am God; be still, and know that you are the delinquent imbecile who snarls and gibbers in the basement of every human mind. The desert can drive men mad, but it can also help them to become supremely sane.

The enormous draughts of emptiness and silence prescribed by the eremites are safe medicine only for a few exceptional souls. By the majority the desert should be taken either dilute or, if at full strength, in small doses. Used in this way, it acts as a spiritual restorative, as an anti-hallucinant, as a de-tensioner and alternative.

In his book, The Next Million Years, Sir Charles Darwin looks forward to thirty thousand generations of ever more humans pressing ever more heavily on ever dwindling resources and being killed off in ever increasing numbers by famine, pestilence, and war. He may be right. Alternatively, human ingenuity may somehow falsify his predictions. But even human ingenuity will find it hard to circumvent arithmetic. On a planet of limited area, the more people there are, the less vacant space there is bound to be. Over and above the material and sociological problems of increasing population, there is a serious psychological problem. In a completely home-made environment, such as is provided by any great metropolis, it is as hard to remain sane as it is in a completely natural environment such as the desert or the forest. O Solitude, where are thy charms? But, O Multitude, where are thine? The most wonderful thing about America is that, even in these middle years of the twentieth century, there are so few Americans. By taking a certain amount of trouble you might still be able to get yourself eaten by a bear in the state of New York. And without any trouble at all you can get bitten by a rattler in the Hollywood hills, or die of thirst, while wandering through an uninhabited desert, within a hundred and fifty miles of Los Angeles. A short generation ago you might have wandered and died within only a hundred miles of Los Angeles. Today the mounting tide of humanity has oozed through the intervening canyons and spilled out into the wide Mojave. Solitude is receding at the rate of four and a half kilometers per annum.

And yet, in spite of it all, the silence persists. For this silence of the desert is such that casual sounds, and even the systematic noise of civilization, cannot abolish it. They co-exist with it—as small irrelevancies at right angles to an enormous meaning, as veins of something analogous to darkness within an enduring transparency. From the irrigated land come the dark gross sounds of lowing cattle, and above them the plovers trail their vanishing threads of shrillness. Suddenly, startlingly, out of the sleeping sagebrush there bursts the shrieking of coyotes—Trio for Ghoul and Two Damned Souls. On the trunks of cottonwood trees, on the wooden walls of barns and houses, the woodpeckers rattle away like pneumatic drills. Picking one's way between the cactuses and the creosote bushes one hears, like some tiny whirring clockwork, the soliloquies of invisible wrens, the calling, at dusk, of the poor wills and even occasionally the voice of homo sapiens—six of the species in a parked Chevrolet, listening to the broadcast of a prize fight, or else in pairs necking to the delicious accompaniment of Crosby. But the light forgives, the distances forget, and this great crystal of silence, whose base is as large as Europe and whose height, for all practical purposes, is infinite, can co-exist with things of a far higher order of discrepancy than canned sentiment or vicarious sport. Jet planes, for example—the stillness is so massive that it can absorb even jet planes. The screaming crash mounts to its intolerable climax and fades again, mounts as another of the monsters rips through the air, and once more diminishes and is gone. But even at the height of the outrage the mind can still remain aware of that which surrounds it, that which preceded and will outlast it.

Progress, however, is on the march. Jet planes are already as characteristic of the desert as are Joshua trees or burrowing owls; they will soon be almost as numerous. The wilderness has entered the armament race, and will be in it to the end. In its multi-million acred emptiness there is room enough to explode atomic bombs and experiment with guided missiles. The weather, so far as flying is concerned, is uniformly excellent, and in the plains lie the flat beds of many lakes, dry since the last Ice Age, and manifestly intended by Providence for hot-rod racing and jets. Huge air-fields have already been constructed. Factories are going up. Oases are turning into industrial towns. In brand new Reservations, surrounded by barbed wire and the FBI, not Indians but tribes of physicists, chemists, metallurgists, communication engineers, and mechanics are working with the coordinated frenzy of termites. From their air-conditioned laboratories and machine shops there flows a steady stream of marvels, each one more expensive and each more fiendish than the last. The desert silence is still there; but so, ever more noisily, are the scientific irrelevancies. Give the boys in the Reservations a few more years and another hundred billion dollars, and they will succeed (for with technology all things are possible) in abolishing the silence, in transforming what are now irrelevancies into the desert's fundamental meaning. Meanwhile, and luckily for us, it is noise which is exceptional; the rule is still this crystalline symbol of universal Mind.

The bulldozers roar, the concrete is mixed and poured, the jet planes go crashing through the air, the rockets soar aloft with their cargoes of white mice and electronic instruments. And yet for all this, "Nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things."

And not merely the dearest, but the strangest, the most wonderfully unlikely. I remember, for example, a recent visit to one of the new Reservations. It was in the spring of 1952 and, after seven years of drought, the rains of the preceding winter had been copious. From end to end the Mojave was carpeted with flowers—sunflowers, and the dwarf phlox, chicory and coreopsis, wild hollyhock, and all the tribe of garlics and lilies. And then, as we neared the Reservation, the flower carpet began to move. We stopped the car, we walked into the desert to take a closer look. On the bare ground, on every plant and bush innumerable caterpillars were crawling. They were of two kinds—one smooth, with green and white markings, and a horn, like that of a miniature rhinoceros, growing out of its hinder end. The caterpillar, evidently, of one of the hawk moths. Mingled with these, in millions no less uncountable, were the brown hairy offspring of (I think) the Painted Lady butterfly. They were everywhere over hundreds of square miles of the desert. And yet, a year before, when the eggs from which these larvae had emerged were laid, California had been as dry as a bone. On what, then, had the parent insects lived? And what had been the food of their innumerable offspring? In the days when I collected butterflies and kept their young in glass jars on the window sill of my cubicle at school, no self-respecting caterpillar would feed on anything but the leaves to which its species had been predestined. Puss moths laid their eggs on poplars, spurge hawks on spurges; mulleins were frequented by the gaily piebald caterpillars of one rather rare and rigidly fastidious moth. Offered an alternative diet, my caterpillars would turn away in horror. They were like orthodox Jews confronted by pork or lobsters; they were like Brahmins at a feast of beef prepared by Untouchables. Eat? Never. They would rather die. And if the right food were not forthcoming, die they did. But these caterpillars of the desert were apparently different. Crawling into irrigated regions, they had devoured the young leaves of entire vineyards and vegetable gardens. They had broken with tradition, they had flouted the immemorial taboos. Here, near the Reservation, there was no cultivated land. These hawk moth and Painted Lady caterpillars, which were all full grown, must have fed on indigenous growths—but which, I could never discover; for when I saw them the creatures were all crawling at random, in search either of something juicier to eat or else of some place to spin their cocoons. Entering the Reservation, we found them all over the parking lot and even on the steps of the enormous building which housed the laboratories and the administrative offices. The men on guard only laughed or swore. But could they be absolutely sure? Biology has always been the Russians¹ strongest point. These innumerable crawlers—perhaps they were Soviet agents? Parachuted from the stratosphere, impenetrably disguised, and so thoroughly indoctrinated, so completely conditioned by means of posthypnotic suggestions that even under torture it would be impossible for them to confess, even under DDT....

Our party showed its pass and entered. The strangeness was no longer Nature's; it was strictly human. Nine and a half acres of floor space, nine and a half acres of the most extravagant improbability. Sagebrush and wild flowers beyond the windows; but here, within, machine tools capable of turning out anything from a tank to an electron microscope; million-volt X-ray cameras; electric furnaces; wind tunnels; refrigerated vacuum tanks; and on either side of endless passages closed doors bearing inscriptions which had obviously been taken from last year's Science Fiction Magazines. (This year's space ships, of course, have harnessed gravitation and magnetism.) ROCKET DEPARTMENT, we read on door after door. ROCKET AND EXPLOSIVES DEPARTMENT, ROCKET PERSONNEL DEPARTMENT. And what lay behind the unmarked doors? Rockets and Canned Tularemia? Rockets and Nuclear Fission? Rockets and Space Cadets? Rockets and Elementary Courses in Martian Language and Literature?

It was a relief to get back to the caterpillars. Ninety-nine point nine recurring percent of the poor things were going to die—but not for an ideology, not while doing their best to bring death to other caterpillars, not to the accompaniment of Te Deums, of Dulce et decorums, of "we shall not sheathe the sword, which we have not lightly drawn, until ..." Until what? The only completely unconditional surrender will come when everybody—but everybody—is a corpse.

For modern man, the really blessed thing about Nature is its otherness. In their anxiety to find a cosmic basis for human values, our ancestors invented an emblematic botany, a natural history composed of allegories and fables, an astronomy that told fortunes and illustrated the dogmas of revealed religion. "In the Middle Ages," writes Emile Male, "the idea of a thing which a man formed for himself, was always more real than the thing itself. ... The study of things for their own sake held no meaning for the thoughtful man. ... The task for the student of nature was to discover the eternal truth which God would have each thing express." These eternal truths expressed by things were not the laws of physical and organic being...laws discoverable only by patient observation and the sacrifice of preconceived ideas and autistic urges; they were the notions and fantasies engendered in the minds of logicians, whose major premises, for the most part, were other fantasies and notions bequeathed to them by earlier writers. Against the belief that such purely verbal constructions were eternal truths, only the mystics protested; and the mystics were concerned only with that "obscure knowledge," as it was called, which comes when a man "sees all in all." But between the real but obscure knowledge of the mystic and the clear, but unreal knowledge of the verbalist, lies the clearish and realish knowledge of the naturalist and the man of science. It was knowledge of a kind which most of our ancestors found completely uninteresting.

Reading the older descriptions of God's creatures, the older speculations about the ways and workings of Nature, we start by being amused. But the amusement soon turns to the most intense boredom and a kind of mental suffocation. We find ourselves gasping for breath in a world where all the windows are shut and everything wears man's smudge and shares man's smell. Words are the greatest, the most momentous of all our inventions, and the specifically human realm is the realm of language. In the stifling universe of medieval thought, the given facts of nature were treated as the symbols of familiar notions. Words did not stand for things; things stood for pre-existent words. This is a pitfall which, in the natural sciences, we have learned to avoid. But in other contexts than the scientific—in the context, for example, of politics—we continue to take our verbal symbols with the same disastrous seriousness as was displayed by our crusading and persecuting ancestors. For both parties, the people on the other side of the Iron Curtain are not human beings, but merely the embodiments of the pejorative phrases coined by propagandists.

Nature is blessedly non-human; and insofar as we belong to the natural order, we too are blessedly non-human. The otherness of caterpillars, as of our own bodies, is an otherness underlain by a principal identity. The non-humanity of wild flowers, as of the deepest levels of our own minds, exists within a system which includes and transcends the human. In the given realm of the inner and outer not-self, we are all one. In the home-made realm of symbols we are separate and mutually hostile partisans. Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons. Our statesmen have tried to come to an international agreement on the use of atomic power. They have not been successful. And even if they had, what then? No agreement on atomic power can do any lasting good, unless it be preceded by an agreement on language. If we make a wrong use of nuclear fission, it will be because we have made a wrong use of the symbols, in terms of which we think about ourselves and other people. Individually and collectively, men have always been the victims of their own words; but, except in the emotionally neutral field of science, they have never been willing to admit their linguistic ineptitude, and correct their mistakes. Taken too seriously, symbols have motivated and justified all the horrors of recorded history. On every level from the personal to the international, the letter kills. Theoretically we know this very well. In practice, nevertheless, we continue to commit the suicidal blunders to which we have become accustomed. The caterpillars were still on the march when we left the Reservation, and it was half an hour or more, at a mile a minute, before we were clear of them. Among the phloxes and the sunflowers, millions in the midst of hundreds of millions, they proclaimed (along with the dangers of over-population) the strength, the fecundity, the endless resourcefulness of life. We were in the desert, and the desert was blossoming, the desert was crawling. I had not seen anything like it since that spring day, in 1948, when we had been walking at the other end of the Mojave, near the great earthquake fault, down which the highway descends to San Bernardino and the orange groves. The elevation here is around four thousand feet and the desert is dotted with dark clumps of juniper. Suddenly, as we moved through the enormous emptiness, we became aware of an entirely unfamiliar interruption to the silence. Before, behind, to right and to left, the sound seemed to come from all directions. It was a small sharp crackling, like the ubiquitous frying of bacon, like the first flames in the kindling of innumerable bonfires. There seemed to be no explanation. And then, as we looked more closely, the riddle gave up its answer. Anchored to a stem of sagebrush, we saw the horny pupa of a cicada. It had begun to split and the full-grown insect was in process of pushing its way our. Each time it struggled, its case of amber-colored chitin opened a little more widely. The continuous crackling that we heard was caused by the simultaneous emergence of thousands upon thousands of individuals. How long they had spent underground, I could never discover. Dr. Edmund Jaeger, who knows as much about the fauna and flora of the Western deserts as anyone now living, tells me that the habits of this particular cicada have never been closely studied. He himself had never witnessed the mass resurrection upon which we had had the good fortune to stumble. All one can be sure of is that these creatures had spent anything from two to seventeen years in the soil, and that they had all chosen this particular May morning to climb out of the grave, burst their coffins, dry their moist wings, and embark upon their life of sex and song.

Three weeks later we heard and saw another detachment of the buried army coming out into the sun among the pines and the flowering fremontias of the San Gabriel Mountains. The chill of two thousand additional feet of elevation had postponed the resurrection; but when it came, it conformed exactly to the pattern set by the insects of the desert: the risen pupa, the crackle of splitting horn, the helpless imago waiting for the sun to bake it into perfection, and then the flight, the tireless singing, so unremitting that it becomes a part of the silence. The boys in the Reservations are doing their best; and perhaps, if they are given the necessary time and money, they may really succeed in making the planet uninhabitable. Applied Science is a conjuror, whose bottomless hat yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas. But I am still optimist enough to credit life with invincibility, I am still ready to bet that the non-human otherness at the root of man’s being will ultimately triumph over the all too human selves who frame the ideologies and engineer the collective suicides. For our survival, if we do survive, we shall be less beholden to our common sense (the name we give to what happens when we try to think of the world in terms of the unanalyzed symbols supplied by language and the local customs) than to our caterpillar-and-cicada sense, to intelligence, in other words, as it operates on the organic level. That intelligence is at once a will to persistence and an inherited knowledge of the physiological and psychological means by which, despite all the follies of the loquacious self, persistence can be achieved. And beyond survival is transfiguration; beyond and including animal grace is the grace of that other not-self, of which the desert silence and the desert emptiness are the most expressive symbols.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

Ozymandias

in this part of the desert Ozymandias—located approximately seventy-five miles from Los Angeles in the Antelope Valley—consists of an abandoned silo and the ruins of a cow-byre. "The hands that mocked"— mocked themselves in the very act of so laboriously creating these poor things—were the hands of a thousand idealists; "the heart that fed" belonged to a Marxist lawyer, with a Gladstone collar and the face of a revivalist or a Shakespearean actor. Job Harriman- was his name; and if the McNamara brothers had not unexpectedly confessed to the dynamiting of the Times building, he would in all probability have become the first Socialist mayor of Los Angeles. But with that confession, his passionately defended clients ceased to be proletarian martyrs and became the avowed killers of twenty-six unfortunate printers and newspapermen. Job Harriman’s chance of winning the election abruptly declined to zero. Another man would have admitted defeat. Not Harriman. If Los Angeles would not have him as its mayor, he would go out into the wilderness and there create a new, better city of his own. On May Day, 1914, the Llano del Rio Co-operative Colony (incorporated first in California and later under the more easy-going laws of Nevada) received its first contingent of settlers.

Three years later, in the Llano View Book, an anonymous enthusiast wrote of the event with a mixture of biblical and patriotic solemnity. "May first, 1914, a hardy little band of pioneers, likened unto those who courageously founded the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts so many years ago, went forth into the Antelope Valley to found another Colony, destined through the years to be quite as historical and quite as significant of the founding of a New Civilization." And this May Day promise had already been fulfilled. "The success of complete cooperation has now been demonstrated convincingly. The demonstration is the most thorough that can be asked for." The colony is now "too firmly established to be affected by anything except a concerted and organized effort backed by Capital. Its future is clear." These words were penned and printed, at the Llano publishing house, in the summer of 1917. Before the year was out, that clear future was a thing of the past. The company was bankrupt, the colonists had dispersed. Within twenty-four hours of their departure playful iconoclasts had smashed five hundred dollars’ worth of windows; within a week, a large frame hotel and several scores of houses and workshops had been demolished and carried off piece-meal by the homesteaders who precariously represented capitalism in the wilderness. Only the silo and the foundations of the cow-byre remained; they were made of concrete and could not be hauled away.

Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

A more squeamish artist than Shelley would have avoided the reduplication of those alliterative epithets. "Boundless and bare," "lone and level"—one is reminded of a passage in Lewis Carroll's versified essay on poetic diction: "The wild man went his weary way to a strange and lonely pump." But the general effect, albeit a little cheap, is dramatically good and even sufficiently true, despite the fact that the sands hereabouts are neither bare nor indefinitely level. A few miles south of Ozymandias the desert tilts upwards to a range of wooded and, in winter, snow-covered mountains. To the north stretches a plain; but its levels are dotted with isolated buttes and rimmed, in the far distance, by other ranges of mountains. And over all the ground spreads the thin carpet of those astonishingly numerous plants and bushes which have learned to adapt themselves to a land where it rains eight or nine inches during the winter and not at all from May to November.

To the brute facts of meteorology and country Job Harriman was resolutely indifferent. When he thought of human affairs, he thought of them only as a Socialist, never as a naturalist. Thus, with a population of only 300,000, Los Angeles was already becoming uncomfortably dry. But because its water would enrich the real-estate operators, Job Harriman opposed the construction of the Owens Valley Aqueduct. Worse, he rationalized his opposition by the obviously absurd statement that the city could grow indefinitely on its local resources. The same ill-informed optimism made nonsense of his plan for Llano. In a good year (and every other year is bad) water from the Big Rock Creek makes possible the raising, at Llano, of crops and cattle worth perhaps $100,000. The Colony owned rights to part of this water. On its irrigated acres 50 or, at the most, 100 persons might have eked out a precarious living. But by the beginning of 1917 Harriman had accepted the applications of almost 1,000 eager cooperators. Every applicant had to buy 2,000 shares of the company's stock, for which he was to pay $500, or preferably $ 1,000, in cash, and the balance in labor. In a year or two, it was assumed, the Colony would be self-sufficient; until then, it would have to live on the cash invested by its members.

For as long as the cash lasted, times were good, enthusiasm high and achievement correspondingly great. A wagon road was driven through the foothills, up into the timberland of the San Gabriel Mountains. Trees were felled and laboriously brought down to the sawmill in the plain below. A quarry was opened, a lime-kiln constructed. The tents of the first colonists gave place to shacks, the shacks to houses. Next a hotel was built, to accommodate the interested visitors from the infernal regions of capitalism. Schools and workshops appeared as though by magic. Irrigation ditches were dug and lined. Eighty horses and a steam tractor cleared, leveled, ploughed, and harvested. Fruit trees were planted, pears canned, alfalfa cut and stored, cows milked, and "the West's most modern rabbitry" established.

Nor were the spiritual needs of the colonists neglected. From the print shop issued two weekly newspapers and a stream of pamphlets. Among the amenities were a women's exchange, a Socialist local, several quartets, two orchestras, a brass band, and a mandolin club.

One of the old-timers has often talked to me nostalgically of that brass band, those mandolins and barbershop ensembles. What pleasure, on a mild night in May or June, to sit out of doors under one's privately owned cottonwood tree and listen, across a mile of intervening sagebrush, to the music of Socialists! The moon is full, the last snow still glitters on the summit of Mount Baden Powell and, to the accompaniment of the steady croaking of frogs along the irrigation ditch and the occasional frantic shrieks of the coyotes, the strains of Sousa and Sweet Adeline and the Unfinished Symphony transcribed for mandolins and saxophone, come stealing with extraordinary distinctness upon the ear. Only Edward Lear- can do full justice to such an occasion. It must have been, in the very highest degree, "meloobious and genteel." But, alas, every magical night is succeeded by yet another busy morning. The al fresco concert was delightful; but that did not make it any easier to collect, next day, from the communal treasury. As well as the mandolins, my old-timer friend recalls his efforts to get paid for services rendered. After long haggling he would think himself lucky if he came away with two dollars in silver and the rest in hay or pumpkins.

For most of the co-operators, the morning after a concert was less disillusioning. I have met three or four ex-colonists—older, sadder, possibly wiser—and all of them bore witness to the happiness of those first months at Llano. Housing, to be sure, was inadequate; food monotonous, and work extremely hard. But there was a sense of shared high purpose, a sustaining conviction that one had broken out of an age-old prison and was marching, shoulder to shoulder with loyal comrades, towards a promised land. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive." And this applies to all dawns without distinction—the dawn of a war and the dawn of a peace, the dawn of revolution and the dawn of reaction, the dawn of passion and in due course the blessed coolness of the dawn of indifference, the dawn of marriage and then, at Reno, the long awaited dawn of divorce. In cooperative communities dawns are peculiarly rosy. For this very reason, midday is apt to seem peculiarly stifling, and the afternoons intolerable and interminable. To the ordinary hazards of community life Llano added the insurmountable obstacles of too many people, too little water, and, after three years, no money.

As the situation grew worse, the propagandists became more lyrical. "Llano offers hope and inspiration for the masses. ... Its purpose is to solve unemployment, to assure safety and comfort for the future and old age." And the words were accompanied by a detailed plan of the city which was just about to be built. "It will be different in design from any other in the world. Its houses will be comfortable, sanitary, handsome, home-like, modern and harmonious with their surroundings, and will insure greater privacy than any other houses ever constructed. They are unique and designed especially for Llano." The publicity worked. Applications and, more important, checks kept steadily coming in.

With each arrival of an idealist's life savings, there was a respite. But a respite at a price. For with those life-savings came another member and his family. The Colony had acquired three days' supply of food, but it had also acquired five extra mouths. Each successive windfall went a little less far. And meanwhile our old friend, Human Nature, was busily at work.

In his office and in court Harriman was a successful attorney. Outside he was an idealist and theorizer, whose knowledge was not of men and women but of sociological abstractions and the more or less useful fictions of economics.

In a preface which he contributed in 1924 to Ernest Wooster's Communities Past and Present, Harriman writes (how touchingly!) about his self-imposed ignorance and subsequent enlightenment. "Believing that life arose out of chemical action and that form was determined by the impinging environment, I naturally believed that all would react more or less alike to the same environment." But in fact they didn't. Against all the rules, "we found more well-to-do men among the unselfish than there were among the selfish." Worse still, "we found to our surprise that there were more selfish men among the poor, in proportion to their number, than there were among the well-to-do. ... Worst and most unexpected was the fact that the selfish persisted in their course with a persistence that was amazing." From amazement the poor man passed to downright "confusion" at the discovery that there are "those who are extremely active (in the work of the Colony) and yet who are also extremely selfish. If their behavior is closely observed, they will invariably be found to be working for self-glory or for power." These discoveries of the immemorially obvious led him to two conclusions, whose extremely unoriginal character is the guarantee of their soundness. First "theories and intellectual concepts play a very small part in our reactions." And, second, "economic determinism seems to play no part in separating the sheep from the goats." In the process of reaching these conclusions, Job Harriman had to pass through ten years of an excruciatingly educative purgatory.

No effort had been made to exclude from Llano the sort of people whose presence is fatal to any close-knit community, and there was no system of rules by which, having been admitted, such persons might be controlled. From the first Harriman found himself confronted by a cantankerous minority of troublemakers. There were the idealistic purists, who complained that he was making too many compromises with the devils of capitalism; there were the malingerers, who criticized but refused to work, there were the greedy, with their clamor for special privileges; there were the power-lovers who envied him and were ambitious to take his place. Meeting secretly in the desert, the "brush-gang," as these malcontents were called, plotted his overthrow. It came at last at the hands of a trusted lieutenant who, in Harriman’s absence, disposed of the Llano property to private owners—including, in a big way, himself. But, long before this final catastrophe, there had been nothing to eat, and the majority of the colonists had returned without their savings, to the world of free competition. A few, under Harriman's leadership, migrated in a special train to Louisiana, where they had collectively bought an abandoned lumber camp and several thousand denuded acres. There was another blissful dawn, followed by a prolonged struggle with a hundred ferocious Texans, who had been invited to join the community, but had not, apparently, been told that it was a co-operative. When these extremely rugged individualists had gone, taking with them most of the Colony’s livestock and machinery, the survivors settled down to the dismal realities of life on an inadequate economic foundation. Work was hard, and for diversion there were only the weekly dances, the intrigues of several rival brush-gangs, and the spectacle of the struggle for power between the ailing Harriman and an ex-insurance salesman of boundless energy called George T. Pickett. By 1924, Harriman was out—for good.

The new manager was one of those "born leaders," who have no patience with democratic methods and are seriously convinced that they always know best. I'd rather work with a bunch of morons than with a lot of "over-educated kickers." But the colonists—or at least some of them—refused to accept his benevolent dictatorship. Brush-gangs bored from within; heretics and seceders campaigned from without. From the neighboring town of Leesville two dissident and mutually hostile groups bombarded the loyalists with anonymous letters and denounced the management and, of course, one another in any left-wing paper that would print their articles.

And all the time New Llano was as far as ever from self-sufficiency. The Colony could boast of no less than thirty-eight industrial and agricultural departments. But all of them, unfortunately, were running at a loss. The only solid asset was Pickett's incomparable salesmanship; the only steady source of income, his far-ranging drives for funds. Through the years a trickle of money flowed in—never quite enough to buy the colonists new shoes, but sufficient at least to prevent actual starvation. In the thirties wildcatters persuaded the management that there was oil on the colony's property. A number of idealists were talked into a speculative investment, and three wells were drilled. Needless to say, all of them were dry.

Then came the Revolution. While Pickett was away, soliciting Federal funds at Washington, his enemies called a meeting of the entire membership. By a majority vote of the minority who attended, Pickett was deposed. For the dominant brush-gang and its supporters, what a blissful dawn! For the rest, it looked like the midnight of all hope. The author of a rare little book, The Crisis in Llano Colony, An Epic Story, belonged to the second group. To express his feelings about Pickett, mere prose seemed inadequate. The history of the conspiracy culminates in a lyric.

He came from out the Land of Graft

To lend a hand to Llano,

Its industry and handicraft, And added to its cargo.

Where devil take the hindmost,

He left the realm where dog eat dog, With Equity his guide-post.

A better life the world to show, A work he tires of never,

While men may come and men may go,

Will he go on forever.

"Forever" was perhaps a little too optimistic. But the fact remains that, in due course, George T. Pickett did come back to Llano. In his Can We Cooperate? Bob Brown prints a letter from one of the surviving colonists, dated November 1937. "Things in hell of a shape here. No food for the past week but sweet potatoes, and darn small ones at that.... No electricity for two months, and I buy plenty kerosene.... Very little money coming in, and what little there is Pickett takes it for his own use. Seems to think everything belongs to him.... Lots of people pretty mad here since Pickett took over again.... I expect few people on the outside would believe the truth about this place. Just try and tell some of those old friends, who sent money in through The Colonist, that one works 365 days a year in this Socialist paradise, then supplies one's own clothes, most of one's own food, light, etc., and they might say one was a liar."

Two years later it was finished. All the colony property had been sold up, and the colonists (most of them old people who had invested their savings and their work in Llano for the sake of security in their declining years), were on relief. All that remained, after twenty-five years of idealistic struggle, was a small brick hotel and a recreation hall.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

But despair is only the penultimate word, never the last. The last word is realism—the acceptance of facts as they present themselves, the facts of nature and of human nature and the primordial fact of that spirit which transcends them both and yet is in all things. The original Ozymandias was no realist; nor was poor Mr. Harriman. In the conditions prevailing at Llano and, later, at New Llano, integral cooperation was as fatally condemned to self-destruction as are, in any circumstances, the ambitions of a king of kings. Fortunately, unrealistic co-operation does no harm except to the co-operators. Unrealistic imperialism, on the other hand, cannot commit suicide without inflicting misery and death upon innumerable victims.

He quit the struggle in the bog,

The economic problems of community living can be solved by any group possessed of common sense and capital. The psychological problems are much more difficult and demand, for their solution, something rarer than either cash or shrewdness.

Life in a community is life in a crowd—the same old crowd, day in, day out. At Llano the colonists divided mankind into two groups—themselves and people "on the outside." The same distinction, in the same words, is made by convicts. "On the inside" are we; "on the outside" lies the whole wide world. Of those nineteenth-century American communities which survived long enough to rear a second generation of co-operators, few were able to resist the impact of the bicycle. Mounted on a pair of wheels, the young people were able to explore that unredeemed but fascinating world "on the outside." After each expedition, it was with mounting reluctance that they returned to the all too familiar crowd. In the end reluctance hardened into refusal. They went out one day and never came back.

The attraction of life "on the outside" can be counteracted in several ways. Shared religious faith is helpful, but not, of itself, enough. One can believe as the others believe, and yet detest the sight of them."Ave Virgo\—Gr-rr—you swine!" Browning's fictional soliloquist is echoed, more decorously, by such real and historical figures as the saintly Dame Gertrude More. "Living in religion (as I can speak by experience), if one is not in a right course of prayer and other exercises between God and our soul, one's nature groweth much worse than it would have been if one had lived in the world." It grows worse because there is no escape from the objects of one's unreasoned abhorrence. "On the outside," we are constantly imitating the conduct of the Old Man in the limerick, "Who purchased a steed, which he rode at full speed, to escape from the people of Basing." "On the inside," be it of Alcatraz, of Llano, of a cloister, there are no steeds; and unless they can learn the difficult art of being charitable, the inmates of such penal, socialistic, or religious colonies will find themselves condemned to a life sentence of boredom, distaste, and loathing. Vows, rules, and a hierarchy can forcibly constrain a man to remain in his community. Only "a course of prayer, by which the soul turneth towards God and learneth from Him the lesson of truly humbling itself," can soften his heart to the point where it becomes susceptible of loving even his exasperating brothers.

At Llano shared religious faith was replaced, less effectively, by a vague Pickwickian belief that, thanks to Socialism, everything would be much better in the twenty-second century. "You've got to get up on some private hill to view the future. I've been on this job ten years, and there has been some real progress. But when I'm overwhelmed by the ugliness, the seemingly useless struggle of it all, I just climb up my hill and see the whole place as it should be."

More effective, as a binding force, than religious or Utopian belief, is the presence among the faithful of some dominant and fascinating personality. These are the human magnets, in relation to whom ordinary men and women behave like iron filings. Their attractive power is hard to analyze and explain. Impressiveness of appearance and high intelligence are sometimes present, but not invariably.

A glittering eye, a mysterious manner, a disconcerting fluctuation between remoteness and concern— these are never amiss. A gift of the gab is useful, and becomes quite invaluable when combined with the right kind of voice—the kind of voice which seems to act directly on the autonomic nervous system and the subconscious mind. Finally, indispensably, there is the will of iron, there is the unswerving tenacity of purpose, the boundless self-confidence—all the qualities which are so conspicuously absent in the common run of anxious, bewildered, and vacillating humanity. A community having capital, sound management, and a leader possessed of magnetic qualities can hardly fail to survive.

Unfortunately (or rather, thank God!) the magnetic leader is not immortal. When his current is turned off, the iron filings fly apart, and yet another experiment in integral co-operation is at an end.

Is there any reason, someone may ask, why it should ever have been begun? For the Marxist, a religious community is anathema and a secular co-operative colony represents no more than "a workingclass form of escape, corresponding to the white-collar boy's flight to Montparnasse." For the capitalist, any kind of integral cooperation is a gratuitous absurdity which might, if it worked too well, become dangerously subversive. But for anyone who is interested in human beings and their so largely unrealized potentialities, even the silliest experiment has value, if only as demonstrating what ought not to be done. And many of the recorded experiments were far from silly. Well planned and carried out with skill and intelligence, some of them have contributed significantly to our knowledge of that most difficult and most important of all the arts—the art of living together in harmony and with benefit for all concerned. Thus, the Shakers cultivated the sense of togetherness by means of the sacramental dance, through collective "speaking with tongues" and in spiritualistic seances, at which mediumship was free to all. The Perfectionists practiced mutual criticism—a drastic form of group therapy which often worked wonders, not only for neurotics, but even for the physically sick. Sex is "the lion of the tribe of human passions"; to tame the lion, John Humphrey Noyes- devised, and for thirty years his community at Oneida put into effect, a system of "Complex Marriage," based upon "Male Continence." Separated, by means of a carefully inculcated technique, from propagation, the "amative function" was refined, taught good manners, reconciled with Protestant Christianity, and made to serve the purpose of religious self-transcendence. "Amativeness," Noyes could truthfully write, "is conquered and civilized among us." A similar conquest had been achieved in India, by those Tantrik prophets, in whom the world-affirming spirit of the Vedas had come to terms, through sacramentalism, with the world-denying spirit of Jainism, Yoga, and early Buddhism. In the West, however, Noyes's experiment stands alone not indeed in its intention (for many before him had tried to do the same thing), but in the realistic and therefore successful way it was carried out. The members of the Oneida Community seem to have been happier, healthier, better behaved, and more genuinely religious than most of their contemporaries "on the outside." That they should have been forced, under the threat of ecclesiastical persecution, to abandon their experiment is a real misfortune. The course of Freudian and post-Freudian psychology would have run a good deal more smoothly if there had been a place, like Oneida, where theorists might have tested their frequently preposterous notions against the realities of a cooperating group, in which the lion no longer raged and a reconciliation between sex, religion, and society was an accomplished fact.

Except in a purely negative way, the history of Llano is sadly uninstructive. All that it teaches is a series of Don'ts. Don't pin your faith on a water supply, which, for half the time, isn't there. Don’t settle a thousand people on territory which cannot possibly support more than a hundred. Don't admit to your fellowship every Tom, Dick, and Harry who may present himself. Don't imagine that a miscellaneous group can live together, in closest physical proximity, without rules, without shared beliefs, without private and public "spiritual exercises," and without a magnetic leader. At Llano everything that ought not to have been done was systematically done. A pathetic little Ozymandias is all that remains to tell the tale.

From where I used to live, on the fringes of what had been the colony's land, this Ozymandias was the only visible trace of human handiwork. Gleaming in the morning light or black against the enormous desert sunsets, that silo was like a Norman keep rising, against all the probabilities, from the sagebrush. The splendor falls on castle walls. Childe Roland to the dark tower came—came, and looking through the opening in the dark tower’s wall, saw within a heap of tin cans, some waste paper and half a dozen empty bottles of Pepsi-Cola. The ruin stands very close to the highway and there are still a few motorists prepared, at a pinch, to walk a quarter of a mile.

But Ozymandias is not the only relic of the cooperative past. Two or three miles to the southeast, on the almost obliterated wagon road over which the colonists once hauled their timber from the mountains, is the Socialist cemetery.

It lies astride of the four thousand-feet contour line—that ecological frontier where the creosote bushes abruptly give place to junipers, the Joshua trees to common yuccas. One ancient and gigantic Joshua—the last outpost of the great army of Joshuas encamped on the wide plains below the foothills —stands like a sentinel on guard over the dead. In a little tumbledown enclosure of wooden palings and chicken wire three or four anonymous mounds have returned completely to the desert.

On what was once bare and weeded ground, the sage and the buckwheat have taken root again and are flourishing as though they had never been disturbed. Nearby a concrete headstone commemorates someone who to judge by his name, must have been of Scandinavian origin. His epitaph is purely quantitative, and all the inscription tells us is that he lived sixty-eight years, seven months, four days, and eleven hours. The most pretentious of the tombs is a mausoleum in the form of a hollow cube of cement. Entering through the broken door one finds a slab, headstone, and an incredible quantity of the desiccated droppings of small rodents. The dance goes on. A human pattern, made up of many patterns of patterns, is resolved into the simpler forms that are its elements. Another vortex catches and draws them into itself. Patterns are built up into patterns of a higher order, and for a few months a little pattern of these patterns of patterns hurries, squeaking, along the rat-roads.

Outside, the Joshua tree stands guard in the empty sunlight, in the almost supernatural silence. A monstrous yucca at the limit of its natural habitat? A symbol within the cosmic symbol? The eye travels out across the plain. The buttes are like kneeling elephants, and beyond them, far away, are the blue ghosts of mountains. There is a coolness against the cheek, and from overhead comes the scaly rattling of the wind in the dead dry leaves of the Joshua tree. And suddenly the symbol is essentially the same as what it symbolizes; the monstrous yucca in the desert is at once a botanical specimen and the essential Suchness. What we shall all know, according to the Bardo Thodol, at the moment of Death may also be known by casual flashes, transfiguringly, while we inhabit this particular pattern of patterns. There is a consciousness of the Pure Truth, like a light "moving across the landscape in springtime in one continuous stream of vibration." Be not afraid. For this "is the radiance of your own true nature. Recognize it." And from out of this light comes "the natural sound of Reality reverberating like a thousand thunders." But, again, be not afraid. For this is the natural sound of your own real self— a thousand thunders which have their source in silence and in some inexpressible way are identical with silence.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

Footnotes

2. Job Harriman (1861-1925). American socialist. He was one of the founders of the American Socialist Party (1901).

3. Edward Lear (1812-1888). English humorist.

4. John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886). American social reformer and founder of a "Perfectionist" church. His Oneida community was established in 1848 in New York State.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

BETWEEN 1800 and 1900 the doctrine of Pie in the Sky gave place, in a majority of Western minds, to the doctrine of Pie on the Earth. The motivating and compensatory Future came to be regarded, not as a state of disembodied happiness, to be enjoyed by me and my friends after death, but as a condition of terrestrial well-being for my children or (if that seemed a bit too optimistic) my grandchildren, or maybe my great-grandchildren. The believers in Pie in the Sky consoled themselves for all their present miseries by the thought of posthumous bliss, and whenever they felt inclined to make other people more miserable than themselves (which was most of the time), they justified their crusades and persecutions by proclaiming, in St. Augustine's delicious phrase, that they were practicing a “benignant asperity,” which would ensure the eternal welfare of souls through the destruction or torture of mere bodies in the inferior dimensions of space and time. In our days, the revolutionary believers in Pie on the Earth console themselves for their miseries by thinking of the wonderful time people will be having a hundred years from now, and then go on to justify wholesale liquidations and enslavements by pointing to the nobler, humaner world which these atrocities will somehow or other call into existence.

Not all the believers in Pie on the Earth are revolutionaries, just as not all believers in Pie in the Sky were persecutors. Those who think mainly of other people's future life tend to become proselytizers, crusaders, and heresy hunters. Those who think mainly of their own future life become resigned. The preaching of Wesley- and his followers had the effect of reconciling the first generations of industrial workers to their intolerable lot and helped to preserve England from the horrors of a full-blown political revolution.

Today the thought of their great-grandchildren’s happiness in the twenty-first century consoles the disillusioned beneficiaries of progress and immunizes them against Communist propaganda. The writers of advertising copy are doing for this generation what the Methodists did for the victims of the first Industrial Revolution.

The literature of the Future and of that equivalent of the Future, the Remote, is enormous. By now the bibliography of Utopia must run into thousands of items. Moralists and political reformers, satirists and science fictioneers—all have contributed their quota to the stock of imaginary worlds. Less picturesque, but more enlightening, than these products of fantasy and idealistic zeal are the forecasts made by sober and well-informed men of science. Three very important prophetic works of this kind have appeared within the last two or three years—The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown, The Foreseeable Future by Sir George Thomson, and The Next Million Years by Sir Charles Darwin. Sir George and Sir Charles are physicists and Mr. Brown is a distinguished chemist. Still more important, each of the three is something more and better than a specialist.

Let us begin with the longest look into the future—The Next Million Years. Paradoxically enough, it is easier, in some ways, to guess what is going to happen in the course of ten thousand centuries than to guess what is going to happen in the course of one century. Why is it that no fortune-tellers are millionaires and that no insurance companies go bankrupt? Their business is the same—foreseeing the future. But whereas the members of one group succeed all the time, the members of the other group succeed, if at all, only occasionally. The reason is simple. Insurance companies deal with statistical averages. Fortune tellers are concerned with particular cases. One can predict with a high degree of precision what is going to happen in regard to very large numbers of things or people. To predict what is going to happen to any particular thing or person is for most of us quite impossible and even for the specially gifted minority, exceedingly difficult. The history of the next century involves very large numbers; consequently it is possible to make certain predictions about it with a fairly high degree of certainty. But though we can pretty confidently say that there will be revolutions, battles, massacres, hurricanes, droughts, floods, bumper crops, and bad harvests, we cannot specify the dates of these events nor the exact locations, nor their immediate, short-range consequences. But when we take the longer view and consider the much greater numbers involved in the history of the next ten thousand centuries, we find that these ups and downs of human and natural happenings tend to cancel out, so that it becomes possible to plot a curve representing the average of future history, the mean between ages of creativity and ages of decadence, between propitious and unpropitious circumstances, between fluctuating triumph and disaster. This is the actuarial approach to prophecy—sound on the large scale and reliable on the average. It is the kind of approach which permits the prophet to say that there will be dark handsome men in the lives of x percent of women, but not which particular woman will succumb.

A domesticated animal is an animal which has a master who is in a position to teach it tricks and, more importantly, to sterilize it or compel it to breed as he sees fit. Human beings have no masters. Even in his most highly civilized state, Man is a wild species, breeding at random and always propagating his kind to the limit of available food supplies. The amount of available food may be increased by the opening up of new land, by the sudden disappearance, owing to famine, disease, or war, of a considerable fraction of the population, or by improvements in agriculture. At any given period of history there is a practical limit to the food supply currently available. Moreover, natural processes and the size of the planet being what they are, there is an absolute limit which can never be passed. Being a wild species, Man will always tend to breed up to the limits of the moment. Consequently very many members of the species must always live on the verge of starvation. This has happened in the past, is happening at the present time, when about 1600 million men, women, and children are more or less seriously undernourished, and will go on happening for the next million years—by which time we may expect that the species homo sapiens will have turned into some other species, unpredictably unlike ourselves but still, of course, subject to the laws governing the lives of wild animals.

We may not appreciate the fact; but a fact nevertheless it remains: we are living in a Golden Age, the most gilded Golden Age of human history—not only of past history, but of future history. For, as Sir Charles Darwin and many others before him have pointed out, we are living like drunken sailors, like the irresponsible heirs of a millionaire uncle. At an ever-accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on? Estimates vary. But all are agreed that within a few centuries, or at most a few millennia, Man will have run through his capital and will be compelled to live, for the remaining 9,970 or 9,980 centuries of his career as homo sapiens, strictly on income. Sir Charles is of the opinion that Man will successfully make the transition from rich ores to poor ores and even sea water, from coal, oil, uranium, and thorium to solar energy and alcohol derived from plants. About as much energy as is now available can be derived from the new sources—but with a far greater expense in man hours, a much larger capital investment in machinery. And the same holds true of the raw materials on which industrial civilization depends. By doing a great deal more work than they are doing now, men will contrive to extract the diluted dregs of the planet’s metallic wealth or will fabricate non-metallic substitutes for the elements they have completely used up. In such an event, some human beings will still live fairly well, but not in the style to which we, the squanderers of planetary capital, are accustomed.

Mr. Harrison Brown has his doubts about the ability of the human race to make the transition to new and less concentrated sources of energy and raw materials. As he sees it, there are three possibilities. “The first and by far the most likely pattern is a return to agrarian existence.” This return, says Mr. Brown, will almost certainly take place unless Man is able not only to make the technological transition to new energy sources and new raw materials, but also to abolish war and at the same time stabilize his population. Sir Charles, incidentally, is convinced that Man will never succeed in stabilizing his population. Birth control may be practiced here and there for brief periods. But any nation which limits its population will ultimately be crowded out by nations which have not limited theirs. Moreover, by reducing cut-throat competition within the society which practices it, birth control restricts the action of natural selection. But wherever natural selection is not allowed free play, biological degeneration rapidly sets in. And then there are the short-range, practical difficulties. The rulers of sovereign states have never been able to agree on a common policy in relation to economics, to disarmament, to civil liberties. Is it likely, is it even conceivable, that they will agree on a common policy in relation to the much more ticklish matter of birth control? The answer would seem to be in the negative. And if, by a miracle, they should agree, or if a world government should some day come into existence, how could a policy of birth control be enforced? Answer: only by totalitarian methods and, even so, pretty ineffectively.

Let us return to Mr. Brown and the second of his alternative futures. “There is a possibility,” he writes, “that stabilization of population can be achieved, that war can be avoided, and that the resource transition can be successfully negotiated. In that event mankind will be confronted with a pattern which looms on the horizon of events as the second most likely possibility—the completely controlled, collectivized industrial society.” (Such a future society was described in my own fictional essay in Utopianism, Brave New World.)

“The third possibility confronting mankind is that of a world-wide free industrial society, in which human beings can live in reasonable harmony with their environment.” This is a cheering prospect; but Mr. Brown quickly chills our optimism by adding that “it is unlikely that such a pattern can exist for long. It certainly will be difficult to achieve, and it clearly will be difficult to maintain once it is established.”

From these rather dismal speculations about the remoter future it is a relief to turn to Sir George Thomson’s prophetic view of what remains of the present Golden Age. So far as easily available power and raw materials are concerned, Western man never had it so good as he has it now and, unless he should choose in the interval to wipe himself out, as he will go on having it for the next three, or five, or perhaps even ten generations. Between the present and the year 2050, when the population of the planet will be at least five billion and perhaps as much as eight billion, atomic power will be added to the power derived from coal, oil, and falling water, and Man will dispose of more mechanical slaves than ever before. He will fly at three times the speed of sound, he will travel at seventy knots in submarine liners, he will solve hitherto insoluble problems by means of electronic thinking-machines. High-grade metallic ores will still be plentiful, and research in physics and chemistry will teach men how to use them more effectively and will provide at the same time a host of new synthetic materials. Meanwhile the biologists will not be idle. Various algae, bacteria, and fungi will be domesticated, selectively bred and set to work to produce various kinds of food and to perform feats of chemical synthesis which would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. More picturesquely (for Sir George is a man of imagination), new breeds of monkeys will be developed, capable of performing the more troublesome kinds of agricultural work, such as picking fruit, cotton, and coffee. Electron beams will be directed onto particular areas of plant and animal chromosomes and, in this way, it may become possible to produce controlled mutations. In the field of medicine, cancer may finally be prevented, while senility (“the whole business of old age is odd and little understood”) may be postponed, perhaps almost indefinitely. “Success,” adds Sir George, “will come, when it does, from some quite unexpected directions; some discovery in physiology will alter present ideas as to how and why cells grow and divide in the healthy body, and with the right fundamental knowledge, enlightenment will come. It is only the rather easy superficial problems that can be solved by working on them directly; others depend on still undiscovered fundamental knowledge and are hopeless till this has been acquired.”

All in all, the prospects for the industrialized minority of mankind are, in the short run, remarkably bright. Provided we refrain from the suicide of war, we can look forward to very good times indeed. That we shall be discontented with our good time goes without saying. Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling towards which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet. But the right to disillusionment is as fundamental as any other in the catalogue. (Actually the right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.)

Turning now from the industrialized minority to that vast majority inhabiting the underdeveloped countries, the immediate prospects are much less reassuring. Population in these countries is increasing by more than 20 million a year, and in Asia at least, according to the best recent estimates, the production of food per head is now ro percent less than it used to be in 19 3 8. In India the average diet provides about 2,000 calories a day—far below the optimum figure. If the country’s food production could be raised by 40 percent—and the experts believe that, given much effort and a very large capital investment, it could be increased to this extent within 15 or 20 years—the available food would provide the present population with 2,800 calories a day, a figure still below the optimum level. But 20 years from now the population of India will have increased by something like 100 million, and the additional food, produced with so much effort and at such great expense, will add little more than a hundred calories to the present woefully inadequate diet. And meanwhile it is not at all probable that a 40 percent increase in food production will in fact be achieved within the next 20 years.

The task of industrializing the underdeveloped countries, and of making them capable of producing enough food for their peoples, is difficult in the extreme. The industrialization of the West was made possible by a series of historical accidents. The inventions which launched the Industrial Revolution were made at precisely the right moment. Huge areas of empty land in America and Australasia were being opened up by European colonists or their descendants. A great surplus of cheap food became available, and it was upon this surplus that the peasants and farm laborers, who migrated to the towns and became factory hands, were enabled to live and multiply their kind. Today there are no empty lands —at any rate none that lend themselves to easy cultivation—and the over-all surplus of food is small in relation to present populations. If a million Asiatic peasants are taken off the land and set to work in factories, who will produce the food which their labor once provided? The obvious answer is: machines. But how can the million new factory workers make the necessary machines if, in the meanwhile, they are not fed? Until they make the machines, they cannot be fed from the land they once cultivated; and there are no surpluses of cheap food from other, emptier countries to support them in the interval.

And then there is the question of capital. “Science,” you often hear it said, “will solve all our problems.” Perhaps it will, perhaps it won't. But before science can start solving any practical problems, it must be applied in the form of usable technology. But to apply science on any large scale is extremely expensive. An underdeveloped country cannot be industrialized, or given an efficient agriculture, except by the investment of a very large amount of capital. But what is capital? It is what is left over when the primary needs of a society have been satisfied. In most of Asia the primary needs of most of the population are never satisfied; consequently almost nothing is left over. Indians can save about one-hundredth of their per capita income. Americans can save between one-tenth and one-sixth of what they make. Since the income of Americans is much higher than that of Indians, the amount of available capital in the United States is about seventy times as great as the amount of available capital in India. To those who have shall be given and from those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have. If the underdeveloped countries are to be industrialized, even partially, and made self-supporting in the matter of food, it will be necessary to establish a vast international Marshall Plan providing subsidies in grain, money, machinery, and trained manpower. But all these will be of no avail, if the population in the various underdeveloped areas is permitted to increase at anything like the present rate. Unless the population of Asia can be stabilized, all attempts at industrialization will be doomed to failure and the last state of all concerned will be far worse than the first—for there will be many more people for famine and pestilence to destroy, together with much more political discontent, bloodier revolutions, and more abominable tyrannies.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

5. John Wesley (1703-1791). English evangelist and founder of Methodism.

Censorship and Spoken Literature

PEACEFULLY COEXISTING, two forms of censorship are at work in the world today. In the totalitarian countries there is political censorship, deliberately enforced by the ruling oligarchy and its executive agencies. In the democratic countries there is no political censorship, except in regard to military secrets. Instead, we have economic censorship, which is being enforced, unintentionally and blindly, by the steady rise in the cost of producing books, plays, and films.

Under totalitarianism, purposeful censorship goes hand in hand with purposeful, one-directional propaganda. Facts, ideas, and attitudes, agreeable to the ruling oligarchy, are constantly harped upon and inculcated. Attitudes, ideas, and facts, of which the ruling oligarchy disapproves, are either condemned or, more often, ignored, as though they did not exist. In the molding of public opinion sustained, systematic silence is at least as effective as systematically reiterated speech.

Where the government is democratic, speech and silence, propaganda and censorship are not prescribed by any single will. They simply happen under the influence of economic pressures and as a diversity of conflicting wills and interests may decide. These conflicting wills and interests are of several kinds—philosophical, religious, political, and, above all, commercial. For every thousand words of printed or spoken commercial propaganda, we are treated to, possibly, one word of philosophical, ten of religious, and fifty to a hundred words of political propaganda. And not only does money speak; it also imposes silence. Philosophers have no power of direct censorship, and politicians not much, except in the military field. Clergymen, it is true, have been able to compel the manufacturers of mass entertainment (but, fortunately, not the producers of books and plays) to conform to a curious little code of religious respectability and sexual make-believe. But the great silencer, the muffler attached to every channel of intellectual and artistic expression, is money. No evil dictator has willed this censorship. It has come about automatically and by accident. But, though unintentional, it is nonetheless effective and nonetheless harmful. What is the nature of this economic censorship and what can we do about it?

Twenty years ago a sale of two thousand copies was enough to recoup an American publisher for the costs of producing a book. Above that point, he was making a profit. In the countries of Western Europe the break-even point was still lower, and publishers found themselves earning money after a sale of only fifteen or even twelve hundred copies. Today an American publisher cannot break even on a sale of less than about seven thousand copies. In Western Europe the critical figure is slightly lower, but still at least three times what it used to be before the Second World War. The price of books has, of course, been considerably increased in recent years. Whether it can be increased much further seems doubtful. People will cheerfully pay four or five times as much as they used to pay for a dinner at their favorite restaurant; but they will not pay more than about twice, or 2. 5 times, as much as they used to pay for a good book by their favorite author. Sales resistance begins at 200 percent of pre-war prices, but production costs stand at 300 percent. Profit can be made only when sales are substantial. Books are therefore subjected to an ever more rigorous ordeal of economic selection. It is becoming increasingly difficult for any work which lacks the obvious earmarks of popularity to get published.

An analogous situation exists in the theater and the motion-picture in-dustry. To stage the most modest play on Broadway costs about seventy thousand dollars, and from ten to twenty times that amount is needed for the production of a not very spectacular movie. Prices of admission have not risen proportionately to costs of production. If a profit is to be made, there must be longer runs and larger audiences than in the past. Whatever its intrinsic merit, the worst seller has no chance of being staged or screened, at any rate on Broadway or in Hollywood. In Western Europe the situation is better—but still bad enough to justify the gravest misgivings for the future.

The new economic censorship is directed, as we have seen, against any book unlikely to sell seven thousand copies or more, any play unlikely to fill a theater for at least three or four months, any movie unlikely to "pack them in" to the tune of several million.

The exponents of Communism and Moral Rearmament are agreed on one point—the primary importance of the theater as an instrument of propaganda. Behind the Iron Curtain ideologically correct plays are used as weapons in the Cold War, while, for their campaigns, the Moral Rearmers have a whole arsenal of Christian Oklahomas and ethical Cats on Hot Tin Roofs. Whether the drama is really as effective in molding opinion as Dr. Buchman and the Russians believe, it is hard indeed to say. Personally I doubt it. People go to the theater in order to have their emotions excited and, when the excitement has lasted long enough, cathartically appeased. The excitement and the appeasement make up a single self-contained experience, having little or no relevance to the non-emotional aspects of the spectator's life. Voltaire, for example, was the author of a number of tragedies, highly esteemed in their day; but it was by his pamphlets, his metaphysical treatises, his articles in the Encyclopedia that he left his mark on the world.

Whether deliberate or unintentional, censorship is always undesirable. There are, however, certain fields in which it does less damage than in others. As a medium for conveying important information and expounding significant ideas, the drama is not so effective as the essay, the treatise, or even the fictional narrative with digressions. Consequently the prevailing economic censorship of plays, movies, and television shows is not so serious a matter as the corresponding censorship of books and periodicals.

Economic censorship can be circumvented in a number of ways. The simplest and most obvious method is the granting of a subsidy. The subsidy may be provided by the author—if he is rich enough. Or by the publishers—if they care sufficiently for worst-selling artistic merit or unpopular notions, and if they have had enough luck with the Book Clubs or possess a large enough captive audience for their text-books to be able to implement their good intentions. Alternatively the subsidy may come from some Foundation, whose directors regard it as part of their duty to encourage literary experimentation and the dissemination of unpopular ideas. Finally the money may, conceivably, be put up by a commercial sponsor, who is ready to take the risk of having his advertisements associated with an obscure, unorthodox, and worst-selling piece of literature. As a general rule, of course, commercial sponsorship is forthcoming only for the work which has the least need of it. To those who have popularity shall be given the princely largess of the advertising agencies. From those who have it not shall be taken away all hope of ever getting published.

At the present time most of the serious monthlies and quarterlies of the democratic West are subsidized. The censorship imposed by rising costs is so effective that if there were no "angels," there would be no worst-selling literature to leaven the enormous lump of intellectual and artistic conformity. But angelic intervention on the part of rich individuals or foundations offers only a partial and not entirely satisfactory solution to the problem of economic censorship. It would be far better for all concerned if the business of publishing could be made self-supporting, or at least as nearly self-supporting as it used to be in the not-too-distant past. The problem here is primarily a technical one. How can books be produced so cheaply as to warrant the publication of a worst seller?

Typesetting, even in its most highly mechanized form, is a slow and very costly procedure. Some day, it may be, a much cheaper photographic alternative to typesetting may be developed. At present the available alternatives are almost as expensive as typesetting and their general adoption would help hardly at all to solve the problems of economic censorship.

But if publishers can no longer afford to manufacture and distribute worst sellers, why shouldn't the job be done by the authors? In the Middle Ages an author had no choice in the matter; he had to be his own publisher. Petrarch and Boccaccio, for example, made manuscript copies of their own writings and even found time, between books, to make copies of works by classical authors. Thanks to the typewriter and the duplicating machine, a writer can now quite easily make hundreds of copies of his book. From carpentry, plumbing, and electronics, the "do it yourself" movement is bound to pass, as the economic censorship becomes more and more rigorous, to book production and publishing. School magazines and the journals of small, impecunious scientific associations are already being published in this "do it yourself" way. Within a few years we may expect to see co-operative societies of unpopular authors, mimeographing their works and selling them by mail to the select few who take an interest in artistic experimentation and are not afraid of "dangerous thoughts."

Modern technology has resuscitated the author-scribe. Carrying us a stage further back in the history of culture, it is now in process of rescuing from oblivion the Homeric author-bard and the wandering minstrel of the Middle Ages. Members of these now-extinct species were to be met with, in the English countryside, as late as the seventeenth century. "When I was a boy," writes John Aubrey, who was born in 1625, "every Gentleman almost kept a Harper in his house." Harpers made a certain amount of music; but their main function was to intone from memory those interminable ballads, in which the most striking events of remote and recent history had been recorded, sometimes by the harpers themselves— for "some of them," Aubrey tells us, "could versify." In Catholic monasteries there were no harpers; but at every meal one of the brethren read aloud something edifying from the Lives of the Saints or the works of the Church Fathers.

The modern hostess would do well to take a tip from St. Benedict. How pleasant even the most drearily uncongenial dinner party would be if we could cut out the small talk and listen to a reading from some intelligent book! And this, precisely, is what modern technology has made physically possible and what its further advance will make economically feasible to an ever-increasing extent. For the blind, there exists already a whole library of talking books, which can be played on a phonograph. These talking books are not available to members of the general public, who must be content with the score or two of readings listed, at exorbitantly high prices, in the record catalogues. If the Homeric bard is to be called back to life, if the minstrel and the monastic lector are to be restored to the position they should never have lost, we must find a way of selling the spoken word at a cheaper rate. Technically the problem can be solved without the slightest difficulty. It is merely a matter of reducing the speed at which records are made to revolve. At least one company manufactures phonographs with turntables which can be run at half the speed of the conventional record player. And this is not the lowest speed at which the speaking voice can be adequately reproduced. With a good needle one can get satisfactory speech recording at eight or even six revolutions a minute. At this rate it would be possible to make a pressing of a fair-sized book on two twelve-inch records.

In time, no doubt, tape recorders and the actual tapes themselves will be drastically cheapened. For the moment, however, it looks as though we must depend on the vinylite record and the slow-speed phonograph for any large-scale revival of spoken literature.

But why, it may be asked, should we wish to revive spoken literature? There are a number of sound reasons. First of all, it may soon come to be actually cheaper to publish a book on a slow-playing record than to publish it in a printed volume. The cost of making the matrices, from which two slow-playing records can be pressed, is far lower than the cost of setting up a sixty-thousand-word book and making the plates from which it will be printed. When the technicians have done the job required of them, worstselling authors will have a way of defying the economic censorship on their works.

And this is not the only, nor even perhaps the most important, reason for desiring a revival of spoken literature. In this universally educated population vast numbers never read, or read only the most rudimentary kinds of sub-literature and Neanderthal journalism. Many of these illiterates are the victims of a theory of education, which has carried a praiseworthy concern with synthesis and wholeness to the grotesque point, where it is regarded as improper to teach a child how to analyze a word into its constituent letters. The result, as Mr. Rudolf Flesch has pointed out in his lively book, Why Johnny Can't Read, is that thousands upon thousands of boys and girls spend ten years at school without fully mastering an art which, under the old analytical methods of teaching, was in most cases perfectly well understood by the age of five or six. To the hosts of nonreaders and poor readers must be added all the radio and television addicts who have never acquired the habit of reading and whose reaction to a book in a hard cover is one of mistrust and a kind of fear. Seeing it, they know, without further investigation, that it is not for them—that if they tried to read it, they would understand nothing and be bored to death. But it can be shown experimentally that, if you can get these nonreaders, poor readers, or reluctant readers to listen to someone else reading aloud from a book which they themselves would never dream of opening, many of them will not only understand what is being read, but will become passionately interested in it.

Ours is a world in which knowledge accumulates and wisdom decays. Inevitably so; for advancing science and technology require the services of specialists, to each of whom is assigned the job (and it is a whole-time, a more than whole-time job) of mastering the intricacies of his particular field and keeping up with the changes in theory and practice brought about by scientific discovery and technical invention. That such specialists may and often do become highly trained barbarians has been, for some years past, the growing concern of educators. To civilize our future physicists and chemists and engineers, our doctors to be, our lawyers and actuaries and managers in the bud, the heads of most universities and technical schools have insisted that specialist training be accompanied and preceded by a course in the humanities. The intentions here are excellent; but what are the results? Not, I would guess from casual observation, entirely satisfactory. And the reason, it seems to me, is that the humanities, insofar as they are genuinely humane, do not lend themselves to being taught with an eye to future examinations and the accumulation of credits. If specialists are to be civilized—and it is imperative that they should be civilized, and civilized, what is more, on every level of the hierarchy, from garage mechanic up to atomic physicist—something less formal, less formidable, and, above all, less silly than credit-gaining courses in insight, evaluation, and life-wisdom should be offered. If marks are to be given, a great deal of time will have to be wasted on the question, so dear to pedants, but so totally beside the point: Who influenced whom to say what when? Whereas the only question that really matters, the only question whose correct answer can exert a civilizing influence on the future specialist, is the question asked by Buddha and Jesus, by Lao-tsu and Socrates, by Job and Aeschylus, and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, by every philosopher, every mystic, every great artist: Who am I and what, if anything, can I do about it? Implicitly, this question is asked and answered (needless to say, incorrectly) by those anonymous writers of advertising copy whose words are read and listened to more frequently and by greater numbers of people than the words of any saint or sage, any sacred book or divine revelation. The problem which confronts the educator can be summed up in a few sentences. Shall we allow the advertisers in the democratic countries and the ruling oligarchies under totalitarianism to enjoy a monopoly in formulating the popular philosophy of life? Shall we, in the higher ranks of the specialists' hierarchy, allow the unrealistic "Nothing-But" philosophies, now fashionable in scientific circles to pass unquestioned? And, if the answer is "No," is there any better way of imparting the immemorial wisdom of mankind than the current method of offering credit-gaining courses in the humanities? To this last and most practical question, my own answer would be that there is such a way. Let there be lectures of orientation within the field of the humanities; but rely for your civilizing influence on a constant and informal exposure of the pupil to the actual utterances of those men and women of the past who have had the greatest insight and the greatest power of expressing that insight. This constant and informal exposure to wisdom is most effective when the words of wisdom are spoken, not read. Except by very few, very recent writers, poetry has always been composed in order to be recited or read aloud. And the same is true of what we may call the literature of wisdom. Most of the saints and sages have taught by word of mouth; and even when they committed them to paper, their words (as anyone can discover for himself) are more effective, have a greater degree of penetrative force, when they are heard than when they are seen on the printed page. And this is true, I believe, not only of sacred and devotional writings, but also of secular wisdom. Listen to the reading aloud of an essay by Bacon or Emerson, by Hume or Bagehot or Russell or Santayana; you will find yourself getting more out of it than you got when you read it to yourself—particularly if you were compelled to read it under the threat of not getting a credit. Printed, the Hundred Great Books are apt to remain unopened on the library shelves. Recorded (in part— for heaven forbid that anyone should waste his voice on recording them all, or recording each one in its entirety), they can be listened to painlessly—at meals, while washing up, as a substitute for the evening paper, in bed on a Sunday morning—and with a degree of understanding, of sympathy, and acceptance rarely evoked in the average reader by the printed page. To any Foundation in any way interested in the problems which beset an urban-industrial society in a state of technological, intellectual, and ethical flux, I would make the following recommendations. Make the best of mankind's literature of wisdom available on cheap, slow-playing records. Do the same, in each of the principal languages, for the best poetry written in that language. Also, perhaps, for a few of the best novels, plays, biographies, and memoirs. Encourage manufacturers to turn out phonographs equipped to play these recordings and at the same time arrange for distribution at cost of the simple planetary gears, by means of which conventional turntables can be used for slow-playing disks. Five or ten million spent in this way would do incomparably more good than hundreds of millions spent on endowing new universities or enlarging those that already exist.

[Esquire, October 1955]

Hyperion to a Satyr

A few months before the outbreak of the Second World War I took a walk with Thomas Mann on a beach some fifteen or twenty miles southwest of Los Angeles. Between the breakers and the highway stretched a broad belt of sand, smooth, gently sloping, and (blissful surprise!) void of all life but that of the pelicans and godwits. Gone was the congestion of Santa Monica and Venice. Hardly a house was to be seen; there were no children, no promenading loincloths and brassieres, not a single sun-bather was practicing his strange obsessive cult. Miraculously, we were alone. Talking of Shakespeare and the musical glasses, the great man and I strolled ahead. The ladies followed. It was they, more observant than their all too literary spouses, who first remarked the truly astounding phenomenon. "Wait," they called, "wait!" And when they had come up with us, they silently pointed. At our feet, and as far as the eye could reach in all directions, the sand was covered with small whitish objects, like dead caterpillars. Recognition dawned. The dead caterpillars were made of rubber and had once been contraceptives of the kind so eloquently characterized by Mantegazza- "una tela di ragno contra I'infezione, una corazza contra ilpiacere" (a spider's web against infection, armor against pleasure).

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle in the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance..⁷

Ten thousand? But we were in California, not the Lake District. The scale was American, the figures astronomical. Ten million saw I at a glance. Ten million emblems and mementoes of Modern Love.

O bitter barren woman! what's the name,

The name, the name, the new name thou hast won?

And the old name, the name of the bitter fertile woman—what was that? These are questions that can only be asked and talked about, never answered in any but the most broadly misleading way. Generalizing about Woman is like indicting a Nation—an amusing pastime, but very unlikely to be productive either of truth or utility.

Meanwhile, there was another, a simpler and more concrete question: How on earth had these objects got here, and why in such orgiastic profusion? Still speculating, we resumed our walk. A moment later our noses gave us the unpleasant answer. Offshore from this noble beach was the outfall through which Los Angeles discharged, raw and untreated, the contents of its sewers. The emblems of modern love and the other things had come in with the spring tide. Hence that miraculous solitude. We turned and made all speed towards the parked car.

Since that memorable walk was taken, fifteen years have passed. Inland from the beach, three or four large cities have leapt into existence. The bean fields and Japanese truck gardens of those ancient days are now covered with houses, drugstores, supermarkets, drive-in theaters, junior colleges, jet plane factories, Laundromats, six-lane highways. But instead of being, as one would expect, even more thickly constellated with Malthusian flotsam and unspeakable jetsam, the sands are now clean, the quarantine has been lifted. Children dig, well-basted sun-bathers slowly brown, there is splashing and shouting in the surf. A happy consummation—but one has seen this sort of thing before. The novelty lies, not in the pleasantly commonplace end—people enjoying themselves—but in the fantastically ingenious means whereby that end has been brought about.

Forty feet above the beach, in a seventy-five-acre oasis scooped out of the sand dunes, stands one of the marvels of modern technology, the Hyperion Activated Sludge Plant. But before we start to discuss the merits of activated sludge, let us take a little time to consider sludge in its unactivated state, as plain, old-fashioned dirt.

Dirt, with all its concomitant odors and insects, was once accepted as an unalterable element in the divinely established Order of Things. In his youth, before he went into power politics as Innocent III, Lotario de' Conti found time to write a book on the Wretchedness of Man's Condition. "How filthy the father," he mused, "how low the mother, how repulsive the sister!" And no wonder! For "dead, human beings give birth to flies and worms; alive, they generate worms and lice." Moreover, "consider the plants, consider the trees. They bring forth flowers and leaves and fruits: But what do you bring forth? Nits, lice, vermin. Trees and plants exude oil, wine, balm and you, spittle, snot, urine, ordure. They diffuse the sweetness of all fragrance—you, the most abominable stink." In the Age of Faith, homo sapiens was also homo pediculosus, also homo immundus—a little lower than the angels, but dirty by definition, lousy, not per accidens, but in his very essence. And as for man's helpmate—Si nee extremis digitis flegma vel stercus tangere patimur, quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desideramus? "We who shrink from touching, even with the tips of our fingers, a gob of phlegm or a lump of dung, how is it that we crave for the embraces of this mere bag of night-soil?" But men's eyes are not, as Odo of Cluny wished they were, "like those of the lynxes of Boeotia"; they cannot see through the smooth and milky surfaces into the palpitating sewage within. That is why

There swims no goose so grey but soon or late Some honest gander takes her for his mate.-

That is why (to translate the notion into the language of medieval orthodoxy), every muck bag ends by getting herself embraced—with the result that yet another stinker-with-a-soul finds himself embarked on a sea of misery, bound for a port which, since few indeed can hope for salvation, is practically certain to be Hell. The embryo of this future reprobate is composed of "foulest seed," combined with "blood made putrid by the heat of lust." And as though to make it quite clear what He thinks of the whole proceeding, God has decreed that "the mother shall conceive in stink and nastiness."

That there might be a remedy for stink and nastiness—namely soap and water was a notion almost unthinkable in the thirteenth century. In the first place, there was hardly any soap. The substance was known to Pliny, as an import from Gaul and Germany. But more than a thousand years later, when Lotario de' Conti wrote his book, the burgesses of Marseilles were only just beginning to consider the possibility of manufacturing the stuff in bulk. In England no soap was made commercially until halfway through the fourteenth century. Moreover, even if soap had been abundant, its use for mitigating the "stink and nastiness," then inseparable from love, would have seemed, to every right-thinking theologian, an entirely illegitimate, because merely physical, solution to a problem in ontology and morals—an escape, by means of the most vulgarly materialistic trick, from a situation which God Himself had intended, from all eternity, to be as squalid as it was sinful. A conception without stink and nastiness would have the appearance—what a blasphemy!—of being Immaculate. And finally there was the virtue of modesty. Modesty, in that age of codes and pigeon holes, had its Queensberry Rules—no washing below the belt. Sinful in itself, such an offense against modesty in the present was fraught with all kinds of perils for modesty in the future. Havelock Ellis observed, when he was practicing obstetrics in the London slums, that modesty was due, in large measure, to a fear of being disgusting. When his patients realized that "I found nothing disgusting in whatever was proper and necessary to be done under the circumstances, it almost invariably happened that every sign of modesty at once disappeared": Abolish "stink and nastiness"; and you abolish one of the most important sources of feminine modesty, along with one of the most richly rewarding themes of pulpit eloquence.

A contemporary poet has urged his readers not to make love to those who wash too much. There is, of course, no accounting for tastes; but there is an accounting for philosophical opinions. Among many other things, the greatly gifted Mr. Auden is a belated representative of the school which held that sex, being metaphysically tainted, ought also to be physically unclean.

Dirt, then, seemed natural and proper, and dirt in fact was everywhere. But, strangely enough, this all-pervading squalor never generated its own psychological antidote—the complete indifference of habit. Everybody stank, everybody was verminous; and yet, in each successive generation, there were many who never got used to these familiar facts. What has changed in the course of history is not the disgusted reaction to filth, but the moral to be drawn from that reaction. "Filth," say the men of the twentieth century, "is disgusting. Therefore let us quickly do something to get rid of filth." For many of our ancestors, filth was as abhorrent as it seems to almost all of us. But how different was the moral they chose to drawl. "Filth is disgusting," they said. "Therefore the human beings who produce the filth are disgusting, and the world they inhabit is a vale, not merely of tears, but of excrement. This state of things has been divinely ordained, and all we can do is cheerfully to bear our vermin, loathe our nauseating carcasses, and hope (without much reason, since we shall probably be damned) for an early translation to a better place. Meanwhile it is an observable fact that villeins are filthier even than lords. It follows, therefore, that they should be treated as badly as they smell." This loathing for the poor on account of the squalor in which they were condemned to live outlasted the Middle Ages and has persisted to the present day.

The politics of Shakespeare's aristocratic heroes and heroines are the politics of disgust. "Footboys" and other members of the lower orders are contemptible because they are lousy—not in the metaphorical sense in which that word is now used, but literally; for the louse, in Sir Hugh Evans's words, "is a familiar beast to man, and signifies love." And the lousy were also the smelly. Their clothes were old and unclean, their bodies sweaty, their mouths horrible with decay.

It made no difference that, in the words of a great Victorian reformer, "by no prudence on their part can the poor avoid the dreadful evil of their surroundings." They were disgusting and that, for the aristocratic politician, was enough. To canvass the common people's suffrages was merely to "beg their stinking breath." Candidates for elective office were men who "stand upon the breath of garlic eaters." When the citizens of Rome voted against him, Coriolanus told them that they were creatures,

whose breath I hate

As reek o' th' rotten fens, whose loves I prize

As the dead carcasses of unburied men, That do corrupt my air.-

And, addressing these same citizens, "You are they," says Menenius,

You are they

That made the air unwholesome when you cast

Your stinking greasy caps in hooting at

Coriolanus' exile.¹

Again, when Caesar was offered the crown, "the rabblement shouted and clapped their chopped hands, and threw up their sweaty night-caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath, because Caesar had refused the crown, that it had almost choked Caesar; for he swounded and fell down at it; and for mine own part," adds Casca, "I durst not laugh for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air." The same "mechanic slaves, with greasy aprons" haunted Cleopatra’s imagination in her last hours.

In their thick breaths,

Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded,

And forced to drink their vapours.-

In the course of evolution man is supposed to have sacrificed the greater part of his olfactory center to his cortex, his sense of smell to his intelligence. Nevertheless, it remains a fact that in politics, no less than in love and social relations, smell judgments continue to play a major role. In the passages cited above, as in all the analogous passages penned or uttered since the days of Shakespeare, there is the implication of an argument, which can be formulated in some such terms as these. "Physical stink is a symbol, almost a symptom, of intellectual and moral inferiority. All the members of a certain group stink physically. Therefore, they are intellectually and morally vile, inferior, and, as such, unfit to be treated as equals." Tolstoy, who was sufficiently clear-sighted to recognize the undesirable political consequences of cleanliness in high places and dirt among the poor, was also sufficiently courageous to advocate, as a remedy, a general retreat from the bath. Bathing, he saw, was a badge of class distinction, a prime cause of aristocratic exclusiveness. For those who, in Mr. Auden's words, "wash too much," find it exceedingly distasteful to associate with those who wash too little. In a society where, let us say, only one in five can afford the luxury of being clean and sweet-smelling, Christian brotherhood will be all but impossible. Therefore, Tolstoy argued, the bathers should join the unwashed majority. Only where there is equality in dirt can there be a genuine and unforced fraternity.

Mahatma Gandhi, who was much more realistic than his Russian mentor, chose a different solution to the problem of differential cleanliness.

Instead of urging the bathers to stop washing, he worked indefatigably to help the non-bathers to keep clean. Brotherhood was to be achieved, not by universalizing dirt, vermin, and bad smells, but by building privies and scrubbing floors.

Spengler, Sorokin, Toynbee-—all the philosophical historians and sociologists of our time have insisted that a stable civilization cannot be built except on the foundations of religion. But if man cannot live by bread alone, neither can he live exclusively on metaphysics and worship. The gulf between theory and practice, between the ideal and the real, cannot be bridged by religion alone. In Christendom, for example, the doctrines of God’s fatherhood and the brotherhood of man have never been selfimplementing. Monotheism has proved to be powerless against the divisive forces first of feudalism and then of nationalistic idolatry. And within these mutually antagonistic groups, the injunction to love one's neighbor as oneself has proved to be as ineffective, century after century, as the commandment to worship one God.

A century ago the prophets who formulated the theories of the Manchester School were convinced that commerce, industrialization, and improved communications were destined to be the means whereby the age-old doctrines of monotheism and human brotherhood would at last be implemented. Alas, they were mistaken. Instead of abolishing national rivalries, industrialization greatly intensified them. With the march of technological progress, wars became bloodier and incomparably more ruinous. Instead of uniting nation with nation, improved communications merely extended the range of collective hatreds and military operations. That human beings will, in the near future, voluntarily give up their nationalistic idolatry, seems, in these middle years of the twentieth century, exceedingly unlikely. Nor can one see, from this present vantage point, any technological development capable, by the mere fact of being in existence, of serving as an instrument for realizing those religious ideals, which hitherto mankind has only talked about. Our best consolation lies in Mr. Micawber's hope that, sooner or later, "Something Will Turn Up."

In regard to brotherly love within the mutually antagonistic groups, something has turned up. That something is the development, in many different fields, of techniques for keeping clean at a cost so low that practically everybody can afford the luxury of not being disgusting.

For creatures which, like most of the carnivores, make their home in a den or burrow, there is a biological advantage in elementary cleanliness. To relieve nature in one's bed is apt, in the long run, to be unwholesome. Unlike the carnivores, the primates are under no evolutionary compulsion to practice the discipline of the sphincters. For these free-roaming nomads of the woods, one tree is as good as another and every moment is equally propitious. It is easy to house-train a cat or a dog, all but impossible to teach the same desirable habits to a monkey. By blood we are a good deal closer to poor Jocko than to Puss or Tray. Man's instincts were developed in the forest; but ever since the dawn of civilization, his life has been lived in the more elaborate equivalent of a rabbit warren. His notions of sanitation were not, like those of the cat, inborn, but had to be painfully acquired. In a sense the older theologians were quite right in regarding dirt as natural to man—an essential element in the divinely appointed order of his existence.

But in spite of its unnaturalness, the art of living together without turning the city into a dunghill has been repeatedly discovered. Mohenjo-daro, at the beginning of the third millennium B.c., had a waterborne sewage system; so, several centuries before the siege of Troy, did Cnossos; so did many of the cities of ancient Egypt, albeit only for the rich. The poor were left to demonstrate their intrinsic inferiority by stinking, in their slums, to high heaven. A thousand years later Rome drained her swamps and conveyed her filth to the contaminated Tiber by means of the Cloaca Maxima. But these solutions to the problem of what we may politely call ’'unactivated sludge" were exceptional. The Hindus preferred to condemn a tithe of their population to untouchability and the daily chore of carrying slops. In China the thrifty householder tanked the family sludge and sold it, when mature, to the highest bidder. There was a smell, but it paid, and the fields recovered some of the phosphorus and nitrogen of which the harvesters had robbed them. In medieval Europe every alley was a public lavatory, every window a sink and garbage chute. Droves of pigs were dedicated to St. Anthony and, with bells round their necks roamed the streets, battening on the muck. (When operating at night, burglars and assassins often wore bells. Their victims heard the reassuring tinkle, turned over in their beds, and went to sleep again—it was only the blessed pigs.) And meanwhile there were cesspools (like the black hole into which that patriotic Franciscan, Brother Salimbene, deliberately dropped his relic of St. Dominic), there was portable plumbing, there were members of the lower orders, whose duty it was to pick up the unactivated sludge and deposit it outside the city limits. But always the sludge accumulated faster than it could be removed. The filth was chronic and, in the slummier quarters, appalling. It remained appalling until well into the nineteenth century. As late as the early years of Queen Victoria's reign sanitation in the East End of London consisted in dumping everything into the stagnant pools that still stood between the jerry-built houses. From the peak of their superior (but still very imperfect) cleanliness the middle and upper classes looked down with unmitigated horror at the Great Unwashed. "The Poor" were written and spoken about as though they were creatures of an entirely different species. And no wonder! Nineteenth-century England was loud with Non-Conformist and Tractarian piety; but in a society most of whose members stank and were unclean the practice of brotherly love was out of the question. The first modern sewage systems, like those of Egypt before them, were reserved for the rich and had the effect of widening still further the gulf between rulers and ruled. But endemic typhus and several dangerous outbreaks of Asiatic cholera lent weight to the warnings and denunciations of the sanitary reformers. In self-defense the rich had to do something about the filth in which their less fortunate neighbors were condemned to live. Sewage Systems were extended to cover entire metropolitan areas. The result was merely to transfer the sludge problem from one place to another. "The Thames," reported a Select Committee of 1836, "receives the excrementitious matter from nearly a million and a half of human beings; the washing of their foul linen; the filth and refuse of many hundred manufactories; the offal and decomposing vegetable substances from the markets; the foul and gory liquid from the slaughterhouses; and the purulent abominations from hospitals and dissecting rooms, too disgusting to detail. Thus that most noble river, which has been given us by Providence for our health, recreation and beneficial use, is converted into the Common sewer of London, and the sickening mixture it contains is daily pumped up into the water for the inhabitants of the most civilized capital of Europe."

In England the heroes of the long campaign for sanitation were a strangely assorted band. There was a bishop, Blomfield of London; there was the radical Edwin Chadwick, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham; there was a physician, Dr. Southwood Smith; there was a low-church man of letters, Charles Kingsley; and there was the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury,- an aris tocrat who had troubled to acquaint himself with the facts of working-class life. Against them were marshaled the confederate forces of superstition, vested interest, and brute inertia. It was a hard fight; but the cholera was a staunch ally, and by the end of the century the worst of the mess had been cleared up, even in the slums. Writing in 1896, Lecky- called it "the greatest achievement of our age." In the historian's estimation, the sanitary reformers had done more for general happiness and the alleviation of human misery than all the more spectacular figures of the long reign put together. Their labors, moreover, were destined to bear momentous fruit. When Lecky wrote, upper-class noses could still find plenty of occasions for passing olfactory judgments on the majority. But not nearly so many as in the past. The stage was already set for the drama which is being played today—the drama whose theme is the transformation of the English caste system into an equalitarian society. Without Chadwick and his sewers, there might have been violent revolution, never that leveling by democratic process, that gradual abolition of untouchability, which are in fact taking place.

Hyperion—what joy the place would have brought to those passionately prosaic lovers of humanity, Chadwick and Bentham! And the association of the hallowed name with sewage, of sludge with the great god of light and beauty—what romantic furies it would have evoked in Keats and Blake! And Lotario de' Conti—how thunderously, in the name of religion, he would have denounced this presumptuous demonstration that homo immundus can effectively modify the abjection of his predestined condition! And Dean Swift, above all—how deeply the spectacle would have disturbed him! For, if Celia could relieve nature without turning her lover’s bowels, if Yahoos, footmen, and even ladies of quality did not have to stink, then, obviously, his occupation was gone and his neurosis would be compelled to express itself in some other, some less satisfactory, because less excruciating, way.

An underground river rushes into Hyperion. Its purity of 99.7 percent exceeds that of Ivory Soap. But 200 million gallons is a lot of water, and the three thousandth part of that daily quota represents a formidable quantity of muck. But happily the ratio between muck and muckrakers remains constant. As the fecal tonnage rises, so does the population of aerobic and anaerobic bacteria. Busier than bees and infinitely more numerous, they work unceasingly on our behalf. First to attack the problem are the aerobes. The chemical revolution begins in a series of huge shallow pools, whose surface is perpetually foamy with the suds of Surf, Tide, Dreft, and all the other monosyllables that have come to take the place of soap. For the sanitary engineers, these new detergents are a major problem. Soap turns very easily into something else; but the monosyllables remain intractably themselves, frothing so violently that it has become necessary to spray the surface of the aerobes' pools with overhead sprinklers. Only in this way can the suds be prevented from rising like the foam on a mug of beer and being blown about the countryside. And this is not the only price that must be paid for easier dishwashing. The

detergents are greedy for oxygen. Mechanically and chemically, they prevent the aerobes from getting all the air they require. Enormous compressors must be kept working night and day to supply the needs of the suffocating bacteria. A cubic foot of compressed air to every cubic foot of sludgy liquid. What will happen when Zoom, Bang, and Whiz come to replace the relatively mild monosyllables of today, nobody, in the sanitation business, cares to speculate.

When, with the assistance of the compressors, the aerobes have done all they are capable of doing, the sludge, now thickly concentrated, is pumped into the Digestion System. To the superficial glance, the Digestion System looks remarkably like eighteen very large Etruscan mausoleums. In fact it consists of a battery of cylindrical tanks, each more than a hundred feet in diameter and sunk fifty feet into the ground. Within these huge cylinders, steam pipes maintain a cherishing heat of ninety-five degrees —the temperature at which the anaerobes are able to do their work with maximum efficiency. From something hideous and pestilential the sludge is gradually transformed by these most faithful of allies into sweetness and light—light in the form of methane, which fuels nine supercharged Diesel engines, each of seventeen hundred horsepower, and sweetness in the form of an odorless solid which, when dried, pelleted, and sacked, sells to farmers at ten dollars a ton. The exhaust of the Diesels raises the steam which heats the Digestion System, and their power is geared either to electric generators or centrifugal blowers. The electricity works the pumps and the machinery of the fertilizer plant, the blowers supply the aerobes with oxygen. Nothing is wasted. Even the emblems of modern love contribute their quota of hydrocarbons to the finished products, gaseous and solid. And meanwhile another torrent, this time about 99.95 percent pure, rushes down through the submarine outfall and mingles, a mile offshore, with the Pacific. The problem of keeping a great city clean without polluting a river or fouling the beaches, and without robbing the soil of its fertility, has been triumphantly solved.

But untouchability depends on other things besides the bad sanitation of slums. We live not merely in our houses, but even more continuously in our garments. And we live not exclusively in health, but very often in sickness. Where sickness rages unchecked and where people cannot afford to buy new clothes or keep their old ones clean, the occasions for being disgusting are innumerable.

Thersites, in Troilus and Cressida, lists a few of the commoner ailments of Shakespeare’s time: "the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, loads o' gravel i¹ the back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheezing lungs, bladders full of imposthume, sciaticas, limekilns i' the palm, incurable bone-ache, and the rivelled feesimple of the tetter." And there were scores of others even more repulsive. Crawling, flying, hopping, the insect carriers of infection swarmed uncontrollably. Malaria was endemic, typhus never absent, bubonic plague a regular visitor, dysentery, without benefit of plumbing, a commonplace. And meanwhile, in an environment that was uniformly septic, everything that could suppurate did suppurate. The Cook, in Chaucer's "Prologue," had a "mormal," or gangrenous sore, on his shin. The Summoner's face was covered with the "whelkes" and "knobbes" of a skin disease that would not yield to any known remedy. Every cancer was inoperable, and gnawed its way, through a hideous chaos of cellular proliferation and breakdown, to its foregone conclusion. The unmitigated horror surrounding illness explains the admiration felt, throughout the Middle Ages and early modern times, for those heroes and heroines of charity who voluntarily undertook the care of the sick. It explains, too, certain actions of the saints—actions which, in the context of modern life, seem utterly incomprehensible. In their filth and wretchedness, the sick were unspeakably repulsive. This dreadful fact was a challenge to which those who took their Christianity seriously responded by such exploits as the embracing of lepers, the kissing of sores, the swallowing of pus. The modern response to this challenge is soap and water, with complete asepsis as the ultimate ideal. The great gulf of disgust which used to separate the sick and the chronically ailing from their healthier fellows, has been, not indeed completely abolished, but narrowed everywhere and, in many places, effectively bridged. Thanks to hygiene, many who, because of their afflictions, used to be beyond the pale of love or even pity, have been readmitted into the human fellowship. An ancient religious ideal has been implemented, at least in part, by the development of merely material techniques for dealing with problems previously soluble (and then how very inadequately, so far as the sick themselves were concerned!) only by saints.

"The essential act of thought is symbolization." Our minds transform experiences into signs. If these signs adequately represent the experiences to which they refer, and if we are careful to manipulate them according to the rules of a many-valued logic, we can deepen our understanding of experience and thereby achieve some control of the world and our own destiny. But these conditions are rarely fulfilled. In all too many of the affairs of life we combine ill-chosen signs in all kinds of irrational ways, and are thus led to unrealistic conclusions and inappropriate acts.

There is nothing in experience which cannot be transformed by the mind into a symbol—nothing which cannot be made to signify something else. We have seen, for example, that bad smells may be made to stand for social inferiority, dirt for a low IQ, vermin for immorality, sickness for a status beneath the human. No less important than these purely physiological symbols are the signs derived, not from the body itself, but from its coverings. A man's clothes are his most immediately perceptible attribute. Stinking rags or clean linen, liveries, uniforms, canonicals, the latest fashions—these are the symbols in terms of which men and women have thought about the relations of class with class, of person with person. In the Institutions of Athens, written by an anonymous author of the fifth century B.c., we read that it was illegal in Athens to assault a slave even when he refused to make way for you in the street. "The reason why this is the local custom shall be explained. If it were legal for the slave to be struck by the free citizen, your Athenian citizen himself would always be getting assaulted through being mistaken for a slave. Members of the free proletariat of Athens are no better dressed than slaves or aliens and no more respectable in appearance." But Athens—a democratic city state with a majority of "poor whites"—was exceptional. In almost every other society the wearing of cheap and dirty clothes has been regarded (such is the power of symbols) as the equivalent of a moral lapse—a lapse for which the wearers deserved to be ostracized by all decent people. In Les Precieuses Ridiculesthe high-flown heroines take two footmen, dressed up in their masters' clothes, for marquises. The comedy comes to its climax when the pretenders are stripped of their symbolic finery and the girls discover the ghastly truth. Et eripitur persona, manet res—or, to be more precise, manet altera persona. The mask is torn off and there remains—what? Another mask—the footman's.

In eighteenth-century England the producers of woolens were able to secure legislation prohibiting the import of cotton prints from the Orient and imposing an excise duty, not repealed until 1832, on the domestic product. But in spite of this systematic discouragement, the new industry prospered— inevitably; for it met a need, it supplied a vast and growing demand. Wool could not be cleaned, cotton was washable. For the first time in the history of Western Europe it began to be possible for all but the poorest women to look clean. The revolution then begun is still in progress. Garments of cotton and the new synthetic fibers have largely abolished the ragged and greasy symbols of earlier class distinctions. And meanwhile, for such fabrics as cannot be washed, the chemical industry has invented a host of new detergents and solvents. In the past, grease spots were a problem for which there was no solution. Proletarian garments were darkly shiny with accumulated fats and oils, and even the merchant's broadcloth, even the velvets and satins of lords and ladies displayed the ineradicable traces of last year's candle droppings, of yesterday's gravy. Dry cleaning is a modern art, a little younger than railway travel, a little older than the first Atlantic cable.

In recent years, and above all in America, the revolution in clothing has entered a new phase. As well as cleanliness, elegance is being placed within the reach of practically everyone. Cheap clothes are mass-produced from patterns created by the most expensive designers. Unfashionableness was once a stigma hardly less damning, as a symbol of inferiority, than dirt. Fifty years ago a girl who wore cheap clothes proclaimed herself, by their obvious dowdiness, to be a person whom it was all but out of the question, if one were well off, to marry. Misalliance is still deplored; but, thanks to Sears and Ohrbach, it seems appreciably less dreadful than it did to our fathers.

Sewage systems and dry cleaning, hygiene and washable fabrics, DDT and penicillin—the catalogue represents a series of technological victories over two great enemies: dirt and that system of untouchability, that unbrotherly contempt, to which, in the past, dirt has given rise.

It is, alas, hardly necessary to add that these victories are in no sense definitive or secure. All we can say is that, in certain highly industrialized countries, technological advances have led to the disappearance of some of the immemorial symbols of class distinction. But this does not guarantee us against the creation of new symbols no less compulsive in their anti-democratic tendencies than the old. A man may be clean; but if, in a dictatorial state, he lacks a party card, he figuratively stinks and must be treated as an inferior at the best and, at the worst, an untouchable.

In the nominally Christian past two irreconcilable sets of symbols bedeviled the Western mind—the symbols, inside the churches, of God's fatherhood and the brotherhood of man; and the symbols, outside, of class distinction, mammon worship and dynastic, provincial, or national idolatry. In the totalitarian future—and if we go on fighting wars, the future of the West is bound to be totalitarian—the time-hallowed symbols of monotheism and brotherhood will doubtless be preserved. God will be One and men will all be His children, but in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Actually there will be slaves and masters, and the slaves will be taught to worship a parochial Trinity of Nation, Party, and Political Boss. Samuel Butler's² Musical Banks will be even more musical than they are today, and the currency in which they deal will have even less social and psychological purchasing power than the homilies of the Age of Faith.

Symbols are necessary—for we could not think without them. But they are also fatal—for the thinking they make possible is just as often unrealistic as it is to the point. In this consists the essentially tragic nature of the human situation. There is no way out, except for those who have learned how to go beyond all symbols to a direct experience of the basic fact of the divine immanence. Tat tvam asi—thou art That. When this is perceived, the rest will be added. In the meantime we must be content with such real but limited goods as Hyperion, and such essentially precarious and mutable sources of good as are provided by the more realistic of our religious symbols.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

Footnotes

6. Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1910). Italian physician and author.

7. These lines are from Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud."

8. These lines are from Chaucer's "The Prologue to The Wife of Bath's Tale" in The Canterbury Tales.

9. These lines are from Shakespeare's Coriolanus 3.3.120-123.

1. These lines are from Shakespeare's Coriolanus 4.6. 129-132.

2. These lines are from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.211-213.

3. Oswald Spengler (1880-1936). German philosopher of history. (Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968). Russian criminologist and social scientist. Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975). English historian.

4. Sir Edwin Chadwick (1801-1890). English social reformer. Thomas Southwood Smith (1788-1861). English physician and sanitary reformer. Charles Kingsley (1819-1875). English author whose Health and Education appeared in 1874. Antony Ashby Cooper, seventh earl of Shaftesbury (1801-1885).

5. William Edward Lecky (1838-1903). Irish historian.

6. A comedy by Moliere produced in 1659.

7. Samuel Butler (1612-1680). English satirist.

Mother

HEAT AND GRAVITY, molecular motion and atomic disintegration—these are the physical prime movers of our economy. But there are also energies of thought, energies of feeling, instinct, and desire—energies which, if analyzed and directed, can be made to do useful work and ring up handsome profits. Some of these invisible energies were harnessed at the very dawn of civilization and have been turning the wheels of industry ever since. Personal vanity, for example, has powered half the looms and supported all the jewelers. The horror of death and the wish for some kind of survival have raised pyramids, have carved innumerable statues and inscriptions, have given employment to whole armies of painters, masons, embalmers, and clergymen. And what of fear, what of aggressiveness and the lust for power, what of pride, envy, and greed? These are the energies which, from the time of chipped flints to the time of split atoms, have powered the armament industry.

In recent years manufacturers and retailers have been turning their attention to other, hitherto unexploited sources of psycho-industrial power. Directed by the advertisers into commercially profitable channels, snobbery and the urge to conformity have now been made to yield the equivalent of millions of horsepower of energy. The longing for sexual success and the dread of being repulsive have become the principal motive force in the ever-growing cosmetics and deodorant industries. And how brilliantly our psychological engineers have tackled the problem of turning religious tradition, children's fantasies, and family affection to commercial use! Read Dickens’s account of an old-fashioned Christmas in The Pickwick Papers and compare what happened at Dingley Dell to what the victims of the modern American Christmas are expected to do now. In Dickens's time, the Savior's birthday was celebrated merely by over-eating and drunkenness. Except for the servants, nobody received a present. Today Christmas is a major factor in our capitalist economy. A season of mere good cheer has been converted, by the steady application of propaganda, into a long-drawn buying spree, in the course of which everyone is under compulsion to exchange gifts with everyone else—to the immense enrichment of merchants and manufacturers.

And now compare the activities of the children described in Little Women, in Puck of Pook's Hill, in Winnie the Pooh, with the activities of children growing up in the age of electronics. Before the invention of television the fantasies of childhood were private, random, and gratuitous. Today, they are public, highly organized, and cannot be indulged in except at considerable expense to the parents, who must pay for a second TV set, buy the brands of breakfast food advertised by the purveyors of fantasy, and supply the young viewers with revolvers and coonskin caps.

The same process of publicizing the private, standardizing the random, and taxing the gratuitous may be observed in the field of personal relationships. The family is an institution which permits and indeed encourages the generation of immense quantities of psychological energy. But until very recent times, this energy was allowed to run to waste without doing any good to industry or commerce. This was a situation which, in a civilization dependent for its very existence on mass production and mass consumption, could not be tolerated. The psychological engineers got to work and soon the private, random, and gratuitous sentiments of filial devotion were standardized and turned to economic advantage. Mother's Day and, despite the growing absurdity of poor Poppa, Father's Day were instituted, and it began to be mandatory for children to celebrate these festivals by buying presents for their parents, or at least by sending them a greeting card. Not a letter, mind you; letters are private, random, and bring money only to the Post Office. Besides, in these days of telephones and Progressive Methods of teaching orthography, few people are willing to write or able to spell. For the good of all concerned (except perhaps the recipients, who might have liked an occasional handwritten note), the greeting card was invented and marketed.

A few weeks ago I found myself, half an hour too early for an appointment, in the World's Largest Drugstore. How was the time to be passed? I had all the pills and toothpaste I needed, all the typing paper, electric-light bulbs, alarm clocks, whiskey, cameras, folding card-tables. I had no use for toys or nylon hosiery, for skin food or chewing gum or fashion magazines. Nothing remained but the greeting cards. They were displayed, hundreds upon hundreds of them, in a many-tiered rack not less (for I made a rough measurement) than fifty-four feet long. There were cards for birthdays, cards for funerals, cards for weddings, and for the consequences of weddings in all numbers from singles to quadruplets. There were cards for the sick, for the convalescent, for the bereaved. There were cards addressed to brothers, to sisters, to aunts, to nephews, to uncles, to cousins, to everyone up and down the family tree to the third and fourth generation. There were serious cards for Father, tender cards for Dad, humorous cards for Pop. And finally there was an immense assortment of cards for Mother. Each of these cards, I discovered, had its poem, printed in imitation handwriting, so that, if Mom were in her second childhood, she might be duped into believing that the sentiment was not a reach-me-down, but custom-made, a lyrical outpouring from the sender's overflowing heart:

Mother dear, you're wonderful

In everything you do!

The happiness of fam'ly life

Depends so much on YOU.

Or, more subtly,

You put the sweet in Home Sweet Home

By loving things you do.

You make the days much happier

By being so sweet, too.

And so on, card after card. In the paradise of commercialized maternity, no Freudian reptile, it is evident, has ever reared its ugly head. The Mother of the greeting cards inhabits a delicious Disneyland, where everything is syrup and Technicolor, cuteness and Schmalz. And this, I reflected, as I worked my way along the fifty-four-foot rack, is all that remains of the cult of the Great Mother, the oldest and, in many ways, the profoundest of all religions.

For Paleolithic man, every day was Mother's Day. Far more sincerely than any modern purchaser of a greeting card, he believed that “Mother dear, you're wonderful." Just how wonderful is attested by the carvings of Mother unearthed in the caves which, twenty thousand years ago, served our ancestors as cathedrals. In limestone, in soapstone, in mammoth ivory—there they stand, the Mother-images of man's earliest worship. Their bowed heads are very small and their faces are perfectly featureless. They have next to no arms and their dwindling legs taper off, with no hint of feet, into nothing. Mother is all body, and that body, with its enormously heavy breasts, its prodigal wealth of belly, thigh, and buttock, is the portrait of no individual mother, but a tremendous symbol of fertility, an incarnation of the divine mystery of life in defiance of death, of perpetual renewal in the midst of perpetual perishing. Mother was felt to be analogous to the fruitful earth and, for centuries, her images were apt to exhibit all the massiveness of her cosmic counterpart. In Egypt, for example, Mother sometimes modulated imperceptibly into a hippopotamus. In Peru she often appeared as an enormous female Toby jug, and everywhere she manifested herself as pot, jar, sacred vessel, grail.

The facts which we only think about (if we think about them at all) scientifically, in terms of biology and ecology, of embryology and genetics, our ancestors evidently thought about all the time. They did not understand them analytically, of course, but directly experienced them with their whole being, physiologically, emotionally, and intellectually, whenever they were confronted by one of their Mother symbols.

How is it that we have permitted ourselves to become so unrealistic, so flippantly superficial in all our everyday thinking and feeling about man and the world he lives in? "The happiness of fam'ly life/ Depends so much on YOU." This apparently is as deep as the popular mind is now prepared to go into the subject of Mother. And the minority opinion of those who have graduated from greeting cards to Dr. Freud is hardly more adequate. They know that Mother dear can be wonderful in more ways than one —that there are wonderful, possessive mothers of only sons, whom they baby into chronic infantility, that there are wonderful, sweet old vampires who go on feeding, into their eighties, on the blood of an enslaved daughter. These are uncomfortable facts, which we must recognize in order to cope with. But this sort of thing is still a very long way from being the whole story of Mother. To those who would like to read something like the whole story I recommend a book which, as it happened, I had finished on the very morning of my encounter with the greeting cards at the World's Largest Drugstore. This book is The Great Mother, by Erich Neumann, recently published as Number 4 7 of the Bollingen Series. It is not an easy book to read; for the author is a psychologist of the school of C. G. Jung, and he writes, as most of Jung's followers write, with all of the old master's turgid copiousness. Jungian literature is like a vast quaking bog. At every painful step the reader sinks to the hip in jargon and generalizations, with never a patch of firm intellectual ground to rest on, and only rarely, in that endless expanse of jelly, the blessed relief of a hard, concrete, particular fact. And yet, in spite of everything, the Jungian system is probably a better description of psychological reality than is the Freudian. It is not the best possible description —far from it; but it does at least lend itself to being incorporated into such a description. If you were to combine Jung with F. W. H. Myers,- and if you were then to enrich the product with the theories of Tantrik Buddhism and the practices of Zen, you would have a working hypothesis capable of explaining most, perhaps indeed all, the unutterably odd facts of human experience and, along with the hypothesis, a set of operational procedures, by means of which its unlikelier elements might be verified.

And now let us return to Mother. For our ancestors, as we have seen, Mother was not only the particular person who made or marred the happiness of fam'ly life; she was also the visible embodiment of a cosmic mystery. Mother manifested Life on all its levels—on the biological and physiological levels and also on the psychological level. Psychologically speaking, Mother was that oceanic Unconscious, out of which personal self-consciousness (the masculine element in human subjective experience) is crystallized and in which, so to speak, it bathes. More obviously, Mother was the source of physical life, the principle of fecundity. But the principle of fecundity is also, in the very nature of things, the principle of mortality; for the giver of physical life is also, of necessity, the giver of death. Ours is a world in which death is the inevitable consequence of life, in which life requires death in order to renew itself. Wherever she has been worshipped—and there is no part of the world in which, at one time or another, she has not been worshipped—the Great Mother is simultaneously the Creator and the Destroyer. Mother gives and Mother takes away; she builds up and then tears down that she may build again and yet again tear down, forever. For us, as self-conscious individuals, as social beings governed by law and trying to live up to ethical ideals, this divine impartiality can only seem appalling. Theologians have always found it exceedingly difficult to "justify the ways of God to man." They have, indeed, found it impossible; for the ways of God cannot be justified in merely human terms. In that profoundest and most splendid product of Hebrew thought, the Book of Job, God refuses to justify Himself; He is content to ask ironical questions and to point to the vast, incomprehensible fact of a world which, whatever else it may be, is most certainly not a world created according to human specifications.

The Book of Job was written in the fifth or perhaps even the fourth century B.C. when the ancient matriarchal system of thought and social organization had been replaced by the patriarchal, and the supreme God was worshipped, not as Mother, but as Father. The originality of the book consists in its demonstration that this masculine God had a great deal in common with the Great Mother of earlier religions. Jehovah is, by definition, the God of righteousness, of willed morality, and self-conscious idealism; but He is also, insists the author of Job, the God of the fathomless Unconscious, the Lord of the irrational Datum, the first Principle of the incomprehensible Fact. A God of righteousness, Jehovah is at the same time the impartial creator, not only of all good things, but also of all that we regard as evil— the impartial destroyer, in His cosmic play, not only of evil, but of all that we regard as good. Long before the God of Job—the God who ironically makes nonsense of all the moralistic notions of Job's comforters —the Great Mother had her negative as well as her positive aspects. She was the Terrible Mother as well as the Beneficent Mother, the Goddess of destruction as well as the Creator and Preserver. Terrible Mothers are to be found in every religious tradition. In Mexico, for example, Mother often appears with a grinning skull for a head and a skirt of woven rattlesnakes. Among the ancient Greeks she is, in one of her numerous aspects, the snaky-haired Gorgon, whose glance has power to turn all living things to stone. In India, Kali, the Great Mother, is sometimes beneficent, sometimes terrible. She nourishes and she devours; she is serenely beautiful and she is a cannibalistic monster. In her positive aspect, she is simultaneously Nature and Intuition, the creator of spiritual no less than of physical life. She is the Eternal Feminine that leads us up and on, and she is the Eternal Feminine that leads us down and back. She puts the sweet in Home Sweet Home, after which she drinks our blood.

Life giving birth to death, destruction preparing the way for new creation, self-consciousness emerging from the unconscious and finding itself torn between the urge to return to the impersonal darkness of nescience and the urge to go forward into the impersonal light of total awareness—these are the cosmic and subjective mysteries, for which our ancestors found expression in their countless symbols of the Great Mother. Nothing of all this was made clear, nothing was analyzed or conceptualized. It was a nonlogical system of potential science, of latent metaphysics. From their contemplation of these symbols men could derive no definite knowledge, only a kind of obscure understanding of the great scheme of things and their own place within it.

To cope with the mysteries of experience, modern man has no such cosmic symbol as the Great Mother; he has only science and technical philosophy. As a scientist, he observes the facts of generation, growth, and death, he classifies his observations in terms of biological concepts, he tests his hypotheses by means of experiment. As a philosopher, he uses the methods of Logical Positivism to prove to his own satisfaction (or rather to his own deepest dissatisfaction) that all the theories of the metaphysicians, all the pregnant hints and suggestions of the symbol makers have no assignable meaning—in a word, are sheer nonsense. And of course the Logical Positivists are perfectly right—provided always that we accept as self-evident the postulate that no proposition has meaning unless it can be verified by direct perception, or unless we can derive from it other "perceptive propositions," which can be so verified. But if we admit—and in practice we all behave as if we did admit it—that "the heart has its reasons" and that there are modes of understanding which do not depend upon perception or logical inferences from perception, then we shall have to take the metaphysicians and especially the metaphysical symbol makers a little more seriously. I say "especially the symbol makers"; for whenever we are dealing with a cosmic or subjective mystery, the verbalized concept is less satisfactory as a means of presentation than the pictorial or diagrammatic symbol. Symbols can express the given, experienced paradoxes of our life without analyzing them, as words (at any rate Indo-European words) must necessarily do, into their selfcontradictory elements. Modern man still creates non-verbal symbols, still makes use of them, in many of the most important junctures of life, as a substitute for analytical thinking. Such symbols as flags, swastikas, hammers, and sickles have had an enormous and, in the main, disastrous influence on the life of our time. All these, it should be noted, are social and political symbols. When it comes to symbolizing cosmic, rather than all too human, matters, we find ourselves very poorly equipped. Our religious symbols, such as the Cross, refer only to the realms of ethics and of what may be called pure spirituality. We have no religious symbols covering the other aspects of the cosmic mystery. The Hindu religion knows how to symbolize Nature and its processes of unceasing creation and unceasing destruction. The Christian, Jewish, and Mohammedan religions do not. In the West, Nature has been completely isolated from the religious context, in which our ancestors used to view it. Our non-human environment and our own physical existence have now become domains exclusively reserved for science. Such exclusiveness is wholly to the bad. What we have to learn is some way of making the best of both worlds, of all the worlds —the world of clear conceptual knowledge and the world of obscure understanding, the world of verbal analysis and the world of comprehensive symbols, the world of science and the world of religion and metaphysics. Will it ever be possible to revive the Great Mother, or create some equivalent symbol of the cosmic mysteries of life and death? Or are we doomed to remain indefinitely, or until the masses lose their minds and run amuck, on the level of the greeting card?

Triviality and make-believe are much more easily turned to economic advantage than realistic profundity. Much more than the school-teachers and the professors, the philosophers and the theologians, our commercial propagandists are the real educators of the masses. If triviality and make-believe are to the advantage of their employers, triviality and make-believe are the attitudes these molders of modern thought will inculcate.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

8. Frederic William Henry Myers (1843-1901). English poet and author of Human Personality and the Survival of Bodily Death (1903). He was also one of the founders in 1882 of the Society for Psychical Research.

Usually Destroyed

our guide through the labyrinthine streets of Jerusalem was a young Christian refugee from the other side of the wall, which now divides the ancient city from the new, the non-viable state of Jordan from the non-viable state of Israel. He was a sad, embittered young man—and well he might be. His prospects had been blighted, his family reduced from comparative wealth to the most abject penury, their house and land taken away from them, their bank account frozen and devaluated. In the circumstances, the surprising thing was not his bitterness, but the melancholy resignation with which it was tempered.

He was a good guide—almost too good, indeed; for he was quite remorseless in his determination to make us visit all those deplorable churches which were built, during the nineteenth century, on the ruins of earlier places of pilgrimage. There are tourists whose greatest pleasure is a trip through historical associations and their own fancy. I am not one of them. When I travel, I like to move among intrinsically significant objects, not through an absence peopled only by literary references, Victorian monuments and the surmises of archaeologists. Jerusalem, of course, contains much more than ghosts and architectural monstrosities. Besides being one of the most profoundly depressing of the earth's cities, it is one of the strangest and, in its own way, one of the most beautiful. Unfortunately our guide was far too conscientious to spare us the horrors and the unembodied, or ill-embodied, historical associations. We had to see everything—not merely St. Anne's and St. James's and the Dome of the Rock, but the hypothetical site of Caiaphas's house and what the Anglicans had built in the seventies, what the Tsar and the German Emperor had countered with in the eighties, what had been considered beautiful in the early nineties by the Copts or the French Franciscans. But, luckily, even at the dreariest moments of our pilgrimage there were compensations. Our sad young man spoke English well and fluently, but spoke it as eighteenth-century virtuosi played music with the addition of fioriture and even whole cadenzas of their own invention. His most significant contribution to colloquial English (and, at the same time, to the science and art of history) was the insertion into almost every sentence of the word "usually." What he actually meant by it, I cannot imagine. It may be, of course, that he didn't mean anything at all, and that what sounded like an adverb was in fact no more than one of those vocalized tics to which nervous persons are sometimes subject. I used to know a professor whose lectures and conversation were punctuated, every few seconds, by the phrase, "With a thing with a thing." "With a thing with a thing" is manifestly gibberish. But our young friend's no less compulsive "usually" had a fascinating way of making a kind of sense—much more sense, very often, than the speaker had intended. "This area," he would say as he showed us one of the Victorian monstrosities, "this area" (it was one of his favorite words) "is very rich in antiquity. St. Helena built here a very vast church, but the area was usually destroyed by the Samaritans in the year 529 after Our Lord Jesus Christ. Then the Crusaders came to the area, and built a new church still more vast. Here were mosaics the most beautiful in the world. In the seventeenth century after Our Lord Jesus Christ the Turks usually removed the lead from the roof to make ammunition; consequently rain entered the area and the church was thrown down. The present area was erected by the Prussian Government in the year 1879 after Our Lord Jesus Christ and all these broken-down houses you see over there were usually destroyed during the war with the Jews in 1948."

Usually destroyed and then usually rebuilt, in order, of course, to be destroyed again and then rebuilt, da capo ad infinitum. That vocalized tic had compressed all history into a four-syllable word. Listening to our young friend, as we wandered through the brown, dry squalor of the Holy City, I felt myself overwhelmed, not by the mere thought of man’s enduring misery, but by an obscure, immediate sense of it, an organic realization. These pullulations among ruins and in the dark of what once were sepulchres; these hordes of sickly children; these galled asses and the human beasts of burden bent under enormous loads; these mortal enemies beyond the dividing wall; these priest-conducted groups of pilgrims befuddling themselves with the vain repetitions, against which the founder of their religion had gone out of his way to warn them—they were dateless, without an epoch. In this costume or that, under one master or another, praying to whichever God was temporarily in charge, they had been here from the beginning. Had been here with the Egyptians, been here with Joshua, been here when Solomon in all his glory ordered his slaves in all their misery to build the temple, which Nebuchadnezzar had usually demolished and Zedekiah, just as usually, had put together again. Had been here during the long pointless wars between the two kingdoms, and at the next destruction under Ptolemy, the next but one under Antiochus and the next rebuilding under Herod and the biggest, best destruction of all by Titus. Had been here when Hadrian abolished Jerusalem and built a brand-new Roman city, complete with baths and a theater, with a temple of Jupiter, and a temple of Venus, to take its place. Had been here when the insurrection of Bar Cocheba was drowned in blood. Had been here while the Roman Empire declined and turned Christian, when Chosroes the Second destroyed the churches and when the Caliph Omar brought Islam and, most unusually, destroyed nothing. Had been here to meet the Crusaders and then to wave them good-bye, to welcome the Turks and then to watch them retreat before Allenby. Had been here under the Mandate and through the troubles of'48, and was here now and would be here, no doubt, in the same brown squalor, alternately building and destroying, killing and being killed, indefinitely.

"I do not think," Lord Russell has recently written, "that the sum of human misery has ever in the past been so great as it has been in the last twenty-five years."- One is inclined to agree. Or are we, on second thoughts, merely flattering ourselves? At most periods of history moralists have liked to boast that theirs was the most iniquitous generation since the time of Cain—the most iniquitous, and therefore, since God is just, the most grievously afflicted. Today, for example, we think of the thirteenth century as one of the supremely creative periods of human history. But the men who were actually contemporary with the cathedrals and Scholastic Philosophy regarded their age as hopelessly degenerate, uniquely bad and condignly punished. Were they right, or are we? The answer, I suspect is: Both. Too much evil and too much suffering can make it impossible for men to be creative; but within very wide limits greatness is perfectly compatible with organized insanity, sanctioned crime, and intense, chronic unhappiness for the majority. Every one of the great religions preaches a mixture of profound pessimism and the most extravagant optimism. "I show you sorrow," says the Buddha, pointing to man in his ordinary unregenerate condition. And in the same context Christian theologians speak of the Fall, of Original Sin, of the Vale of Tears, while Hindus refer to the workings of man's home-made destiny, his evil karma. But over against the sorrow, the tears, the self-generated, self-inflicted disasters, what superhuman prospects! If he so wishes, the Hindu affirms, a man can realize his identity with Brahman, the Ground of all being; if he so wishes, says the Christian, he can be filled with God; if he so wishes, says the Buddhist, he can live in a transfigured world where Nirvana and Samsara, the eternal and the temporal, are one. But, alas—and from optimism based on the experience of the few, the saints and sages return to the pessimism forced upon them by their observations of the many—the gate is narrow, the threshold high, few are chosen because few choose to be chosen. In practice man usually destroys himself—but has done so up till now a little less thoroughly than he has built himself up. In spite of everything, we are still here. The spirit of destruction has been willing enough, but for most of historical time its technological flesh has been weak. The Mongols had only horses as transport, only bows and spears and butchers' knives for weapons; if they had possessed our machinery, they could have depopulated the planet. As it was, they had to be content with small triumphs—the slaughter of only a few million, the stamping out of civilization only in Western Asia.

In this universe of ours nobody has ever succeeded in getting anything for nothing. In certain fields, progress in the applied sciences and the arts of organization has certainly lessened human misery; but it has done so at the cost of increasing it in others. The worst enemy of life, freedom, and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worse enemy is total efficiency. Human interests are best served when society is tolerably well organized and industry moderately advanced. Chaos and ineptitude are anti-human; but so too is a superlatively efficient government, equipped with all the products of a highly developed technology. When such a government goes in for usually destroying, the whole race is in danger.

The Mongols were the aesthetes of militarism; they believed in gratuitous massacre, in destruction for destruction's sake. Our malice is less pure and spontaneous; but, to make up for this deficiency, we have ideals. The end proposed, on either side of the Iron Curtain, is nothing less than the Good of Humanity and its conversion to the Truth. Crusades can go on for centuries, and wars in the name of God or Humanity are generally diabolic in their ferocity. The unprecedented depth of human misery in our time is proportionate to the unprecedented height of the social ideals entertained by the Totalitarians on the one side, the Christians and the secularist democrats on the other.

And then there is the question of simple arithmetic. There are far more people on the earth today than there were in any earlier century. The miseries which have been the usual consequence of the usual course of nature and the usual behavior of human beings are the lot today, not of the 300 million men, women, and children who were contemporary with Christ, but more than 2.5 billion. Obviously, then, the sum of our present misery cannot fail to be greater than the sum of misery in the past. Every individual is the center of a world, which it takes very little to transform into a world of unadulterated suffering. The catastrophes and crimes of the twentieth century can transform almost 10 times as many human universes into private hells as did the catastrophes and crimes of 2,000 years ago. Moreover, thanks to improvements in technology, it is possible for fewer people to do more harm to greater numbers than ever before.

After the capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, how many Jews were carried off to Babylon? Jeremiah puts the figure at 4,600, the compiler of the Second Book of Kings at 10,000. Compared with the forced migrations of our time, the Exile was the most trivial affair. How many million were uprooted by Hitler and the Communists? How many more million were driven out of Pakistan into India, out of India into Pakistan? How many hundreds of thousands had to flee, with our young guide, from their homes in Israel? By the waters of Babylon 10,000 at the most sat down and wept. In the single refugee camp at Bethlehem there are more exiles than that. And Bethlehem's is only one of dozens of such camps scattered far and wide over the Near East.

So it looks, all things considered, as though Lord Russell were right—that the sum of misery is indeed greater today than at any time in the past. And what of the future? Germ warfare and the H-Bomb get all the headlines and, for that very reason, may never be resorted to. Those who talk a great deal about suicide rarely commit it. The greatest threat to happiness is biological. There were about 1,200 million people on the planet when I was born, 6 years before the turn of the century. Today there are 2,700 million; 30 years from now there will probably be 4,000 million. At present about 1,600 million people are underfed. In the 1980s the total may well have risen to 2,500 million, of whom a considerable number may actually be starving. In many parts of the world famine may come even sooner. In his Report on the Census of 1951 the Registrar General of India has summed up the biological problem as it confronts the second most populous country of the world. There are now 375 million people living within the borders of India, and their numbers increase by 5 million annually. The current production of basic foods is 70 million tons a year, and the highest production that can be achieved in the foreseeable future is 94 million tons. Ninety-four million will support 450 million people at the present substandard level, and the population of India will pass the 4 50 million mark in 1969. After that, there will be a condition of what the Registrar General calls "catastrophe."

In the index at the end of the sixth volume of Dr. Toynbee’s A Study of History, Popilius Laenas gets five mentions and Porphyry of Batamaea, two; but the word you would expect to find between these names, Population, is conspicuous by its absence. In his second volume, Mr. Toynbee has written at length on "the stimulus of pressures"—but without ever mentioning the most important pressure of them all, the pressure of population on available resources. And here is a note in which the author describes his impressions of the Roman Campagna after twenty years of absence. "In 1911 the student who made the pilgrimage of the Via Appia Antica found himself walking through a wilderness almost from the moment when he passed beyond the City Walls.... When he repeated the pilgrimage in 1931, he found that, in the interval, Man had been busily reasserting his mastery over the whole stretch of country that lies between Rome and the Castelli Romani.... The tension of human energy on the Roman Campagna is now beginning to rise again for the first time since the end of the third century B.C." And there the matter is left, without any reference to the compelling reason for this "rise in tension." Between 1911 and 1931 the population of Italy had increased by the best part of eight million. Some of these eight million went to live in the Roman Campagna. And they did so, not because Man with a large M had in some mystical way increased the tension of human energy, but for the sufficiently obvious reason that there was nowhere else for them to go. In terms of a history that takes no cognizance of demographical facts, the past can never be fully understood, the present is quite incomprehensible, and the future entirely beyond prediction.

Thinking, for a change, in demographic as well as in merely cultural, political, and religious terms, what kind of reasonable guesses can we make about the sum of human misery in the years to come. First, it seems pretty certain that more people will be hungrier and that, in many parts of the world, malnutrition will modulate into periodical or chronic famine. (One would like to know something about the Famines of earlier ages, but the nearest one gets to them in Mr. Toynbee's index is a blank space between Muhammad Falak-al-Din and Gaius Fannius.) Second, it seems pretty certain that, though they may help in the long run, remedial measures aimed at reducing the birthrate will be powerless to avert the miseries lying in wait for the next generation. Third, it seems pretty certain that improvements in Agriculture (not referred to in Mr. Toynbee's index, though Agrigentum gets two mentions and Agis IV, King of Sparta, no less than forty-seven) will be unable to catch up with current and foreseeable increases in population. If the standard of living in industrially backward countries is to be improved, agricultural production will have to go up every single year by at least 2¹/2 percent, and preferably by 3 Vr percent. Instead of which, according to the FAO, Far Eastern food production per head of population will be ro percent less in 1956 (and this assumes that the current Five-Year Plans will be fully realized) than it was in 1938.

Fourth, it seems pretty certain that, as a larger and hungrier population "mines the soil" in a desperate search for food, the destructive processes of erosion and deforestation will be speeded up. Fertility will therefore tend to go down as human numbers go up. (One looks up erosion in Mr. Toynbee's index but finds only Esarhaddon, Esotericism, and Esperanto; one hunts for forests, but has to be content, alas, with Formosus of Porto.)

Fifth, it seems pretty certain that the increasing pressure of population upon resources will result in increasing political and social unrest, and that this unrest will culminate in wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions.

Sixth, it seems pretty certain that, whatever the avowed political principles and whatever the professed religion of the societies concerned, increasing pressure of population upon resources will tend to increase the power of the central government and to diminish the liberties of individual citizens. For, obviously, where more people are competing for less food, each individual will have to work harder and longer for his ration, and the central government will find it necessary to intervene more and more frequently in order to save the rickety economic machine from total breakdown, and at the same time to repress the popular discontent begotten by deepening poverty.

If Lord Russell lives to a hundred and twenty (and, for all our sakes, I hope most fervently that he will), he may find himself remembering these middle decades of the twentieth century as an almost Golden Age. In 19 54, it is true, he decided that the sum of human misery had never been so great as it had been in the preceding quarter century. On the other hand, "you ain't seen nuthin' yet." Compared with the sum of four billion people's misery in the eighties, the sum of two billion miseries just before, during, and after the Second World War may look like the Earthly Paradise.

But meanwhile here we were in Jerusalem, looking at the usually destroyed antiquities and rubbing shoulders with the usually poverty-stricken inhabitants, the usually superstitious pilgrims. Here was the Wailing Wall, with nobody to wail at it; for Israel is on the other side of a barrier, across which there is no communication except by occasional bursts of rifle fire, occasional exchanges of hand grenades. Here, propped up with steel scaffolding, was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—that empty tomb to which, for three centuries, the early Christians paid no attention whatsoever, but which came, after the time of Constantine, to be regarded, throughout Europe, as the most important thing in the entire universe. And here was Siloam, here St. Anne's, here the Dome of the Rock and the site of the Temple, here, more ruinous than Pompeii, the Jewish quarter, levelled, usually, in 1948 and not yet usually reconstructed. Here, finally, was St. James's, of the Armenians, gay with innumerable rather bad but charming paintings, and a wealth of gaudily colored tiles. The great church glowed like a dim religious merry-go-round. In all Jerusalem it was the only oasis of cheerfulness. And not alone of cheerfulness. As we came out into the courtyard, through which the visitor must approach the church's main entrance, we heard a strange and wonderful sound. High up, in one of the houses surrounding the court, somebody was playing the opening Fantasia of Bach's Partita in A Minor—playing it, what was more, remarkably well. From out of the open window, up there on the third floor, the ordered torrent of bright pure notes went streaming out over the city's immemorial squalor. Art and religion, philosophy and science, morals and politics—these are the instruments by means of which men have tried to discover a coherence in the flux of events, to impose an order on the chaos of experience. The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time—the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing. Music is a device for working directly upon the experience of Time. The composer takes a piece of raw, undifferentiated duration and extracts from it, as the sculptor extracts the statue from his marble, a complex pattern of tones and silences, of harmonic sequences and contrapuntal interweavings. For the number of minutes it takes to play or listen to his composition, duration is transformed into something intrinsically significant, something held together by the internal logics of style and temperament, of personal feelings interacting with an artistic tradition, of creative insights expressing themselves within and beyond some given technical convention. This Fantasia, for example—with what a tireless persistence it drills its way through time! How effectively—and yet with no fuss, no self-conscious heroics—it transfigures the mortal lapse through time into the symbol, into the very fact, of a more than human life! A tunnel of joy and understanding had been driven through chaos and was demonstrating, for all to hear, that perpetual perishing is also perpetual creation. Which was precisely what our young friend had been telling us, in his own inimitable way, all the time. Usually destroyed—but also, and just as often, usually rebuilt. Like the rain, like sunshine, like the grace of God and the devastation of Nature, his verbalized tic was perfectly impartial. We walked out of the courtyard and down the narrow street. Bach faded, a donkey brayed, there was a smell of undis-posed sewage. "In the year of Our Lord 1916," our guide informed us, "the Turkish Government usually massacred approximately 750,000 Armenians."

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

9. John Robert Russell, thirteenth duke of Bedford (1917-). English journalist and nobleman.

dream much longer, passionately perhaps, / Of the other fruit, the Amazon's burnt breast."

Famagusta or Paphos

FAMAGUSTA reminded me irresistibly of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s back lot at Culver City. There, under the high fog of the Pacific, one used to wander between the facades of Romeo and Juliet's Verona into Tarzan's jungle, and out again, through Bret Harte, into Harun al-Rashid and Pride and Prejudice. Here, in Cyprus, the mingling of styles and epochs is no less extravagant, and the sets are not merely realistic— they are real. At Salamis, in the suburbs of Famagusta, one can shoot Quo Vadis against a background of solid masonry and genuine marble. And downtown, overlooking the harbor, stands the Tower of Othello (screen play by William Shakespeare, additional dialogue by Louella Katz); and the Tower of Othello is not the cardboard gazebo to which the theater has accustomed us, but a huge High Renaissance gun emplacement that forms part of a defense system as massive, elaborate, and scientific as the Maginot Line. Within the circuit of those prodigious Venetian walls lies the blank space that was once a flourishing city—blank space with a few patches of modern Turkish squalor, a few Byzantine ruins and, outdoing all the rest in intrinsic improbability, the Mosque. Flanked by the domes and colonnades of a pair of pretty little Ottoman buildings, the Mosque is a magnificent piece of thirteenth-century French Gothic, with a factory chimney, the minaret, tacked on to the north end of its facade. Golden and warm under the Mediterranean blue, this lesser Chartres rises from the midst of palms and carob trees and oriental coffee-shops. The muezzin (reinforced—for this is the twentieth century—by loudspeakers) calls from his holy smokestack, and in what was once the Cathedral of St. Nicholas the Faithful—or, if you prefer, the Infidels-pray not to an image or an altar, but towards Mecca.

We climbed back into the car. "Paphos," I said to the chauffeur as matter-of-factly as in more familiar surroundings one would say, "Selfridge's," or "the Waldorf-Astoria." But the birthplace of Venus, it turned out, was a long way off and the afternoon was already half spent. Besides, the driver assured us (and the books confirmed it) there was really nothing to see at Paphos. Better go home and read about the temple and its self-mutilated priests in Frazer. Better still, read nothing, but emulating Mallarme, write a sonnet on the magical name. Mes bouquins refermes sur le nom de Paphos. "My folios closing on the name of Paphos, / What fun, with nothing but genius, to elect / A ruin blest by a thousand foams beneath / The hyacinth of its triumphal days! / Let the cold come, with silence like a scythe! / I'll wail no dirge if, level with the ground, / This white, bright frolic should deny to all / Earth's sites the honor of the fancied scene. / My hunger, feasting on no mortal fruits, / Finds in their studied lack an equal savor. / Suppose one bright with flesh, human and fragrant! / My foot upon some snake where our love stirs the fire, / I

Mes bouquins refermes sur le nom de Paphos,

II m'amuse d'elire avec le seul genie

Une mine, par mille ecumes benie

Sous 1'hyacinthe, au loin, de ses jours triomphaux.

Coure le froid avec ses silences de faux,

Je n'y hululerai pas de vide nenie

Si ce tres blanc ebat au ras du sol denie

A tout site 1'honneur du paysage faux.

Ma faim qui d'aucuns fruits ici ne se regale

Trouve en leur docte manque une saveur egale:

Qu'un eclate de chair humain et parfumant!

Le pied sur quelque guivre oil notre amour tisonne,

Je pense plus longtemps, peut-etre eperdument

A 1'autre, au sein brule d'une antique amazone.

How close this is to Keats's:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on,

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

Parodying the Grecian Urn in terms of Mallarme's Amazonian metaphor, we have: "Felt breasts are round, but those unfelt are rounder; therefore, absent paps, swell on." And the Keatsian formula can be applied just as well to Paphos. "Seen archaeological remains are interesting; but those unseen are more impressively like what the ruins of Aphrodite's birthplace ought to be." All of which, in a judicial summing up, may be said to be, on the one hand, profoundly true and, on the other, completely false. Unvisited ruins, ditties of no tone, the solipsistic love of non-existent bosoms—these are all chemically pure, uncontaminated by those grotesque or horrible irrelevances which Mallarme called "blasphemies" and which are the very stuff and substance of real life in a body. But this kind of chemical purity (the purity, in Mallarmean phraseology, of dream and Azure) is not the same as the saving purity of the Pure in Heart; this renunciation of irrelevant actuality is not the poverty in which the Poor in Spirit find the Kingdom of Heaven. Liberation is for those who react correctly to given reality, not to their own, or other people's notions and fancies. Enlightenment is not for the Quietists and Puritans who, in their different ways, deny the world, but for those who have learned to accept and transfigure it. Our own private silences are better, no doubt, than the heard melodies inflicted upon us by the juke box. But are they better than Adieu m'Amour or the slow movement of the second Razumovsky Quartet? Unless we happen to be greater musicians than Dufay or Beethoven, the answer is, emphatically, No. And what about a love so chemically pure that it finds in the studied lack of fruits a savor equal or superior to that of human flesh? Love is a cognitive process, and in this case the lover's nuptial knowledge will be only of himself, a knowledge, specifically, of his imagination in its relations to his physiology. And it is the same with the stay-at-home knowledge of distant ruins. In certain cases—and the case of Paphos, perhaps, is one of them—fancy may do a more obviously pleasing job than archaeological research or a sightseer's visit. But, in general, imagination falls immeasurably short of the inventions of Nature and History. By no possibility could I, or even a great poet like Mallarme, have fabricated Salamis-Famagusta. To which, of course, Mallarme would have answered that he had no more wish to fabricate Salamis-Famagusta than to reproduce the real, historical Paphos. The picturesque detail, the unique and concrete datum—these held no interest for the poet whose advice to himself and others was: "Exclude the real, because vile"; exclude the too precise meaning and rature ta vague litterature, correct your literature until it becomes (from the realist's point of view) completely vague. Mallarme defined literature as the antithesis of journalism. Literature, for him, is never a piece of reporting, never an account of a chose vue—a thing seen in the external world or even a thing seen, with any degree of precision, by the inner eye. Both classes of seen things are too concretely real for poetry and must be avoided. Heredity and a dismal environment conspired to make of Mallarme a Manichean Platonist, for whom the world of appearances was nothing or worse than nothing, and the Ideal World everything. Writing in 1867 from Besancon where, a martyr to Secondary Education, he was teaching English to a pack of savage boys who found him boring and ridiculous, he described to his friend Henri Cazalis the consummation of a kind of philosophical conversion. "I have passed through an appalling year. Thought has come to think itself, and I have reached a Pure Conception.... I am now perfectly dead and the impure st region in which my spirit can venture is Eternity. ... I am now impersonal and no longer the Stephane you have known—but the Spiritual Universe's capacity to see and develop itself through that which once was I." In another historical context Mallarme would have devoted himself to Quietism, to the attainment of a Nirvana apart from and antithetical to the world of appearances. But he lived under the Second Empire and the Third Republic; such a course was out of the question. Besides, he was a poet and, as such, dedicated to the task of "giving a purer meaning to the words of the tribe"—un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu. "Words," he wrote, "are already sufficiently themselves not to receive any further impression from outside." This outside, this world of appearances, was to be reduced to nothing, and a world of autonomous and, in some sort, absolute words substituted for it. In other, Mallarmean words, "the pure cup of no liquor but inexhaustible widowhood announces a rose in the darkness"—a mystic rose of purged, immaculate language that is, in some sort, independent of the given realities for which it is supposed to stand, that exists in its own right, according to the laws of its own being. These laws are simultaneously syntactical, musical, etymological, and philosophical. To create a poem capable of living autonomously according to these laws is an undertaking, to which only the literary equivalent of a great contemplative saint is equal. Such a saint-surrogate was Mallarme—the most devout and dedicated man of letters who ever lived; but "patriotism is not enough." Nor are letters. The poet's cup can be filled with something more substantial than words and inexhaustible widowhood, and still remain undefiled. It would be possible, if one were sufficiently gifted, to write a sonnet about Salamis-Famagusta as it really is, in all the wild incongruous confusion left by three thousand years of history—a sonnet that should be as perfect a work of art, as immaculate and, though referring to the world of appearances, as self-sufficient and absolute as that which Mallarme wrote on the name of Paphos and the fact of absence. All I can do, alas, is to describe and reflect upon this most improbable reality in words a little less impure, perhaps, than those of the tribe, and in passing to pay my homage to that dedicated denier of reality, that self-mortified saint of letters, whose art enchants me as much today as it did more than forty years ago when, as an undergraduate, I first discovered it. Dream, azure, blasphemy, studied lack, inexhaustible widowhood—fiddlesticks! But how incredibly beautiful are the verbal objects created in order to express this absurd philosophy!

Tel qu'en Lui-meme enfinTeternite le change ...

Cet unanime blanc conflit

D'une guirlande avec la meme

Le pur vase d’aucun breuvage Que 1'inexhaustible veuvage ...-

O si chere de loin et proche et blanche, si Delicieusement toi, Mary, que je songe

A quelque baume rare emane par mensonge

Sur aucun bouquetier de cristal obscurci..

Treasures of sound and syntax, such lines are endowed with some of the intense thereness of natural objects seen by the transfiguring eye of the lover or the mystic. Utterly dissimilar from the given marvels of the world, they are yet, in some obscure way, the equivalents of the first leaves in springtime, of a spray of plum blossom seen against the sky, of moss growing thick and velvety on the sunless side of oaks, of a seagull riding the wind. The very lines, in which Mallarme exhorts the poet to shut his eyes to given reality, partake, in some measure at least, of that reality's divine and apocalyptic nature.

Le sens trop precis rature Ta vague litterature.-

Ainsi le choeur des romances

A la levre vole-t-il

Exclus-en situ commences

Le reel parce que vii

Reading, one smiles with pleasure—smiles with the same smile as is evoked by the sudden sight of a woodpecker on a tree trunk, of a humming bird poised on the vibration of its wings before a hibiscus flower.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

Footnotes

1. The lines can be translated as: "This unanimous white conflict of a garland with the same ..." (Mallarme, "Une dentelle").

2. The lines can be translated as: "The pure vase that the inexhaustible widowhood ..." (Mallarme, "Surgi de la croupe et du bond").

3. The lines can be translated as: "0 by far so near and dear and white, so deliciously yourself, Mary, that I dream of some rare balm emanating falsely from a shaded crystal flower bowl...."

4. The lines can be translated as: "Thus the romantic chorus flies to the lips / Excluded if it begins the real, because vile. / The too precise meanings—erasings—Your vague literature" (Mallarme, "Hommage").

Faith, Taste, and History

among tall stories, surely one of the tallest is the history of Mormonism. A founder whose obviously home-made revelations were accepted as more than gospel truth by thousands of followers; a lieutenant and successor who was "for daring a Cromwell, for intrigue a Machiavelli, for executive force a Moses, and for utter lack of conscience a Bonaparte”; a body of doctrine combining the most penetrating psychological insights with preposterous history and absurd metaphysics; a society of puritanical but theater-going and music-loving polygamists; a church once condemned by the Supreme Court as an organized rebellion, but now a monolith of respectability; a passionately loyal membership distinguished, even in these middle years of the twentieth century, by the old-fashioned Protestant and pioneering virtues of self-reliance and mutual aid—together, these make up a tale which no self-respecting reader, even of Science Fiction, should be asked to swallow. And yet, in spite of its total lack of plausibility, the tale happens to be true.

My book-knowledge of its truth had been acquired long ago and intermittently kept up-to-date. It was not, however, until the spring of 1953 that I had occasion actually to see and touch the concrete evidences of that strange history.

We had driven all day in torrential rain, sometimes even in untimely snow, across Nevada. Hour after hour in the vast blankness of desert plains, past black, bald mountains that suddenly closed in through the driving rain, to recede again, after a score of wintry miles, into the grey distance. At the state line the weather had cleared for a little, and there below us, unearthly in a momentary gleam of sunshine, lay the Great Salt Desert of Utah, snow-white between the nearer crags, with the line of blue or inky peaks rising, far off, from the opposite shore of that dry ghost of an inland sea.

There was another storm as we entered Salt Lake City, and it was through sheets of falling water that we caught our first glimpse, above the chestnut trees, of a flood-lit object quite as difficult to believe in, despite the evidence of our senses, as the strange history it commemorates. The improbability of this greatest of the Mormon Temples does not consist in its astounding ugliness. Most Victorian churches are astoundingly ugly. It consists in a certain combination of oddity, dullness, and monumentality unique, so far as I know, in the annals of architecture.

For the most part, Victorian buildings are more or less learned pastiches of something else— something Gothic, something Greek or nobly Roman, something Elizabethan or Flamboyant Flemish, or even vaguely Oriental. But this Temple looks like nothing on earth—and yet contrives to be completely unoriginal, utterly and uniformly prosaic. Moreover, whereas most of the churches built during the past century are gimcrack altars of brick veneered with imitation stone, of lattice work plastered to look like masonry, this vast essay in eccentric dreariness was realized, from crypt to capstone, in the solidest of granite. Its foundations are cyclopean, its walls are three yards thick. Like the Escorial, like the Great Pyramid, it was built to last indefinitely. Long after the rest of Victorian and twentiethcentury architecture shall have crumbled back to dust, this thing will be standing in the Western desert, an object, to the neo-Neolithic savages of post-atomic times, of uncomprehending reverence and superstitious alarm.

To what extent are the arts conditioned by, or indebted to, religion? And is there, at any given moment of history, a common sociopsychological source that gives to the various arts—music and painting, architecture and sculpture—some kind of common tendency? What I saw that night in Temple Square, and what I heard next day during an organ recital in the Tabernacle, brought up the old problem in a new and, in many ways, enlightening context.

Here, in the floodlights, was the most grandiose by far of all Western Cathedrals. This Chartres of the desert was begun and largely built under economic and social conditions hardly distinguishable from those prevailing in France or England in the tenth century. In 1853, when the Temple's foundation-stone was laid, London could boast its Crystal Palace, could look back complacently on its Great Exhibition of the marvels of early Victorian technology. But here in Utah men were still living in the Dark Ages —without roads, without towns, with no means of communication faster than the ox-wagon or muletrain, without industry, without machines, without tools more elaborate than saws and scythes and hammers—and with precious few even of those. The granite blocks of which the temple is built were quarried by man-power, dressed by man-power, hauled over twenty miles of trackless desert by manpower and ox-power, hoisted into position by man-power. Like the cathedrals of medieval Europe the Temple is a monument, among other things, to the strength and heroic endurance of striped muscle.

In the Spanish colonies, as in the American South, striped muscle was activated by the whip. But here in the West there were no African slaves and no local supply of domesticable aborigines. Whatever the settlers wanted to do had to be done by their own hands. The ordinary run of settlers wanted only houses and mills and mines and (if the nuggets were large enough) Paris fashions imported at immense expense around the Horn. But these Mormons wanted something more—a granite Temple of indestructible solidity. Within a few years of their arrival in Utah they set to work. There were no whips to stimulate their muscles, only faith—but in what abundance! It was the kind of mountain-moving faith that gives men power to achieve the impossible and bear the intolerable, the kind of faith for which men die and kill and work themselves beyond the limits of human capacity, the kind of faith that had launched the Crusades and raised the towers of Angkor-Vat. Once again it performed its historic miracle. Against enormous odds, a great cathedral was built in the wilderness.

Alas, instead of Bourges or Canterbury, it was This.

Faith, it is evident, may be relied on to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation. There is, however, no guarantee that it will produce good art. Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable. Religious art is sometimes excellent, sometimes atrocious; and the excellence is not necessarily associated with fervor nor the atrocity with lukewarmness. Thus, at the turn of our era, Buddhism flourished in north-western India. Piety, to judge by the large number of surviving monuments, ran high; but artistic merit ran pretty low. Or consider Hindu art. For the last three centuries it has been astonishingly feeble. Have the many varieties of Hinduism been taken less seriously than in the times when Indian art was in its glory? There is not the slightest reason to believe it. Similarly there is not the slightest reason to believe that Catholic fervor was less intense in the age of the Mannerists than it had been three generations earlier. On the contrary, there is good reason to believe that, during the Counter-Reformation, Catholicism was taken more seriously by more people than at any time since the fourteenth century. But the bad Catholicism of the High Renaissance produced superb religious art; the good Catholicism of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced a great deal of rather bad religious art. Turning now to the individual artist—and after all, there is no such thing as "Art," there are only men at work—we find that the creators of religious masterpieces are sometimes, like Frangelico, extremely devout, sometimes no more than conventionally orthodox, sometimes (like Perugino, the supreme exponent of pietism in art) active and open disbelievers.

For the artist in his professional capacity, religion is important because it offers him a wealth of interesting subject-matter and many opportunities to exercise his skill. Upon the quality of his production it has little or no influence. The excellence of a work of religious art depends on two factors, neither of which has anything to do with religion. It depends primarily on the presence in the artist of certain tendencies, sensibilities, and talents; and, secondarily, it depends on the earlier history of his chosen art, and on what may be called the logic of its formal relations. At any given moment that internal logic points towards conclusions beyond those which, as a matter of historical fact, have been reached by the majority of contemporary artists. A recognition of this fact may impel certain artists—especially young artists-to try to realize those possible conclusions in concrete actuality. Sometimes these attempts are fully successful; sometimes, in spite of their author's talents, they fail. In either case, the outcome does not depend on the nature of the artist's metaphysical beliefs, nor on the warmth with which he entertains them.

The Mormons had faith and their faith enabled them to realize a prodigious ideal—the building of a Temple in the wilderness. But though faith can move mountains it cannot of itself shape those mountains into cathedrals. It will activate muscle, but has no power to create architectural talent where none exists. Still less can it alter the facts of artistic history and the internal logic of forms.

For a great variety of reasons, some sociological and some intrinsically aesthetic, some easily discernible and others obscure, the traditions of the European arts and crafts had been disintegrated, by the middle years of the nineteenth century, into a chaos of fertile bad taste and ubiquitous vulgarity. In their fervor, in the intensity of their concern with metaphysical problems, in their readiness to embrace the most eccentric beliefs and practices, the Mormons, like their contemporaries in a hundred Christian, Socialist, or Spiritualist communities, belonged to the Age of the Gnostics. In everything else they were typical products of rustic nineteenth-century America. And in the field of the plastic arts nineteenthcentury America, especially rustic America, was worse off even than nineteenth-century Europe. Barry's- Houses of Parliament were as much beyond these temple-builders as Bourges or Canterbury.

Next morning, in the enormous wooden Tabernacle, we listened to the daily organ recital. There was some Bach and a piece by Cesar Franck and finally some improvised variations on a hymn tune. These last reminded one irresistibly of the good old days of the Silent Screen—the days when, in a solemn hush and under spotlights, the tail-coated organist at the console of his Wurlitzer would rise majestically from the cellarage, would turn and bend his swan-like loins in acknowledgment of the applause, would resume his seat and slowly extend white hands. Silence, and then boom! the Picture Palace was filled with the enormous snoring of thirty-two-foot contra-trombones and bombardes. And after the snoring would come the Londonderry Air on the vox humana, "A Little Grey Home in the West" on the vox angelica, and perhaps (what bliss!) "The End of a Perfect Day" on the vox treacliana, the vox bedroomica, the vox unmentionabilis.

How strange, I found myself reflecting, as the glutinous tide washed over me, how strange that people should listen with apparently equal enjoyment to this kind of thing and the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major. Or had I got hold of the wrong end of the stick? Perhaps mine was the strange, the essentially abnormal attitude. Perhaps there was something wrong with a listener who found it difficult to adore both these warblings around a hymn tune and the Prelude and Fugue.

From these unanswerable questions my mind wandered to others, hardly less puzzling, in the domain of history. Here was this huge instrument. In its original and already monumental state, it was a project of pioneering faith. An Australian musician and early Mormon convert, Joseph Ridges, had furnished the design and supervised the work. The timber used for making the pipes was hauled by oxen from forests three hundred miles to the south. The intricate machinery of a great organ was homemade by local craftsmen. When the work was finished, what kind of music, one wonders, was played to the Latter Day Saints assembled in the Tabernacle? Hymns, of course, in profusion. But also Handel, also Haydn and Mozart, also Mendelssohn and perhaps even a few pieces by that queer old fellow whom Mendelssohn had resurrected, Johann Sebastian Bach.

It is one of the paradoxes of history that the people who built the monstrosities of the Victorian epoch should have been the same as the people who applauded, in their hideous halls and churches, such masterpieces of orderliness and unaffected grandeur as the Messiah, and who preferred to all his contemporaries that most elegantly classical of the moderns, Felix Mendelssohn. Popular taste in one field may be more or less completely at variance with popular taste outside that field. Still more surprisingly, the fundamental tendencies of professionals in one of the arts may be at variance with the fundamental tendencies of professionals in other arts.

Until very recently the music of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries was, to all but learned specialists, almost completely unknown. Now, thanks to long-playing phonograph records, more and more of this buried treasure is coming to the surface. The interested amateur is at last in a position to hear for himself what, before he could only read about. He knows, for example, what people were singing when Botticelli was painting Venus and Mars; what Van Eyck might have heard in the way of love songs and polyphonic masses; what kind of music was being sung or played in St. Mark’s while Tintoretto and Veronese were at work, next door, in the Doge's Palace; what developments were taking place in the sister-art during the more than sixty years of Bernini's career as sculptor and architect.

Dunstable and Dufay, Ockeghem and Josquin, Lassus, Palestrina, Victoria-—their overlapping lives cover the whole of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Music, in those two centuries, underwent momentous changes. The dissonances of the earlier, Gothic polyphony were reduced to universal consonance; the various artifices—imitation, diminution, augmentation, and the rest—were perfected and, by the greater masters, used to create rhythmical patterns of incredible subtlety and richness. But through the whole period virtually all serious music retained those open-ended, free-floating forms which it had inherited from the Gregorian Chant and, more remotely, from some oriental ancestor. In contrast, European folk-music was symmetrical, four-square, with regular returns to the same starting-point and balanced phrases, as in metrical poetry, of pre-established and foreseeable length. Based upon plain-chant and written, for the most part, as a setting to the liturgical texts, learned music was analogous not to scanned verse but to prose. It was a music without bars—that is to say, with no regularity of emphasis. Its component elements were of different lengths, there were no returns to recognizable starting-points, and its geometrical analogue was not some closed figure, like the square or circle, but an open curve undulating away to infinity. That such a music ever reached a close was due not to the internal logic of its forms but solely to the fact that even the longest liturgical texts come at last to their Amen. Some attempt to supply a purely musical reason for not going on forever was made by those composers who wrote their masses around a cantus firmus—a melody borrowed, almost invariably, from the closed, symmetrical music of popular songs. Sung or played in very slow time, and hidden in the tenor, sometimes even in the bass, the cantus firmus was, for all practical purposes, inaudible. It existed for the benefit not of listeners, but of the composer; not to remind bored churchgoers of what they had heard last night in the tavern, but to serve a strictly artistic purpose. Even when the cantus firmus was present, the general effect of unconditioned, free-floating continuousness persisted. But, for the composer, the task of organization had been made easier; for buried within the fluid heart of the music was the unbending armature of a fully metrical song.

While Dufay was still a choir boy at Cambrai, Ghiberti was at work on the bronze doors of Santa Maria de! Fiore, the young Donatello had been given his first commissions. And when Victoria, the last and greatest of the Roman masters, died in 1613, Lorenzo Bernini was already a full-blown infant prodigy. From Early Renaissance to Baroque, the fundamental tendency of the plastic arts was through symmetry and beyond it, away from closed forms towards unbalanced openness and the implication of infinity. In music, during this same period, the fundamental tendency was through openness and beyond it, away from floating continuousness towards meter, towards four-square symmetry, towards regular and foreseeable recurrence. It was in Venice that the two opposite tendencies, of painting and of music, first became conspicuous. While Tintoretto and Veronese moved towards openness and the asymmetrical, the two Gabrielis² moved, in their motets and their instrumental music, towards harmony, towards regular scansion and the closed form. In Rome, Palestrina and Victoria continued to work in the old free-floating style. At St. Mark's, the music of the future—the music which in due course was to develop into the music of Purcell and Couperin,- of Bach and Handel—was in process of being born. By the 1630s, when even sculpture had taken win'g for the infinite, Bernini's older contemporary, Heinrich Schuetz,-the pupil of Giovanni Gabrieli, was writing (not always, but every now and then) symmetrical music that sounds almost like Bach.

For some odd reason, this kind of music has recently been labeled "baroque." The choice of this nickname is surely unfortunate. If Bernini and his Italian, German, and Austrian followers are baroque artists (and they have been so designated for many years), then there is no justification, except in the fact that they happened to be living at the same time, for applying the same epithet to composers, whose fundamental tendencies in regard to form were radically different from theirs.

About the only seventeenth-century composer to whom the term "baroque" can be applied, in the same sense as we apply it to Bernini, is Claudio Monteverdi. In his operas and his religious music there are passages in which Monteverdi combines the openness and boundlessness of the older polyphony with a new expressiveness. The feat is achieved by setting an unconditionally soaring melody to an accompaniment not of other voices but of variously colored chords. The so-called baroque composers are baroque (in the established sense of the word) only in their desire for a more direct and dramatic expression of feeling. To realize this desire, they developed modulation within a fully tonal system, they exchanged polyphony for harmony, they varied the tempo of their music and the volume of its sound, and they invented modern orchestration. In this concern with expressiveness they were akin to their contemporaries in the fields of painting and sculpture. But in their desire for squareness, closedness, and symmetry they were poles apart from men whose first wish was to overthrow the tyranny of centrality, to break out of the cramping frame or niche, to transcend the merely finite and the all too human.

Between 1598 and 1680—the years of Bernini's birth and death—baroque painting and sculpture moved in one direction, baroque music, as it is miscalled, moved in another, almost opposite direction. The only conclusion we can draw is that the internal logic and the recent history of the art, in which a man is working, exercise a more powerful influence upon him than do the social, religious, and political events of the time in which he lives. Fifteenth-century sculptors and painters inherited a tradition of symmetry and closedness. Fifteenth-century composers inherited a tradition of openness and asymmetry. On either side the intrinsic logic of the forms was worked out to its ultimate conclusion. By the end of the sixteenth century neither the musical nor the plastic artists could go any further along the roads they had been following. Going beyond themselves, the painters and sculptors pursued the path of open-ended asymmetry, the free-floating musicians turned to the exploration of regular recurrence and the closed form. Meanwhile, the usual wars and persecutions and sectarian throat-cuttings were in full swing; there were economic revolutions, political and social revolutions, revolutions in science and technology. But these merely historical events seem to have affected artists only materially—by ruining them or making their fortunes, by giving or withholding the opportunity to display their skill, by changing the social or religious status of potential patrons. Their thought and feeling, their fundamental artistic tendencies were reactions to events of a totally different order—events not in the social world but in the special universe of each man's chosen art.

Take Schuetz, for example. Most of his adult life was spent in running away from the recurrent horrors of the Thirty Years' War. But the changes and chances of a discontinuous existence left no corresponding traces upon his work. Whether at Dresden or in Italy, in Denmark or at Dresden again, he went on drawing the artistically logical conclusions from the premises formulated under Gabrieli at Venice and gradually modified, through the years, by his own successive achievements, and the achievements of his contemporaries and juniors.

Man is a whole, but a whole with an astounding capacity for living, simultaneously or successively, in watertight compartments. What happens here has little or no effect on what happens there. The seventeenth-century taste for closed forms in music was inconsistent with the seventeenth-century taste for asymmetry and openness in the plastic arts. The Victorian taste for Mendelssohn and Handel was inconsistent with the Victorian taste for Mormon Temples, Albert Halls, and St. Pancras Railway Stations. But in fact these mutually exclusive tastes coexisted and had no perceptible effects on one another. Consistency is a verbal criterion, which cannot be applied to the phenomena of life. Taken together, the various activities of a single individual may "make no sense," and yet may be perfectly compatible with biological survival, social success, and personal happiness.

Objective time is the same for every member of a human group and, within each individual, for each inhabitant of a watertight compartment. But the self in one compartment does not necessarily have the same Zeitgeist as the selves in other compartments or as the selves in whom other individuals do their equally inconsistent living. When the senses of history are at a maximum, men and women tend to react to them in the same way. For example, if their country is involved in war, most individuals become heroic and self-sacrificing. And if the war produces famine and pestilence, most of them die. But where the historical pressures are more moderate, individuals are at liberty, within rather wide limits, to react to them in different ways. We are always synchronous with ourselves and others; but it often happens that we are not contemporary with either.

At Logan, for example, in the shadow of another Temple, whose battlemented turrets gave it the air of an Early Victorian "folly," of a backdrop to Edmund Kean in Richard III, we got into conversation with a charming contemporary, not of Harry Emerson Fosdick or the late Bishop Barnes, but of Brother Juniper—a Mormon whose faith had all the fervor, all the unqualified literalness, of peasant faith in the thirteenth century. He talked to us at length about the weekly baptisms of the dead. Fifteen hundred of them baptized by proxy every Saturday evening and thus, at long last, admitted to that heaven where all the family ties persist throughout the eons. To a member of a generation brought up on Freud, these posthumous prospects seemed a bit forbidding. Not so to Brother Juniper. He spoke of them with a kind of quiet rapture. And how celestially beautiful, in his eyes, was this cyclopean gazebo! How inestimable the privilege, which he had earned, of being allowed to pass through its doors! Doors forever closed to all Gentiles and even to a moiety of the Latter Day Saints. Around that heavenly Temple the lilac trees were in full scent and the mountains that ringed the fertile valley were white with the snowy symbol of divine purity. But time pressed. We left Brother Juniper to his paradise and drove on.

That evening, in the tiny Natural History Museum at Idaho Falls, we found ourselves talking to two people from a far remoter past—a fascinating couple straight out of a cave. Not one of your fancy Magdalenian caves with all that modernistic art-work on the walls. No, no—a good old-fashioned, down-to-earth cave belonging to nice ordinary people three thousand generations before the invention of painting. These were Australopiths whose reaction to the stuffed grizzly was a remark about sizzling steaks of bear-meat; these were early Neanderthalers who could not see a fish or bird or four-footed creature without immediately dreaming of slaughter and a guzzle.

"Boy" said the cave lady, as we stood with them before the solemn, clergyman-like head of an enormous moose. "Would he be good with onions!"

It was fortunate, I reflected, that we were so very thin, they so well-fed and therefore, for the moment, so amiable.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

5. Sir Charles Barry (1795-1860). English architect.

6. John Dunstable (c. 1390-1453). English composer. Guillaume Dufay (c. 1400-1474). French composer.

Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1425-1495). Flemish composer. Josquin Des Prez (c. 1440-1521). Franco-Flemish composer. Orlandus Lassus (c. 1532-1594). Netherlandish composer. Tomos Louis De Victoria (1548-1611). Spanish composer.

7. Andrea Gabrieli (c. 1533-1586) and Giovanni Gabrieli (c. 1555-1612). Italian composers.

8. Frarn;:ois Couperin (1668-1733). French composer.

9. Heinrich Schuetz (1585-1672). German composer.

Liberty, Quality, Machinery

JOHN ruskin deplored the railway engine. It might be useful; but why, why did it have to look like a railway engine? Why couldn’t it be dressed up as a fiery dragon, breathing flames as it rushed along, and flapping iron wings? Machines, Ruskin thought, and all their productions are intrinsically hideous. If we must have them, let it be with Gothic trimmings.

To William Morris, power-driven contraptions were odious, even in fancy dress, even when disguised as wyverns or basilisks. He objected to them on aesthetic grounds, and, as a sociologist, he loathed them. In the process of creating ugliness and multiplying monotony, machines had destroyed the old order and were turning the men and women who tended them into brutes and automata. Morris's ideal was the Middle Ages. Not, it goes without saying, the real Middle Ages, but an improved Victorian version of Merrie England—clean, kindly, and sensible, free from bad smells and religious dogmas, from bubonic plague and papal indulgences and periodic famines. A snug little world of healthy, virtuous craftsmen, craftswomen, and craftschildren, producing not for somebody else's profit but for their own use and for the greater glory of God, and having, in the process, a really wonderful time.

Today we like to think of applied science as a kind of domesticated djinn, indentured to the service of the no-longer-toiling masses. Half a century ago Tolstoy saw in applied science the greatest threat to liberty, the most powerful instrument of oppression in the hands of tyrants. "If the arrangement of society is bad (as ours is) and if a small number of people have power over the majority and oppress them, every victory over Nature will inevitably serve to increase that power and that oppression. This is what is actually happening.” It was for this reason (among others) that Tolstoy advocated a return to handicraft production within village communities, which were to be, as nearly as possible, self-sufficient. His greatest disciple, Mahatma Gandhi, preached the same doctrine—and lived long enough to see the nation, whose independence he had won, adopt a policy of all-out industrialization.

It is easy enough to detect the flaws in these classical arguments against machinery and in favor of a return to handicraft production. All of them fail to take into account the most important single fact of modern history—the rapid, the almost explosive increase in human numbers. Within the combined life spans of Tolstoy and Gandhi the population of the planet was more than trebled. Let us consider a few of the aesthetic, psychological, and political consequences of this unprecedented event in human history.

By no means all the ugliness of which Ruskin and Morris complained, was due to the substitution of machine production for handicrafts. Much of it was simply the result of there being, every year, more and more people. Beyond a certain point, human beings cannot multiply without producing an environment which, at the best, is predominantly dreary, soul-stultifying, and hideous, at the worst foul and squalid into the bargain. There have been beautiful cities of as much as 200,000 or 300,000 inhabitants. There has never been a beautiful city of a million or over. The old, unindustrialized parts of Cairo or Bombay are worse than fully industrialized London, or New York, or the Ruhr. Man cannot live satisfactorily by bricks and mortar alone. This would be true even if the bricks and mortar were put together in decent houses. In actual practice a little good architecture has always been surrounded, in the world's great capitals, by vast expanses of mean and dreary squalor. In the small cities of earlier centuries, filth and ugliness surrounded the splendid churches and palaces; but these slums were to be measured in acres, not in square miles. Small quantities of man-made squalor can be taken with impunity, particularly when associated with the woods and fields which surrounded the small city on every side, endowing it, as an urban unit, with a kind of over-all beauty of its own. This kind of over-all urban beauty has never existed in a great metropolis, most of which must always seem, by the mere fact that it goes on and on, unutterably dull, hideous, and soul-destroying. What Ruskin and William Morris were really objecting to was the consequence, not of machinery, but of Victorian fertility combined with improved sanitation and cheap food from the New World. Families were large and, for the first time in history, most of their members survived infancy and grew up to produce large families of their own—and, in the process, to create hundreds of monster cities, tens of thousands of square miles of squalor and ugliness.

Thanks to the advanced technology, of which Tolstoy and Gandhi so passionately disapproved, one-third, more or less, of the earth's 2,700 million inhabitants enjoy unprecedented prosperity and longevity, and the remaining two-thirds contrive, however miserably, to remain alive, on the average, for 30 years or so. A return to handicraft production would entail the outright liquidation, within a few years, of at least a billion men, women, and children. Moreover, if, while returning to handicraft production, we were to maintain our present standards of cleanliness and public health, numbers would tend once more to increase, and within half a century the liquidated billion would be back again, and ripe for new famines and another liquidation. Where Nature kills the majority of human beings in childhood, the practice of contraception is suicidal. But where human beings understand the principles of sanitation and where, consequently, most of the members of large families survive to become parents in their turn, it is unrestricted fertility that threatens to destroy not merely happiness and liberty, but, as numbers outrun resources, life itself. Generalized death control imposes the duty of generalized birth control. Gandhi was aware of the population problem and hoped (he can hardly have believed) that it could be solved by the inculcation of sexual continence among young married couples. In actual fact it is unlikely to be solved until such time as the physiologists and pharmacologists can provide the Asiatic and African masses with a contraceptive pill that can be swallowed, every few weeks, like an aspirin tablet. Within a generation of the discovery of such a pill, world population may be stabilized —somewhere, let us hope, on this side of 5,000 million. After which it may be possible to raise the standard of Far Eastern, Middle Eastern, Near Eastern, African, and Caribbean living to levels somewhat less subhuman than those now prevailing—a feat which will require all man's good-will, all his best intelligence and (far from a return to handicraft production) a yet more advanced technology.

But the fact that man cannot now survive without advanced technology does not mean that Tolstoy was entirely wrong. Every victory over Nature does unquestionably strengthen the position of the ruling minority. Modern oligarchs are incomparably better equipped than were their predecessors. Thanks to fingerprinting, punched cards, and IBM machines, they know practically everything about practically everyone. Thanks to radios, planes, automobiles, and the whole huge armory of modern weapons, they can apply force wherever it is called for, almost instantaneously. Thanks to the media of mass communication, they can browbeat, persuade, hypnotize, tell lies, and suppress truth on a national, even a global scale. Thanks to hidden microphones and the gentle art of wire-tapping, their spies are omnipresent. Thanks to their control of production and distribution, they can reward the faithful with jobs and sustenance, punish malcontents with unemployment and starvation. Reading the history, for example, of the French Revolution and Napoleon's dictatorship, one is constantly amazed at the easygoing ineptitude of earlier governmental procedures. Until very recent times such liberties as existed were assured, not by constitutional guarantees, but by the backwardness of technology and the blessed inefficiency of the ruling minority.

In the West our hard-won guarantees of personal liberty have not, so far, been offset by the political consequences of advancing technology. Applied science has put more power into the hands of the ruling few; but the many have been protected by law and, to make assurance doubly sure, have created (in the form of trade unions, co-operatives, political machines, and lobbies) great systems of power to counterbalance the power systems of the industrialists, government officials, and soldiers, who own or can command the resources of modern technology. Where, as in Russia or in Nazi Germany, the masses have not been protected by law and have been unable to create or maintain their own defensive power systems, Tolstoy's predictions have been fulfilled to the letter. Every victory over Nature has been at the same time a victory of the few over the many. And all the while the machinery of mass production is growing larger, more elaborate, increasingly expensive. In consequence its possession is coming to be confined more and more exclusively to the wielders of financial power and the wielders of political power —to big business, in a word, and big government. Never was there a greater need for the old Eternal Vigilance than exists today.

But here let us note a development entirely unforeseen by Ruskin and Morris, by Tolstoy, Gandhi, and most even of the more recent philosophers and sociologists who have viewed with alarm man's increasing dependence on the machine as producer of necessities and luxuries, the dispenser of entertainment and distractions, the fabricator of synthetic works of art, of tin or plastic surrogates for the immemorial products of manual skill. While big machines have been growing spectacularly bigger, new races of dwarf machines have quietly come into existence and are now, at least in America, proliferating like rabbits. These little machines are for private individuals, not for the great organizations directed by the wielders of financial and political power. They are produced by big business; but their purpose, paradoxically enough, is to restore to the individual consumer some, at least, of that independence of big business which was his in that not-too-distant past, when there was no big business to depend on. Small power tools, in conjunction with new gadgets of every variety, new synthetic raw materials, new paints and putties, new solders and adhesives, have called into existence (and at the same time have been called into existence by) a new breed of artisans. These new artisans pass their working hours in a factory that turns out mass-produced goods, in an office that arranges for their distribution, in a shop that sells them, a lorry or a train that delivers them to their destination. But in their spare time —and a forty-hour week leaves a good deal of spare time—they become craftsmen, using the tools and materials supplied by the mass producers, but working for themselves, either for the sheer fun of it, or because they cannot afford to pay someone else to do the job, or else (deriving pleasure from what they are forced to do by economic necessity) for both reasons at once.

The "do-it-yourself" movement has its comic aspects. But then so does almost everything else in this strange vale of tears and guffaws which is the scene of our earthly pilgrimage. The important fact is not that amateur plumbing is a fruitful subject for the cartoonist, but that something is actually being done to solve, at least partially, some of the problems created by a technology rapidly advancing, in industry after industry, towards complete automation. Millions of persons have grown tired of being merely spectators or listeners, and have decided to fill their leisure with some kind of constructive activity. Most of this activity is utilitarian in character; but there are also many cases in which these new handicraft workers of the machine age supplement their utilitarian hobbies with the practice of one of the fine arts. There is a countless host, not only of amateur plumbers, but also of amateur sculptors, painters, ceramists. Never before has there been so general an interest in art (you can buy books on Picasso and Modigliani on the bookstalls), and never before have there been so many wielders of paintbrushes and modelers of clay. Are we then (in spite of all that Ruskin and Morris and their followers said about machinery) on the threshold of a new Golden Age of creative achievement? I wonder ...

Art is not one thing, but many. Metaphysically speaking, it is a device for making sense of the chaos of experience, for imposing order, meaning, and a measure of permanence on the incomprehensible flux of our perpetual perishing. The nature of the order imposed, of the significance discovered and expressed, depends upon the native endowments and the social heredity of the person who does the imposing, discovering, and expressing. And this brings us to art as communication, art as the means whereby exceptionally gifted individuals convey to others their reactions to events, their insights into the nature of man and the universe, their visions of ideal order. All of us have such visions and insights; but whereas ours are commonplace, theirs are unique and enlightening. Art-as-communication is pretty pointless, unless the things communicated are worth communicating. But even in cases where they are not worth communicating, art is still valuable—if not to the persons who look at it, at least to those who produce it. For art is also a method of self-discovery and self-expression; an untier of knots, an unscrambler of confusions; a safety valve for blowing off emotional steam; a cathartic (the medical metaphor is as old as Aristotle) for purging the system of the products of the ego's constant autointoxication. Art-as-therapy is good for everybody—for children and the aged, for imbeciles and alcoholics, for neurotic adolescents and tired businessmen, for prime ministers on week-ends and monarchs on the sly (Queen Victoria, for example, took drawing lessons from Edward Lear, the author of The Book of Nonsense). Art-as-therapy is even good for great artists.

To me alone there came a thought of grief;

A timely utterance gave that thought relief, And I again am strong.

Besides being a masterpiece of art-as-communication, Wordsworth’s great Ode was also a (to him) most salutary dose of art-as-therapy. Involving, as they do, the highest manual skill, sculpture, painting, and ceramics are more effective as therapy than is poetry, at any rate Western poetry. In China writing is a branch of painting—or perhaps it would be truer to say that painting is a branch of the fine art of writing. In the West the writing even of the noblest poem is a purely mechanical act and so can never afford psychological relief comparable to that which we obtain from an art involving manual skill.

The spread of amateur house building, of amateur painting and sculpture, will soothe many tempers and prevent the onset of a host of neuroses, but it will not add appreciably to the sum of architectural, pictorial, and plastic masterpieces. At every period of history the number of good artists has been very small, the number of bad and indifferent artists very great. Because immense numbers of people now practice art as therapy, it does not follow that there will be any noticeable increase in the output of masterpieces. Because I feel better for having expressed my feelings in a daub, it does not follow that you will feel better for looking at my daub. On the contrary, you may feel considerably worse. So let us practice arras-therapy, but never exhibit the stuff as though it were art-as-communication.

We should not even expect to see an increase in the amount of good craftsmanship. In the past good craftsmanship has been contingent on two factors—intense and prolonged specialization in a single field, and ignorance of every style but that which happens to be locally dominant. Before the invention of foolproof machines nobody became an acknowledged master of his craft without going through a long apprenticeship. Moreover, the Jack of All Trades was, proverbially and almost by definition, the master of none. If you wanted to have your house thatched, you went to the thatcher; if you needed a table, you applied to the joiner. And so on. Specialization in the crafts and arts goes back to remotest antiquity. Archaeologists assure us that the great Paleolithic cave paintings were executed, in all probability, by teams of travelling artists, whose native skill had been increased by constant practice. As for flint arrowheads, these were manufactured in places where the raw material was plentiful and distributed to consumers over enormous areas.

Our new artisans, with their power tools and amazingly diversified raw materials, are essentially Jacks of All Trades, and their work consequently is never likely to exhibit the kind of excellence which distinguishes the work of highly trained specialists in a single craft. Moreover, the older craftsmen took for granted the style in which they had been brought up and reproduced the old models with only the slightest modification. When they departed from the traditional style, their work was apt to be eccentric or even downright bad. Today we know too much to be willing to follow any single style. Scholarship and photography have placed the whole of human culture within our reach. The modern amateur craftsman or amateur artist finds himself solicited by a thousand different and incompatible models. Shall he imitate Pheidias or the Melanesians? Miro or Van Eyck? Being under no cultural compulsion to adopt any particular line he selects, combines, and blends. The result, in terms of art-as-significant-communication, is either negligible or monstrous, either an insipid hash or the most horrifying kind of raspberry, sardine, and chocolate sundae. Never mind! As a piece of occupational therapy, as a guarantee against boredom and an antidote to TV and the other forms of passive entertainment, the thing is altogether admirable.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

Canned Fish

an enormous new building had been added to the cannery. From now on, in straight-line and continuous production, 600 women would daily convert 350 tons of frozen carcasses into 700,000 tins of tuna. Today the new facilities were being dedicated.

It was a solemn occasion. A rostrum had been erected on the wharf outside the factory. Bunting flapped in the fishy breeze. Mayors, senators, vice-governors were on hand to say a few well-chosen words. The new cannery, it appeared, was a triumph not only of technology but also and above all of Private Enterprise, of the American Way of Life. It represented, we were told, two million dollars' worth of faith in the Future, of fidelity to the Past, of belief in Progress, of trust in ... But listening to eloquence is something I have never been very good at. I looked at my companion, and my companion looked at me. Without a word we rose and tiptoed away.

A friendly engineer offered to show us round the factory. We began with the thawing tanks, into which the ocean-going trawlers discharged their refrigerated cargo. Next came the butchering tables, where the great fish are cleaned, and from which their heads, guts, and tails are spirited away across the street, to a processing plant that transforms them (not without an overpowering stench) into fish meal for poultry. From the butchering tables we moved to the huge pressure cookers, the cooling shelves, the long conveyor belts of stainless steel, the machines for filling the cans, the machines for sealing and sterilizing the cans, the machines for labeling the cans, the machines for packing the cans in cartons.

So far as tunas were concerned, this was a holiday. The factory was empty; our voices reverberated in a cathedral silence. But next door, in the mackerel department, the work of canning was in full swing. Standing at an immensely long work bench, a line of overalled women receded into the dim distance. Beyond the bench was a trough full of rapidly flowing water, and beyond the trough were the conveyor belt and, above it, on a shelf, an inexhaustible reservoir of empty cans. From an upper story, where, invisible to us, the butchering was evidently going on, a wide-mouthed pipe descended perpendicularly. About once every minute a plug was pulled and a cataract came rushing down the pipe. Floating in the water were thousands of cross-sections of mackerel. At breakneck speed they were whirled along the trough. As they passed, each woman reached out a gloved hand and dragged ashore as much as she needed for the 5 or 6 cans that she would fill before the next discharge. The cross-sections were rammed into place—a big chunk, a smaller chunk, a tiny chunk, whatever piece would fit into the three-dimensional jigsaw—and the tightly packed can was placed on the conveyor belt, along which it moved, unhurrying, towards the weighers, the sealers, the sterilizers, labelers, and craters. I clocked the performance and found that it took from ro to 15 seconds to fill a can. Three hundred, on an average, every hour; 2,400 in the course of a work ing day; 12,000 a week.

Outside, in the hazy sunshine, a dignitary of some sort was still talking. "Liberty," he declaimed, and a second, distant loudspeaker repeated the overlapping syllables. "Liberty-berry."

Once more the plug was pulled. Another Niagara of water and sliced fish came rushing down the flume.

"Oppor-opportunity," bawled the loudspeakers. "Way of life-of life." Buried in every language are nodules of petrified poetry, rich and un-suspected veins of fossil wisdom. Consider, for example, the French word travail. It is derived from Late Latin trepalium, the name of a kind of rack used for dislocating the joints of criminals and reluctant witnesses. Etymologically, work is the equivalent of torture. In English we preserve the word's original sense in relation to obstetrics (a woman "in travail") and have endowed it with the secondary meaning, not of work, but of wayfaring. Journeys in the Middle Ages were exhausting and dangerous. "Travel" is trepalium—torment for tourists.

The word "work" is emotionally neutral; but "toil" and the now obsolete "swink" carry unpleasant overtones. It was the same in the languages of classical antiquity. Panos in Greek and labor in Latin signify both "work" and "suffering." "And Rachel travailed," we read in the Book of Genesis, "and she had hard labor." Two words for work, two words for pain. Moreover, when Modern English "labor" carries its primary meaning, it generally stands for work of the most disagreeable kind—compulsory work, as in the case of penal "hard labor," or the heavy unskilled work which is performed by "laborers."

Backward-looking sentimentalists are never tired of telling us that in the Middle Ages, work was all joy and spontaneous creativity. Then what, one may ask, could have induced our ancestors to equate labor with anguish? And why, when they wanted a name for work, did they borrow it from the torture chamber?

Who first invented work, and bound the free

And holiday-rejoicing spirit down

To the ever-haunting importunity

Of business in the green fields, and the town—

To plough, loom, anvil, spade—and, oh! most sad,

To that dry drudgery of the desk's dry wood?

Who but the Being unblest, alien from good,

Sabbathless Satan, he who his unglad

Task ever plies 'mid rotatory burnings,

That round and round incalculably reel—

For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel—

In that red realm from which are no returnings,

Where toiling and turmoiling ever and aye,

He and his thoughts keep pensive working-day.¹

Lamb was right. In every civilization work, for all but a favored few, has always been a thing of hideous dreariness, an infernal monotony of boredom at the best and, at the worst, of discomfort or even sheer anguish. One remembers the description, in The Golden Ass, of the animals and humans who worked, while the owner’s wife amused herself with magic and adultery, at the flour mill. Men and asses, mules and boys—they were all in travail, all on the trepalium, bruised, galled, strained beyond the limits of organic endurance. And the life of laborers in a medieval village, the life of journeymen and apprentices in the workshop of a master craftsman in the town, was hardly less dismal than that of their pre-Christian ancestors. In its beginnings industrialization merely aggravated an already intolerable state of affairs. The physical tortures im-posed in the dark Satanic mills of Georgian and Early Victorian England were worse, because more systematic, better organized, than the travail of earlier centuries. Thanks to automatic machines and labor laws, thanks to trade unions and the internal combustion engine, thanks to hoists and belts and humanitarianism, there are now few tasks which actually hurt. The rack has been abolished. But the boredom, the frightful punctuality of wheels returning again and again to the same old position—these remain. Remain under free enterprise, remain under Socialism, remain under Commumsm.

Under the present technological dispensations the opportunity to escape from the tyranny of repetition comes only to a very small minority. But with the multiplication of fully automatic machines, fully automatic factories, even fully automatic industries, the case will be altered. Some of those now condemned to the task of keeping time with wheels will become the highly skilled doctors and nurses of the new, all-but-human gadgets. The rest will do—what? It remains to be seen. Only one thing seems tolerably certain. Owing to the deplorable lack of quantitative and qualitative uniformity displayed by living organisms, the fish-canning industry will be one of the last to become fully automatic. The technical procedures current today will probably be current, with only trifling modifications, a generation from now. Should we rejoice over this island of stability in a flux of change? Or should we lament? In another twenty-five or thirty years we may be in a position to answer.

And meanwhile what will have happened to the raw material of our industry? What, in a word, will the fish be up to? A generation ago the biologist and the commercial fishermen would have answered, without hesitation: "If they aren’t over-fished, they will be doing exactly what they are doing now." Times have changed, and today the answer to our question would probably be: "Goodness only knows." For in recent years fishes have been behaving in the most eccentric and indecorous manner. Consider, for example, the European tuna. Forty years ago individual specimens of Thunnus thynnus were caught, at certain seasons, in the English Channel and the North Sea; but there was no tuna-packing industry north of Portugal, and the main supply of tinned or salted tunny came from the Mediterranean islands of Sardinia and Sicily. Today there is a flourishing tunny industry in Norway.

And the tuna's is by no means an isolated or exceptional case. Fishes which, not long ago, were thought of as being exclusively tropical, are now caught off the New England coast, and fishes once regarded as natives of the temperate zone have moved into the Arctic. The North Sea has ceased to be the great fishing ground of Western Europe. Today ocean-going trawlers, equipped with freezing units, make long voyages to the coasts of Iceland and northernmost Scandinavia. The Eskimos of Greenland have given up their traditional occupation, the hunting of seals, and have taken instead to fishing for cod. What were once regarded as immutable behavior patterns have changed, almost overnight. The world of fishes is in a state of revolution. Within the next twenty or thirty years the strangest things may happen in that world-with incalculable results for all concerned in the catching and processing of sea-food.

This revolution in the watery world of the fish is a consequence of a larger revolution in the earth's atmosphere—a revolution which is changing the climate of the northern hemisphere and is likely to affect profoundly the course of human history during the next few generations or even centuries. The causes of this climatic revolution are obscure; but its effects are manifest. The glaciers are everywhere melting. The snowpack on the mountains has diminished to such an extent that the Jungfrau is now thirty feet lower than it was when I was a boy. The Spitzbergen archipelago, which used to be open for shipping for about four months out of the twelve, is now open for eight or nine. Russian ice-breakers and cargo ships sail the once impassable seas that wash the northern coasts of the Soviet empire. In Canada and Siberia agriculture is moving steadily into higher and higher latitudes. Plants, birds, and mammals hitherto unknown in those regions have now made their entrance and may soon take the place of the cold-loving species which are beginning to find their environment uncomfortably balmy.

This sort of thing, we should remember, has happened before, not merely in the remote geological past, but in quite recent historical times. In the early Middle Ages Europe (and presumably the rest of the northern hemisphere) enjoyed two or three centuries of most unusual weather. There was enough sunshine in southern England to ripen grapes, and for four or five generations it was possible to drink British wine. Then, about the time of Chaucer, the climate changed again, and for a couple of centuries Europe experienced the rigors of what has been called the Little Ice Age. In Denmark and northern Germany many villages had to be abandoned. In Iceland the cultivation of cereals became impossible, and the fields, in many cases, were covered by the encroaching glaciers. Today the glaciers are in full retreat, and there is every reason to believe that in a few years rye and barley will once more be grown, to the further enrichment of a country which has already profited by the migration to its shores of innumerable fishes fleeing from the increasing warmth of the North Sea.

But if the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere become pleasantly warmer, does it not follow that the low latitudes will grow most unpleasantly hotter? There are some indications that this may be actually happening. In Africa, north of the equator, forests are giving place to savannahs, and savannahs are drying up into deserts. And what of the long, hardly intermitted drought, from which large areas of the American Southwest have recently been suffering? Is this the usual kind of cyclical dry spell, or does it presage a relatively permanent worsening of an arid, or semi-arid climate? Time alone will show. Meanwhile, if I had a few millions to invest for the benefit of my grandchildren, I would put them all into Canada rather than Texas. "Westward the course of empire takes its way." So wrote the good Bishop Berkeley two centuries ago. Reincarnated today, the philosopher-poet would probably turn his prophetic eyes ninety degrees to the right. Westward no longer, but northward, northward moves the course of empire. The tunas, the pilchards, the sharks and codfish—these forward-looking pioneers have already made the move, or at least are swimming in the right direction. In ever-increasing numbers, men will soon be following their example.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

1. These lines are from Charles Lamb's "Work."

in

Art, Literature. Music

Conversation with Stravinsky

IT IS A SMALLISH house built on a terrace scooped out of the side of a hill, and approached by steps that climb through a precipitous garden from the street below. A house with the easy, unpretentious charm of Californian architecture, when it strikes the happy mean between the excessively Spanish and the inordinately functional, between the dark Andalusian cavern on the one hand and, on the other, the tool shed with plate-glass sides. Its windows are large, but not too large. They admit plenty of light, but keep the outside out, where it belongs, and make possible that intimately private life, which so many modern architects seem to regard as morally reprehensible.

And what a pleasant, what a highly civilized privacy one finds behind those windows. Picassos on the walls, books on the shelves, volumes of reproductions on the tables, furniture and ornaments that bear witness to the good taste and lively imagination of the mistress of the house, and in a small crowded room at the end of a passage, a piano, a library of musical scores, a writing table. In this little room and at that table were composed three of the most notable works of our time—The Symphony in Three Movements, the Mass for Mixed Voices and Double Wind Quintet, and The Rake's Progress.

To those who do not share it, a special gift must always seem in the highest degree mysterious and inexplicable. What does it actually feel like to think in terms of melodies and harmonic progressions? What precisely goes on in the mind of someone who responds to experience with The Musical Offering, for example, or The Symphony of Psalms? As one who is merely a listener, not in the least a composer, I find it hard indeed to imagine. Hence the pleasure I always find in reading the books, or listening to the talk, of a musician at once as eminent in his own field as Stravinsky and so articulate, at the same time, in the field of verbal expression.

A gift for being intelligent and intelligible in terms of words has by no means invariably accompanied the gift for being intelligent and intelligible in terms of sounds. Indeed, some of the greatest musicians have been remarkably uninteresting as writers.

Conversely some of the most gifted literary men among the composers—Berlioz, for example, and Wagner—have allowed their literature to get into their music, with disquieting and even disastrous results. Stravinsky is one of those happy amphibians who is at home on the dry land of words as well as in the ocean of music, and whose prowess ashore has never spoiled him as a swimmer. His Poetique Musicale is a most excellent and rewarding book; and his conversation combines that book's lucidity with a liveliness and a range of digression which he does not permit himself in his writings.

Good in English, better in French, and, presumably, best of all in Russian, Stravinsky’s talk has a curious and fascinating quality all its own. One begins, for example, with a discussion of aesthetics and the problems of expression—problems in regard to which Stravinsky has decided and austerely classical views. From abstractions one passes in due course to the particular case and the concrete example— to the technique of writing canons for voice and instruments; to the superiority of the chaste viola da gamba over the all too expressive cello; to the agreeably acid tone of the flute a bee, as used in the days of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Then the talk takes a literary turn, and we pass from Tolstoy (whom Stravinsky does not greatly admire) to Dostoevsky (whom he does) to Rozanov and Shestov,¹ and from Gide on Chopin to the musical bad taste of Marcel Proust. And this brings us back, inevitably, to the theme of themes—to music. Music of the past, music of the present, music as it will be in the future, when rising costs have finally abolished the Wagnerian orchestra and composers must write once again for chamber groups. The talk ranges from the fourteenth century to the twentieth, from Guillaume de Machault and his conception (essentially similar to Stravinsky’s) of liturgical music to the twelve-tone system and the reasons why Stravinsky himself prefers the seven-tone variety.

Musical criticism is another favorite theme. Stravinsky likes to cite such enormous aberrations as Grillparzer’s pronouncement that Weber was wholly without melody and so cacophonous that he ought to have been suppressed by the police. And what of the corresponding idiocies in our own day? Charity imposes silence. And anyhow only those without critical guilt have any right to throw stones.

To be a good talker, one needs a quick intelligence and a fund of readily available knowledge. To be a good listener, one must be charitable, one must be sensitively aware of other people, and one must be interested in everything. Stravinsky possesses all these qualities and can therefore listen as well as he talks. True, he does not suffer bores very gladly, nor fools—particularly pretentious ones. But even towards the bores and the fools he exhibits a politeness, whose core is inborn kindliness and whose exquisitely polished surface is the result of an upbringing in the best kind of aristocratic tradition.

This politeness in all circumstances is the more admirable in one whose temperament is far from lymphatic. There is an energy which is steady, pachydermatous, almost sleepy; and there is an energy of a more bird-like kind, swift, tremulously awake. Stravinsky’s energy, which is enormous, is of the second variety. He is a prodigious worker, never satisfied with any achievement however high; but this steady and unbending will to perfection is associated with a far from unbendable organism. Like many other men of genius, his is at once the sensitive autonomic nervous system. It lifts him up, but it also lets him

down; it helps him to a heightened awareness; it also creates obstacles and brings a variety of difficulties and sufferings.

But, rain or shine, the will to perfection never fails. Nor does the politeness. Through all the intermittences, the work goes forward; and when fools rush in to ask for an autograph, to tell him effusively how much they admire Prince Igor (or do they mean Boris Godunov?), Stravinsky’s courtesy remains unimpaired. The worst that befalls them is to discover, if they permit themselves to be distracted for a moment, that the master is no longer there.

[Vogue, February 15, 1953]

1. Vasily Rozanov (1856-1919). Russian critic and philosopher. Lev Shestov (1866-1938). Russian critic and essayist.

Art and Religion

DOES ART hold up the mirror to its period? Or does every period hold up the mirror to its art?

Does the artist follow or lead? Or does he walk alone, heeding only the categorical imperatives of his talent and the inner logic of the tradition within which he works?

Is he the representative of his epoch? Or does he stand for a constituency no wider than that particular class of talented persons—his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors—to which, by the predesti-nation of his heredity, he happens to belong?

All these questions can be correctly answered now in the affirmative, now in the negative, now with a simultaneous yes or no. There are no general rules; there are only particular cases; and most of these cases exist, so far as we are concerned, in a thick night of ignorance.

Here, for example, is the case that presents itself to every tourist who goes to Rome—the fascinatingly enigmatic case of baroque art and seventeenth-century Catholicism. In what way were the two related? What was the nature of the connection between the art forms of the period and the religious experiences of those who lived through it?

Three hundred years after the event all that we know for certain is that the personages represented in baroque religious art are all in a state of chronic emotional excitement. They wave their arms, roll their eyes, press hands to palpitating bosoms, sometimes, in an excess of feeling, swoon away into unconsciousness. We look at them with a mixture of aesthetic admiration and moral distaste, then start to speculate about the men and women who were contemporary with them. Was their religious life as wildly agitated as the life of these creatures of the painters’ and sculptors’ imagination? And, if so, had the art been modeled on their agitation, or was their agitation due to familiarity with an art that had become agitated for purely aesthetic reasons? Or, finally, was there no agitation in the real world corresponding to that prevailing in the worlds of painting and sculpture? Baroque artists were tired of doing what their predecessors had done and were committed by the inner logic of their tradition to an exploration of the inordinate; therefore the figures above the altars had to gesticulate in a studied frenzy. But the religious life of the people who worshipped at those altars—had that become significantly different from the religious life of the men and women of other periods? Were there not then, as always, a few ardent contemplatives and actives, imperfectly leavening a great lump of the legalistic and the corybantic, the timeserving and the lukewarm?

I myself incline to the last alternative. Environment is never the sole determinant, and heredity is always at work, producing every variety of physique and temperament at every period of history. All the potentialities of human nature exist at all times, and at all times (in spite of an environment which may be unfavorable to some of them) practically all the potentialities are to some extent actualized. One has only to read Salimbene’s Chronicle- and Law's Serious Call in order to realize that there were as many irreligious people in the ages of faith as there were pietists in the ages of reason. The Byzantines who went mad about trinitarian theology were the same Byzantines who went mad about the chariot races. And our own age of atomic physics is also a notable age of astrology and numerology. At every period there exists, not a synthesis, but a mere brute collocation of opposites and incompatibles. And yet at any given epoch there is only one prevailing style of art, in terms of which painters and sculptors treat of a strictly limited number of subjects. Art may be defined, in this context, as a process of selection and transformation, whereby an unmanageable multiplicity is reduced to a semblance, at least, of unity. Consequently we must never expect to find in art a reflection of contemporary reality as it is actually experienced by human beings in all their congenital and acquired variety. Thus, from a study of the restrained and formalized art of the Italian trecento, who could infer the existence of those wild religious revivals which were so characteristic a feature of the period? And, conversely, who from the frenzies of the baroque could infer the facts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mysticism? Looking at a Carlo Dolci Magdalen, who could guess what St. John of the Cross had said about true Charity—that it is a matter, not of feeling, but of the will? Or who, with Bernini’s St. Teresa before his eyes, would ever suspect that Bernini’s contemporary, Charles de Condren, had deplored the weakness which caused ecstatics to receive God si animalement? The truth would seem to be that while the great masses of the people remained, as ever, indifferent or fitfully superstitious, and while the masters of the spiritual life preached a worship of the Spirit in the spirit, the artists of the time chose to glorify a Christianity of thrills and visceral yearnings, now violent, now cloyingly sentimental. And they chose to do so for reasons connected, not with the problems of life, but with those of art. Their paintings and sculpture did not, and indeed could not, reflect the manifold religious experience of the time, nor did the religious experience of most of the contemporaries reflect the prevailing art. Art and religious life went their separate ways, the artists using religion as their opportunity for developing a baroque expressionism, and the religious using this art as an instrument for achieving the various kinds of experience for which their temperaments had fitted them. And precisely the same relations between religion and art had existed when the “Primitives” were using a multiform Catholicism as an opportunity for creating one particular kind of static composition, and when the religious were using these works as instruments for the practice of revivalism, now of contemplation, now of magic.

From Rome and the baroque let us pass for a moment to Tuscany and the rococo. A few miles from Siena there stands among the vineyards a large Carthusian monastery, called Pontignano, now inhabited by a score of peasant families. In the old days each of the monks occupied an apartment of three rooms —a kitchen, a bedroom, and a tiny oratory. The front doors of these apartments give on to the cloisters, and at the back are little walled gardens, where a man could grow vegetables and dig his own grave. Every brother lived independently of all the rest, a solitary in a community of solitaries, a mute among the silent. Most of the buildings at Pontignano date from the fourteenth century, but were refurbished by an interior decorator of the eighteenth. Under his direction the church was adorned with an enormous high altar of wood, painted to look like marble, and the little oratories, in which the monks said their private prayers, were stuccoed over with rococo twiddles, till they looked like the boudoirs of so many provincial Pompadours. To us, with our incorrigible sense of history, this conjunction of St. Bruno and Louis XV seems deliriously incongruous. But how did it strike the monks who actually prayed in those oratories? Did they suddenly start to think, feel, and behave like those libertine abbes whom we associate with that kind of decoration? Surely not. “Never reformed, because never deformed,” the Carthusian order held on its way regardless of changes in aesthetic fashion. In their newly plastered oratories the brethren meditated on death, just as their predecessors had meditated when the decorations were Baroque or Renaissance, Gothic or Romanesque. Styles change, empires rise and fall; but death remains itself, a brute fact, sooner or later, of every individual’s experience—a fact that has no history and to which, in consequence, all historical changes, whether political or economic, scientific or artistic, are completely irrelevant. The Pompadourish art in the Pontignano oratories tells us nothing whatever about contemporary Carthusian religion, which was centered, as ever, upon the contemplation of death. All we learn from it is that, when eighteenth-century monks found it necessary to restore ancient buildings, the only restorers available, in an age that was still innocent of pastiche and antiquarian forgery, were men brought up in the current tradition of art.

In our own days the religious are worse off than were the monks of Pontignano. Not living Rococo, but the bogus-medieval, or some atrocious piece of mass-produced bondieuserie, is all that they can find for their purposes. And yet, in spite of the nullity of modern religious art, religion, in all its aspects from the fetishistic to the contemplative, continues to flourish and to produce its good or evil fruits. Man is a whole, and so, perhaps, is society; but they are wholes divided, like ships, into watertight compartments. On one side of a bulkhead is art, on the other religion. There may be good wine in one compartment, bilge-water in the other. The connection between the two is not by pipe or osmosis, but only from above, only for the intellect that looks down and can see both simultaneously and recognize them as belonging (by juxtaposition rather than by fusion) to the same individual or social whole.

[Themes and Variations, 1950]

2. Salimbene Di Adam (1221-c. 1290). Italian friar and historian.

Variations on a Baroque Tomb

“THE SKELETON/' as we all know, "was invisible in the happy days of pagan art." And invisible it remained, in spite of Christianity, for most of the centuries that followed. Throughout the Middle Ages, the knights, the mitered bishops, the ladies who warm their feet on the backs of little dogs—all are reassuringly in the flesh. No skulls adorn their tombs, no bones, no grisly reapers. Artists in words may cry, “Alas, my heart will break in three, Terribilis Mors conturbat me” Artists in stone are content to carve the likeness of a sleeper upon a bed. The Renaissance comes and still the sleep persists, tranquil amid the sculptured dreams of a paradise half earthly, half celestial.

Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance

Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,

The Savior at his sermon on the mount,

St. Praxed in a glory, and one Pan

Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off,

And Moses with the tables.-

But by the middle of the sixteenth century a change has taken place. The effigy no longer sleeps, but opens its eyes and sits up—ideally noble, as on the Medicean tombs, or soberly a portrait, like any one of those admirable busts in their round niches between the pilasters of a classical design. And, at the base, below the Latin inscription, it not infrequently happens (at any rate in Rome and after 1550) that a little skull, in bone-white marble, reminds the onlooker of what he himself will soon be, of what the original of the portrait has already become.

Why should the death’s-head have become fashionable at this particular moment of history? The religiously minded might surmise that it had something to do with the Counter-Reformation- the medically minded, that it was connected with that sixteenth-century pandemic of syphilis, whose noseless victims were a constant reminder of man's latter end; the artistically minded, that some mortuary sculptor of the time had a taste for, and a happy knack with, bones. I do not venture to decide between the possible alternatives, but am content to record the fact, observable by anyone who has been in Rome, that there, after the middle of the century, the skulls indubitably are.

As the years pass these reminders of mortality assume an ever greater importance. From being miniatures they grow in a short time into full-blown, death-sized replicas of the thing behind the face. And suddenly, imitating those bodiless seraphs of medieval and renaissance painting, they sprout a pair of wings and learn to fly. And meanwhile the art of the late Renaissance has become the Baroque. By an aesthetic necessity, because it is impossible for self-conscious artists to go on doing what has been supremely well done by their predecessors, the symmetrical gives place to the disbalanced, the static to the dynamic, the formalized to the realistic. Statues are caught in the act of changing their positions; pictorial compositions try to break out of their frames. Where there was understatement, there is now emphasis; where there was measure and humanity, there is now the enormous, the astounding, the demi-god, and the epileptic subman.

Consider, for example, those skulls on the monuments. They have grown in size; their truth to death is overpowering and, to heighten the effect of verisimilitude, the sculptor has shifted them from their old place on the central axis and now shows them, casual and unposed, in profile or three-quarters face, looking up to heaven or down into the grave. And their wings! Vast, wildly beating, wind-blown —the wings of vultures in a hurricane. The appetite for the inordinate grows with what it feeds upon, and along with it grow the virtuosity of the artists and the willingness of their patrons to pay for ever more astounding monuments. By 1630 the skull is no longer adequate as a memento mori; it has become necessary to represent the entire skeleton.

The most grandiose of these reminders of our mortality are the mighty skeletons which Bernini made for the tombs of Urban VIII and Alexander VII in St. Peter’s. Majestic in his vestments and intensely alive, each of the two Popes sits there aloft, blessing his people. Some feet below him, on either side, are his special Virtues—Faith, Temperance, Fortitude, who knows? In the middle, below the Pontiff, is the gigantic emblem of death. On Urban’s tomb the skeleton is holding (slightly cock-eyed, for it would be intolerably old-fashioned and unrealistic if the thing were perfectly level) a black marble scroll inscribed with the Pope’s name and title; on Alexander’s the monster has been “ stopped," as the photographers say, in the act of shooting up from the doorway leading into the vault. Up it comes, like a rocket, at an angle of sixty or seventy degrees, and as it rises it effortlessly lifts six or seven tons of the red marble drapery, which mitigates the rigidities of architecture and transforms the statically geometrical into something mobile and indeterminate.

The emphasis, in these two extraordinary works, is not on heaven, hell, and purgatory, but on physical dissolution and the grave. The terror which inspired such works as the Dies Irae was of the second death, the death inflicted by an angry judge upon the sinner’s soul. Here, on the contrary, the theme is the first death, the abrupt passage from animation to insensibility and from worldly glory to supper with the convocation of politic worms.

Chi un tempo, carco d’amorose prede, ebbe I’ostro alle guance a 1’oro al crine, deforme, arido teschio, ecco, si vede.-

Bernini’s tombs are by no means unique. The Roman churches are full of cautionary skeletons. In Santa Maria sopra Minerva, for example, there is a small monument attached to one of the columns on the north side of the church. It commemorates a certain Vizzani, if I remember rightly, a jurisconsult who died some time before the middle of the seventeenth century. Here, as in the wall monuments of the High Renaissance, a bust looks out of a rounded niche placed above the long Latin catalogue of the dead man’s claims upon the attention of posterity. It is the bust, so intensely lifelike as to be almost a caricature, of a florid individual in his middle forties, no fool evidently, but wearing an expression of serene and unquestioning complacency. Socially, professionally, financially, what a huge success his life has been! And how strongly, like Milton, he feels that "nothing profits more than self-esteem founded on just and right.” But suddenly we become aware that the bust in its round frame is being held in an almost amorous embrace by a great skeleton in high relief, whizzing diagonally, from left to right, across the monument. The lawyer and all his achievements, all his self-satisfaction, are being wafted away into darkness and oblivion.

Of the same kind, but still more astounding, are the tombs of the Pallavicini family in San Francesco a Ripa. Executed by Mazzuoli- at the beginning of the eighteenth century, these monuments are among the last and at the same time the most extravagant outflowerings of the baroque spirit. Admirably carved, the usual Virtues keep guard at the base of each of the vast pyramidal structures. Above them, flapping huge wings, a ten-foot skeleton in bronze holds up for our inspection a pair of oval frames, containing busts of the departed Pallavicini. On one side of the family chapel we see the likenesses of two princely ecclesiastics. Death holds them with a studied carelessness, tilting their frames a little, one to the left, the other to the right, so that the grave ascetic faces look out, as though through the ports of a rolling ship. Opposite them, in the hands of another and, if possible, even more frightful skeleton, are two more members of the family—an elderly princess, this time, and her spouse. And what a spouse! Under the majestic wig the face is gross, many-chinned, complacently imbecile. High blood-pressure inflates the whole squat person almost to bursting point; pride keeps the pig-snout chronically pointing to the skies. And it is Death who now holds him aloft; it is Corruption, who, with triumphant derision, exhibits him, forever pilloried in marble, a grotesque and pitiable example of human bumptiousness.

Looking at the little fat man up there in the skeleton's clutches, one reflects, with a certain astonishment, that some Pallavicino must have ordered and presumably paid for this strange monument to a departed relative. With what intentions? To display the absurdity of the old gentleman’s pretensions to grandeur? To make a mock of everything he had lived for? The answer to these questions is, at least in part, affirmative. All these baroque tombs were doctrinally sound. The heirs of popes and princes laid out huge sums to celebrate the glories of their distinguished forebears—but laid them out on monuments whose emphatically Christian theme is the transience of earthly greatness and the vanity of human wishes. After which they addressed themselves with redoubled energy to the task of satisfying their own cravings for money, position, and power. A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor and survival a thing beyond the bounds of possibility. The men of the Baroque differed from those of other epochs not in what they actually did, not even in what they thought about those doings, but in what they were ready to express of their thoughts. They liked an art that harps on death and corruption and were neither better nor worse than we who are reticent about such things.

The fantastic dance of death in San Francesco a Ripa is almost the last of its kind. Thirty years after it was carved, Robert Blair- could achieve a modest popularity by writing such lines as these:

Methinks I see thee with thy head low laid,

While surfeited upon thy damask cheek

The high-fed worm, in lazy volumes rolled, Riots unscared.

But eighteenth-century sculptors made no attempt to realize these gruesome images. On graves and monuments Death no longer comments upon the mad pretensions of his victims. Broken columns, extinguished torches, weeping angels and muses—these are now the emblems in vogue. The artist and his patron are concerned to evoke sentiments less painful than the horror of corruption. With the nineteenth century we enter an age of stylistic revivals; but there is never a return to the mortuary fashions of the Baroque. From the time of Mazzuoli until the present day no monument to any important European has been adorned with death’s heads or skeletons.

We live habitually on at least three levels—the level of strictly individual existence, the level of intellectual abstraction, and the level of historical necessity and social convention. On the first of these levels our life is completely private; on the others it is, at least partially, a shared and public life. Thus, writing about death, I am on the level of intellectual abstraction. Participating in the life of a generation, to which the mortuary art of the Baroque seems odd and alien, I am on the level of history. But when I actually come to die, I shall be on the first level, the level of exclusively individual experience. That which, in human life, is shared and public has always been regarded as more respectable than that which is private. Kings have their Astronomers Royal, Emperors their official Historiographers; but there are no Royal Gastronomers, no Papal or Imperial Pornographers. Among crimes, the social and the historical are condoned as last infirmities of noble mind, and their perpetrators are very generally admired. The lustful and intemperate, on the contrary, are condemned by all—even by themselves (which was why Jesus so much preferred them to the respectable Pharisees). We have no God of Brothels, but the God of Battles, alas, is still going strong.

Baroque mortuary sculpture has as its basic subject matter the conflict, on one important front, between the public and the private, between the social and the individual, between the historical and the existential. The prince in his curly wig, the Pope in his vestments, the lawyer with his Latin eulogy and his smirk of self-satisfaction—all these are pillars of society, representatives of great historical forces and even makers of history. But under smirk and wig and tiara is the body with its unshareable physiological processes, is the psyche with its insights and sudden graces, its abysmal imbecilities and its unavowable desires. Every public figure—and to some extent we are all public figures—is also an island universe of private experiences; and the most private of all these experiences is that of falling out of history, of being separated from society—in a word, the experience of death.

Based as they always are upon ignorance—invincible in some cases, voluntary and selective in others —historical generalizations can never be more than partially true. In spite of which and at the risk of distorting the facts to fit a theory, I would suggest that, at any given period, preoccupation with death is in inverse ratio to the prevalence of a belief in man's perfectibility through and in a properly organized society. In the art and literature of the age of Condorcet, of the age of Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx, of the age of Lenin and the Webbs there are few skeletons. Why? Because it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that men came to believe in progress, in the march of history towards an ever bigger and better future, in salvation, not for the individual, but for society. The emphasis is on history and environment, which are regarded as the primary determinants of individual destiny. Indeed, among orthodox Marxians they are now (since the canonization of Lysenko and the anathema pronounced on " reactionary Morganism") regarded as the sole determinants. Predestination, whether Augustinian or Mendelian, whether karmic or genetic, has been ruled out, and we are back with Helvetius and his shepherd boys who can all be transformed into Newtons, back with Dr. Watson and his infinitely conditionable infants. But meanwhile the fact remains that, in this still unregenerate world, each of us inherits a physique and a temperament. Moreover, the career of every individual man or woman is essentially non-progressive. We reach maturity only to decline into decrepitude and the body's death. Could anything be more painfully obvious? And yet how rarely in the course of the last 250 years has death been made the theme of any considerable work of art! Among the great painters only Goya has chosen to treat of death, and then only of death by violence, death in war. The mortuary sculptors, as we have seen, harp only on the sentiments surrounding death—sentiments ranging from the noble to the tender and even the voluptuous. (The most delicious buttocks in the whole repertory of art are to be found on Canova’s² monument to the last of the Stuarts.)

In the literature of this same period death has been handled more frequently than in painting or sculpture, but only once (to my knowledge, at least) with complete adequacy. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyitch is one of the artistically most perfect and at the same time one of the most terrible books ever written. It is the story of an utterly commonplace man who is compelled to discover, step by agonizing step, that the public personage with whom, all his life, he has identified himself is hardly more than a figment of the collective imagination, and that his essential self is the solitary, insulated being who falls sick and suffers, rejects, and is rejected by the world and finally (for the story has a happy ending) gives in to his destiny, and in the act of surrender, at the very moment of death, finds himself alone and naked, in the presence of the Light. The baroque sculptors are concerned with the same theme; but they protest too much and their conscious striving for sublimity is apt to defeat its own object. Tolstoy is never emphatic, indulges in no rhetorical flourishes, speaks simply of the most difficult matters and flatly, matter-of-factly, of the most terrible. That is why his book has such power and is so profoundly disturbing to our habitual complacency. We are shocked by it in much the same way as we are shocked by pornography— and for the same reason. Sex is almost as completely private a matter as death, and a work of art which powerfully expresses the truth about either of them is very painful to the respectable public figure we imagine ourselves to be. Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations. And nothing is more desolating than a thorough knowledge of the private self. Hence the utility of such books as Ivan Ilyitch and, I would venture to add, such books as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

And here let me add a parenthetical note on the pornography of the age which witnessed the rise of the ideas of progress and social salvation. Most of it is merely pretty, an affair of wish-fulfilments— Boucher carried to his logical conclusion. The most celebrated pornographer of the time, the Marquis de Sade, is a mixture of escapist maniac and philosophe. He lives in a world where insane fantasy alternates with post-Voltairean ratiocination; where impossible orgies are interrupted in order that the participants may talk, sometimes shrewdly, but more often in the shallowest eighteenth-century way, about morals, politics, and metaphysics. Here, for example, is a typical specimen of Sadian sociology. "Is incest dangerous? Certainly not. It extends family ties and consequently renders more active the citizen’s love of his fatherland.” In this passage, as throughout the work of this oddest product of the Enlightenment, we see the public figure doing his silly best to rationalize the essentially unrationalizable facts of private existence. But what we need, if we are to know ourselves, is the truthful and penetrating expression in art of precisely these unrationalizable facts—the facts of death, as in Ivan Ilyich, the facts of sex, as in Tropic of Cancer, the facts of pain and cruelty, as in Goya’s Disasters, the facts of fear and disgust and fatigue, as in that most horrifyingly truthful of war-books, The Naked and the Dead. Ignorance is a bliss we can never afford; but to know only ourselves is not enough. If it is to be a fruitful desolation, self-knowledge must be made the road to a knowledge of the Other. Unmitigated, it is but another form of ignorance and can lead only to despair or complacent cynicism. Floundering between time and eternity, we are amphibians and must accept the fact. Noverim me, noverim Te—the prayer expresses an essentially realistic attitude towards the universe in which, willy-nilly, we have to live and to die.

Death is not the only private experience with which baroque art concerns itself. A few yards from the Pallavicino tombs reclines Bernini’s statue of Blessed Ludovica Albertoni in ecstasy. Here, as in the case of the same artist's more celebrated St. Teresa, the experience recorded is of a privacy so special that, at a first glance, the spectator feels a shock of embarrassment. Entering those rich chapels in San Francesco and Santa Maria della Vittoria, one has the impression of having opened a bedroom door at the most inopportune of moments, almost of having opened Tropic of Cancer at one of its most startling pages. The posture of the ecstatics, their expression and the exuberance of the tripe-like drapery which surrounds them and, in the Albertoni’s case, overflows in a kind of peritoneal cataract on to the altar below—all conspire to emphasize the fact that, though saints may be important historical figures, their physiology is as disquietingly private as anyone else’s.

By the inner logic of the tradition within which they worked, baroque artists were committed to a systematic exploitation of the inordinate. Hence the epileptic behavior of their gesticulating or swooning personages, and hence, also, their failure to find an adequate artistic expression for the mystical experience. This failure seems all the more surprising when one remembers that their period witnessed a great efflorescence of mystical religion. It was the age of St. John of the Cross and Benet of Canfield, of Mme. Acarie and Father Lallemant and Charles de Condren, of Augustine Baker and Surin and Olier.- All these had taught that the end of the spiritual life is the unitive knowledge of God, an immediate intuition of Him beyond discursive reason, beyond imagination, beyond emotion. And all had insisted that visions, raptures, and miracles were not the "real thing,” but mere by-products which, if taken too seriously, could become fatal impediments to spiritual progress. But visions, raptures, and miracles are astounding and picturesque occurrences, and astounding and picturesque occurrences were the predestined subject-matter of artists whose concern was with the inordinate. In baroque art the mystic is represented either as a psychic with supernormal powers, or as an ecstatic, who passes out of history in order to be alone, not with God, but with his or her physiology in a state hardly distinguishable from that of sexual enjoyment. And this in spite of what all the contemporary masters of the spiritual life were saying about the dangers of precisely this sort of thing.

Such a misinterpretation of mysticism was made inevitable by the very nature of baroque art. Given the style in which they worked, the artists of the seventeenth century could not have treated the theme in any other way. And, oddly enough, even at times when the current style permitted a treat ment of the less epileptic aspects of religion, no fully adequate rendering of the contemplative life was ever achieved in the plastic arts of Christendom. The peace that passes all understanding was often sung and spoken; it was hardly ever painted or carved. Thus, in the writings of St. Bernard, of Albertus Magnus, of Eckhart and Tauler and Ruysbroeck- one may find passages that express very clearly the nature and significance of mystical contemplation. But the saints who figure in medieval painting and sculpture tell us next to nothing about this anticipation of the beatific vision. There are no equivalents of those Far Eastern Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who incarnate, in stone and paint, the experience of ultimate reality. Moreover, the Christian saints have their being in a world from which non-human Nature (that mine of supernatural beauties and transcendent significances) has been almost completely excluded. In his handbook on painting Cennino Cennini gives a recipe for mountains. Take some large jagged stones, arrange them on a table, draw them, and, lo and behold, you will have a range of Alps or Apennines good enough for all the practical purposes of art. In China and Japan mountains were taken more seriously. The aspiring artist was advised to go and live among them, to make himself alertly passive in their presence, to contemplate them lovingly until he could understand the mode of their being and feel within them the workings of the immanent and transcendent Tao. As one might have expected, the medieval artists of Christendom painted mere backgrounds, whereas those of the Far East painted landscapes that are the equivalent of mystical poetry—formally perfect renderings of man’s experience of being related to the Order of Things.

This experience is, of course, perfectly private, non-historical and unsocial. That is why, to the organizers of Churches and the exponents of salvation through the State, it has always seemed so suspect, shady, and even indecent. And yet, like sex and pain and death, there it remains, one of the brute facts with which, whether we like them or not, we have to come to terms. Maddeningly, unbearably, an occasional artist rubs our noses in his rendering of these facts. Confronted by the pornographies of suffering, of sensuality, of dissolution, by The Disasters of War and The Naked and the Dead, by Tropic of Cancer, by Ivan Ilyitch and even (despite their ludicrous sublimity) by the baroque tombs, we shrink and are appalled. And in another way there is something hardly less appalling in the pornographies (as many good rationalists regard them) of mysticism. Even the consolations of religion and philosophy are pretty desolating for the average sensual man, who clings to his ignorance as the sole guarantee of happiness. Terribilis Mors conturbat me; but so does terribilis Vita.

[Themes and Variations, 1950]

3. These lines are from Robert Browning’s “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church."

4. The lines can be translated: “He who, once upon a time, laden with love’s preys / had roses in his cheeks and gold in his hair / now sees himself [reduced to] a misshapen, dried up skull."

5. Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzuoli, also known as Parmigianino (1503-1540). Italian painter.

6. Robert Blair (1699-1746). Scottish poet and preacher.

7. Antonio Canova (1757-1822). Venetian sculptor.

8. Charles de Condren (1588-1641). French mystic. Augustine Baker (1575-1641). English monk and writer of ascetic and mystical treatises. Jean-Joseph Surin (1600-1665). French mystic. Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-1657). French priest and founder of the Sulpicians.

9. Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint (1090-1153). French theologian and religious reformer. Albertus Magnus (c. 1200-1280). Medieval theologian of Swabian origins. Johann Tauler (c. 1300-1361). German mystic. Johannes Ruysbroeck (1293-1381). Flemish mystic.

Variations on El Greco

IN 1541, when Domenikos Theotokopoulos was born, his native island of Crete had been for more than three centuries under Venetian rule. Trade had followed the imperial flag, but not culture. In language, in thought, in art, the island remained as what it had been ever since the People of the Sea finally broke the Minoan power—a part of Greece. In the Cretan schools young men studied the philosophers of ancient Athens and the theologians of Christian Byzantium, Byzantine paintings and Byzantine mosaics adorned the churches, and even in the revolutionary sixteenth century the Cretan artists went their traditional way without paying the smallest attention to what had been happening in near-by Italy. Their pictures were two-dimensional, non-realistic, innocent of perspective and chiaroscuro. So far as they were concerned, Giotto and Masaccio, to say nothing of Raphael and Michelangelo and Titian, might never have existed.

Young Domenikos received a sound Greek education and studied painting under the best masters of the island. Not, however, for very long. In Candia one could see, along with the other importations from the mainland, examples of Venetian painting. The orthodox might shake their heads. What a way to treat the Mother of God! And that indecently human personage—was that supposed to be the Pantocrator? But to a young man of original and enquiring mind their very unorthodoxy must have seemed attractive. They were tokens from a world where the artist was his own master, where too he might make technical experiments, where he was free to see and represent all the things which, for the Byzantines, simply didn’t exist. Moreover, this world of artistic liberty was also a world where a man could make his fortune. Venice was rich; Crete, miserably poor. There was no future for a man in Candia; but on the mainland, on the mainland —

In the early fifteen-sixties, when the young immigrant from Crete first stepped ashore, Venice was at the height of her artistic glory. Titian was a very old man, but painting as well as, or indeed better than, he had ever done in his youth. Tintoretto, his junior by forty years, was hard at work, transforming the principles of High Renaissance composition into those of the Baroque. Still in his youthful prime, Veronese was effortlessly turning out enormous masterpieces of decorative art. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” But, all dawns—the artistic no less than the political, the religious, the sexual—give place to mornings, afternoons, and nights. After having worked for several years as "a disciple of Titian” (to use the phrase by which he was later to be described) Domenikos came to be profoundly dissatisfied with Venetian art. It could hardly have been otherwise. By nature introspective, by nurture a Christian Neo-Platonist and a student of Byzantine art, the young man might admire Venetian technique, but could never approve the uses to which that technique was put. For his taste Venetian art was too pagan, too voluptuous, too decorative, too much concerned with appearances, insufficiently inward and serious. In search of an art more conformable to his own nature and ideals Domenikos migrated in 1570 to Rome. But Rome, alas, proved to be no less disappointing than Venice. The great masters of the High Renaissance were all dead, and their successors were second-rate mannerists, incapable of creating anything new and living parasitically upon the achievements of the past. For Domenikos, the living were without interest and even the mighty dead were not the masters he had been looking for. Of Michelangelo, for example, he complained that the man did not know how to paint—which is a rather violent way of expressing the unquestionable truth that Michelangelo was primarily a sculptor and that his paintings are in some sort translations of sculpture into a language which was not the artist’s native tongue. To a young man whose vocation was to express himself, not in marble, not in transcriptions of sculpture, but in color and the rich texture of oil pigments, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel were not very instructive.

The artist’s stay in Rome lasted for several years. Then, at some date prior to 1577, he undertook yet another migration, this time to Spain. Why to Spain? As usual, we do not know. And when, some years later, during a lawsuit, the same question was put to El Greco himself, he declined to answer. Evidently he was of the opinion that people should mind their own business.

The Cretan’s wanderings were now at an end. He settled in Toledo, and there with his wife, Jeronima de las Cuevas, and his son, Jorge Manuel, he remained until his death in 1614. Of his life in Spain we know only a very little more than we know of his life in Crete and Italy—that is to say, next to nothing. Here are some of the scanty odds and ends of information that have come down to us.

Professionally, El Greco was successful. Many commissions came his way and he was well paid for his work. On several occasions he went to law with his ecclesiastical patrons in order to get his price. He had the reputation of spending his money with a lordly extravagance, and it was said that he paid an orchestra to make music while he ate his meals. His apartment on the verge of the great canyon of the Tagus contained twenty-four rooms, most of which, however, were left almost completely unfurnished. Of his own genius he had no doubts. He knew that he painted superlatively well and he was quite ready to say so in public. Moreover, when Philip II and certain of the clergy objected to his pictures on the ground that they did not respect the norms of ecclesiastical art, he steadfastly refused to compromise and went on painting exactly as he thought fit. Like Tintoretto, he modeled small clay figures, with the aid of which he studied effects of lighting and foreshortening. Pacheco, the father-in-law of Velasquez, saw a whole cupboardful of these figures when he visited El Greco shortly before the latter’s death. Needless to say, they have all disappeared and along with them has gone the treatise which El Greco wrote on painting. Among the painter’s friends were poets, men of learning, eminent ecclesiastics. His library, as we know from the inventory which was made after his death, contained, among other Greek works, the famous Mystical Theology of Dionysius the Areopagite,¹ together with more recent Italian books on Neo-Platonic philosophy. In the light of this fact, a curious anecdote recorded by Giulio Clovio, one of El Greco’s Roman friends, takes on a special significance. “Yesterday,” wrote Clovio in a letter which is still extant, "I called at his (El Greco’s) lodgings to take him for a walk through the city. The weather was very fine.... But on entering the studio I was amazed to find the curtains so closely drawn that it was hardly possible to see anything. The painter was sitting in a chair, neither working nor sleeping, and declined to go out with me on the ground that the light of day disturbed his inward light.” From this it would appear that El Greco took more than a theoretical interest in the mystical states described by Dionysius and the Neo-Platonists; he also practiced some form of meditation.

Of El Greco’s personal appearance we know nothing for certain. The so-called “self-portrait” may perhaps represent the painter’s features; or, on the other hand, it may not. The evidence is inconclusive. At every turn the man eludes us. Only his work remains.

A representational picture is one that “tells a story”—the story, for example, of the Nativity, the story of Mars and Venus, the story of a certain landscape or a certain person as they appeared at a certain moment of time. But this story is never the whole story. A picture always expresses more than is implicit in its subject. Every painter who tells a story tells it in his own manner, and that manner tells another story superimposed, as it were, upon the first—a story about the painter himself, a story about the way in which one highly gifted individual reacted to his experience of our universe. The first story is told deliberately; the second tells itself independently of the artist’s conscious will. He cannot help telling it; for it is the expression of his own intimate being—of the temperament with which he was born, the character which he himself has forged and the unconscious tendencies formed by the interaction of temperament, character, and outward circumstances.

Like most of his predecessors and contemporaries, El Greco was mainly a religious painter, a teller of old familiar stories, from the Gospels and the legends of the saints. But he told it in his own peculiar manner, and that manner tells another story, so enigmatic that we pore over it in fascinated bewilderment, trying to construe its meaning.

In looking at any of the great compositions of El Greco’s maturity, we must always remember that the intention of the artist was neither to imitate nature nor to tell a story with dramatic verisimilitude. Like the Post-Impressionists three centuries later, El Greco used natural objects as the raw material out of which, by a process of calculated distortion, he might create his own world of pictorial forms in pictorial space under pictorial illumination. Within this private universe he situated his religious subject-matter, using it as a vehicle for expressing what he wanted to say about life.

And what did El Greco want to say? The answer can only be inferred; but to me, at least, it seems sufficiently clear. Those faces with their uniformly rapturous expression, those hands clasped in devotion or lifted towards heaven, those figures stretched out to the point where the whole inordinately elongated anatomy becomes a living symbol of upward aspiration—all these bear witness to the artist’s constant preoccupation with the ideas of mystical religion. His aim is to assert the soul’s capacity to come, through effort and through grace, to ecstatic union with the divine Spirit. This idea of union is more and more emphatically stressed as the painter advances in years. The frontier between earth and heaven, which is clearly defined in such works as The Burial of Count Orgaz and The Dream of Philip II, grows fainter and finally disappears. In the latest version of Christ’s Baptism there is no separation of any kind. The forms and colors flow continuously from the bottom of the picture to the top. The two realms are totally fused.

Does this mean that El Greco actually found a perfect pictorial expression for what his contemporary, St. Teresa of Avila,- called “the spiritual marriage”? I think not. For all their extraordinary beauty, these great paintings are strangely oppressive and disquieting. Consciously El Greco was telling two stories— a story from the Gospels or the legends of the saints, and a story about mystical union with the divine. But, unconsciously, he told yet another story, having little or nothing to do with the two he knew he was telling. All that is disquieting in El Greco pertains to this third story and is conveyed to the spectator by his highly individual manner of treating space and the forms by which that space is occupied.

In the Byzantine art, with which El Greco was familiar in his youth, there is no third dimension. The figures in the icons and mosaics are the inhabitants of a Flatland in which there is no question of perspective. And precisely because there is no perspective, these figures seem to exist in a celestial universe having implications of indefinite extension. From ancient and conservative Byzantium El Greco travelled through time as well as space to modern Venice. Here, in Titian’s paintings, he found the realistic representation of a third dimension travelling back from the picture-plane to far-away landscapes of blue mountains under majestic clouds. And in Tintoretto's compositions he could study those rocketing centrifugal movements that carry the spectator’s mind beyond the picture-frame and suggest the endless succession of things and spaces existing in the world outside.

The nature of El Greco’s personality was such that he chose to combine Byzantium and Venice in the strangest possible way. His pictures are neither flat nor fully three-dimensional. There is depth in his private universe, but only a very little of it. From the picture-plane to the remotest object in the background there is, in most cases, an apparent distance of only a few feet. On earth, as in heaven, there is hardly room to swing a cat. Moreover, unlike Tintoretto and the baroque artists of the seventeenth century, El Greco never hints at the boundlessness beyond the picture-frame. His compositions are centripetal, turned inwards on themselves. He is the painter of movement in a narrow room, of agitation in prison. This effect of confinement is enhanced by the almost complete absence from his paintings of a landscape background. The whole picture-space is tightly packed with figures, human and divine; and where any chink is left between body and body, we are shown only a confining wall of cloud as opaque as earth, or of earth as fluidly plastic as the clouds. So far as El Greco is concerned, the world of non-human nature is practically nonexistent.

No less disquieting than the narrowness of El Greco’s universe is the quality of the forms with which he filled it. Everything here is organic, but organic on a low level, organic to a point well below the limit of life’s perfection. That is why there is no sensuality in these paintings, nothing of the voluptuous. In a work of art we are charmed and attracted by forms which represent or at least suggest the forms of such objects as we find attractive in nature—flowers, for example, fruits, animals, human bodies in their youthful strength and beauty. In life we are not at all attracted by protoplasm in the raw or by individual organs separated from the organism as a whole. But it is with forms suggestive precisely of such objects that El Greco fills his pictures. Under his brush the human body, when it is naked, loses its bony framework and even its musculature, and becomes a thing of ectoplasm—beautifully appropriate in its strange pictorial context, but not a little uncanny when thought of in the context of real life. And when El Greco clothes his boneless creatures, their draperies become pure abstractions, having the form of something indeterminately physiological.

And here a brief parenthesis is in order. A painter or a sculptor can be simultaneously representational and non-representational. In their architectural backgrounds and, above all, in their draperies, many works, even of the Renaissance and the Baroque, incorporate passages of almost unadulterated abstraction. These are often expressive in the highest degree. Indeed, the whole tone of a representational work may be established, and its inner meaning expressed, by those parts of it which are most nearly abstract. Thus, the pictures of Piero della Francesca leave upon us an impression of calm, of power, of intellectual objectivity and stoical detachment. From those of Cosimo Tura there emanates a sense of disquiet, even of anguish. When we analyze the purely pictorial reasons for our perception of a profound difference in the temperaments of the two artists, we find that a very important part is played by the least representational elements in their pictures—the draperies. In Piero’s draperies there are large unbroken surfaces, and the folds are designed to emphasize the elementary solid-geometrical structure of the figures. In Tura’s draperies the surfaces are broken up, and there is a profusion of sharp angles, of jagged and flame-like forms. Something analogous may be found in the work of two great painters of a later period, Poussin and Watteau. Watteau’s draperies are broken into innumerable tiny folds and wrinkles, so that the color of a mantle or a doublet is never the same for half an inch together. The impression left upon the spectator is one of extreme sensibility and the most delicate refinement. Poussin’s much broader treatment of these almost non-representational accessories seems to express a more masculine temperament and a philosophy of life akin to Piero’s noble stoicism.

In some works the non-representational passages are actually more important than the representational. Thus in many of Bernini's statues, only the hands, feet, and face are fully representational; all the rest is drapery—that is to say, a writhing and undulant abstraction. It is the same with El Greco’s paintings. In some of them a third, a half, even as much as two-thirds of the entire surface is occupied by low-level organic abstractions, to which, because of their representational context, we give the name of draperies, or clouds, or rocks. These abstractions are powerfully expressive and it is through them that, to a considerable extent, El Greco tells the private story that underlies the official subjectmatter of his paintings.

At this point the pure abstractionist will come forward with a question. Seeing that the non-representational passages in representational works are so expressive, why should anyone bother with representation? Why trouble to tell a high-level story about recognizable objects when the more important low-level story about the artist’s temperament and reactions to life can be told in terms of pure abstractions? I myself have no objection to pure abstractions which, in the hands of a gifted artist, can achieve their own kind of aesthetic perfection. But this perfection, it seems to me, is a perfection within rather narrow limits. The Greeks called the circle "a perfect figure.” And so it is—one cannot improve on it. And yet a composition consisting of a red circle inscribed within a black square would strike us, for all its perfection, as being a little dull. Even aesthetically the perfect figure of a circle is less interesting than the perfect figure of a young woman. This does not mean, of course, that the representation of the young woman by a bad artist will be more valuable, as a picture, than a composition of circles, squares, and triangles devised by a good one. But it does mean, I think, that nature is a richer source of forms than any text-book of plane or solid geometry. Nature has evolved innumerable forms and, as we ourselves move from point to point, we see large numbers of these forms, grouped in an endless variety of ways and thus creating an endless variety of new forms, all of which may be used as the raw materials of works of art. What is given is incomparably richer than what we can invent. But the richness of nature is, from our point of view, a chaos upon which we, as philosophers, men of science, technicians, and artists, must impose various kinds of unity. Now, I would say that, other things being equal, a work of art which imposes aesthetic unity upon a large number of formal and psychological elements is a greater and more interesting work than one in which unity is imposed upon only a few elements. In other words, there is a hierarchy of perfections. Bach’s Two-Part Inventions are perfect in their way. But his Chromatic Fantasia is also perfect; and since its perfection involves the imposition of aesthetic unity upon a larger number of elements it is (as we all in fact recognize) a greater work. The old distinction between the Fine Arts and the crafts is based to some extent upon snobbery and other nonaesthetic considerations. But not entirely. In the hierarchy of perfections a perfect vase or a perfect carpet occupies a lower rank than that, say, of Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, or Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, or the Grande Jatte of Georges Seurat. In these and a hundred other masterpieces of painting the pictorial whole embraces and unifies a repertory of forms much more numerous, varied, strange, and interesting than those which come together in the wholes organized by even the most gifted craftsmen. And, over and above this richer and subtler formal perfection, we are presented with a non-pictorial bonus of a story and, explicit or implicit, a criticism of life. At their best, non-representational compositions achieve perfection; but it is a perfection nearer to that of the jug or rug than to that of the enormously complex and yet completely unified masterpieces of representational art—most of which, as we have seen, contain expressive passages of almost pure abstraction. At the present time it would seem that the most sensible and rewarding thing for a painter to do is (like Braque, for example) to make the best and the most of both worlds, representational as well as non-representational.

Within his own Byzantine-Venetian tradition El Greco did precisely this, combining representation with abstraction in a manner which we are accustomed to regard as characteristically modern. His intention, as we have seen, was to use this powerful artistic instrument to express, in visual terms, man’s capacity for union with the divine. But the artistic means he employed were such that it was not possible for him to carry out that intention. The existence of a spiritual reality transcendent and yet immanent, absolutely other and yet the sustaining spiritual essence of every being, has frequently been rendered in visual symbols—but not symbols of the kind employed by El Greco. The agitation of quasi-visceral forms in an overcrowded and almost spaceless world from which non-human nature has been banished cannot, in the very nature of things, express man's union with the Spirit who must be worshipped in spirit.

Landscape and the human figure in repose—these are the symbols through which, in the past, the spiritual life has been most clearly and powerfully expressed, "Be still and know that I am God.” Recollectedness is the indispensable means to the unitive knowledge of spiritual reality; and though recollectedness should and by some actually can be practiced in the midst of the most violent physical activity, it is most effectively symbolized by a body in repose and a face that expresses an inner serenity. The carved or painted Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of India and the Far East are perhaps the most perfect examples of such visual symbols of the spiritual life. Hardly less adequate are the majestic Byzantine figures of Christ, the Virgin, and the Saints. It seems strange that El Greco, who received his first training from Byzantine masters, should not have recognized the symbolical value of repose, but should have preferred to represent or, through his accessory abstractions, to imply, an agitation wholly incompatible with the spiritual life of which he had read in the pages of Dionysius.

No less strange is the fact that a disciple of Titian should have ignored landscape and that a Neo-Platonist should have failed to perceive that, in the aged master’s religious pictures, the only hint of spirituality was to be found, not in the all too human figures, but in the backgrounds of Alpine foothills, peaks, and skies. Civilized man spends most of his life in a cozy little universe of material artifact, of social conventions, and of verbalized ideas. Only rarely, if he is the inhabitant of a well-ordered city, does he come into direct contact with the mystery of the non-human world, does he become aware of modes of being incommensurable with his own, of vast, indefinite extensions, of durations all but everlasting. From time immemorial deity has been associated with the boundlessness of earth and sky, with the longevity of trees, rivers, and mountains, with Leviathan and the whirlwind, with sunshine and the lilies of the field. Space and time on the cosmic scale are symbols of the infinity and eternity of Spirit. Non-human nature is the outward and visible expression of the mystery which confronts us when we look into the depths of our own being. The first artists to concern themselves with the spiritual significance of nature were the Taoist landscape painters of China. "Cherishing the Way, a virtuous man responds to objects. Clarifying his mind, a wise man appreciates forms. As to landscapes, they exist in material substance and soar into the realm of spirit.... The virtuous man follows the Way by spiritual insight; the wise man takes the same approach. But the lovers of landscape are led into the Way by a sense of form.... The significance which is too subtle to be communicated by means of word of mouth may be grasped by the mind through books and writings. Then how much more so in my case, when I have wandered among the rocks and hills and carefully observed them with my own eyes! I render form by form and appearance by appearance.... The truth comprises the expression received through the eyes and recognized by the mind. If, in painting, therefore, the likeness of an object is skillfully portrayed, both the eye and the mind will approve. When the eyes respond and the mind agrees with the objects, the divine spirit may be felt and truth may be attained in the painting.” So wrote Tsung Ping, who was a contemporary of St. Augustine, in an Introduction to Landscape Painting, which has become a Chinese classic. When, twelve hundred years later, European artists discovered landscape, they developed no philosophy to explain and justify what they were doing. That was left to the poets—to Wordsworth, to Shelley, to Whitman. The Presence which they found in nature, "the Spirit of each spot,” is identical with Hsuan P’in, the mysterious Valley Spirit of the Tao Te Ching, who reveals herself to the landscape painter and, by him, is revealed to others in his pictures. But the lack of an explanatory philosophy did not prevent the best of the European landscape painters from making manifest that

Something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.”¹

"This is not drawing,” Blake exclaimed, when he was shown one of Constable’s sketches, "this is inspiration.” And though Constable himself protested that it was only drawing, the fact remains that the best of his landscapes are powerful and convincing renderings of the spiritual reality in which all things have their being. Indeed, they are much more adequate as symbols of spiritual life than the majority of the works in which Blake consciously tried to express his spiritualist philosophy. Much less gifted as painter than as poet, and brought up in a deplorable artistic tradition, Blake rarely produced a picture that “comes off” to the extent of expressing what he says so perfectly in his lyrics and in isolated passages

of the Prophetic Books. Constable, on the other hand, is a great nature mystic without knowing or intending it. In this he reminds us of Seurat. “They see poetry in what I do," complained that consummate master of landscape. “No; I apply my method and that is all there is to it.” But the method was applied by a painter who combined the most exquisite sensibility with intellectual powers of the first order. Consequently what Seurat supposed to be merely pointillisms was in fact inspiration—was a vision of the world in which material reality is the symbol and, one might say, the incarnation of an all-embracing spiritual reality. The famous method was the means whereby he told this Taoistic and Wordsworthian story; pointillisms, as he used it, permitted him to render empty space as no other painter has ever done, and to impose, through color, an unprecedented degree of unity upon his composition. In Seurat’s paintings the near and the far are separate and yet are one. The emptiness which is the symbol of infinity is of the same substance as the finite forms it contains. The transient participates in the eternal, samsara and nirvana are one and the same. Such is the poetry with which, in spite of himself, Seurat filled those wonderful landscapes of Honfleur and Gravelines and the Seine. And such is the poetry which El Greco, in spite of what seems to have been a conscious desire to imply it, was forced by the nature of his artistic instrument to exclude from every picture he painted. His peculiar treatment of space and form tells a story of obscure happenings in the sub-conscious mind—of some haunting fear of wide vistas and the open air, some dream of security in the imagined equivalent of a womb. The conscious aspiration towards union with, and perfect freedom in, the divine spirit is overridden by a sub-conscious longing for the consolations of some ineffable uterine state. In these paintings there is no redemption of time by eternity, no transfiguration of matter by the spirit. On the contrary, it is the low-level organic that has engulfed the spiritual and transformed it into is own substance.

When we think of it in relation to the great world of human experience, El Greco’s universe of swallowed spirit and visceral rapture seems, as I have said, curiously oppressive and disquieting. But considered as an isolated artistic system, how strong and coherent it seems, how perfectly unified, how fascinatingly beautiful! And because of this inner harmony and coherence, it asserts in one way all that it had denied in another. El Greco’s conscious purpose was to affirm man’s capacity for union with the divine. Unconsciously, by his choice of forms and his peculiar treatment of space, he proclaimed the triumph of the organic and the incapacity of spirit, so far as he personally was concerned, to transfigure the matter with which it is associated. But at the same time he was a painter of genius. Out of the visceral forms and cramped spaces, imposed upon him by a part of his being beyond his voluntary control, he was able to create a new kind of order and perfection and, through this order and perfection, to re-affirm the possibility of man’s union with the Spirit—a possibility which the raw materials of his pictures had seemed to rule out.

There is no question here of a dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. A work of art is not a becoming, but a multiple being. It exists and has significance on several levels at once. In most cases these significances are of the same kind and harmoniously reinforce one another. Not always, however. Occasionally it happens that each of the meanings is logically exclusive of all the rest. There is then a happy marriage of incompatibles, a perfect fusion of contradictions. It is one of those states which, though inconceivable, actually occur. Such things cannot be; and yet, when you enter the Prado, when you visit Toledo, there they actually are.

[Thsmss and Variations, 1950]

1. Dionysius the Areopagite (1st century A.D.). Christian philosopher of Greek or Syrian origin.

2. St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582). Spanish mystic and author.

3. These lines are from William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13,1798."

Variations on The Prisons

AT THE TOP of the main staircase in University College, London, there stands a box-like structure of varnished wood, somewhat larger than a telephone-booth, somewhat smaller than an outdoor privy. When the door of this miniature house is opened, a light goes on inside, and those who stand upon the threshold find themselves confronted by a little old gentleman sitting bolt upright in a chair and smiling benevolently into space. His hair is gray and hangs almost to his shoulders; his wide-brimmed straw hat is like something out of the illustrations to an early edition of Paul et Virginie;⁴ he wears a cutaway coat (green, if I remember rightly, with metal buttons) and pantaloons of white cotton, discreetly striped. This little old gentleman is Jeremy Bentham,-or at least what remains of Jeremy Bentham, after the dissection ordered in his will—a skeleton with hands and face of wax, dressed in the clothes which once belonged to the author of The Principles of Morals and Legislation.

To this odd shrine (so characteristic, in its excessive unpretentiousness, of "that nook-shotten isle of Albion") I paid my visit of curiosity in the company of one of the most extraordinary, one of the most admirable men of our time, Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Many years have passed since then; but I remember very clearly the expression of affectionate amusement which appeared on Schweitzer’s face as he looked at the mummy. "Dear Bentham," he said at last, "dear Bentham! I like him so much better than Hegel. He was responsible for so much less harm."

The comment was unexpected but true, and, in our twentieth-century context, painfully to the point. The German philosopher was proud of being tief. but lacked completely the humility which is the necessary condition of the ultimate profundity. That was why he ended up as the idolater of the Prussian state and the spiritual father of those Marxian theories of history, in terms of which it is possible to justify every atrocity on the part of true believers and to condemn every good or reasonable act performed by infidels. Bentham, on the contrary, made no claims to tiefness. Shallow with the kindly and sensible shallowness of the eighteenth century, he thought of individuals as real people, not as mere cells in the brawn and bone of a social organism whose soul is the State. From Hegel’s depths have sprung tyranny, war, and persecutions; from the shallows of Bentham, a host of unpretentious but real benefits —the repeal of antiquated laws, the introduction of sewage systems, the reform of municipal government, almost everything sensible and humane in the civilization of the nineteenth century. Only in one field did Bentham ever sow the teeth of dragons. He had the logician’s passion for order and consistency; and he wanted to impose his ideas of tidiness not only upon thoughts and words, but also upon things and institutions. Now tidiness is undeniably a good—but a good of which it is easily possible to have too much and at too high a price. The love of tidiness has often figured, along with the love of power, as an incitement to tyranny. In human affairs the extreme of messiness is anarchy; the extreme of tidiness, an army or a penitentiary. Anarchy is the enemy of liberty, and so, at its highest pitch, is mechanical efficiency. The good life can be lived only in a society where tidiness is preached and practiced, but not too fanatically, and where efficiency is always haloed, as it were, by a tolerated aura of mess. Bentham himself was no tyrant and no worshipper of the all-efficient, ubiquitous, and providential State. But he loved tidiness and inculcated that kind of social efficiency which has been and is being made an excuse for the concentration of power in the hands of a few experts and the regimentation of the masses. And meanwhile we have to remember the strange and rather alarming fact that Bentham devoted about 25 years of his long life to the elaboration in minutest detail of the plans for a perfectly efficient prison. The Panopticon, as he called it, was to be a circular building so constructed that every convict should pass his life in perpetual solitude while remaining under the perpetual surveillance of a warder posted at the center. (Significantly enough, Jeremy Bentham borrowed the idea of the Panopticon from his brother, Sir Samuel, the naval architect, who, while employed by Catherine the Great to build warships for Russia, had designed a factory along panoptical lines, for the purpose of getting more work out of the newly industrialized mujiks'). Bentham’s plan for a totalitarian housing project was never carried out. To console him for his disappointment, the philosopher was granted, by Act of Parliament, 23,000 pounds from the public funds.

The architecture of modern prisons lacks the logical perfection of the Panopticon; but its inspiration is that same passion for a more than human tidiness which moved the Bentham brothers and which has been, time out of mind, characteristic of martinets and dictators. Before the days of Howard and Bentham and the Philadelphia Quakers, nobody, for some odd reason, seems ever to have thought of making prisons orderly and efficient. The jails to which Elizabeth Fry brought her inexhaustible treasures of charity and common sense were like the embodiments of some criminal delirium. Passing those doors, the prisoner found himself condemned to an existence resembling that of Hobbes’s theoretical state of nature. Behind the facade of Newgate—a facade which its architect, uninhibited by the tiresome necessity of finding a place for windows, had been able to make consummately elegant— there existed, not a world of men and women, not even a world of beasts, hut a chaos, a pandemonium.

The artist whose work most faithfully reflects the nature of this hell is Hogarth—not the Hogarth of the harmoniously colored paintings, but he of the engravings, he of the hard insensitive line, the ruthless delineator of senseless evil and chaotic misery, as well within the Fleet and Newgate and Bedlam as outside, in those other prisons, those other asylums, the dramshops of Gin Alley, the brothels and gaming-rooms of Covent Garden, the suburban playgrounds, where children torment their dogs and birds with scarcely imaginable refinements of cruelty and obscenity.

Within a space of thirty or forty years the Prison Discipline Society accomplished an extraordinary reformation. From being sub-humanly anarchical, prisons became sub-humanly mechanical. Ever since Sir Joshua Jebb erected his model jail at Pentonville, the consciousness of being inside a machine, inside a realized idea of absolute tidiness and perfect regimentation, has been a principal part of the punishment of convicts. In the Nazi concentration camps hell on earth was not of the old Hogarthian kind, but neat, tidy, thoroughly scientific. Seen from the air, Belsen is said to have looked like an atomic research laboratory or a well-designed motion picture studio. The Bentham brothers have been dead these hundred years and more; but the spirit of the Panopticon, the spirit of Sir Samuel’s mu/zfe-compelling workhouse, has gone marching on to strange and terrible destinations.

Today every efficient office, every up-to-date factory is a panoptical prison, in which the worker suffers (more or less, according to the character of the warders and the degree of his own sensibility) from the consciousness of being inside a machine. It is, I think, only in literature that there has been an adequate artistic rendering of this consciousness. De Vigny,- for example, has said fine and penetrating things about the soldier’s enslavement to an ideal of absolute tidiness; and in War and Peace there is a memorable chapter on the way in which the impersonal forces of Orders from Above, of High Policy expressing itself through the workings of a system, transforms Pierre’s kindly French jailers into insensitive and pitiless automata. But in the twentieth century an army is only one among many Panopticons. There are also the regiments of industry, the regiments of book-keeping and administration. These have evoked a good deal of plaintive or truculent writing, but not much, and nothing very satisfactory, in the way of pictorial art. There were, it is true, certain Cubists, who liked to paint machines or to represent human figures as though they were parts of machines. But a machine, after all, is itself a work of art, much more subtle, much more interesting from a formal point of view, than any representation of a machine can be. In other words, a machine is its own highest artistic expression and merely loses by being simplified and quintessentialized in a symbolic representation. As for the representation of human beings in mechanomorphic guise—this is effective only to a certain point. For the real horror of the situation in an industrial or administrative Panopticon is not that human beings are transformed into machines (if they could be so transformed, they would be perfectly happy in their prisons); no, the horror consists precisely in the fact that they are not machines, but freedom-loving animals, far-ranging minds and God-like spirits, who find themselves subordinated to machines and constrained to live within the issueless tunnel of an arbitrary and inhuman system.

Beyond the real historical prisons of too much tidiness and those where anarchy engenders the hell of physical and moral chaos, there lie yet other prisons, no less terrible for being fantastic and unembodied —the metaphysical prisons, whose seat is within the mind, whose walls are made of nightmare and incomprehension, whose chains are anxiety and their racks a sense of personal and even generic guilt. De Quincey’s Oxford Street and the road on which he had his vision of sudden death were prisons of this kind. So was the luxurious inferno described by Beckford in Vathek. So were the castles, the courtrooms, the penal colonies inhabited by the personages of Kafka’s novels. And, passing from the world of words to that of forms, we find these same metaphysical prisons delineated with incomparable force in the strangest and, in many ways, the most beautiful, of Piranesi’s etchings.

Historical generalizations are delightful to make and thrilling to read. But how much, I wonder, do they contribute to our understanding of the human enigma? The question is one which I will not venture to answer, except with a series of other questions. For example, if, as we are told, the art of a period reflects the social history of that period, in what way precisely do Perugino’s paintings express the age whose history is written in The Prince of Machiavelli? Again, modern historians assure us that the thirteenth century was the Age of Faith and a period of progress. Then why should all the moralists who actually lived during the thirteenth century have regarded it as an age of decadence and why should its liveliest chronicler, Salimbene, depict for us a society that behaves as though it had never even heard of Christian morals? Or consider the fourth century in Constantinople. At this time and place, we are assured by certain historians, men were wholly preoccupied with problems of theology. If this is the case, why do the writers who were contemporary with those men complain that they lived only for the chariot races? And, finally, why should Voltaire and Hume be regarded as more typical of the eighteenth century than Bach and Wesley? Why have I myself, in an earlier paragraph, spoken of the kindly and sensible shallowness of the eighteenth century, when that century gave birth to such men as William Law and Saint-Martin, to the author of the Songs of Experience and the engraver of The Prisons. The truth is, of course, that every variety of human being exists at every period. In religion, for example, every generation has its fetishists, its revivalists, its legalists, its rationalists, and its mystics. And, whatever the prevailing fashion in art may happen to be, every age has its congenital romantics and its natural classicists. True, at any period the prevailing fashions in art, in religion, in modes of thought and feeling are more or less rigid. Consequently it is always more or less hard for those, whose temperaments are at odds with the fashion, to express themselves. Any given work of art may be represented as the diagonal in a parallelogram of forces—a parallelogram of which the base is longer than the upright; in others the upright is longer than the base.

Piranesi’s Prisons are creations of the second kind. In them the personal, private, and therefore universal and everlasting upright is notably longer than the merely historical and therefore transient and local base. The proof of this is to be found in the fact that these extraordinary etchings have continued, during two centuries, to seem completely relevant and modern, not merely in their formal aspects, but also as expressions of obscure psychological truths. To use a once popular religious phrase, they "spoke to the condition” of Coleridge and De Quincey and they speak no less eloquently to ours. That which Piranesi expressed is not subject to historical change. He is not, like Hogarth, recording the facts of contemporary social life. Nor is he, like Bentham, trying to design a mechanism that shall change the nature of such facts. His concern is with states of the soul—states that are largely independent of external circumstances, states that recur whenever Nature, at her everlasting game of chance, combines the hereditary factors of physique and temperament in certain patterns.

In the past psychology was generally treated as a branch of ethics or theology. Thus, for St. Augustine, the problem of human differences was the same as the problem of Grace and the mystery of God's Good Pleasure. And it is only in quite recent times that men have learnt to talk about the idiosyncrasies of personal behavior in any terms but those of sin and virtue. The metaphysical prisons delineated by Piranesi, and described by so many modern poets and novelists, were well known to our ancestors—but well known, not as symptoms of disease or of some temperamental peculiarity, not as states to be analyzed and expressed by lyric poets, but rather as moral imperfections, as criminal rebellion against God, as obstacles in the way of enlightenment. Thus the weltschmerz, of which the German Romantics were so proud, the ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosite, which was the theme of so many of Baudelaire's most splendid verses, is nothing else than that acedia, for indulging in which the constitutionally bored and melancholy were plunged head over ears in the black mud of hell’s third circle. And this is what St. Catherine of Siena had to say about the state of mind which is the very climate and atmosphere of all Kafka’s novels. “Confusion is a leprosy that dries up the body and soul, and binds the arms of holy desire. It makes the soul unendurable to itself, disposing the mind to conflicts and fantasies. It robs the soul of supernatural light and darkens its natural light. Let the demons of confusion be vanquished by living faith and holy desire." To someone like St. Catherine, whose primary concern was union with God and the salvation of souls, even to someone whose preoccupation with Christianity was, like Dante's, rather that of a philosopher than of a theocentric saint, the idea of treating spiritual confusion or acedia or any other kind of metaphysical prison as merely a subject for scientific research or artistic manipulation would have seemed a kind of criminal imbecility. The historical base upon which medieval thinkers and artists erected their personal uprights was so long and so deeply rooted in traditional theology and ethics, that it proved impossible even for Boccaccio—born storyteller and passionate humanist though he was—to pay more than the most perfunctory attention to psychology. In the Decameron even the outward appearance of the personages is hardly described; and the characterization is confined to simple adjectives, such as “gentle," “courtly," “avaricious," “amorous," and the like. It required a greater genius and a profounder skepticism than Boccaccio’s to invent a psychology independent of theology and ethics. And let us remember that Chaucer—the Chaucer of the later Canterbury Tales—remained without any rival until the time of Shakespeare. In relation to its traditional base, his personal upright is the tallest in all medieval literature. The resulting diagonal represents a work of truly astounding originality.

On their much smaller scale The Prisons of Piranesi are also astonishingly original. No previous painter or draughtsmen had ever done anything at all like them. There had, of course, been plenty of fantasists before the days of Piranesi—even fantasists who expressed themselves in terms of architectural design, like the Bibbienas. But the Bibbienas were men of the theater and their architectural inventions were intended primarily to astonish the groundlings, to express, not the subterranean workings of a tormented soul, but those thoroughly vulgar aspirations towards grandiosity which, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tormented the great ones of the earth, together with all who snobbishly wanted to be like them. Another, more celebrated fantasist was Salvator Rosa7 —a man who, for reasons which are now incomprehensible, was regarded by the critics of four and five generations ago as one of the world's greatest artists. But Salvator Rosa’s romantic fantasies are pretty cheap and obvious. He is a melodramatist who never penetrates beneath the surface. If he were alive today, he would be known, most probably, as the indefatigable author of one of the more bloodthirsty and uninhibited comic strips. Much more talented was Magnasco,- whose speciality was monks by candlelight in a state of Gothic or Grecoesque elongation. His inventions are always pleasing, but always, one feels, without any deep or abiding significance—things created arbitrarily on one of the higher levels of consciousness, somewhere near the top of a very whimsical and accomplished head. The fantasy displayed in The Prisons is altogether of a different order. It is a fantasy without precedent, based upon facts, which Piranesi was the first to describe in pictorial terms. All the plates in the series are self-evidently variations on a single symbol, whose reference is to things existing in the physical and metaphysical depths of human souls and bodies—to acedia and confusion, to nightmare and angst, to incomprehension and panic bewilderment.

The most disquietingly obvious fact about all these dungeons is the perfect pointlessness which reigns throughout. Their architecture is colossal and magnificent. One is made to feel that the genius of great artists and the labor of innumerable slaves have gone into the creation of these monuments, every detail of which is completely without a purpose. Yes, without a purpose; for the staircases lead nowhere, the vaults support nothing but their own weight and enclose vast spaces that are never truly rooms, but only ante-rooms, lumber-rooms, vestibules, outhouses. And this magnificence of cyclopean stone is everywhere made squalid by wooden ladders, by flimsy gangways and catwalks. And the squalor is for squalor’s sake, since all these rickety roads through space are manifestly without destination. Below them, on the floor, stand great machines incapable of doing anything in particular, and from the arches over head hang ropes that carry nothing except a sickening suggestion of torture. Some of the prisons are lighted only by narrow windows. Others are half open to the sky, with hints of yet other vaults and walls in the distance. But even where the enclosure is more or less complete, Piranesi always contrives to give the impression that this colossal pointlessness goes on indefinitely and is co-extensive with the universe. Engaged in no recognizable activity, paying no attention to one another, a few small faceless figures haunt the shadows. Their insignificant presence merely emphasizes the fact that there is nobody at home.

Physically, every human being is always alone, suffering in solitude, incapable of participating in the vital processes of his fellows. But, though self-contained, this island-organism is never self-sufficient. Each living solitude is dependent upon other living solitudes and, more completely still, upon the ocean of being from which it lifts its tiny reef of individuality. The realization of this paradox of solitude in the midst of dependence, of isolation accompanied by insufficiency, is one of the principal causes of confusion and acedia and anxiety. And in their turn, of course, confusion and acedia and anxiety intensify the sense of loneliness and make the human paradox seem yet more tragic. The occupants of these metaphysical prisons are the hopeless spectators of "this pomp of worlds, this pain of birth”— of a magnificence without meaning, a misery without end and beyond the power of unaided man to understand or to bear.

It is said that the first idea of The Prisons came to Piranesi in the delirium of fever. What is certain, however, is that his first idea was not the last; for some of the etchings exist in early states, in which many of the most characteristic and most disquieting details of The Prisons, as we now know them, are lacking. From this it is to be inferred that the state of mind expressed in these etchings was, for Piranesi, chronic and in some sort normal. Fever may have originally suggested The Prisons; but in the years which elapsed between Piranesi’s first essays and the final publication of the plates, recurrent moods of confusion and acedia and angst must have been responsible for such obscure but, as we now see, indispensable symbols as the ropes, the aimless engines, the makeshift wooden stairs and bridges.

The plates of The Prisons were published while their author was still a young man, and during the remainder of his fairly long life Piranesi never returned to the theme which, in them, he had handled with such consummate mastery. Most of his work, thenceforward, was topographical and archaeological. His theme was always Rome; and this was true even when he abandoned the facts of ruins and baroque churches to undertake excursions into the realm of fantasy. For what he liked to imagine was still Rome—Rome as it ought to have been, as it might have been, if Augustus and his successors had possessed an inexhaustible treasury and an inexhaustible supply of manpower. It is fortunate that their resources were limited; for the hypothetical Rome of Piranesi’s fancy and the imperial dreams is a nightmare of pretentiousness and grandiose vulgarity.

St. Catherine held that the demons of confusion are to be vanquished only by holy desire and faith in the Christian revelation. But actually any sustained desire and any intense faith will win the battle. Piranesi seems to have been without any profound religious conviction or mystical aspiration. His faith was that of a humanist, his god was Roman antiquity, and his motivating desire was a mixture of the artist’s will to beauty, the archaeologist’s will to historical truth, and the poor man’s will to make a living for his family. These, apparently, were sufficient antidotes to acedia and spiritual confusion. At any rate he never gave a second expression to the state of mind which inspired The Prisons.

Considered from a purely formal point of view, The Prisons are remarkable as being the nearest eighteenth-century approach to a purely abstract art. The raw material of Piranesi’s designs consists of architectural forms; but, because The Prisons are images of confusion, because their essence is pointlessness, the combinations of architectural forms never add up to an architectural drawing, but remain free designs, untrammeled by any considerations of utility or even of possibility, and limited only by the necessity of evoking the general idea of a building. In other words, Piranesi uses architectural forms to produce a series of beautifully intricate designs, which resemble the abstractions of the Cubists in being composed of geometrical elements, but which have the advantage of combining pure geometry with enough subject-matter, enough literature, to express more forcibly than a mere pattern can do, the obscure and terrible states of spiritual confusion and acedia.

Of natural, as opposed to geometrical, forms Piranesi, in The Prisons, makes hardly any use. There is not a leaf or a blade of grass in the whole series, not a bird or an animal. Here and there, irrelevantly alive in the midst of the stony abstractions, stand a few human figures, darkly cloaked, featureless and impassive.

In the topographical etchings things are very different. Here Piranesi uses natural forms as a romantically decorative foil to the pure geometry of the monuments. The trees have an unkempt wildness; the personages in the foreground are either beggars, inconceivably ragged, or else fine ladies and gentlemen no less inconceivably be-ribboned and be-wigged, sometimes on foot, sometimes in rococo coaches, carved into the likeness of wedding-cakes or merry-go-rounds. Everywhere the purpose is to set off the smoothness and solidity of hewn stone by juxtaposing the wavering, flame-like forms of plants and human beings. At the same time the figures serve another purpose, which is to make the monuments seem larger than in fact they are. Men and women are reduced to the stature of children; horses become as small as mastiffs. Inside the basilicas the pious reach up to the holy water fonts and even on tiptoe, can hardly wet their fingers. Peopled by dwarfs, the most modest of baroque buildings assumes heroic proportions; a little piece of classicism by Pietro da Cortona seems gravely portentous, and the delightful gimcrack of Borromini takes on the quality of something cyclopean. This trick of increasing the apparent size of buildings by diminishing the known yardstick of the human figure was a favorite device among eighteenth-century artists. It was reduced to its final absurdity in such pictures as the Belshazzar's Feast of John Martin, where the ant-like king and his courtiers sit down to dinner in a hall about two miles long and fifteen hundred feet high.

In The Prisons there is no hint of this ingenuous and simple-minded theatricality. Such prisoners as we are shown exist for the purpose of emphasizing, not the super-human grandeur of the buildings, but their inhuman vacancy, their sub-human pointlessness. They are, quite literally, lost souls, wandering— or not even wandering, standing about—in a labyrinthine emptiness. It is interesting to compare them with the personages in Blake’s illustrations to The Inferno of Dante. These damned souls are so far from being lost that they seem to be so perfectly at home among their flames and crags and morasses. In all the circles of hell everybody is vaguely heroic in the corrupt classical manner of the late eighteenth century, and everybody appears to take the liveliest interest in his fellows. In The Prisons there are no Michelangelesque muscles, no exhibitionism of athletic extraverts, no trace of social life and hint that such a thing is even possible. Every man is muffled up, furtive, and even when in company, completely alone. Blake's drawings are curious and sometimes beautiful; but never for a moment can we take them seriously as symbols of extremist suffering. Piranesi’s prisoners, on the contrary, are the inhabitants of a hell which, though but one out of the many worst of all possible worlds, is completely credible and bears the stamp of self-evident authenticity.

[Themes and Variations, 1950]

4. A sentimental romance by Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, first published in 1787.

5. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). English philosopher and reformer.

6. Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863). French poet and novelist.

7. Salvatore Rosa (1615-1673). Italian painter and poet.

8. Alessandro Magnasco (1667-1749). Italian painter.

Variations on Goya

THERE ARE ANTHOLOGIES of almost everything—from the best to the worst, from the historically significant to the eccentric, from the childish to the sublime. But there is one anthology, potentially the most interesting of them all, which, to the best of my knowledge, has never yet been compiled; I mean, the Anthology of Later Works.

To qualify for inclusion in such an anthology, the artist would have to pass several tests. First of all, he must have avoided a premature extinction and lived on into artistic and chronological maturity. Thus the last poems of Shelley, the last compositions of Schubert and even of Mozart would find no place in our collection. Consummate artists as they were, these men were still psychologically youthful when they died. For their full development they needed more time than their earthly destiny allowed them. Of a different order are those strange beings whose chronological age is out of all proportion to their maturity, not only as artists, but as human spirits. Thus, some of the letters written by Keats in his early twenties and many of the paintings which Seurat executed before his death at thirty-two might certainly qualify as Later Works. But, as a general rule, a certain minimum of time is needed for the ripening of such fruits. For the most part, our hypothetical anthologist will make his selections from the art of elderly and middle-aged men and women.

But by no means all middle-aged and elderly artists are capable of producing significant Later Works. For the last half-century of a long life, Wordsworth preserved an almost unbroken record of dullness. And in this respect he does not stand alone. There are many, many others whose Later Works are their worst. All these must be excluded from our anthology, and I would pass a similar judgment on that other large class of Later Works, which, though up to the standard of the earlier, are not significantly different from them. Haydn lived to a ripe old age and his right hand never forgot its cunning; but it also failed to learn a new cunning. Peter Pan-like, he continued, as an old man, to write the same sort of thing he had written twenty, thirty, and forty years before. Where there is nothing to distinguish the creations of a man’s maturity from those of his youth it is superfluous to include any of them in a selection of characteristically Later Works.

This leaves us, then, with the Later Works of those artists who have lived without ever ceasing to learn of life. The field is relatively narrow; but within it, what astonishing, and sometimes what disquieting treasures! One thinks of the ineffable serenity of the slow movement of Beethoven's A Minor Quartet, the peace passing all understanding of the orchestral prelude to the Benedictus of his Missa Solemnis.

But this is not the old man's only mood; when he turns from the contemplation of eternal reality to a consideration of the human world, we are treated to the positively terrifying merriment of the last movement of his B-flat Major Quartet—merriment quite inhuman, peals of violent and yet somehow abstract laughter echoing down from somewhere beyond the limits of the world. Of the same nature, but if possible even more disquieting, is the mirth which reverberates through the last act of Verdi's Falstaff, culminating in that extraordinary final chorus in which the aged genius makes his mature st comment on the world—not with bitterness or sarcasm or satire, but in a huge, contrapuntal paroxysm of detached and already posthumous laughter.

Turning to the other arts, we find something of the same non-human, posthumous quality in the Later Works of Yeats and, coupled with a prodigious majesty, in those of Piero della Francesca. And then, of course, there is The Tempest—a work charged with something of the unearthly serenity of Beethoven's Benedictus but concluding in the most disappointing anticlimax, with Prospero giving up his magic for the sake (heaven help us!) of becoming once again a duke. And the same sort of all too human anticlimax saddens us at the end of the second part of Faust, with its implication that draining fens is Man's Final End, and that the achievement of this end automatically qualifies the drainer for the beatific vision.

And what about the last El Grecos—for example, that unimaginable Immaculate Conception at Toledo with its fantastic harmony of brilliant, ice-cold colors, its ecstatic gesticulations in a heaven with a third dimension no greater than that of a mine-shaft, its deliquescence of flesh and flowers and drapery into a set of ectoplasmic abstractions? What about them, indeed? All we know is that, beautiful and supremely enigmatic, they will certainly take their place in our hypothetical anthology.

And finally, among these and all other extraordinary Later Works, we should have to number the paintings, drawings, and etchings of Goya's final twenty-five or thirty years.

The difference between the young Goya and the old may be best studied and appreciated by starting in the basement of the Prado, where his cartoons for the tapestries are hung; climbing thence to the main floor, where there is a room full of his portraits of royal imbeciles, grandees, enchanting duchesses, majas, clothed and unclothed; walking thence to the smaller room containing those two great paintings: the Second of May—Napoleon’s Mamelukes cutting down the crowd—and Los Fusilamientos del Tres de Mayo, the firing squads at work upon their victims by the light of lanterns; and finally, mounting to the top floor where hang the etchings and drawings, together with those unutterably mysterious and disturbing “black paintings,” with which the deaf and ageing Goya elected to adorn the dining-room of his house, the Quinta del Sordo. It is a progress from light-hearted eighteenth-century art, hardly at all unconventional in subject-matter or in handling, through fashionable brilliancy and increasing virtuosity to something quite timeless both in technique and spirit—the most powerful of commentaries on human crime and madness, made in terms of an artistic convention uniquely fitted to express precisely that extraordinary mingling of hatred and compassion, despair and sardonic humor, realism and fantasy.

"I show you sorrow,” said the Buddha, "and the ending of sorrow”—the sorrow of the phenomenal world in which man, “like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep,” and the ending of sorrow in the beatific vision, the unitive contemplation of transcendental reality. Apart from the fact that he is a great and, one might say, uniquely original artist, Goya is significant as being, in his Later Works, the almost perfect type of the man who knows only sorrow and not the ending of sorrow.

In spite of his virulent anti-clericalism, Goya contrived to remain on sufficiently good terms with the Church to receive periodical commissions to paint religious pictures. Some of these, like the frescoes in the cupola of La Florida, are frankly and avowedly secular. But others are serious essays in religious painting. It is worth looking rather closely at what is probably the best of these religious pieces-the fine Agony in the Garden. With outstretched arms, Christ raises towards the comforting angel a face whose expression is identical with that of the poor creatures whom we see, in a number of unforgettably painful etchings and paintings, kneeling or standing in an excruciating anticipation before the gun-barrels of a French firing squad. There is no trace here of that loving confidence which, even in the darkest hours, fills the hearts of men and women who live continually in the presence of God; not so much as a hint of what Francois de Sales calls "holy indifference” to suffering and good fortune, of the fundamental equanimity, the peace passing all understanding, which belongs to those whose attention is firmly fixed upon a transcendental reality.

For Goya the transcendental reality did not exist. There is no evidence in his biography or his works that he ever had even the most distant personal experience of it. The only reality he knew was that of the world around him; and the longer he lived the more frightful did that world seem—the more frightful, that is to say, in the eyes of his rational self; for his animal high spirits went on bubbling up irrepressibly, whenever his body was free from pain or sickness, to the very end. As a young man in good health, with money and reputation, a fine position and as many women as he wanted, he had found the world a very agreeable place. Absurd, of course, and with enough of folly and roguery to furnish subject-matter for innumerable satirical drawings, but eminently worth living in. Then all of a sudden came deafness; and, after the joyful dawn of the Revolution, Napoleon and French Imperialism and the atrocities of war; and, when Napoleon’s hordes were gone, the unspeakable Ferdinand VII and clerical reaction and the spectacle of Spaniards fighting among themselves; and all the time like the drone of a bagpipe accompanying the louder noises of what is officially called history, the enormous stupidity of average men and women, the chronic squalor of their superstitions, the bestiality of their occasional violences and orgies.

Realistically or in fantastic allegories, with a technical mastery that only increased as he grew older, Goya recorded it all. Not only the agonies endured by his people at the hands of the invaders, but also the follies and crimes committed by these same people in their dealings with one another. The great canvases of the Madrid massacres and executions, the incomparable etchings of War's Disasters, fill us with an indignant compassion. But then we turn to the Disparates and the Pinturas Negras. In these, with a sublimely impartial savagery, Goya sets down exactly what he thinks of the martyrs of the Dos de Mayo when they are not being martyred. Here, for example, are two men—two Spaniards—sinking slowly towards death in an engulfing quicksand, but busily engaged in knocking one another over the head with bludgeons. And here is a rabble coming home from a pilgrimage—scores of low faces, distorted as though by reflection in the back of a spoon, all open-mouthed and yelling. And all the blank black eyes stare vacantly and idiotically in different directions.

These creatures who haunt Goya’s Later Works are inexpressibly horrible, with the horror of mindlessness and animality and spiritual darkness. And above the lower depths where they obscenely pullulate is a world of bad priests and lustful friars, of fascinating women whose love is a “dream of lies and inconstancy,” of fatuous nobles and, at the top of the social pyramid, a royal family of half-wits, sadists, Messalinas, and perjurers. The moral of it all is summed up in the central plate of the Caprichos, in which we see Goya himself, his head on his arms, sprawled across his desk and fitfully sleeping, while the air above is peopled with the bats and owls of necromancy and just behind his chair lies an enormous witch’s cat, malevolent as only Goya’s cats can be, staring at the sleeper with baleful eyes. On the side of the desk are traced the words, "The dream of reason produces monsters.” It is a caption that admits of more than one interpretation. When Reason sleeps, the absurd and loathsome creatures of superstition wake and are active, goading their victim to an ignoble frenzy. But this is not all, Reason may also dream without sleeping; may intoxicate itself, as it did during the French Revolution, with the day-dreams of inevitable progress, of liberty, equality, and fraternity imposed by violence, of human self-sufficiency and the ending of sorrow, not by the all too arduous method which alone offers any prospect of success, but by political re-arrangements and a better technology. The Caprichos were published in the last year of the eighteenth century; in 1808 Goya and all Spain were given the opportunity of discovering the consequences of such daydreaming. Murat marched his troops into Madrid; the Desastres de la Guerra were about to begin.

Goya produced four main sets of etchings—the Caprichos, the Desastres de la Guerra, the Tauromaquia, and the Disparates or Proverbios. All of them are Later Works. The Caprichos were not published until he was fifty-three; the plates of the Desastres were etched between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-five; the Tauromaquia series first saw the light when he was sixty-nine (and at the age of almost eighty he learned the brand new technique of lithography in order to be able to do justice to his beloved bulls in yet another medium); the Disparates were finished when he was seventy-three.

For the non-Spaniard the plates of the Tauromaquia series will probably seem the least interesting of Goya’s etchings. They are brilliant records of the exploits of the bull-ring; but unfortunately, or fortunately, most of us know very little about bull-fighting. Consequently, we miss the finer shades of the significance of these little masterpieces of documentary art. Moreover, being documentary, the etchings of the Tauromaquia do not lend themselves to being executed with that splendid audacity, that dramatic breadth of treatment, which delight us in the later paintings and the etchings of the other three series. True, we find in this collection a few plates that are as fine as anything Goya ever produced—for example, that wonderful etching of the bull which has broken out of the arena and stands triumphant, a corpse hanging limp across its horns, among the spectators’ benches. But by and large it is not to the Tauromaquia that we turn for the very best specimens of Goya’s work in black and white, or for the most characteristic expressions of his mature personality. The nature of the subject-matter makes it impossible for him, in these plates, to reveal himself fully either as a man or as an artist.

Of the three other sets of etchings two, the Caprichos and Disparates, are fantastic and allegorical in subject-matter, while the third, the Desastres, though for the most part it represents real happenings under the Napoleonic terror, represents them in a way which, being generalized and symbolical, rather than directly documentary, permits of, and indeed demands, a treatment no less broad and dramatic than is given to the fantasies of the other collections.

War always weakens and often completely shatters the crust of customary decency which constitutes a civilization. It is a thin crust at the best of times, and beneath it lies—what? Look through Goya’s Desastres and find out. The abyss of bestiality and diabolism and suffering seems almost bottomless. There is practically nothing of which human beings are not capable when war or revolution or anarchy gives them the necessary opportunity and excuse; and to their pain death alone imposes a limit.

Goya’s record of disaster has a number of recurrent themes. There are those shadowy archways, for example, more sinister than those even of Piranesi’s Prisons, where women are violated, captives squat in a hopeless stupor, corpses lie rotting, emaciated children starve to death. Then there are the vague street corners at which the famine-stricken hold out their hands; but the whiskered French hussars and carabiniers look on without pity, and even the rich Spaniards pass by indifferently, as though they were "of another lineage.” Of still more frequent occurrence in the series are the crests of those naked hillocks on which lie the dead, like so much garbage. Or else, in dramatic silhouette against the sky above those same hill-tops, we see the hideous butchery of Spanish men and women, and the no less hideous vengeance meted out by infuriated Spaniards upon their tormentors. Often the hillock sprouts a single tree, always low, sometimes maimed by gun-fire. Upon its branches are impaled, like the beetles and caterpillars in a butcher bird’s larder, whole naked torsos, sometimes decapitated, sometimes without arms; or else a pair of amputated legs, or a severed head—warnings, set there by the conquerors, of the fate awaiting those who dare to oppose the Emperor. At other times the tree is used as a gallows—a less efficient gallows, indeed, than that majestic oak which, in Callot’s Miseres de la Guerre, is fruited with more than a score of swinging corpses, but good enough for a couple of executions en passant, except, of course, in the case recorded in one of Goya’s most hair-raising plates, in which the tree is too stumpy to permit of a man’s hanging clear of the ground. But the rope is fixed, none the less, and to tighten the noose around the victim’s neck, two French soldiers tug at his legs while with his foot a third man thrusts with all his strength against the shoulders.

And so the record proceeds, horror after horror, unalleviated by any of the splendors which other painters have been able to discover in war; for, significantly, Goya never illustrates an engagement, never shows us impressive masses of troops marching in column or deployed in the order of battle. His concern is exclusively with war as it affects the civilian population, with armies disintegrated into individual thieves and ravishers, tormentors and executioners—and occasionally, when the guerrilleros have won a skirmish, into individual victims tortured in their turn and savagely done to death by the avengers of their own earlier atrocities. All he shows us is war's disasters and squalors, without any of the glory or even picturesqueness.

In the two remaining series of etchings we pass from tragedy to satire and from historical fact to allegory and pictorial metaphor and pure fantasy. Twenty years separate the Caprichos from the Disparates, and the later collection is at once more sombre and more enigmatic than the earlier. Much of the satire of the Caprichos is merely Goya’s sharper version of what may be called standard eighteenthcentury humor. A plate such as Hasta la Muerte, showing the old hag before her mirror, coquettishly trying on a new head-dress, is just Rowlandson-with-a-difference. But in certain other etchings a stranger and more disquieting note is struck. Goya’s handling of his material is such that standard eighteenth-century humor often undergoes a sea-change into something darker and queerer, something that goes below the anecdotal surface of life into what lies beneath—the unplumbed depths of original sin and original stupidity. And in the second half of the series the subject-matter reinforces the effect of the powerful and dramatically sinister treatment; for here the theme of almost all the plates is basely supernatural. We are in a world of demons, witches, and familiars, half horrible, half comic, but wholly disquieting inasmuch as it reveals the sort of thing that goes on in the squalid catacombs of the human mind.

In the Disparates the satire is on the whole less direct than in the Caprichos, the allegories are more general and more mysterious. Consider, for example, the technically astonishing plate, which shows a large family of three generations perched like huddling birds along a huge dead branch that projects into the utter vacancy of a dark sky. Obviously, much more is meant than meets the eye. But what? The question is one upon which the commentators have spent a great deal of ingenuity—spent it, one may suspect, in vain. For the satire, it would seem, is not directed against this particular social evil or that political mistake, but rather against unregenerate human nature as such. It is a statement, in the form of an image, about life in general. Literature and the scriptures of all the great religions abound in such brief metaphorical verdicts on human destiny. Man turns the wheel of sorrow, burns in the fire of craving, travels through a vale of tears, leads a life that is no better than a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing.

Poor man, what art? A tennis ball of error,

A ship of glass tossed in a sea of terror:

Issuing in blood and sorrow from the womb,

Crawling in tears and mourning to the tomb.

How slippery are thy paths, how sure thy fall!

How art thou nothing, when thou art most of all!-

And so on. Good, bad, and indifferent, the quotations could be multiplied almost indefinitely. In the language of the plastic arts, Goya has added a score of memorable contributions to the stock of humanity’s gnomic wisdom.

The Disparate of the dead branch is relatively easy to understand. So is the comment on Fear contained in the plate which shows soldiers running in terror from a gigantic cowled figure, spectral against a jet black sky. So is the etching of the ecstatically smiling woman riding a stallion that turns its head and, seizing her skirts between its teeth, tries to drag her from her seat. The allegorical use of the horse, as a symbol of the senses and the passions, and of the rational rider or charioteer who is at liberty to direct or be run away with, is at least as old as Plato.

But there are other plates in which the symbolism is less clear, the allegorical significance far from obvious. That horse on a tight-rope, for example, with a woman dancing on its back; the men who fly with artificial wings against a sky of inky menace; the priests and the elephant; the old man wandering among phantoms. What is the meaning of these things? And perhaps the answer to that question is that they have no meaning in any ordinary sense of the word; that they refer to strictly private events taking place on the obscurer levels of their creator’s mind. For us to look at them, it may be that their real point and significance consist precisely in the fact that they image forth so vividly and yet, of necessity, so darkly and incomprehensibly, some at least of the unknown quantities that exist at the heart of every personality.

Goya once drew a picture of an ancient man tottering along under the burden of years, but with the accompanying caption, "I’m still learning.” That old man was himself. To the end of a long life, he went on learning. As a very young man he paints like the feeble eclectics who were his first masters. The first signs of power and freshness and originality appear in the cartoons for the tapestries, of which the earliest were executed when he was thirty. As a portraitist, however, he achieves nothing of outstanding interest until he is almost forty. But by that time he really knows what he’s after, and during the second forty years of his life he moves steadily forward towards the consummate technical achievements, in oils, of the Pinturas Negras, and, in etching, of the Desastres and the Disparates. Goya’s is a stylistic growth away from the restraint and into freedom, away from timidity and into expressive boldness.

From the technical point of view the most striking fact about almost all Goya’s successful paintings and etchings is that they are composed in terms of one or more clearly delimited masses standing out from the background, often indeed silhouetted against the sky. When he attempts what may be called an “all-over” composition, the essay is rarely successful. For he lacks almost completely the power which Rubens so conspicuously possessed—the power of filling the entire canvas with figures or details of landscape, and upon that plenum imposing a clear and yet exquisitely subtle three-dimensional order. The lack of this power is already conspicuous in the tapestry cartoons, of which the best are invariably those in which Goya does his composing in terms of silhouetted masses, and the worst those in which he attempts to organize a collection of figures distributed all over the canvas. And compare, from this point of view, the two paintings of the Dos de Mayo—the Mamelukes cutting down the crowd in the Puerta del Sol, and the firing squads at work in the suburbs, after dark. The first is an attempt to do what Rubens would have done with an almost excessive facility to impose a formally beautiful and dramatically significant order upon a crowd of human and animal figures covering the greater part of the canvas. The attempt is not successful, and in spite of its power and the beauty of its component parts, the picture as a whole is less satisfying as a composition, and for that reason less moving as a story, than is the companion piece, in which Goya arranges his figures in a series of sharply delimited balancing groups, dramatically contrasted with one another and the background. In this picture the artist is speaking his native language, and he is therefore able to express what he wants to say with the maximum of force and clarity. This is not the case with the picture of the Mamelukes. There, the formal language is not truly his own, and consequently his eloquence lacks the moving power it possesses when he lets himself go in the genuine Goyescan idiom.

Fortunately, in the etchings, Goya is very seldom tempted to talk in anything else. Here he composes almost exclusively in terms of bold separate masses, silhouetted in luminous greys and whites against a darkness that ranges from stippled pepper-and-salt to intense black, or in blacks and heavily shaded greys against the whiteness of virgin paper. Sometimes there is only one mass, sometimes several, balanced and contrasted. Hardly ever does he make the, for him, almost fatal mistake of trying to organize his material in an all-over composition.

With the Desastres and the Disparates his mastery of this, his predestined method of composition becomes, one might say, absolute. It is not, of course, the only method of composition. Indeed, the nature of this particular artistic idiom is such that there are probably certain things that can never be expressed in it—things which Rembrandt, for example, was able to say in his supremely beautiful and subtle illustrations to the Bible. But within the field that he chose to cultivate—that the idiosyncrasies

of his temperament and the quality of his artistic sensibilities compelled him to choose—Goya remains incomparable.

[Themes and Variations, 1950]

9. These lines are from John Hall’s "On the Hour-glass.”

TONIGHT MUSIC is honoring another art; we are commemorating a dead poet. What kind of a poet? For there are many varieties of the species. “Poetry” is a name we apply to many sorts of human activity. There is the poetry of social solidarity—the poetry of national anthems, patriotic songs, and narratives. There are hymns and psalms—the poetry of religious solidarity and spiritual consolation. There is didactic poetry, there is satire and invective, there is the poetry of the belly laugh and the snigger.

And finally there is the highest and most rarefied kind of all—lyric poetry. And what, we may ask, is the function of lyric poetry? The question was answered long since by the great French poet, Stephane Mallarme. Lyric poetry exists to “Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu” To give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe. In other words, the business of the lyric poet is to explore the relationship between words and things, and to discover new modes of expression, new ways of rendering and understanding the mysteries of human experience.

This is immensely important. For man is an amphibian. He lives half in given reality, half in the homemade universe of symbols. We are like icebergs, immersed in language but projecting into immediate experience. If the language is inadequate, we shall be unable to deal effectively with the experience.

But language always tends to become inadequate with the mere passage of time. It is a perishable commodity, like milk or fruit, and tends to go stale, even to putrefy. The function of lyric poetry-indeed of all high literary art—is to renew the language of the tribe, to make it a living instrument of expression.

To show just how stale and putrescent our language can become, let me quote a passage from a textbook of sociology much used in our colleges and universities:

In our age no personality can be regarded as properly developed and moulded, if it has not been trained in the higher type of conditioning of adjustment behaviour responses to abstract language stimuli, because the latter transcend in breadth and depth the content of concrete personality.

Golly! This is as obscure as the most difficult poetry and turns out, when at last you have unraveled the meaning, to be pure bosh. It is not only aesthetically disgusting; it is also completely untrue. And this is the sort of stuff to which, with the advance of higher education, more and more young men and women are being exposed. Literary artists and especially lyrical poets exist to provide an antidote for such linguistic crimes.

Dylan Thomas was one of the most gifted of recent renewers and purifiers of our language. He possessed in the highest degree the unanalysable art of the lyric poet—the art of imparting to worn-out, dog’s-eared symbols the living quality of direct experience.

He could do this even in his prose. Here is a sentence from his radio play, Under Milk Wood: “Oh, isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?” Eight words and they say more than a theologian or a philosopher could express in fifty pages of dialectic. I have no time for further examples. But fortunately we are to hear the recorded voice of the dead poet reading three of his own lyrics. The poem on the October wind is especially interesting in this context; for it is a lyrical poem about the experience of being a lyrical poet —the experience of trying to find adequate verbal symbols for immediate perceptions and feelings. He speaks in the poem of “the wordy shapes of the shapes of women,” “the vowelled beeches,” “the oaken voices,” “the meadow’s signs,” “the dark-vowelled birds.” Such phrases do not add up to a critical treatise on meaning in poetry; but they indicate more directly what are the inner workings of a poet’s mind; they show us where the poet lives—on the unquiet frontier between the two worlds of experience and of symbols; they permit us to understand (from inside, so to speak) the fusion of fact and language into a new poetic fact, which has the comprehensibility of the verbal symbol and, at the same time, the living freshness of the actual experience. Meanwhile the authors of textbooks continue to corrupt the young by telling them, in the most obscenely barbarous words, that “abstract language stimuli transcend in breadth and depth the content of concrete personalities.” God help a generation that neglects to read its poets.

[1954]

1. Untitled manuscript of the address by Aldous Huxley read on Sept. 20, 1954, at the memorial program for Dylan Thomas given by the Southern California Chamber Music Society in Los Angeles.

Doodles in the Dictionary

IN ONLY ONE respect do I resemble Shakespeare: I know little Latin and less Greek. Once, long ago, I knew quite a lot of both. I had to; for I was brought up in what it is now fashionable to call the Western Tradition, the educational system which equated wisdom with a knowledge of the classical authors in the original, and defined culture as an ability to write grammatically correct Greek and Latin prose. And not merely prose; for at Eton, in my day, we strictly meditated the thankless Muse. The whole of every Tuesday, from seven in the morning until ten at night, was devoted to the exhausting and preposterous task of translating thirty or forty lines of English poetry into Latin or, on great occasions, Greek verses. For those who were most successful in producing pastiches of Ovid or Horace or Euripides, there were handsome prizes. I still have a Matthew Arnold in crimson morocco, a Shelley in half-calf, to testify to my one-time prowess in these odd fields of endeavor. Today I could no more write a copy of Greek iambics, or even of Latin hexameters, than I could fly. All I can remember of these once indispensable arts is the intense boredom by which the practice of them was accompanied. Even today the sight of Dr. Smith's Shorter Latin Dictionary, or of Liddell’s and Scott’s Greek Lexicon, has power to recall that ancient ennui. What dreary hours I have spent frantically turning those pages in search of a word for “cow” that could be scanned as a dactyl, or to make sure that my memory of the irregular verbs and the Greek accents was not at fault! I hate to think of all that wasted time. And yet, in view of the fact that most human beings are destined to pass most of their lives at jobs in which it is impossible for them to take the slightest interest, this old-fashioned training with the dictionary may have been extremely salutary. At least it taught one to know and expect the worst of life. Whereas the pupil in a progressive school, where everything is made to seem entertaining and significant, lives in a fool’s paradise. As a preparation for life, not as it ought to be, but as it actually is, the horrors of Greek grammar and the systematic idiocy of Latin Verses were perfectly appropriate. On the other hand, it must be admitted that they tended to leave their victims with a quite irrational distaste for poor dear Dr. Smith.

Not long ago, for example, I had an urgent call from my friend Jake Zeitlin, the bookseller. "I have something to show you,” he said, “something very exciting.” I walked over to his shop without delay. But when, triumphantly, he held up a small Latin dictionary, my heart sank and I found myself feeling— such is the force of the conditioned reflex—some of the weariness of spirit which such objects had evoked during my school-days, nearly half a century ago. True, this particular dictionary was the work of an Agrege des Classes de Grammaire des Lycees, and the equivalents of the Latin words were in French. But the resemblance to Dr. Smith was sufficiently close to trigger my customary reaction. Looking at it, I felt all of a sudden like one who has just inhaled a lungful of stale air at the entrance to a subway station. But then the book was opened and reverently laid before me. On the almost blank fly-leaf was an exquisite pen-and-ink drawing of three horses in tandem straining on the traces of a heavy two-wheeled cart. It was a marvel of expressiveness, of truth to nature, of economy of means. How had this lovely thing found its way into the dismal counterpart of Shorter Smith? The answer, when it came, was as simple as it was surprising. This dictionary had belonged, in the late seventies and earliest eighties of the last century, to a boy called Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

In 1880, when most of these drawings were made, Toulouse-Lautrec was sixteen. The first of the two accidents, which were to transform a merely delicate child into a grotesquely deformed cripple, had taken place in the spring of 1878; the second, fifteen months later, in the late summer of 1879. By 1880 the broken thigh bones had mended, more or less; and he still believed—to judge from the pictures he drew of himself at this time—that his legs would start growing again. He was mistaken. His trunk developed normally and became in due course the torso of an adult man; the legs remained what they had been at the time of his first fall, the short, spindly shanks of a boy of fourteen. Meanwhile life had to be lived; and in spite of pain, in spite of enforced inactivity, in spite of the suspicion and then the certainty that he henceforward had to face the world as a dwarfish monster, Lautrec lived it with unfailing courage and irrepressible high spirits. His education, interrupted after less than three years at the lycee, was carried on under private tutors and in 1880 he sat for his baccalaureate examination, failed, took the test again in 1881 and came through with flying colors. It was in the interval between the two examinations that he decorated the margins of his dictionary with the drawings at which I was now looking, entranced, in Jake Zeitlin’s shop.

Up to the age of ten (provided of course that his teachers don’t interfere) practically every child paints like a genius. Fifteen years later the chances of his still painting like a genius are about 400,000 to 1. Why this infinitesimal minority should fulfil the promise of childhood, while all the rest either dwindle into mediocrity or forget the very existence of the art they once practiced (within the limits of childish capacity) with such amazing skill and originality, is an unsolved riddle. When we have learned its answer we may be able to transform education from the sadly disappointing affair it now is into the instrument of social and individual reconstruction which it ought to be. Meanwhile we can only record the facts without understanding them. For some as yet entirely mysterious reason, Lautrec was one of the infinitesimal minority. His interest in painting began very early, and along with it, presumably, went the ordinary childish genius. At 3, it is recorded, he asked to be allowed to sign the parish register on the occasion of his baby brother’s christening. It was objected, not unreasonably, that he didn’t know how to write. “Very well,” he answered, “I will draw an ox.” Throughout his childhood oxen remained a favorite subject; and along with oxen, dogs, poultry, falcons (his father, Count Alphonse de Toulouse-Lautrec, was a passionate falconer), and above all horses. He would spend long hours in the barnyard of one or other of the family chateaux, gazing intently at the birds and animals. And what he saw he remembered, not vaguely and imprecisely as the rest of us remember things, but in all its detail. And later, when the imaginative and symbolic art of childhood gave place to his first adolescent essays in representation, he was able to reproduce these memories with amazing precision. Later, as a mature artist, he seldom used models; he preferred to rely on a memory which could supply him with everything he needed. Is this kind of memory inborn, or can it be acquired by suitable training? Are we all capable of accurate recall, and do we fail to realize our innate potentialities because of some improper use of our minds and bodies? Here is another riddle which educators might profitably investigate.

Lautrec was good at Latin and in the course of his three years at school carried off several prizes for composition and translation. But proficiency did not exclude boredom, and when the learned foolery of grammar and versification became unbearable, he would open the equivalent of Shorter Smith, dip his pen in the ink and draw a tiny masterpiece. Dictionnaire Latin-Francais. Above the words is a cavalryman galloping to the left, a jockey walking his horse towards the right. We open the book at random and find Prophetice, Propheticus, with a falcon alighting on them. Coetus and Cohaerentia are topped by a pair of horse’s hoofs, glimpsed from the back as the animal canters past. Two pages of the preface are made beautiful, the first by an unusually large drawing of a tired old nag, the second by another and no less powerful version of the three horses in tandem, which adorned the fly-leaf.

The draughtsman was only sixteen; but these furtive doodlings, while his tutor’s back was turned, are the works of an already mature artist, and exhibit an easy mastery of the medium and an understanding of the subject matter which, in the case even of most men of outstanding talent, are the fruit only of long experience and constant practice. Lautrec’s first master, the academician and fashionable portrait painter, Bonnat,- was of another opinion. “Perhaps you are curious to know,” the boy wrote in a letter to his Uncle Charles, "what sort of encouragement I am getting from Bonnat. He tells me: ’Your painting isn’t bad; it’s clever, but still it isn’t bad. But your drawing is simply atrocious.’” This to a pupil who could scribble from memory little things of which even the greatest master would not feel ashamed! The reason for Bonnat’s disapproval becomes clear when we read what a fellow-student wrote of Lautrec in the life class. “He made a great effort to copy the model exactly; but in spite of himself he exaggerated certain typical details, sometimes the general character, so that he distorted without trying to or even wanting to. I have seen him forcing himself to ’prettify’ his study of a model—in my opinion, without success. The expression 'seforcer dfaire joli’ is his own.”

The word "fact” is derived from factum, "something made.” And in fact, a fact is never, as we like to suppose, a wholly independent, given thing, but always what we choose to make of that given thing. A fact is that particular version of the given which, in any particular context, we find useful. The same event, say the explosion of an H-bomb, is simultaneously a fact in the sphere of physics and chemistry, a fact in physiology, medicine, and genetics, a psychological fact, a political fact, an economic fact, an ethical fact, even an aesthetic fact—for the atomic cloud is wonderfully beautiful. A great representational artist, such as Lautrec or Goya, as Degas or Rembrandt, is interested in several aspects of experience—the aesthetic, the biological, the psychological, and, sometimes, the ethical—and the facts which he sets down on paper or canvas are forms which he extracts from given reality, which he makes, for the purpose of expressing and communicating his own special preoccupations. For this reason he finds no incompatibility between truth to nature and distortion. Indeed, if there is to be truth to the particular aspects of nature in which he is interested, there must be a certain amount of distortion. Sometimes the distortion is mainly a matter of omission. (Few even of the most realistic painters portray every eyelash.) Sometimes it is due to an exaggeration of that which, in the given, reveals most clearly the side of Nature to which the artist aspires to be true. Hsieh Ho, the fourth-century artist who formulated the famous Six Principles of Chinese painting, expresses the same truth in another way. “The first principle is that, through a vitalizing spirit, a painting should possess the movement of life.” A number of other renderings of the First Principle have been suggested, such as "a painting should possess rhythmic vitality”; “a painting should express the life movement of the spirit through the rhythm of things”; “a painting should manifest the fusion of the rhythm of the spirit with the movement of living things.” But, however the renderings may vary, “it is quite evident,” in the words of the great Sinologist, Osvald Siren, "that the First Principle refers to something beyond the material form, call it character, soul, or expression. It depends on the operation of the spirit, or the mysterious breath of life, by which the figures may become as though they were moving or breathing.” It is to this rhythm of the spirit manifested by the movement of given events that the artist pays attention; and in order to render this spiritual essence of things, he may be compelled to distort appearance, to refrain both from exactly copying or conventionally prettifying. In his own way Lautrec was a faithful exponent of Hsieh Ho’s First Principle. Even as a boy, as yet completely ignorant of the masters under whose influence his mature style was to be formed, Hokusai, Degas, Goya, even in the margins of his Latin dictionary he was making manifest the vitalizing spirit in the movements of life.

The horse is now an almost extinct animal and in a few years, I suppose, will be seen only in zoos and, perhaps, on race tracks and in the parks of Texas oil millionaires. For the man in the street—a street now blessedly undefiled by the mountains of dung which, in my childhood, used to make of every metropolis an Augean stable—the disappearance of the horse is a blessing. For the budding artist, it is a disaster. The Percheron, the thoroughbred hunter, the sleek cob, the splendid creatures that drew the rich man's carriage, even the miserable hacks in the shafts of cabs and omnibuses—each in its own way manifestly embodied the rhythm of the spirit in the movement of its equine life. Today, in the great cities of Europe and America, the movement of life is confined to human beings, most of whom are incredibly graceless, and to a few dogs, cats, and starlings. Communications are assured (and at the same time obstructed) by automobiles. But automobiles completely lack the movement of life. They are static objects fitted with a motor. To make them look as though they had the movement of life, their manufacturers give them inconvenient shapes and decorate them with arrowy strips of chromium. But it is all in vain. The most rakish sports car remains, even at a hundred miles an hour, essentially undynamic. Whereas even at five miles an hour, even a cab horse is a manifestation of life movement, an embodiment of the rhythm of the spirit. In the past, the horse was ubiquitous. Wherever he turned the young artist saw life movement. Walking or trotting, cantering or galloping, it challenged his powers of representation and expression, it spurred him to explore the underlying mystery of the spirit which lives and moves in forms. What amazing works of art have owed their existence to the horse! In ancient Mesopotamia, in Greece, in China and Japan, among the Etruscans and at Rome, in the battle pictures of the Renaissance, in scores of paintings by Rubens, by Velasquez, by Gericault, by Delacroix—what a cavalcade! The invention of the internal-combustion engine has deprived the painters and sculptors of the twentieth century of one of the richest sources of artistic inspiration. Along with Degas, Lautrec was almost the last of the great portrayers of horses. Indeed, if Count Alphonse had had his way, Henri would never have painted anything else. "This little book,” wrote the Count on the fly-leaf of a manual of falconry presented to his son when he was twelve, “will teach you to enjoy the life of the great outdoors, and if one day you should experience the bitterness of life, dogs and falcons and, above all, horses will be your faithful companions and will help you to forget a little.” And it is not only the bitterness of human life, it is also its appalling vulgarity that dogs and falcons and horses will help us forget. This, surely, is why Disney’s nature films have achieved so wide a popularity. After an overdose of all too human hams, what an enormous relief to see even a tarantula, even a pair of scorpions! But, alas, life in the great outdoors was not the life which fate had prepared for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. His accident debarred him from participation in any form of sport or country exercise. And though he still loved horses and was never tired of studying their life-movements at the circus and on the race track, he loved Montmartre and alcohol, cabaret singers and prostitutes with an even intenser passion. “Any curiosity,” wrote one of his friends, “delighted him, stirred him to joyful enthusiasm. He would fish out such odds and ends as a Japanese wig, a ballet slipper, a peculiar hat, a shoe with an exaggeratedly high heel and show them to you with the most amusing remarks; or else he would unexpectedly turn up, in the pile of debris, a fine Hokusai print, a letter written by a pimp to his mistress, a set of photographs of such splendid masterpieces of painting as Ucello’s Battle in the National Gallery or Carpaccio’s Courtesans playing with Animals in the Correr Museum, all of which he accompanied by enthusiastic exclamations and sensitive or explosive comments.” The drunks and tarts, the lecherous gentlemen in top hats, the sensation-hunting ladies in feather boas, the stable boys, the lesbians, the bearded surgeons performing operations with a horrifying disregard of the first principles of asepsis—these also were curiosities, more remarkable even than Japanese wigs, and these became the subject matter of most of Lautrec’s pictures, the environment in which he liked to live. He portrayed them simply as curiosities, passing no moral judgment, but simply rendering the intrinsic oddity of what he saw around him. It was in this spirit of the curiosity hunter, the collector of odds and ends that he visited the theater. Plays as such did not interest him. Good or bad, they were merely strings of words. What he liked in a theater was not the literature, but the actors—the way they grimaced and gesticulated, the curious effects produced by the lights from above and beneath, the garish costumes moving against preposterously romantic backgrounds of painted canvas. The first beginnings of this interest in the theater are visible in Lautrec’s dictionary. Above pugillus, there is a diminutive jester in cap and bells—a memory, presumably, of some figure seen during the carnival at Nice. And encroaching upon quamprimum, quamquam, quamvis, and quanam is a personage whose attitude and vaguely medieval costume would seem to be those of an actor in one of the touring companies which Henri may have seen on the Riviera. And finally, opposite Naenia (the word for “funeral chant”), there is a beautiful sketch of a young actress dressed as a page in tights (for legs were not bared until well after the First World War), the briefest of trunk hose, and a doublet. There is no effort in this or any other drawing by the youthful Lautrec to stress the femininity of his model. Our current obsession with the bosom is conspicuously absent. Generally speaking, hope springs eternal in the male breast in regard to the female breast. Here there is no undue optimism. In Lautrec, the clear-sighted artist is stronger than the yearning adolescent, as it was to be stronger, later on, than the frequenter of brothels. There is never anything sexy about Lautrec’s art; but there also is never anything deliberately, sarcastically anti-feminist in it. Degas, it is evident, took pleasure in posing his models in the most unalluring postures. A lady who had visited an exhibition of his works once asked him why he chose to make all his women look so ugly. “Madame,” the painter replied, “because women generally are ugly.” Unlike Degas, Lautrec never set out to prove that they were either ugly or attractive. He just looked at them, as he had looked from his earliest childhood at oxen, horses, falcons, dogs; then, from memory and with appropriate distortions, rendered their lifemovement, now graceful, now grotesque, and the underlying rhythm of the mysterious spirit that manifests itself in every aspect of our beautiful, frightful, unutterably odd, and adorable universe.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

2. Leone Joseph Bonnat (1833—1922). French painter.

Gesualdo: Variations on a Musical Theme

SPACE HAS BEEN explored, systematically and scientifically, for more than five centuries; time, for less than five generations. Modern geography began in the fourteen-hundreds with the voyages of Prince Henry the Navigator. Modern history and modern archeology came in with Queen Victoria. Except in the Antarctic there is today no such thing as a terra incognita; all the corners of all the other continents have now been visited. In contrast, how vast are the reaches of history which still remain obscure! And how recently acquired is most of our knowledge of the past! Almost everything we know about Paleolithic and Neolithic man, about the Sumerian, Hittite, and Minoan civilizations, about pre-Buddhist India and pre-Columbian America, about the origins of such fundamental human arts as agriculture, metallurgy, and writing, was discovered within the last sixty or seventy years. And there are still new worlds of history to conquer. Even in such well-dug regions as the Near and Middle East literally thousands of sites await the burrowing archaeologist, and thousands more are scattered far and wide over Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Moreover, there is work for the explorer in times and cultures much nearer home. For, strange as it may seem, it is only within the last generation that certain aspects of quite recent European history have come to be critically investigated. A very striking example of this failure to explore our own back yard is supplied by the history of music. Practically everybody likes music; but practically nobody has heard any music composed before r 680. Renaissance poetry, painting, and sculpture have been studied in minutest detail, and the labors of five generations of scholars have been made available to the public in hundreds of monographs, general histories, critical appreciations, and guidebooks. But Renaissance music—an art which was fully the equal of Renaissance poetry, painting, and sculpture—has received relatively little attention from scholars and is almost unknown to the concert-going public. Donatello and Piero della Francesca, Titian and Michelangelo—their names are household words and, in the original or in reproduction, their works are familiar to everyone. But how few people have heard, or even heard of, the music of Dufay and Josquin, of Okeghem and Obrecht, of Ysaac and Wert and Marenzio, of Dunstable, Byrd, and Victoria!- All that can be said is that, twenty years ago, the number was still smaller than it is today. And a couple of generations earlier the ignorance was almost total. Even so great a historian as Burckhardt—the man who wrote with such insight, such a wealth of erudition, about every other aspect of the Renaissance in Italy—knew next to nothing about the music of his chosen period. It was not his fault; there were no modern editions of the music and nobody ever played or sang it. Consider, by way of example, the Vespers, composed in 1610 by one of the most famous, one of the most historically important of Italian musicians, Claudio Monteverdi. After the middle of the seventeenth century this extraordinary masterpiece was never again performed until the year 1935. One can say without any exaggeration that, until very recent times, more was known about the Fourth Dynasty Egyptians, who built the pyramids, than about the Flemish and Italian contemporaries of Shakespeare who wrote the madrigals.

This sort of thing, let us remember, has happened before. From the time of the composer’s death in 1750 to the performance under Mendelssohn, in 1829, of the Passion According to St. Matthew, no European audience had ever heard a choral work by John Sebastian Bach. What Mendelssohn and the nineteenth-century musicologists, critics, and virtuosi did for Bach another generation of scholars and performers has begun to do for Bach’s predecessors, whose works have been rediscovered, published in critical editions, performed here and there, and even occasionally recorded. It is gradually dawning upon us that the three centuries before Bach are just as interesting musically speaking, as the two centuries after Bach.

There exists in Los Angeles a laudable institution called the Southern California Chamber Music Society. This society sponsors a series of Monday evening concerts, at which, besides much fine and seldom-heard classical and contemporary music, many pre-Bach compositions are performed. Among these earlier compositions one group stands out in my memory as uniquely interesting—a group of madrigals and motets by an almost exact contemporary of Shakespeare, Carlo Gesualdo. Another English poet, John Milton, was an admirer of Gesualdo and, while in Italy, bought a volume of his madrigals which, with a number of other books, he sent home by ship from Venice. Milton’s admiration is understandable; for Gesualdo’s music is so strange and, in its strangeness, so beautiful that it haunts the memory and fires the imagination. Listening to it, one is filled with questioning wonder. What sort of a man was it who wrote such music? Where does it fit into the general musical scheme, and what is its relevance for us? In the paragraphs that follow I shall try, in the light of my sadly limited knowledge of Gesualdo’s time and of Gesualdo’s art, to answer, or at least to speculate about, these questions.

Let us begin, then, with the biographical facts. Carlo Gesualdo, was born in or about 1560, either at Naples or in one of his father’s numerous castles in the neighborhood of Naples. The Gesualdi were of ancient and noble lineage, had been barons for fifteen generations, counts for eight, dukes for four or five, and, for the past three generations, hereditary Princes of Venosa. Carlo’s mother hailed from northern Italy and was a sister of the great Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, who died in 15 84 and was canonized in 1610. In his later years Gesualdo could speak not only of my father, the Prince, but even (going one better) of my uncle, the Saint. Of the boy’s education we know nothing and can only infer, from his later achievements, that he must have had a very thorough grounding in music.

Every age has its own characteristic horrors. In ours there are the Communists and nuclear weapons, there are nationalism and the threat of overpopulation. The violence in which we indulge is truly monstrous; but it is, so to say, official violence, ordered by the proper authorities, sanctioned by law, ideologically justified, and confined to periodical world wars, between which we enjoy the blessings of law, order, and internal peace. In the Naples of Gesualdo’s day, violence was ruggedly individualistic, unorganized, and chronic. There was little nationalism and world wars were unknown; but dynastic squabbles were frequent and the Barbary Corsairs were incessantly active, raiding the coasts of Italy in search of slaves and booty. But the citizen’s worst enemies were not the pirates and the foreign princes; they were his own neighbors. Between the wars and the forays of the infidels there were no lucid intervals, such as we enjoy between our wholesale massacres, of civic decency, but an almost lawless and policeless free-for-all in a society composed of a class of nobles, utterly corrupted by Spanish ideas of honor (Naples was then a Spanish colony), a small and insignificant middle class, and a vast mob of plebeians living in bestial squalor and savagery, and sunk, head over ears, in the most degrading superstition. It was in this monstrous environment that Carlo grew up, an immensely talented and profoundly neurotic member of the overprivileged minority.

In 1586 he married Maria d’Avalos, a girl of twenty, but already a widow. (Her previous husband, it was whispered, had died of too much connubial bliss.) Gesualdo had two children by this lady, one of his own begetting, the other almost certainly not; for after two years of marriage, the lovely and lively Donna Maria had taken a lover, Don Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria. On the night of October 16, 1590, accompanied by three of his retainers, armed with swords, halberds, and arquebuses, Gesualdo broke into his wife’s room, found the lovers in bed, and had them killed. After which he took horse and galloped off to one of his castles where, after liquidating his second child (the one of doubtful paternity), he remained for several months—not to escape the law (for he was never prosecuted and, if he had been, would certainly have been acquitted as having done only what any injured husband had the right and even the duty to do), but to avoid the private vengeance of the Avalos and Carafa families. These last were outraged, not so much by the murder (which was entirely in order) as by the fact that the killing had been done by lackeys and not by Gesualdo himself. According to the code of honor, blue blood might be spilled only by the possessor of blue blood, never by a member of the lower classes.

Time passed and the storm, as all storms finally do, blew over. From his feudal keep in the hills Gesualdo was able to return to Naples and the cultivated society of madrigal-singing amateurs and professional musicians. He began composing, he even published. Second and third editions of his madrigals were called for. He was almost a best-seller.

The Prince of Venosa, the Serenissimo as he was called by his respectful contemporaries, was now an eligible widower, and sometime in 1592 or 1593 his paternal uncle, the Archbishop of Naples, entered into negotiations with Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, with a view to securing for his nephew a princess of the great house of Este. Suitable financial arrangements were made, and in February, 1594, the nuptials of Carlo Gesualdo and Donna Leonora d’Este were celebrated at Ferrara with all the usual pomp. After a short stay in the south, Gesualdo returned to Ferrara with his bride, now pregnant, rented a palace, and settled down for a long stay.

Ferrara in 1594 was a setting sun, still dazzling, but on the brink of darkness. Three years later, on the death of Duke Alfonso without a male heir, the city, which was a papal fief, reverted to its overlord, the Pope, and was incorporated into the States of the Church. The glory that was Ferrara vanished overnight, forever.

That Ferrara should ever have become a glory is one of the unlikeliest facts in that long succession of actualized improbabilities which make up human history. The ducal territory was small and, in those malarious days, unhealthy. Its material resources were scanty, and the most important local industry was the smoking of eels, caught in the winding channels of the delta of the Po. Militarily, the state was feeble in the extreme. Powerful and not always friendly neighbors surrounded it and, to make matters worse, it lay on the invasion route from Germany and Austria. In spite of which Ferrara became and for 150 years—from the middle of the fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth century—remained not only a sovereign state of considerable political importance, but also one of the most brilliant intellectual centers of Western Europe. This position the city owed entirely to the extraordinary ability and good taste of its rulers, the dukes of the house of Este. In the game of international and interdynastic politics, the Estensi were consummately skillful players. At home they were not too tyrannical, and had a happy knack, when discontent ran high, of blaming their ministers for everything and so maintaining their own popularity.

Their domestic life was relatively harmonious. Unlike many of the ruling families of Italy, the Estensi seldom murdered one another. True, a few years before Carlo’s marriage to Leonora, the Duke had had his sister’s lover strangled. But this was an exceptional act—and anyhow he refrained from strangling the lady; the integrity of the clan was preserved. But from our present point of view the most remarkable thing about the Dukes of Ferrara was their steady patronage of talent, especially in the fields of literature and music. The greatest Italian poets of the sixteenth century—from Ariosto at the beginning to Guarini and Tasso at the end—were summoned to Ferrara, where the dukes either gave them jobs in the administration of the state, or else paid them a pension, so that they might devote the whole of their time to literature. Musicians were no less welcome than poets. From 1450 to 1600 most of the greatest composers of the time visited Ferrara, and many of them stayed at the court for long periods. They came from Burgundy and Flanders, the most productive centers of early Renaissance music; they came from France, they came even from faraway England. And later, when the Italians had learned their lesson from the North and had become, in their turn, the undisputed leaders in the field, they came from all over the peninsula. The huge square castello at the heart of the city, the ducal hunting lodges, the summer palaces by the sea, the mansions of the nobles and the foreign ambassadors—all of them resounded with music: learned polyphonic music and popular songs and dances. Music for lutes (there was a functionary at the ducal court whose sole duty it was to keep the lutes perpetually in tune) and music for the organ, for viols, for wind instruments, for the earliest forms of harpsichord and clavichord. Music performed by amateurs sitting around the fire or at a table, and music rendered by professional virtuosi. Music in church, music at home, and (this was a novelty) music in the concert hall. For there were daily concerts in the various ducal palaces, concerts in which as many as sixty players and singers would take part. On grand occasions—and at Ferrara there seems to have been a grand occasion at least twice a week—there were masques with choral interludes, there were plays with overtures and incidental music, there were performances in those sunset years of decline, of the first rudimentary operas. And what wonderful voices could be heard at Alfonso's court! Ferrara’s Three Singing Ladies were world famous. There was Lucrezia Bendidio, there was Laura Peperara and, most remarkable of the trio, there was the beautiful, learned, and many-talented Tarquinia Molza. But every Eden, alas, has its serpent, and, in Tarquinia’s musical paradise, there was not merely a reptile to rear its ugly head; there were several Adams as well.

Tarquinia married and was widowed; then, in her middle thirties she fell under the spell of that most charming and romantic of men, Torquato Tasso. The poet, who wrote a great deal about love, but very seldom made it, was alarmed, and, putting up a barrage of platonic verse, beat a hasty retreat. Tarquinia had to be content, for several years, with lovers of less exalted intellectual rank. Then, in her forties, she found another man of genius, the great Flemish composer, Giaches Wert, who was in the employ of the Duke of Mantua. Their passion was reciprocal and so violent that it created a scandal. The unhappy Tarquinia was exiled to Modena, and Wert returned, alone, to the court of the Gonzagas.

For a man of Gesualdo’s gifts and sensibilities, Ferrara combined the advantages of a seat of higher education with those of a heaven on earth. It was a place where he could simultaneously enjoy himself and learn. And learn he certainly did. The madrigals he composed before 1594 are admirable in their workmanship; but their style, though his own, is still within the bounds of sixteenth-century music. The madrigals and motets written after his stay at Ferrara are beyond those bounds—far out in a kind of noman’s land.

Gesualdo left no memoirs and, in spite of his high contemporary reputation and his exalted position in the world, very little is known of his later-life, except that he was unhappy and dogged by misfortune. His son by his second wife died in childhood. His son by the murdered Donna Maria, the heir to all the family titles and estates grew up to loathe his father and long for his death; but it was he who died first. One of Gesualdo’s daughters went to the bad and presented him with several illegitimate grandchildren. Meanwhile he was constantly tormented, says a contemporary gossip writer, by a host of demons. His life-long neurosis had deepened, evidently into something like insanity. Apart from the music, which he went on composing with undiminished powers, his only pleasure seems to have been physical pain. He would, we are told, submit ecstatically to frequent whippings. These at last became a physiological necessity. According to that much persecuted philosopher, Tommaso Campanella, the Prince of Venosa could never go to the bathroom (cacare non poterat) unless he had first been flogged by a servant specially trained to perform this duty. Remorse for the crimes of his youth weighed heavily on Gesualdo’s conscience. The law might excuse, public opinion might even approve; but Holy Writ was explicit: Though shalt not kill. A few years before his death in 1613 he endowed a Capuchin friary in his native town of Gesualdo and built a handsome church. Over the altar hung a huge penitential picture, painted to the prince’s order and under his personal direction. This picture, which still survives, represents Christ the Judge seated on high and flanked by the Blessed Virgin and the Archangel Michael. Below Him, arranged symmetrically, in descending tiers, to right and left, are Saint Francis and Saint Mary Magdalen, Saint Dominic and Saint Catherine of Siena, all of them, to judge by their gestures, emphatically interceding with the Savior on behalf of Carlo Gesualdo, who kneels in the lower left-hand corner, dressed in black velvet and an enormous ruff, while, splendid in the scarlet robes of a Prince of the Church, his uncle, the Saint, stands beside him, with one hand resting protectively on the sinner's shoulder. Opposite them kneels Carlo’s aunt, Isabella Borromeo, in the costume of a nun, and at the center of this family group is the murdered child, as a heavenly cherub. Below, at the very bottom of the composition, Donna Maria and the Duke of Andria are seen roasting everlastingly in those flames from which the man who had them butchered still hopes against hope to be delivered.

So much for the facts of our composer’s life—facts which confirm an old and slightly disquieting truth: namely, that between an artist’s work and his personal behavior there is no very obvious correspondence. The work may be sublime, the behavior anything from silly to insane and criminal. Conversely the behavior may be blameless and the work uninteresting or downright bad. Artistic merit has nothing to do with any other kind of merit. In the language of theology, talent is a gratuitous grace, completely unconnected with saving grace or even with ordinary virtue or sanity.

From the man we now pass to his strange music. Like most of the great composers of his day, Gesualdo wrote exclusively for the human voice—to be more precise, for groups of five or six soloists singing contrapuntally. All his five- or six-part compositions belong to one or other of two closely related musical forms, the madrigal and the motet. The motet is the older of the two forms and consists of a setting, for any number of voices from three to twelve, of a short passage, in Latin, from the Bible or some other sacred text. Madrigals may be defined as non-religious motets. They are settings, not of sacred Latin texts, but of short poems in the vernacular. In most cases, these settings were for five voices; but the composer was free to write for any number of parts from three to eight or more.

The madrigal came into existence in the thirties of the sixteenth century and, for seventy or eighty years, remained the favorite art form of all composers of secular music. Contrapuntal writing in five parts is never likely to be popular, and the madrigal made its appeal, not to the general public, but to a select audience of professional musicians and highly educated amateurs, largely aristocratic and connected for the most part with one or other of the princely or ecclesiastical courts of the day. (One is amazed, when one reads the history of renaissance music, by the good taste of Europe’s earlier rulers. Popes and emperors, kings, princes, and cardinals—they never make a mistake. Invariably, one might almost say infallibly, they choose for their chapel masters and court composers the men whose reputation has stood the test of time and whom we now recognize as the most gifted musicians of their day. Left to themselves, what sort of musicians would our twentieth-century monarchs and presidents choose to patronize? One shudders to think.)

Gesualdo wrote madrigals, and a madrigal, as we have seen, is a non-religious motet. But what else is it? Let us begin by saying what it is not. First and foremost, the madrigal, though sung, is not a song. It does not, that is to say, consist of a tune, repeated stanza after stanza. Nor has it anything to do with the art form known to later musicians as the aria. An aria is a piece of music for a solo voice, accompanied by instruments or by other voices. It begins, in most cases, with an introduction, states a melodic theme in one key, states a second theme in another key, goes into a series of modulations and ends with a recapitulation of one or both themes in the original key. Nothing of all this is to be found in the madrigal. In the madrigal there is no solo singing. All the five or more voices are of equal importance, and they move, so to speak, straight ahead, whereas the aria and the song move in the equivalent of circles or spirals. In other words, there are, in the madrigal, no returns to a starting point, no systematic recapitulations. Its form bears no resemblance to the sonata form or even to the suite form. It might be described as a choral tone poem, written in counterpoint. When counterpoint is written within a structural pattern, such as the fugue or canon, the listener can follow the intricacies of the music almost indefinitely. But where the counterpoint has no structural pattern imposed upon it, where it moves forward freely, without any returns to a starting point, the ear finds it very hard to follow it, attentively and understanding^, for more than a few minutes at a stretch. Hence the brevity of the typical madrigal, the extraordinary succinctness of its style.

During the three-quarters of a century of its existence, the madrigal underwent a steady development in the direction of completer, ever intenser expressiveness. At the beginning of the period it is a piece of emotionally neutral polyphony, whose whole beauty consists in the richness and complexity of its manyvoiced texture. At the end, in the work of such masters as Marenzio, Monteverdi, and, above all, Gesualdo, it has become a kind of musical miracle, in which seemingly incompatible elements are reconciled in a higher synthesis. The intricacies of polyphony are made to yield the most powerfully expressive effects, and this polyphony has become so flexible that it can, at any moment, transmute itself into blocks of chords or a passage of dramatic declamation.

During this stay at Ferrara, Gesualdo was in contact with the most "advanced" musicians of his day. A few miles away, at Mantua, the great Giaches Wert, sick and prematurely old, was still composing; and at the same court lived a much younger musician, Claudio Monteverdi, who was to carry to completion the revolution in music begun by Wert. That revolution was the supersession of polyphony by monody, the substitution of the solo voice, with instrumental or vocal accompaniment, for the madrigalist’s five or six voices of equal importance. Gesualdo did not follow the Mantuans into monody; but he was certainly influenced by Wert’s essays in musical expressionism. Those strange cries of grief, pain, and despair, which occur so frequently in his later madrigals, were echoes of the cries introduced by Wert into his dramatic cantatas.

At Ferrara itself Gesualdo’s closest musical friends were Count Fontanelli and a professional composer and virtuoso, Luzzasco Luzzaschi. Like Gesualdo, Fontanelli was an aristocrat and had murdered an unfaithful wife; unlike Gesualdo, he was not a man of genius, merely a good musician passionately interested in the latest developments of the art. Luzzaschi was a writer of madrigals, and had invented a number of expressive devices, which Gesualdo employed in his own later productions. More important, he was the only man who knew how to play on, and even compose for, an extraordinary machine, which was the greatest curiosity in Duke Alfonso's collection of musical instruments. This was the archicembalo, a large keyboard instrument belonging to the harpsichord family, but so designed that a player could distinguish, for example, between B flat and A sharp, could descend chromatically from E, through E flat, D sharp, D, D flat, C sharp to a final C major chord. The archicembalo required thirty-one keys to cover each octave and must have been fantastically difficult to play and still harder, one would imagine, to compose for. The followers of Schoenberg are far behind Luzzaschi; their scale has only twelve tones, his, thirty-one. Luzzashi’s thirty-one-tone compositions (none of which, unfortunately, survive) and his own experiments on the archicembalo profoundly influenced the style of Gesualdo’s later madrigals. Forty years ago, the Oxford musicologist, Ernest Walker, remarked that Gesualdo’s most famous madrigal, Moro lasso, sounded like "Wagner gone wrong." Hardly an adequate criticism of Gesualdo, but not without significance.

The mention of Wagner is fully justified; for the incessant chromaticisms of Gesualdo’s later writing found no parallel in music until the time of Tristan. As for the "gone-wrongness”—this is due to Gesualdo’s unprecedented and, until recent times, almost unimitated treatment of harmonic progression. In his madrigals successive chords are related in ways which conform neither to the rules of sixteenth-century polyphony, nor to the rules of harmony which hold good from the middle of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. An infallible ear is all that, in most cases, preserves these strange and beautiful progressions from seeming altogether arbitrary and chaotic. Thanks to that infallible ear of his, Gesualdo’s harmonies move, always astonishingly, but always with a logic of their own, from one impossible, but perfectly satisfying, beauty to another. And the harmonic strangeness is never allowed to continue for too long at a stretch. With consummate art, Gesualdo alternates these extraordinary passages of Wagner-gone-wrong with passages of pure traditional polyphony. To be fully effective, every elaboration must be shown in a setting of simplicity, every revolutionary novelty should emerge from a background of the familiar. For the composers of arias, the simple and familiar background for their floridly expressive melodies was a steady, rhythmically constant accompaniment. For Gesualdo, simplicity and familiarity meant the rich, many-voiced texture of contrapuntal writing. The setting for Wagner-gone-wrong is Palestrina.

Every madrigal is the setting of a short poem in the vernacular, just as every motet is the setting of a short passage from the Vulgate or some other piece of sacred Latin literature. The texts of the motets were generally in prose, and the early polyphonists saw no obvious reason for imposing upon this essentially rectilinear material a circular musical form. After the invention of the aria, the composers of music for prose texts habitually distorted the sense and rhythm of their words in order to force them into the circular, verse-like patterns of their new art form. From Alessandro Scarlatti, through Bach and Handel, Mozart, Haydn, and Mendelssohn—all the great composers from 1650 to 1850 provide examples, in their musical settings, of what may be called the versification of prose. To do this, they were compelled to repeat phrases and individual words again and again, to prolong single syllables to inordinate length, to recapitulate, note for note, or with variations, entire paragraphs. How different was the procedure of the madrigalists! Instead of versifying prose, they found it necessary, because of the nature of their art form, to prosify verse. The regular recurrences of lines and stanzas—these have no place in the madrigal, just as they have no place in the motet. Like good prose, the madrigal is recti-linear, not circular. Its movement is straight ahead, irreversibly asymmetrical. When they set a piece of poetry to music, the madrigalists set it phrase by phrase, giving to each phrase, even each word, its suitable expression and linking the successive moods by a constant adaptation of the polyphonic writing, not by the imposition from outside of a structural pattern. Every madrigal, as I have said, is a choral tone poem. But instead of lasting for a whole hour like the huge, spectacular machines of Liszt and Richard Strauss, it concentrates its changing moods into three or four minutes of elaborate and yet intensely expressive counterpoint.

The Italian madrigalists chose their texts, for the most part, from the best poets. Dante was considered too harsh and old-fashioned; but his great fourteenth-century successor, Petrarch, remained a perennial favorite. Among more recent poets, Ariosto, though set fairly frequently, was much less popular than Guarini and Tasso, whose emotional tone was more emphatic and who took pleasure in just those violent contrasts of feeling which lent themselves most perfectly to the purposes of the madrigalist. In their shorter pieces (pieces written expressly to be set to music) Tasso and his contemporaries made use of a kind of epigrammatic style, in which antithesis, paradox, and oxymoron played a major part and were turned into a literary convention, so that every versifier now talked of dolorous joy, sweet agony, loathing love, and living death—to the immense delight of the musicians, for whom these emotional ambiguities, these abrupt changes of feeling offered golden opportunities.

Gesualdo was a personal friend of Torquato Tasso and, during the last, mad, wandering years of the poet's life, helped him with money and letters of introduction. As we should expect, he set a number of Tasso's poems to music. For the rest he made use of anything that came to hand. Many of his finest madrigals are based on snatches of verse having no literary merit whatsoever. That they served his purpose was due to the fact that they were written in the current idiom and contained plenty of emphatically contrasting words, which he could set to appropriately expressive music. Gesualdo’s indifference to the poetical quality of his texts, and his methods of setting words to music, are very clearly illustrated in one of the most astonishing of his madrigals, Ardita zanzaretta—a work, incidentally, whose performance at Los Angeles in the Autumn of 1955 was probably the first in more than three hundred years. This extracfrdinary little masterpiece compresses into less than three minutes every mood from the cheerfully indifferent to the perversely voluptuous, from the gay to the tragic, and in the process employs every musical resource, from traditional polyphony to Wagner-gone-wrong chromaticism and the strangest harmonic progressions, from galloping rhythms to passages of long, suspended notes. Then we look at the text and discover that this amazing music is the setting of half-a-dozen lines of doggerel. The theme of Ardita zanzaretta is the same as the theme of a tiny poem by Tasso, tasteless enough in all conscience, but written with a certain elegance of style. A little mosquito (zanzaretta) settles on the bosom of the beloved, bites and gets swatted by the exasperated lady. What a delicious fate, muses Tasso, to die in a place where it is such bliss to swoon away!

Felice te felice,

piu che nel rogo oriental Fenice!

(Oh happy, happy bug—more happy than the Phoenix on its oriental pyre!)

Gesualdo’s nameless librettist takes the same subject, robs it of whatever charm Tasso was able to lend it, and emphasizes the bloodiness of the mosquito's fate by introducing—twice over in the space of only six lines—the word stringere, meaning to squeeze, squash, squelch. Another improvement on Tasso is the addition of a playful sally by the lover. Since he longs to share the mosquito's fate, he too will take a bite in the hope of being squashed to death on the lady’s bosom. What follows is a literal translation of this nonsense, accompanied by a description of the music accompanying each phrase. "A bold little mosquito bites the fair breast of who consumes my heart.” This is set to a piece of pure neutral polyphony, very rapid and, despite its textural richness, very light. But the lady is not content with consuming the lover’s heart; she also "keeps it in cruel pain.” Here the dancing polyphony of the first bars gives place to a series of chords moving slowly from dissonance to unprepared dissonance. The pain, however unreal in the text, becomes in the music genuinely excruciating. Now the mosquito “makes its escape, but rashly flies back to that fair breast which steals my heart away. Whereupon she catches it.” All this is rendered in the same kind of rapid, emotionally neutral polyphony as was heard in the opening bars. But now comes another change. The lady not only catches the insect, “she squeezes it and gives it death.” The word morte, death, occurs in almost all Gesualdo’s madrigals. Sometimes it carries its literal meaning; more often, however, it is used figuratively, to signify sensual ecstasy, the swoon of love. But this makes no difference to Gesualdo. Whatever its real significance, and whoever it is that may be dying (the lover metaphorically or, in a literal sense, a friend, a mosquito, the crucified Savior), he gives to the word, morte, a musical expression of the most tragic and excruciating kind. For the remorseful assassin, death was evidently the most terrifying of prospects.

From the insect’s long-drawn musical martyrdom, we return to cheerfulness and pure polyphony. “To share its happy fate, I too will bite you.” Gesualdo was a pain-loving masochist and this playful suggestion of sadism left him unmoved. The counterpoint glides along in a state of emotional neutrality. Then comes a passage of chromatic yearning on the words “my beloved, my precious one.” Then polyphony again. “And if you catch and squeeze me....” After this, the music becomes unadulterated Gesualdo. There is a cry of pain-ahi! -and then “I will swoon away and, upon that fair breast, taste delicious poison.” The musical setting of these final words is a concentrated version of the love-potion scene in Tristan—the chief difference being that Gesualdo’s harmonic progressions are far bolder than any attempted, 2.5 centuries later, by Richard Wagner.

Should pictures tell stories? Should music have a connection with literature? In the past the answer would have been, unanimously, yes. Every great painter was a raconteur of Biblical or mythological anecdotes; every great composer was a setter-to-music of sacred or profane texts. Today the intrusion of literature into the plastic arts is regarded almost as a crime. In the field of music, this anti-literary reign of terror has been less savage. Program music is deplored (not without reason, considering the horrors bequeathed to us by the Victoria era); but in spite of much talk about “pure music,” good composers still write songs, masses, operas, and cantatas. Good painters would do well to follow their example and permit themselves to be inspired to still better painting by the promptings of a literary theme. In the hands of a bad painter, pictorial storytelling, however sublime the subject matter, is merely comic strip art on a large scale. But when a good painter tells the same story, the case is entirely different. The exigencies of illustration—the fact that he has to show such-and-such an environment, performing such-and-such actions—stimulates his imagination on every level, including the purely pictorial level, with the result that he produces a work which, though literary, is of the highest quality as a formal composition. Take any famous painting of the past—Botticelli's “Calumny of Apelles,” for example, or Titian's “Bacchus and Ariadne.” Both of these are admirable illustrations—they are very complex and yet perfectly harmonious and unified arrangements of forms and colors. Moreover the richness of their formal material is a direct consequence of their literary subject matter. Left to itself, the pictorial imagination even of a painter of genius could never conjure up such a subtle and complicated pattern of shapes and hues as we find in these illustrations of texts by Lucian and Ovid. To achieve their purely plastic triumphs, Botticelli and Titian required to be stimulated by a literary theme. It is a highly significant fact that, in no abstract or non-representational painting of today, do we find a purely formal composition having anything like the richness, the harmonious complexity, created in the process of telling a story, by the masters of earlier periods. The traditional distinction between the crafts and the fine arts is based, among other things, on degrees of complexity. A good picture is a greater work of art than a good bowl or a good vase. Why? Because it unifies in one harmonious whole more, and more diverse, elements of human experience than are or can be unified and harmonized in the pot. Some of the non-representational pictures painted in the course of the last fifty years are very beautiful; but even the best of them are minor works, inasmuch as the number of elements of human experience which they combine and harmonize is pitifully small. In them we look in vain for that ordered profusion, that lavish and yet perfectly controlled display of intellectual wealth, which we discover in the best works of the “literary” painters of the past.

In this respect the composer is more fortunate than the painter. It is psychologically possible to write “pure music” that shall be just as harmoniously complex, just as rich in unified diversities, as music inspired by a literary text. But even in music the intrusion of literature has often been beneficent. But for the challenge presented by a rather absurd anecdote couched in very feeble language, Beethoven would never have produced the astonishing “pure music” of the second act of Fidelio. And it was Da Ponte, with his rhymed versions of the stories of Figaro and Don Giovanni, who stimulated Mozart to reveal himself in the fullness of his genius. Where music is a matter of monody and harmony, with a structural pattern (the sonata form or the suite form) imposed, so to speak, from the outside, it is easy to write “pure music,” in which the successive moods shall be expressed, at some length, in successive movements. But where there is no structural pattern, where the style is polyphonic and the movement of the music is not circular, but straight ahead, irreversible and recti-linear, the case is different. Such a style demands extreme brevity and the utmost succinctness of expression. To meet these demands for brevity and succinctness, the musical imagination requires a text—and a text, moreover, of the kind favored by the madrigalists, paradoxical, antithetical, full of

All things counter, original, spare, strange

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who know how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.-

Contemporary musicians, who aspire to write “pure music” in forms as rich, subtle, and compact as those devised by Gesualdo and his contemporaries, would do well to turn once more to the poets.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

3. Luca Marenzio (c. 1553-1599). Italian composer. Heinrich Isaac (1450-1517). Franco-Flemish composer.

Giaches de Wert (1535-1596). Franco-Flemish composer. Jakob Obrecht (1452-1505). Franco-Flemish composer.

4. These hnes are from Gerald Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty.”

Domesticating Sex

EVERY CIVILIZATION is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. The domestication of sex presents a problem whose solution must be attempted on two distinct levels of human experience, the psychophysiological and the social. On the social level the relations of the sexes have everywhere been regulated by law, by uncodified custom, by taboo and religious ritual. Hundreds of volumes have been filled with accounts of these regulations, and it is unnecessary to do more than mention them in passing. Our present concern is with the problem of domesticating sex at the source, of civilizing its manifestations in the individual lover. This is a subject to which, in our Western tradition, we have paid much too little attention. Indeed, it is only in very recent years that, thanks to the declining influence of the Judeo-Christian ethic, we have been able to discuss it realistically. In the past the problem used to be dealt with in one or other of three equally unsatisfactory ways. Either it was not mentioned at all, with the result that adolescents coming to maturity were left to work out their sexual salvation, unassisted, within the framework of the prevailing, and generally barbarous socio-legal system. Or else it was mentioned—but mentioned on the one hand with obscene delight or obscene disapproval (the tone of the pornographers and the puritan moralists), or on the other with a vague and all too “spiritual” sentimentality (the tone of the troubadours, Petrarchians, and romantic lyrists). Today we are condemned neither to silence, nor obscenity, nor sentimentality; we are at liberty, at last, to look at the facts and to ask ourselves what, if anything, can be done about them. One of the best ways of discovering what can be done is to look at what has been done. What experiments have been made in this field, and how successful have they been?

I shall begin not at the faraway beginning of everything, among the Trobrianders, for example, or the Tahitians, but rather at the beginning of our own current phase of civilization—in the middle years that is to say, of the nineteenth century.

Victoria had been on the throne for seven years when, in r 844, John Humphrey Noyes published his book, Bible Communism. (It is worth remarking that, for the American public of a hundred years ago, Communism was essentially biblical. It was preached and practiced by men and women who wanted to emulate the earliest Christians. The appeal was not to Marx’s Manifesto—still unpublished when Noyes wrote his book—but to the Acts of the Apostles.) In the fourth chapter of Bible Communism and again, at greater length, in his Male Continence, written more than twenty years later, Noyes set forth his theories of sex and described the methods employed by himself and his followers for transforming a wild, Godeclipsing passion into a civilized act of worship, a prime cause of crime and misery into a source of individual happiness, social solidarity, and good behavior.

“It is held in the world,” Noyes writes in Bible Communism, “that the sexual organs have two distinct functions—viz; the urinary and the propagative. We affirm that they have three—the urinary, the propagative and the amative., i.e., they are conductors first of the urine, secondly of the semen and thirdly of the social magnetism....” After Mrs. Noyes had come dangerously near to death as the result of repeated miscarriages, Noyes and his wife decided that, henceforth, their sexual relationships should be exclusively amative, not propagative. But how were the specifically human aspects of sex to be detached from the merely biological? Confronted by this question, Robert Dale Owen had advocated coitus interruptus; but Noyes had read his Bible and had no wish to emulate Onan. Nor did he approve of contraceptives—“those tricks,” as he called them, “of the French voluptuaries.” Instead he advocated Male Continence and what Dr. Stockham was later to call Karezza. With the most exemplary scientific detachment he began by “analysing the act of sexual intercourse. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. Its beginning and most elementary form is the simple presence of the male organ in the female.” Presence is followed by motion, motion by crisis. But now “suppose the man chooses to enjoy not only simple presence, but also reciprocal motion, and yet to stop short of the crisis.... If you say that this is impossible, I answer that I know it is possible—nay, that it is easy.” He knew because he himself had done it. “Beginning in 1844, I experimented on the idea” (the idea that the amative function of the sexual organs could be separated from the propagative) “and found that the self-control it required is not difficult; also that my enjoyment was increased; also that my wife’s experience was very satisfactory, which it had never been before; also that we had escaped the horrors and the fear of involuntary propagation.” Noyes was a born prophet, a missionary in the bone. Having made a great discovery, he felt impelled to bring the good news to others—and to bring it, what was more, in the same package with what he believed to be true Christianity. He preached, he made disciples, he brought them together in a community, first in Vermont and later at Oneida, in upstate New York. “Religion,” he declared, “is the first interest, and sexual morality the second in the great enterprise of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth.” At Oneida the religion was Perfectionist Christianity and the sexual morality was based upon the psychophysiological practices of Male Continence and the social law of Complex Marriage. Like all earlier founders of religious communities, Noyes disapproved of exclusive attachments between the members of his group. All were to love all, unpossessively, with a kind of impersonal charity which, at Oneida, included sexual relationships. Hence the establishment, within the community, of Complex Marriage. Noyes did not condemn monogamy; he merely believed that group love was better than exclusive love. “I would not,” he wrote, “set up a distinction of right and wrong between general and special love, except that special love, when false, makes more mischief. I insist that all love, whether general or special, must have its authority in the sanction and the inspiration of the ascending fellowship. All love that is at work in a private corner, away from the general circulation, where there are no series of links connecting it with God, is false love; it sunders and devours, instead of making unity, peace and harmony.” At Oneida there was to be no love in a private corner, no idolatrous and God-eclipsing attachment of one for one, outside the general circulation. Each was married to all; and when any given pair decided (with the advice and permission of the Elders) to consummate their latent nuptials, Male Continence guaranteed that their union should be fruitful only of “social magnetism.” Love was for love’s sake and for God’s, not for offspring.

The Oneida Community endured for thirty years and its members, from all accounts, were excellent citizens, singularly happy, and measurably less neurotic than most of their Victorian contemporaries. The women of Oneida had been spared what one of Noyes’s lady correspondents described as “the miseries of Married Life as it is in the World.” The men found their self-denial rewarded by an experience, at once physical and spiritual, that was deeper and richer than that of unrestrained sexuality. Here is the comment of a young man who had lived in the community and learned the new Art of Love. “This Yankee nation,” he wrote to Noyes, “claims to be a nation of inventors, but this discovery of Male Continence puts you, in my mind, at the head of all inventors.” And here are Noyes’s own reflections on the psychological, social, and religious significance of his discovery. “The practice which we propose will advance civilization and refinement at railroad speed. The self-control, retention of life, and advance out of sensualism, which must result from making freedom of love a bounty on the chastening of sensual indulgence, will at once raise the race to new vigor and beauty, moral and physical. And the refining effects of sexual love (which are recognized more or less in the world) will be increased a hundredfold when sexual intercourse becomes a method of ordinary conversation and each becomes married to all.” Furthermore, “in a society trained in these principles, amative intercourse will have its place among the ’fine arts.’ Indeed, it will take rank above music, painting, sculpture, etc.; for it combines the charms and benefits of them all. There is as much room for cultivation of taste and skill in this department as in any.” And this is not all. Sexual love is a cognitive act. We speak—or at least we used to speak—of carnal knowledge. This knowledge is of a kind that can be deepened indefinitely. “To a true heart, one that appreciates God, the same woman is an endless mystery. And this necessarily flows from the first admission that God is unfathomable in depths of knowledge and wisdom.” Male Continence transforms the sexual act into a prolonged exchange of “social magnetism”; and this prolonged exchange makes possible an ever deepening knowledge of the mystery of human nature—that mystery which merges ultimately, and becomes one with the mystery of Life itself.

Noyes’s conception of the sexual act (when properly performed) as at once a religious sacrament, a mode of mystical knowledge, and a civilizing social discipline has its counterpart in Tantra. In the twenty-seventh chapter of Sir John Woodroffe’s Shakti and Shakta the interested reader will find a brief account of the Tantrik’s sexual ritual, together with a discussion of the philosophy which underlies the practice. “Nothing in natural function is low or impure to the mind which recognizes it as Shakti and the working of Shakti. It is the ignorant and, in a true sense, vulgar mind which regards any natural function as low or coarse. The action in this case is seen in the light of the inner vulgarity of mind.” Once the reality of the world as grounded in the Absolute is established, the body seems to be less an obstacle to freedom; for it is a form of that self-same Absolute.” In Tantra the sexual sacrament borrows the method of Yoga, “not to frustrate, but to regulate enjoyment. Conversely enjoyment produces Yoga by the union of body and spirit.” Here are made one Yoga which liberates and Bhoga which enchains.” In Hindu philosophy (which is not philosophy in the modern Western sense of the word, but rather the description and tentative explanation of a praxis aimed at the transformation of human consciousness), the relations between body, psyche, spirit, and Divine Ground are described in terms of a kind of occult physiology, whose language comes nearer to expressing the unbroken continuity of experience, from the “lowest” to the “highest,” than any hitherto devised in the West. “Coition,” in terms of this occult physiology, “is the union of the Shakti Kundalini, the ’Inner Woman’ in the lowest center of the Sadhaka's body with the Supreme Shiva in the highest center in the upper Brain. This, the Yogini Tantra says, is the best of all unions for those who are Yati, that is, who have controlled their passions.”

In the West the theory and practice of Tantra were never orthodox, except perhaps during the first centuries of Christianity. At this time it was common for ecclesiastics and pious laymen to have “spiritual wives,” who were called Agapetae, Syneisaktoi, or Virgines Subintroductae. Of the precise relationships between these spiritual wives and husbands we know very little; but it seems that, in some cases at least, a kind of Karezza, or bodily union without orgasm, was practiced as a religious exercise, leading to valuable spiritual experiences.

For the most part, Noyes’s predecessors and the Christian equivalents of Tantra must be sought among the heretics—the Gnostics in the first centuries of our era, the Cathars in the early Middle Ages, and the Adamites or Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit from the later thirteenth century onwards. In his monograph on The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch Wilhelm Franger has brought together much interesting material on the Adamites. They practiced, we learn, a modum specialem coeundi, a special form of intercourse, which was identical with Noyes’s Male Continence or the coitus reservatus permitted by Roman Catholic casuists. This kind of sexual intercourse, they declared, was known to Adam before the Fall and was one of the constituents of Paradise. It was a sacramental act of charity and, at the same time, of mystical cognition, and, as such, was called by the Brethren acclivitas—the upward path. According to Aegidius Cantor, the leader of the Flemish Adamites in the first years of the fifteenth century, “the natural sexual act can take place in such a manner that it is equal in value to a prayer in the sight of God.” A Spanish follower of the Adamite heresy declared, at his trial that “after I had first had intercourse with her (the prophetess, Francisca Hernandez) for some twenty days, I could say that I had learned more wisdom in Valladolid than if I had studied for twenty years in Paris. For not Paris, but only Paradise could teach such wisdom .” Like Noyes and his followers, the Adamites practiced a form of sexual communism, and practiced it not, as their enemies declared, out of a low taste for orgiastic promiscuity, but because Complex Marriage was a method by which every member of the group could love all the rest with an impartial and almost impersonal charity; could see and nuptially know in each beloved partner the embodiment of the original, unfallen Adam—a godlike son or daughter of God.

Among literary testimonials to Male Continence, perhaps the most elegant is a little poem by Petronius. Long and inevitably disgusting experience had taught this arbiter of the elegancies that there must be something better than debauchery. He found it in physical tenderness and the peace of soul which such tenderness begets.

Foeda est in coitu et brevis voluptas,

et taedet Veneris statim peractae.

Non ergo ut pecudes libidinosae

caeci protinus irruamus illuc;

nam languescit amor peritque flamma;

sed sic sic sine fine feriati

et tecum jaceamus osculantes.

Hie nullus labor est ruborque nullus;

hoc juvit, juvat et diu juvabit;

hoc non deficit, incipitque semper.

Which was Englished by Ben Jonson, as follows:

Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short;

And done, we straight repent us of the sport;

Let us not then rush blindly on unto it,

Like lustful beasts that only know to do it;

For lust will languish, and that heat decay.

But thus, thus, keeping endless holiday,

Let us together closely lie and kiss;

There is no labor, nor no shame in this;

This hath pleased, doth please and long will please; never

Can this decay, but is beginning ever.

And here, from a novelist and poet of a very different kind is a passage that hints at what is revealed by physical tenderness, when it is prolonged by Male Continence into a quasi-mystical experience. “She had sunk to a final rest," Lawrence writes, near the end of The Plumed Serpent, “within a great opened-out cosmos. The universe had opened out to her, new and vast, and she had sunk to the deep bed of pure rest ... She realized, almost with wonder, the death in her of the Aphrodite of the foam: the seething, frictional, ecstatic Aphrodite. By a swift dark instinct, Cipriano drew away from this in her. When, in their love, it came back on her, the seething electric female ecstasy, which knows such spasms of delirium, he recoiled from her. It was what she used to call her ‘satisfaction,’ she had loved Joachim for this, that again, and again, and again he could give her this orgiastic ‘satisfaction,’ in spasms that made her cry aloud.

“But Cipriano would not. By a dark and powerful instinct he drew away from her as soon as this desire rose again in her, for the white ecstasy of frictional satisfaction, the throes of Aphrodite of the foam. She could see that, to him, it was repulsive. He just removed himself, dark and unchangeable, away from her.

“And she, as she lay, would realize the worthlessness of this foam-effervescence, its strange externality to her. It seemed to come from without, not from within. And succeeding the first moment of disappointment, when this sort of ’satisfaction’ was denied her, came the knowledge that she did not really want it, that it was really nauseous to her.

“And he in his dark, hot silence would bring her back to the new, soft, heavy, hot flow, when she was like a fountain gushing noiseless and with urgent softness from the deeps. There she was open to him soft and hot, yet gushing with a noiseless soft power. And there was no such thing as conscious ’satisfaction.’ What happened was dark and untellable. So different from the beak-like friction of Aphrodite of the foam, the friction which flares out in circles of phosphorescent ecstasy, to the last wild spasm which utters the involuntary cry, like a death-cry, the final love-cry.”

Male Continence is not merely a device for domesticating sexuality and heightening its psychological significance; it is also, as the history of the Oneida Community abundantly proves, a remarkably effective method of birth control. Indeed, under the name of coitus reservatus, it is one of the two methods of birth control approved by the authorities of the Roman Church—the other and more widely publicized method being the restriction of intercourse to the so-called safe periods. Unfortunately large-scale field experiments in India have shown that, in the kind of society which has the most urgent need of birth control, the safe period method is almost useless. And whereas Noyes, the practical Yankee, devoted much time and thought to the problem of training his followers in Male Continence, the Roman Church has done little or nothing to instruct its youth in the art of coitus reservatus. (How odd it is that while primitive peoples, like the Trobrianders, are careful to teach their children the best ways of domesticating sex, we, the Civilized, stupidly leave ours at the mercy of their wild and dangerous passions!)

Meanwhile, over most of the earth, population is rising faster than available resources. There are more people with less to eat. But when the standard of living goes down, social unrest goes up, and the revolutionary agitator, who has no scruples about making promises which he knows very well he cannot keep, finds golden opportunities. Confronted by the appalling dangers inherent in population increase at present rates, most governments have permitted and one or two have actually encouraged their subjects to make use of contraceptives. But they have done so in the teeth of protests from the Roman Church. By outlawing contraceptives and by advocating instead two methods of birth control, one of which doesn't work, while the other, effective method is never systematically taught, the prelates of that Church seem to be doing their best to ensure, first, a massive increase in the sum of human misery and, second, the triumph, within a generation or two, of World Communism.

[Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956]

The Double Crisis

Appendix

Themes and Variations

(Chatto & Windus, 1950)

Table of Contents as Originally Published

Variations on a Philosopher

Art and Religion

Variations on a Baroque Tomb

Variations on El Greco

Variations on The Prisons

Variations on Goya

Adonis and the Alphabet and Other Essays (Chatto & Windus, 1956)

Table of Contents as Originally Published

The Education of an Amphibian

Knowledge and Understanding

The Desert

Ozymandias

Liberty, Quality, Machinery

Censorship and Spoken Literature

Canned Fish

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Hyperion to a Satyr

Mother

Adonis and the Alphabet

Miracle in Lebanon

Usually Destroyed

Famagusta or Paphos

Faith, Taste, and History

Doodles in the Dictionary

Gesualdo: Variations on a Musical Theme Domesticating Sex

A NOTE ON THE EDITORS

Robert S. Baker is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studied at the University of Western Ontario and at the University of Illinois, where he received a Ph.D. He has written Brave New World: History, Science, and Dystopia and The Dark Historic Page: Social Satire and Historicism in the Novels of Aldous Huxley, 1921-1939.

James Sexton teaches English at Camosun College in Victoria, British Columbia. He studied at the University of British Columbia, the University of Oregon, and the University of Victoria, where he received a Ph.D. With David Bradshaw he has edited an edition of Huxley's play Now More Than Ever, and has edited a collection of Huxley's Hearst essays.