Collected Works of George Grant : Volume 2 (1951-1959) [1 ed.] 9781442673069, 9780802007636

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COLLECTED WORKS OF GEORGHE GRANT VOLUME 2 1951-1959

COLLECTED WORKS

OF GEORGE GRANT Volume 2 1951-1959 Edited by Arthur Davis

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press 2002 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-0763-5

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Grant, George, 1918-1988 Collected works of George Grant ,' edited by Arthur Davis Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1.1933-1950 - v. 2.1951-1959. ISBN 0-8020-0762-7 (v. 1) ISBN 0-8020-0763-5 (v. 2) 1. Philosophy. 2. Political science. 3. Religion. 4. Canada - Politics and government. I. Davis, Arthur, 1939- . II. Title. B995.G741999

191

C99-931317-7

This volume has been published with the generous financial assistance of W.H. Loewen. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Permissions

xi

Chronology

xiii

Introduction to Volume 2:1951-1959 The Dalhousie Years The Texts of Volume 2: Sources and Presentation 'Philosophy' - Massey Commission Report

xvii xxxi 3

'Canadian Universities and Protestant Churches'

22

'Pursuit of an Illusion: A Commentary on Bertrand Russell'

34

'Two Theological Languages'

49

'Philosophy and Adult Education'

66

'Plato and Popper'

75

Training for the Ministry'

93

'Turning New Leaves' - Review of Henry Marshall Tory by E.A. Corbett

95

'Adult Education in the Expanding Economy'

100

vi

Contents

'Charles Cochrane'

110

'What Is Philosophy?'

116

'Jean-Paul Sartre'

1123

'Canada - History'

137

'The Minds of Men in the Atomic Age'

156

'The Paradox of Democratic Education'

166

'The Teaching Profession in an Expanding Economy'

182

'The Uses of Freedom - A Word and Our World'

190

'Morals in Nova Scotia'

204

'Acceptance and Rebellion'

221

'Philosophy' - Encyclopedia Canadiana 'The Humanities in Soviet Higher Education' Philosophy in the Mass Age

300 305 310

'Fyodor Dostoevsky' - with Sheila Grant

408

'Christ, What a Planet!'

420

Three Talks and a Review 'The Basic Problems of Mankind?' 'On Education' 'What's an Arts Faculty for?' 'Some Recent Mozart Recordings'

425 430 437 440

Contents

vii

Lectures at Dalhousie - A Selection A. Introduction to Philosophy B. Ethics C. Plato D. St Augustine E. Kant List of Dalhousie Lectures and Fragments

443 444 446 461 476 490 506

Appendix 1: Comments on Hegel and on Religion and Philosophy Notebooks 1,2, and 4 (1956-7)

519

Appendix 2: Poems To S.V.G. To Elizabeth Good Friday Easter

533

Appendix 3: List of Radio and Television Broadcasts by George Grant - CBC

536

Appendix 4: Editorial and Textual Principles and Methods Applied in Volume 2

544

Index

547

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Acknowledgments

A large project needs the help and goodwill of many friends, colleagues, critics, and interested parties. I cannot mention them all, but I single out particularly Sheila Grant, who extended her wonderful hospitality during my many visits to work on the papers at her Halifax home, as well as giving her wise counsel, sharing her special knowledge of Grant's writing, and contributing countless hours of hard work to the preparation of the papers; Ron Schoeffel, editor-in-chief of the University of Toronto Press and the editor of this project, who deserves heartfelt gratitude for years of advice, support, and assurance; and Henry Roper, who has agreed to co-edit the rest of the series beginning with the next volume, and whose help with the editing and selection of the unpublished work in this second volume has been vital. I wish also to give special thanks to Mel Wiebe for his excellent advice and rigorous attention to detail on both the first and second volumes, to Anne Laughlin for her care, patience, and artistry while guiding the design and editing of both volumes, and to Peter Emberley for his enormous contribution to the early preparation of the works in this volume. I thank Ed Andrew, for initial and strong on-going support of the project, Gerald Owen, for extensive and always valuable editorial assistance, Dennis Lee, for wise and timely editing and advice, Michael Burns, for support and advice in the early stages, Jon Alexander, for early work in the project scanning much of Grant's published writing, Mark Haslett, for working so diligently in compiling an exhaustive bibliography and tracking down obscure journals, Louis Greenspan, for unflinching support and assistance, and William Christian, for sharing the knowledge of Grant he has garnered. Some of the many others who have helped along the way include

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Acknowledgments

Bob Davis, H.D. Forbes, Nita Graham, David Jones, Lawrence Schmidt, Kassie Temple, and Samantha Thompson. The editors are grateful for financial assistance during the period of the early editorial work of the project from the Canadian Studies Directorate, Secretary of State, the Jackman Foundation, the Henry White Kinnear Foundation, and the McLean Foundation, and I am especially thankful for indispensable, on-going financial support from Atkinson College, York University. Special Acknowledgment The editors are particularly indebted to W.H. Loewen for his commitment to support financially the publication of these volumes.

Permissions

The editor thanks the following for permission to reprint material in this volume: Sheila Grant for 'Acceptance and Rebellion/ the unpublished lectures, notebooks, talks, essays, poems, and radio broadcasts; Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd for 'Canada - History'; the Privy Council Office of the Government of Canada for 'Philosophy' in the Report from the Massey Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences; the Edwin Mellen Press for 'Two Theological Languages' from 'Two Theological Languages' by George Grant and Other Essays In Honour of His Work; the University of Toronto Press for Philosophy in the Mass Age; Grolier Society for 'Philosophy' in Encyclopedia Canadiana; The Dalhousie Review for 'Pursuit of an Illusion: A Commentary on Bertrand Russell'; the Canadian Association for Adult Education for 'Philosophy and Adult Education,' published in the journal Food for Thought; Canadian Journals of Economics and Political Science (formerly one journal) for 'Plato and Popper'; The Anglican Outlook for 'Adult Education in the Expanding Economy'; The United Church Observer for a letter to the editor; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for 'Jean-Paul Sartre,' 'The Minds of Men in the Atomic Age,' and 'Fyodor Dostoevsky'; Education Forum for 'The Paradox of Democratic Education'; and Queen's Quarterly for 'The Uses of Freedom - A Word and Our World.'

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Chronology: George Grant's Life

1918

Born in Toronto on 13 November to William Grant and Maude Parkin. 1927 Enters Upper Canada College in Toronto. 1935 Father dies. 1936 Enters Queen's University to study history. 1939 Awarded Ontario Rhodes Scholarship. Enters Balliol College, Oxford, to study jurisprudence. 1940 Volunteers as Air Raid Precaution Officer on the London docks in Bermondsey during the Battle of Britain. 1941 Applies to join the Merchant Marine but is rejected because he has contracted tuberculosis. Works on a farm in Buckinghamshire. Conversion experience to a belief in 'order beyond space and time.' 1942 Convalesces in Canada. 1943 Works under Dr E.A. Corbett as National Secretary of the Canadian Association for Adult Education. Writes for the journal Food for Thought and, with Jean Hunter Morrison, for the radio program Citizens' Forum. 1945 Returns to Balliol to study theology. Attracted to circle of A.D. Lindsay, Austin Farrer, and C.S. Lewis. Meets Sheila Allen. 1947 Marries Sheila Allen. Begins work at Dalhousie University as Professor of Philosophy. Works closely with Professor James Doull, 'who taught me to read Plato.' 1948 Daughter Rachel born. 1950 Son William born. Oxford University awards Grant DPhil degree for dissertation entitled 'The Concept of Nature and Supernature in the Theology of John Oman.' 1952 Son Robert born.

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Chronology: George Grant's Life

1954 1957 1959

Daughter Catherine born. Daughter Isabel born. Son David born. Grant delivers a series of nine talks on CBC Radio's University of the Air. Publishes a revised version of the nine radio talks as Philosophy in the Mass Age. Accepts and then resigns a position at the newly established York University in Toronto. While in Toronto writes for Mortimer Adler of the Institute for Philosophical Research, including a review of the year's books in philosophy and religion published in the first volume of Great Ideas of Today. Contributes 'An Ethic of Community' to Social Purpose for Canada, a book published to coincide with the founding of the New Democratic Party. Accepts a position as Associate Professor of Religion at McMaster University. Writes first essay on Simone Weil (unpublished). Mother dies. Appointed Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Publishes Lament for a Nation. Addresses International Teach-in at the University of Toronto. Publishes a new introduction to Philosophy in the Mass Age. Publishes Technology and Empire. Delivers Massey Lectures on the CBC, which are published as Time as History in 1971. Writes a new introduction to Lament for a Nation. Begins work on Technique(s) and Good,' a book projected but not completed. Delivers Josiah Wood Lectures at Mount Allison University, which were published as English-Speaking Justice in 1978. Begins work on 'Good and Technique,' another book not completed. Resigns teaching position at McMaster University. Accepts Killam professorship in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University, with a cross-appointment to the Departments of Classics and Religion. Begins work on the idea of history in the thought of Rousseau and Darwin. Publishes essay on Celine, intended as part of a projected book on Celine and the nature of art. Retires from teaching.

1960

1961

1963 1965 1966 1969 1970 1971 1974 1976 1980

1982 1983 1984

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xv

Publishes Notre Dame University Press edition of EnglishSpeaking Justice. 1986 Publishes Technology and Justice (Anansi and Notre Dame University Presses). Publishes Est-ce la Fin du Canada? Lamentation sur I'echec du nationalisme Canadien, the French edition of Lament for a Nation (reprinted 1992). Begins work on a projected book responding to Heidegger's Nietzsche with a defence of Christianity and Plato. 1988 Dies in Halifax on 27 September. 1985

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Introduction to Volume 2: 1951-1959

The Dalhousie Years

George Grant spent his first years as a teacher at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. From 1947 to 1960 he built a philosophy curriculum that included regular courses on Ethics, Plato, St Augustine, and Kant. He continued with the ethical, religious, and political questions he had begun to raise at Oxford. With these as the medium he challenged his students to test their mid-twentieth-century Nova Scotian and North American ways of thinking against the intuitions of the older Greek and Christian rational traditions. Most of his students came from the Maritimes. In this region religious traditions had perhaps survived longer than in larger urban centres such as Toronto, but by then even in Nova Scotia these traditions were giving way in the face of what Grant called 'the expanding economy.' Indeed, Grant had been hired by President A.E. Kerr with the understanding that he was expected in part to teach a philosophy informed by religious and moral concerns. He arrived in Halifax and began to teach at Dalhousie two years before completing his doctoral thesis on John Oman in 1950. He turned his full attention to teaching, public speaking, and writing after the thesis was completed, remaining in Halifax until 1960, when he accepted a position at Toronto's York University. This second volume contains Grant's published writings of the period at Dalhousie. These begin with 'Philosophy/ his contribution to the Massey Royal Commission Report in 1951, and end with Philosophy in

the Mass Age and two CBC broadcasts, one on Dostoevsky and the other assessing the events of 1959. From Grant's unpublished writings the volume includes a 120-page typescript (1956-7) titled 'Acceptance

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and Rebellion' by the editors, a selection of his Dalhousie lectures, some talks and essays, a few poems, and excerpts from notebooks. Dalhousie in the 1950s

At Oxford, chance had put Grant in touch with Sheila Allen and James Doull, two persons who were to affect his life and thought profoundly. Sheila Allen was an Englishwoman who had come from a tradition of education, as Grant later put it. She had been raised a Roman Catholic but had left the church before meeting Grant. She had been a nurse during the war and was, like Grant, a pacifist. They married in 1947. In addition to being the mother of their six children, Sheila Grant was Grant's lifelong intellectual companion and editor-collaborator, whose impact on his thought cannot be overstated. She discussed lectures with him and sat in on graduate seminars, sometimes held at their home in the early 1950s. In addition, she helped him with his writings, poring over them with him line by line. On occasion, when Grant was overextended and there was a deadline to meet, she did some of the writing for him. An example is the CBC piece on Dostoevsky in 1959. Students and other friends of the family found visits with George and Sheila Grant delightful, because of their generous hospitality that often included tea and sandwiches and because of wonderful conversation about experiences and the politics of the day woven together with an astonishing reach into the worlds of poetry, novels, art, philosophy, and religion. James Doull was born and raised in Nova Scotia, and had studied classics and philosophy at Oxford during the same period as Grant. Both men were then hired by Dalhousie, Grant in philosophy and Doull in classics, although Doull taught philosophy courses as well. Grant's friendship with Doull deepened during the Dalhousie years. In a 1978 interview he said of Doull's influence: When I was leaving Oxford in 1947 ... it meant going to Dalhousie. I had to teach philosophy when I didn't really know any. Doull, who was my own age and really educated in a way I was not, led me into Kant and Plato. I will never forget once, walking down the street in Halifax, he showed me what the image of the sun in Plato's Republic meant. Everything that I had been trying to think came together.

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Of course Doull's great teacher has been Hegel, and I am not a Hegelian. That has led Doull and me apart. But that doesn't make one forget one's debt. He was the person who made me really look at western philosophy.1 Doull and Grant became well known in Dalhousie and Halifax circles in the 1950s as the central figures in the Philosophy and Classics departments. The two taught students to approach philosophical and religious questions partly through their debate with each other. Differences between Plato and Aristotle and Kant and Hegel, on the role of philosophy in relation to religion, for example, came alive for students when Grant sided with Plato and Kant and Doull with Aristotle and Hegel. Students were attracted to Grant because he understood their lingering attachment to religious belief and also their excitement about the modern world. Grant had a strong connection to both - to religion and to modern thinking. The key to his teaching was his attention to his students, to what mattered to them; he had high hopes for the young people he taught; he believed it was important to know what they were going through in order to teach them. They could discover truth for themselves, even in the difficult context of mid-century North America and Canada, given the right encouragement, inspiration, and guidance, and assuming they were capable of work and discipline. Grant began his teaching in a period comparable to Plato's: the decline of the Christian religion, like the decline of the mythical Greek religion in Plato's day, meant students had been left with no guidance about how to live their lives, other than the powerful influences of the contemporary secular world. Grant understood the power of the belief in progress because he himself was raised to be progressive. At the same time, however, his progressive stance had been weakened by the shattering experiences of the war. Grant believed the tragedies of the twentieth century demanded a more religious stance, one that should replace progress. He knew a return to the old religion was neither possible nor desirable. Rather, he hoped for reverence inside the modern world with a greater awareness of its limits and dangers. Plato's philosophy helped Grant make sense of his philosophical and religious conversion. His belief in an eternal order grounded, rather than contradicted, his progressive desire to seek economic and

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political justice. 'What Plato enabled me to do/ he claimed, 'was to see some unity between ordinary things and relate them to my belief in God,'2 Students from the 1950s like Louis Greenspan, who later taught with Grant at McMaster University, remember the unique world that formed around the Grant family: I look at Dalhousie in those years as an enchanted world, you know. The curriculum of the university and the structure of student-teacher relations was quite different than it is now... Your classroom was really three places. This was so with George. First, it was the classroom itself. It was also the Lord Nelson tavern where we drank beer and talked philosophy. And then it was in Sheila and George's home, which was a kind of salon for philosophy students. And I marvel to this day: they had six young children, and still, whenever people came into the house, [we had] long conversations about philosophy in which they would both participate. So it was a kind of magic world.3 Grant met the Canadian novelist Matt Cohen in the sixties, but Cohen's recollection of Grant's teaching two decades later in 1985 speaks equally well for the Dalhousie years. As with many other students who met him at the time, I was very impressed by his willingness or even eagerness to take what I said seriously. Because this, as I say, was his method of teaching: to make people take what they thought seriously, and therefore possibly think different things and examine the conclusions ... because he believed that what was right and wrong was within people, within every person. Because that was his view of what people were. To him, the business of living and the business of philosophy were the same thing. And I think that that was one of the things that made him so attractive to students, because they felt that in a sense he was saying to them that the most important thing you've got is your life and how you live it.4 During an interview with David Cayley for a CBC Ideas program (1985), Grant said what he thought drew out his best when teaching. [Leo] Strauss once said, and I think it is the best thing I've ever known

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about teaching, ever heard about teaching - he said, never go into a class without thinking that there is somebody in the classroom who has a greater intelligence and a nobler heart than yourself. That remark is so good, that it just reduced me [to tears]. And I think if you don't like the young, for God's sake don't be paid a lot of money to teach them ... But I think if you're teaching the young in all their variety and all their difference, one must love them, or else what the hell? Why do it?5 Grant as Public Commentator

Grant's writings of the mid-fifties (works like 'The Minds of Men in the Atomic Age')6 and his many talks given to professional groups were linked closely with his experience of teaching. He saw 'the expanding economy' or 'the mass scientific society' becoming the new religion of the parents of his students. 'It is only necessary,' he wrote, 'to look at any of our institutions - government, the schools, the universities or the churches - to see how more and more these institutions are unified around this religion, the religion of the manipulation of nature for short-term economic gains.'7 He saw Canadians choosing technology and prosperity, unaware of the price they would pay for it. Grant, in contrast, thought freedom still had to be found through truth experienced in faith. The 'freest of all men once said: "I have overcome the world." And this is what life is for, to overcome the world, as we live in it deeply.'8 He wrote frequently against the transformation of education in the schools and the university into 'mass education.' Education, in the sense of opening the minds of the young to 'know what is truly worth desiring,' was changing to vocational training, or preparing the young for prosperous jobs and adjusting them to the demands of a mass society. 'The surrender of the universities to the boom spirit is overwhelming,' he said. I watch it every day of my life. Universities are now places where young people can ensure their entrance into the prosperous part of society by learning some technique, and where staff employees (once known as professors) increase the scope of some immediately useful technique.9 The Protestant churches, he thought, were becoming 'tame confederates' of the expanding economy, ignoring the 'real work of the

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church ... to teach people through thought and prayer and worship to seek the ultimate truth, and to live by it.' The new society seemed to be a liberation and an opening up of new possibilities, but Grant drew attention to what he took to be the pragmatic adjustment of our care for others to the demands of capitalist technology, and the consequent lowering of expectations with regard to love and justice: Whether freedom and love will be realized in the technological world who can tell? ... I do not want to be pessimistic. However, what is certain, beyond doubt, is that whether we live at the end of the world or at the dawn of a golden age or neither, it still counts absolutely to each one of us that in and through the beauty and anguish, the good and evil of the world, we come in freedom upon the joy unspeakable.10 Grant's Clash with the Professional Philosophers

Grant's vision of the nature and purpose of education and of philosophy, was perhaps bound to offend many professors in established philosophy departments. The clash had begun back in 1948 with Grant's attack on University of Toronto professor Fulton Anderson's book on Francis Bacon in The Dalhousie Review. Where one may criticize Professor Anderson is in his failure to judge the limitations of Bacon. The scholar is always called upon for a judgment of worth and surely in the light of what we know today, the enslavement of Bacon to the optimism of the scientific Renaissance is worth considering more deeply than Professor Anderson attempts ... What meaning is there in Bacon's attempt to cut off truth humanly discoverable from the revealed dogmas of religion? Its only implication is that the truths of religion are not rational but arbitrary. Therefore it leads to an exaltation of the truths of natural science, and such an exaltation, coupled with man's original sin, leads straight to the grinning mask of scientific humanism at Hiroshima.11

Anderson was enraged by the review and tried to get President Kerr to censure Grant. This was the first of a series of difficult encounters between the two philosophers, face to face and in publications. In 1951 the Canadian government published the Massey Royal Com-

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mission Report on all aspects of Canadian education, culture, and mass media. Among the essays was Grant's account of the unhealthy state of non-Catholic Canadian philosophy, under the title 'Philosophy.' He began with a definition of philosophy: The study of philosophy is the analysis of the traditions of our society and the judgment of those traditions against our varying intuitions of the Perfection of God. It is the contemplation of our own and others' activity, in the hope that by understanding it better we may make it less imperfect.12 Grant then proceeded to an attack on scepticism: It is a great illusion that scepticism breeds thought and that doubt is the producer of art. The sceptic fails in that courage which alone can buttress the tiring discipline of being rational. Why should those who believe there is so little to know spend their energy in the hard activity of contemplation? As the late A.N. Whitehead wrote, it is in the ages of faith that men pursue truth and beauty.13 According to B.K. Sandwell, Grant stirred up a hornets' nest with his assertion that an awakening of a genuine Canadian philosophy was brewing outside philosophy departments - among young Canadians and in the work of scholars like Charles Cochrane, Northrop Frye, Arthur Woodhouse, and Harold Innis.14 Grant had stated: [I]t is impossible to be with young Canadians and not feel an eager and questioning curiosity, a dissatisfaction with easy answers, out of which a truly Canadian philosophy might be born. This possible awakening is seen at a further level in the scholarly writings that are appearing ... [T]hese new works are not so much coming from men in the philosophy departments proper as from men whose studies are in one of the specialized fields. Such studies have led men to understand the limits of their fields seen in isolation, and so to an attempt to relate that field to the problem of human existence as a whole. Thus their thought has become philosophical. Too often those in the philosophy departments proper have not been to the same degree challenged by the modern world so as to face the problems of philosophy in this living way,15

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RH. Anderson's hostility to Grant hardened as a result of his essay in the Massey Report. As a response, he organized a conference of Canadian philosophers and arranged for its proceedings to be published by the University of Toronto Press in a volume to which he contributed an introduction.16 The work had the effect of severely hurting Grant's reputation in the leading Canadian philosophy departments. Anderson, in his introduction, opposed Grant's account of philosophy while praising the character and health of Canadian philosophy departments. According to him, Grant was wrong about philosophy's relation to religion and inaccurate in his account of what was happening to Canadian philosophy. He denied that Canadian philosophers in the 1920s and 1930s were all pragmatists and positivists. Grant, he argued, was acting unprofessionally when he mixed philosophy with religion, but also when he wove common sense, economic matters, current politics, and social questions into his philosophical study. Grant was 'unhistorical' when he ignored or denied that philosophy had moved on from its earlier ties to theology. Anderson criticized Grant's approach to philosophy, therefore, as an unnecessary return to metaphysics. Grant, he stated, was among those who had 'a yearning for monism of a sort' and 'would have all sciences and knowledge merged in a unity under the direction of, say, a sociologist or a theologian.'17 Anderson, by contrast, believed that Canadian philosophers had established a broad approach that included systematic analysis, under the divisions of logic, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of science. Professional philosophers tended to ignore Grant's work, even after he became Canada's best known political philosopher. For a time in the early fifties, the attacks on his work and reputation by the 'progressives,' as he called his detractors, led Grant to write 'indirectly.' As he explained many years later in an interview with William Christian: I certainly had to be aware that at the time I came into the Canadian universities and the next years, if I wanted to have anything to say in them, I had to speak very indirectly. It was probably alright to talk about Socrates, but it was not alright to talk about Christ. I think the main thing 18 is that there has been a sustained hostility to Christianity which was powerful but hidden. After all, to be really nasty, the progressives have been as self-righteous as any ruling group in history. I think that is true.

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This statement, however, does not mean that Grant decided to conceal or mask his true beliefs in his writing or his teaching. His motive was always to communicate truthfully in language that could be understood by his students or readers. He was fascinated at times by esoteric writing, but was incapable of doing it himself. He did realize that a teacher in a modern university could no longer teach religious truth in the same manner that one would do in a theological seminary. But that did not lead him to hide his Christianity from his readers, his students, or the numerous groups of teachers and social workers to whom he delivered talks. Grant was unshaken by the criticisms of Anderson and other Canadian philosophers, as is shown in a letter to his mother at the time: As for Fulton Anderson to hell with him. As [Charles] Cochrane said over and over, the philosophy departments in Canadian universities have surrendered their true task. They turned philosophy into technical work for the few rather than a way of life open to all. Sureness is not necessarily dogmatism and I know that it is not a question of Anderson not believing in God and I believing. I know God exists. Plato shows to those who listen that one cannot avoid that conclusion. The face of Anderson's scepticism and secularism is all around the world. Life has been too long for me and I had to learn at too great a price not to be frank about what one believes. At the personal and practical level I am always unsure and confused but at this level I know I am right, not because of the '1,' but because the arguments are irrefutable. And nothing could be more important than this because in the next years the future of the world is tied up with those who have rational love of God. All I hate about it is the bitterness engendered and the fact that good work may be prevented by that bitterness. As to the controversy one cannot speak wrongly when one has Plato and Augustine and Kant behind one. The issue is not really God but whether philosophy is a practical study which can help men to live.19

Grant continued to develop his own view of philosophy by writing an essay entitled 'Pursuit of An Illusion: A Commentary on Bertrand Russell.' It appeared later the same year, once again in The Dalhousie Review.20 This critique of Russell also served as an indirect reply to the tradition represented by Anderson because it was a defence of the

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source of practical judgment in religion and classical philosophy. Grant argued that Russell was inconsistent on the question of the status of practical judgment. Russell, in his work after 1914, asked his readers to take seriously his judgments about politics, education, religion, and sex, when he had previously denied any validity to 'practical' reason. I so often hear Russell talked about as a great advocate of human reason as against the obscurantism and mysticism of the older philosophy and theology. The fact remains however that at the centre of the old philosophy and theology there lies the proposition that man is a rational animal. This proposition meant that man can only achieve his proper end by the perfection of his reason. At the heart of Russell's thought lies the denial of this. My argument is ... with those who admire Russell and think in so doing they are affirming the rationality of man.21 According to Grant, Russell denied the possibility of rational truth (meaning truth based on human nature) in the realms of ethics, politics, and religion, without facing up to the implications of that doctrine, that it would leave us bereft of any guidance. Grant argued that it would be naive to believe that ethical and political traditions of decency would survive once they had been undermined as philosophically untenable. Grant argued that, without knowing it, modern society was heading for disaster. The tradition of equality would gradually cease to hold people if it was no longer supported by religion and philosophy. The question then which Russell's philosophy raises is whether reason can be practical. I believe this is the most important issue of all philosophy,forif we say with Russell that our action cannot finally be regulated by principles, we are saying that in the most important aspect of our nature reason is impotent.22 Grant concluded with an assertion that philosophy would be no longer worthy of its name if it denied that it is a search for wisdom about how we should live our lives. Philosophy means simply the love of wisdom, and wisdom means knowledge of the true end of life. If men are not rational they cannot

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reach such knowledge and therefore the attempt is the pursuit of an illusion. This is why Russell is such a confused thinker. Calling himself a philosopher, he has tried to convince men that philosophy is a waste of time.23

The alternative role for philosophy would, by default, be service to science and economic development. To sum up the clash with the Canadian philosophical establishment of the 1940s and 1950s: Grant chose to stand in defence of a philosophy whose subject was 'the whole of things,' and in defence of reason as a basis of practical judgment, believing, like C.N. Cochrane, that philosophy departments had 'surrendered their true task.' In a more measured assessment of the Toronto philosophy department in 1958, he stated his basic objection to their approach: The emphasis in the department, under Brett and his successor, F.H. Anderson, has been on the scholarly activity of intellectual history. All the varying traditions of classical and European philosophy are investigated, expounded and analyzed. A series of able works on the philosophers of the great tradition has come from the members of this department. Such a tradition of sound scholarship leads students and teachers to a catholic view of the world, which scorns immature systembuilding and prevents men from closing their eyes to what they do not care to understand. It has prevented Canadian philosophy from being dominated by the linguistic emphasis that characterizes contemporary English and American thought. Its main danger of inadequacy, perhaps, is that academic philosophers may be led to confine themselves to history and to living in silence before the urgent present of society.24 Grant on Freedom, Evil, Acceptance, and Rebellion

Grant placed questions about the meaning of the word 'freedom' at the centre of his teaching and writing throughout the 1950s. In his doctoral thesis on John Oman he had written about 'the appalling difficulty' that attends the meeting of human autonomy with the embrace of Love which enfolds it.25 When he taught courses on Augustine and Kant he was drawn to their accounts of the freedom of the will in relation to God. His defence of Greek and continental philosophy against

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the empiricism that dominated Canadian philosophy during his time, and his critique of thinkers like Russell and Popper, hinged on different conceptions of human freedom. Grant's conception of freedom was intertwined with the question of theodicy, the question about the justification of God's creation of a world where evil flourishes. Are we free to change the evils of the world or must we accept them as part of God's creation? Concerning the difficulty of reconciling faith in God with the fact of torture, Grant wrote in a later Notebook: 'I think it is a significant fact that many years after the war, I would not speak to Charles Gimpel [member of the French Resistance who was tortured by the Nazis and never fully recovered] about faith. How can I say to him, I believe, that is, that the world is ultimately good?'26 Grant sometimes saw the question about freedom posed in a conundrum: Does our humanity lie primarily in our freedom (and responsibility) to change the world - as the modern secular world had come to believe? Or does it lie in our joyful, liberating acceptance of and reverence for God and the created world to which we belong - as Greek philosophy and Christianity maintained? Grant believed that acceptance was primary, following his conversion in 1941; but he continued to believe that we must try to change what we can of the evils of war and domination. Thinkers, therefore, ought to take up the task of restoring the proper balance between acceptance and rebellion. He feared the one-sided modern commitment of 'free' human beings to the transformation of the world, but he sought a solution in a moderate intervention rather than a withdrawal to passive acceptance of evil. Two important essays instruct us on Grant's thinking about freedom in the early 1950s: Two Theological Languages' (1953)27 and 'The Uses of Freedom: A Word and Our World' (1956).28 In Two Theological Languages,' he argued that western theologians have the difficult task of striking a balance between two inherited traditions: rational theology, in which freedom is seen as recognition, affirmation, and acceptance of necessity; and Biblical theology, wherein freedom, considered a fact of existence possessed equally by everyone, entails human responsibility for evil and for its overcoming. Grant rejected the idea that we can know rationally that evils like bombing and torture are part of God's will or plan. He did not believe we could understand the reasonable-

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ness of the divine gift of freedom; it would be blasphemy to rationalize evil as 'good' because it must have been God's will. Grant republished 'Two Theological Languages' in 1988 with an addendum stating that, in 1953, he had made the basic mistake of reading the modern 'existential' understanding of the language of freedom back into the Bible. His position in 1988 was that biblical language also asserted, as did the Greek, that the truth, given by grace, sets us free.29 With this correction, however, he did not mean that human beings, set free by grace, are no longer responsible for evil and its overcoming. He was still working on 'the appalling difficulty,' the meeting of human autonomy with God who frees us yet also makes us responsible. In 1956, Grant published an essay in Queen's Quarterly entitled 'The Uses of Freedom: A Word and Our World.' In this work, as in 'Two Theological Languages,' he traced the history of our inheritance of the idea of freedom from Greek and Hebrew roots, through medieval Catholicism and later Protestantism, to the era of enlightenment and modern science. 'Freedom,' in North America, had come to mean exclusively 'the ability to change the world' and 'the ability to get what we want,' losing sight of the larger truth that we are guided and freed as we try to change the world. North Americans had come to exalt scientists and businessmen, the masters of useful techniques to transform the world, while underestimating the practitioners of poetry, philosophy, and prayer, who were, as Grant saw it, the guardians of the 'infinite' truth that frees us. Hegel, Marx, Freud, Sartre, and Marcuse

Throughout the years at Dalhousie, Grant had been engaged with the liberal-capitalist and scientific tendencies in English and North American philosophy. What is new in the late fifties is his investigation of modern continental thought, primarily that of Hegel, Marx, Freud, and the existentialists. James Doull had introduced Grant to Hegel, the thinker who claimed to have absorbed and elevated Greek philosophy and Christianity into a vigorous modern scientific and historical system. In April of 1955 Grant wrote a letter to President Alex Kerr of Dalhousie, announcing his intention to write a book about the freedom of the will while on sabbatical leave in England during the 1956-7 term. To do justice to the relationship between problems of evil and human

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freedom, he said, he needed to understand certain parts of Hegel's philosophy. He also wished to explore the many different and confusing uses of the word 'freedom' in the western tradition. The 1956-7 sabbatical in England yielded 'Acceptance and Rebellion,' a book-length typescript in three chapters, the first two entitled by Grant 'Acceptance and Evil' and 'An Account of American Civilization,' and the third, a critical examination of empiricism and Sartre's existentialism, untitled. It is possible that Grant intended 'Acceptance and Evil' to be the title for the whole book, since it appears at the head of the first chapter, but the editors have decided that 'Acceptance and Rebellion' is a more appropriate title for the whole. It captures more effectively the mysterious conflict of stances toward the world that Grant was trying to fathom: his faith demanded joyful acceptance of the events of the world, but he was faced with facts of evil that horrified him and called for rebellion and transformation. In his notebook at the time of writing the work, Grant first used the words 'adoration' and 'rebellion' for the conflict, and then he moved to the use of 'acceptance' and 'evil,' with evil demanding rebellion rather than acceptance.30 Grant was drawn to thinkers like Marx, Sartre,31 and Marcuse because they were dedicated to overcoming the evils of economic oppression, torture, and war, and claimed to have found ways to accomplish such an overcoming. Sartre and Marcuse were 'moralists' who called upon the thought of Marx and Freud, their moralist mentors, to challenge the capitalism, imperialism, and sexual repression of the established order. Grant applauded the determination of these thinkers to overcome oppression as much as he opposed their inadequate treatment of individual human beings and 'the infinite' with which those individuals are engaged. He believed that Hegel was the great philosopher of history, but that Marx was greater on the demands of practice because of his emphasis on the concrete overcoming of the evils of capitalism. Grant's references to Hegel in the notebooks of 1956-8 show that he did not accept Hegel's 'gnostic' reduction of religion to reason and specifically that he rejected Hegel's historical justification of evil as the 'cunning of reason' extending its sway over unwitting human beings.32 We do not know from any direct evidence why 'Acceptance and Rebellion' was never published,33 nor why it was never finished. Grant probably abandoned the project when he ended up using many of the

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same arguments in a series of University of the Air radio talks on the CBC in 1959. These radio talks were published the following year by Copp Clark (with co-publication in the United States) under the title Philosophy in the Mass Age, ruling out publication of the earlier work. Philosophy in the Mass Age was Grant's first book, and it drew together much of the thought of the Dalhousie years. He began by describing the new mass society that had come into being, driven by the imperatives of science, technology, and capitalism. In mass society the powerful few dominated the majority. He argued that his job as a moral philosopher was to show how modern people, treasuring as they do equality and moral and political free participation, are in grave danger of losing the ability to experience any sense of limit on their actions apart from the dictates of mass society. And they are also in danger of losing the joy of knowing that they belong to God's world in a world where the intimate and the ultimate are being eclipsed by the immediate. Ancient philosophy and religion, according to Grant, gave us natural and moral law, defining our purposes and limits, but the long development of modernity has made us believe that we can and must legislate our own laws and limits. In the twentieth century, Marxists, existentialists, and American progressive pragmatists have come to believe that their attempts to overcome evil are unacceptably hampered by transcendent truth. Liberals, socialists, and existentialists alike, therefore, have come to see any form of public or institutional religion as an attempt to justify and impose illegitimate authority and unjust practices, or at least to interfere unacceptably with individual freedom of choice. Grant could see indispensable truths on both sides of this debate about law and freedom. He concluded the book with the positive hope that thinkers were at work who would be able to find a new way to articulate moral limits, one that would enable us to retain but also to moderate the modern drive to change the world. The Texts of Volume 2: Sources and Presentation Most of the published works in this volume did not present any unusual editorial problems. They include several articles, reviews, broadcasts, and one poem. They have been gathered together from scattered

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sources such as the CBC, the CAAE's magazine Food for Thought, The Dalhousie Review, and Queen's Quarterly. Two published works did raise some editorial questions. The headnote for Two Theological Languages' describes the editorial process that led to the inclusion of this piece in Volume 2 and not Volume 1. Philosophy in the Mass Age has appeared in three editions (1959,1965, and 1995), with significant differences in both the second and third. William Christian used the original script of the broadcast talks when he edited the third edition. Grant composed by hand as well as on the typewriter, but generally did not retain original handwritten drafts once he had a typed version to work with. The lectures and notebooks were written by hand and have been transferred to the computer. The task has been to reproduce the printed version, typescript, or manuscript accurately and to provide the necessary introductory notes and annotations. The works in this volume appear in chronological order, with the exceptions of the lectures, poems, and some of the writings that cannot be given exact dates. Groups of writings are 'classified' arbitrarily in this introduction, only to facilitate an account of their sources and the editorial work involved in their presentation. Published Works of the 1950s 1. Articles about Philosophy, Theology, History, and Education Grant's publications of the 1950s (other than Philosophy in the Mass Age) include seven substantial philosophical articles. The first is his essay on the state of non-Catholic Canadian philosophy written for the Massey Commission Report. The others include two on adult education, two defences of traditional philosophy against Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, one about the universities and the churches, and one about the concept of freedom. There are also two encyclopedia articles on philosophy and Canadian history, two major addresses published by the Canadian Institute of Public Affairs and the Ontario Secondary School Federation, two broadcasts for the CBC's Architects of Modern Thought series (about Sartre and Dostoevsky), a book review, a letter to the editor, and one published poem. 2. Philosophy in the Mass Age Grant delivered nine talks for the CBC's University of the Air series from January to March in 1958. The first eight were edited for the pub-

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lication of Philosophy in the Mass Age in 1959. The book was reprinted without the original preface and 'with a new introduction' in 1966. The third edition, edited by William Christian in 1993, contains all the earlier prefaces and introductions, the edited-out parts of the original broadcast scripts in brackets, and the ninth talk, in which Grant answers questions sent in by listeners. We have chosen the second edition as the copy-text, as explained in the headnote for this work. Unpublished Works of the 1950s 1. Talks and Radio Broadcasts The talks - given to teachers, social workers, ministers, professors, and administrators - sometimes contain material treated elsewhere. Still, they show Grant's frequent attempts to communicate his concerns to professional groups. Four of the seven talks found in Grant's papers cannot be dated with any certainty. We decided therefore to gather the undated pieces and present them near the end of the volume. We also found four typescripts of talks delivered on radio among the papers. 2. 'Acceptance and Rebellion' This unpublished 120-page typescript of a three-chapter book, found in Grant's study, was written in England during a sabbatical leave in the 1956-7 academic year (see p. xxx above for an account of the context of this writing in Grant's life and work during the late 1950s, as well as the substantial headnote for the piece itself). The editors have supplied the title for the work, based on an examination of the text and on Grant's approach to moral philosophy at Dalhousie in the 1950s. 3. Selections from the 1950s Lectures Sheila Grant found over 100 lectures and fragments of lectures written in longhand on legal-size foolscap among the Grant papers. Twelve have been chosen for publication here. They were selected in part on the basis of intrinsic interest and in some cases because they illustrate Grant's approach to teaching during this period. We have supplied annotations and headnotes to help readers understand Grant's references and the 1950s Dalhousie context in which they were delivered. Only some of the lectures could be dated accurately. We have made an exception to the chronological principle and grouped all the lectures together in the final section of the volume.

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4. Poems A few unpublished poems survive from the early fifties as well as the poem 'Good Friday,' published in the United Church Observer. We have selected three of the ten unpublished poems to accompany the published one. As the poems do not as a whole fit clearly in the chronology of Grant's writings they are placed together in appendix 2. CBC Broadcast List (1950s-1980s)

We have compiled a list of Grant's radio and television broadcasts for the CBC, as complete as possible given the limitations of the CBC's records and our resources. We consider the list valuable because it indicates the surprisingly large amount of broadcasting work Grant did. We decided to print the entire list in all the volumes because Grant's 'second career,' as we called it in the introduction to the first volume, should be seen as a whole, from his behind-the-scenes work with the CAAE and the Citizens' Forum programs in the mid-1940s and reaching into the 1970s and 1980s. Arthur Davis

Notes 1 See 'Conversation: Intellectual Background' in George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversations, ed. Larry Schmidt (Toronto: Anansi 1978), 64. 2 From Tape #2, Side #1 of the 1985 interviews of George Grant by David Cayley in preparation for the CBC Ideas series 'The Moving Image of Eternity.' 3 Professor Louis Greenspan of McMaster University, interviewed by David Cayley in 'The Moving Image of Eternity,' CBC Ideas transcript, 5. 4 Matt Cohen, interviewed by David Cayley for "The Moving Image of Eternity' (see transcript, 8). 5 In Ibid., 8. 6 Grant, "The Minds of Men in the Atomic Age' in Texts of Addresses Delivered at the Twenty-fourth Annual Couchiching Conference: August 13-20,1955 (Toronto: Canadian Institute on Public Affairs and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1955). Reprinted below, 156ff. 7 In 'Adult Education in the Expanding Economy/ an address delivered to

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the National Conference on Adult Education on 27 May 1954 and published in Food for Thought 15/1 (September-October): 4. Reprinted below, lOOff., at 100. 8 Grant in 'The Minds of Men in the Atomic Age,' 41. Reprinted below, 156ff., at 159. 9 Ibid., 43; below, 162. 10 Ibid., 45; below, 164. 11 Grant in a review of The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, by F.H. Anderson (Toronto: Chicago University Press and W.J. Gage 1948) in The Dalhousie Review 28/3 (October): 312. Reprinted in vol. 1 of Collected Works of George Grant (CW), 148-9. 12 Grant in 'Philosophy,' published in Royal Commission Studies: A Selection of Essays Prepared for the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Science (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, Printer to the King 1951), 119. Reprinted below, 3ff., at 4. 13 Ibid., 132-3; below, 20. 14 Sandwell's review of Grant's contribution to the Massey Commission Report appeared in the 12 July 1952 issue of Saturday Night. 15 Grant, 'Philosophy,' 126-8; below, 12-13. 16 See John A. Irving, editor, with Charles W. Hendel, Allison H. Johnson and Rupert C. Lodge, and with an introduction by Fulton H. Anderson, Philosophy in Canada: A Symposium (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1952). 17 Ibid., 3. 18 See 'George Grant and Religion, A Conversation Prepared and Edited by William Christian,' Journal of Canadian Studies 26/1 (Spring 1991): 43. 19 See William Christian, ed., George Grant: Selected Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 175. 20 See Grant's letter of 2 November 1953, collected by Professor William Christian, for his statement that his Russell piece was supposed to be an answer to Anderson. 21 In 'Pursuit of An Illusion: A Commentary on Bertrand Russell,' Dalhousie Review 32 (Summer 1952): 108. Reprinted below, 34ff., at 45-6. 22 Ibid., 101-2; below, 39. 23 Ibid., 109; below, 46. 24 In 'Philosophy,' published in Encyclopaedia Canadiana, 8:183-4 (Ottawa: Grolier Society of Canada, 1958 and later editions). Reprinted below, 300ff., at 302. 25 CW, 1,451. 26 See Notebook 1,139; below, 526. The interpolation is by William Christian from a discussion with Sheila Grant.

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27 See the headnote for Two Theological Languages,' (49) for information about different versions and why it appears in this volume. 28 'The Uses of Freedom - A Word and Our World,' Queen's Quarterly 62/4 (Winter 1956); reprinted in Queen's Quarterly 100/1 (Spring 1993): 185-97. See below, 190ff. 29 See 'Two Theological Languages' by George Grant and Other Essays in Honour of His Work, ed. Wayne Whillier (Lewiston, Queenston: The Edwin Mellen Press 1990), 16-19. 30 See Notebook 1,74-6,83; below, 520-1,523. 31 See 'Jean-Paul Sartre' in Architects of Modern Thought (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1955), 65-74. It was originally a talk on CBC Radio. A 'retraction' written by Grant in 1985 (intended as a footnote to any future republication) can be found at the end of that essay published in this volume (123ff., at 133-4). 32 When Grant said he was not a Hegelian in an interview of 1978, he meant that he had always been critical of Hegel on this point, notwithstanding his statement in 1966 that he once thought Hegel the greatest of all philosophers. See 'Conversation with George Grant: Part II. Intellectual Background,' in George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversations, ed. Larry

Schmidt (Toronto: Anansi 1978), 64. 33 A few passages about Freud and Marcuse were incorporated into 'Conceptions of Health,' a work written in 1959 and published in 1962 in Psychiatry and Responsibility, ed. Helmut Schoek and James W. Wiggins (Princeton: Van Nostrand), 117-34.

COLLECTED WORKS OF GEORGE GRANT VOLUME 2 1951-1959

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Philosophy

Grant was chosen to write an essay on the state of philosophy in English Canadian universities for the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949-51, known as the Massey Commission, named after Grant's uncle, the honourable Vincent Massey. Grant's essay appeared in Royal Commission Studies: A Selection of Essays Prepared for the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, Printer to the King 1951), 119-33, and is reprinted in William Christian and Sheila Grant, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 159-73. Grant's view, expressed at the head of the essay, that philosophy is 'analysis of the traditions of our society and the judgment of those traditions against our varying intuitions of the Perfection of God,' aroused anger and opposition among the established professional philosophers in central Canada. Fulton H. Anderson of the University of Toronto was moved to refute Grant's account of philosophy and the state of Canadian philosophy in his introduction to Philosophy in Canada: A Symposium (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1952). It is worth noting that Grant did not think he was turning back the clock. He considered his religious response to the twentieth century more 'up to date' than the secular approach of his professional opponents. 'All over the western world, the multiplying tragedies that have occurred since 1914 have turned more sensitive minds to a new assessment of human existence.' Grant did come to realize he could not completely defy the dominant views of the period, however. He recalled in a 1988 interview with William Christian that he learned a lesson from the uproar caused by this writing: he would have to teach and write indirectly about the figures he chiefly admired, Socrates and Christ. Sheila Grant told Professor Chris-

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tian: 'I do remember that his article "Philosophy" for the Massey Report in 1951 shocked the philosophic community to the core. He had criticized the teaching of philosophy in Canada for completely ignoring the Christian tradition. This may have prevented him from ever being offered a job at the University of Toronto.'1

The study of philosophy is the analysis of the traditions of our society and the judgment of those traditions against our varying intuitions of the Perfection of God. It is the contemplation of our own and others' activity, in the hope that by understanding it better we may make it less imperfect. At the centre of the traditional faith of the West has been the understanding that there are two approaches to reality, the contemplative and the active, and that only in the careful proportioning of these can individuals and societies find health. The contemplative life whether mystical, artistic, or philosophic has therefore been encouraged by societies not only for the good of the contemplative himself but because his influence upon more active members was considered of value. Philosophy was therefore encouraged as the rational form of such contemplation. Such a definition of philosophy asserts that it is in no sense limited to being a technical subject confined to specialists in universities. It is an activity necessary for all sorts and conditions of men - politicians and saints, artists and business men, scientists and farmers - if such men are to relate their particular functions to the general ends which society desires. Philosophy is not then confined to a subject found in university calendars. Yet at the same time universities are the focal points upon which will depend in large measure the state of rational contemplation in the rest of society. In the universities, society allows scholars the time and the freedom to contemplate the universe, to partake of the wisdom of the past, to add their small measure to the understanding of that wisdom, and to transmit the great tradition to certain chosen members of the younger generation. If the universities are not rich in the practice of philosophy it is unlikely that less favoured parts of the community will be much touched by it. Therefore what follows will be concerned with the teaching and practice of philosophy as it is carried on in our universities.

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In writing of this question it is only realism to pose the problem pessimistically. Why do our universities fail in providing a place where young Canadians are encouraged to think about their world in the broadest and deepest way? That the universities are not providing such a place is but to state a truism. Can it be doubted that Canadian universities today exist essentially as technical schools for the training of specialists? They turn out doctors and physicists, economists and chemists, lawyers and social workers, psychologists and agriculturalists, dietitians and sociologists, and these technicians are not being called upon in any systematic way to relate their necessary techniques to any broader whole. Even the traditional humane subjects such as history, the classics, and European literature are in many cases being taught as techniques by which the student can hope to earn his living, not as useful introductions to the sweep of our spiritual tradition. Indeed behind the character of our classrooms lies the fact that this production of technicians is being encouraged by the dominant forces that shape society. The general voting public (that is, the parents of the young) think of the university as a place where the child can become a specialist and so equip himself to enter or to remain in the more economically fortunate part of society. Governments - provincial and federal - use their influence to see that practical training is encouraged, so that the society will not be ill-equipped in any necessary technique, whether that technique be appropriate to a university or not. Anyone who has sat on a faculty of graduate studies knows well that the ablest students are being encouraged (in that clearest form of encouragement - the financial) to become technicians, by our government. Students who want to become physicists, biochemists, etc. know that if they are at all promising they will receive help from the National Research Council, the Department of Defence, etc. Students in such fields also know that there will be lucrative jobs waiting for them when their studies are finished. On the other hand, those students who are studying in the general humane tradition know that financial help in their fields is small and that jobs will be hard to find when they are through. Finally it must be said that the university authorities themselves do little to control this tendency. In some universities in English-speaking Canada, there are four times as many people teaching physics as teaching philosophy, and three times as many people teaching animal husbandry. These general facts about our universities must be mentioned, for it

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is clearly impossible for the study of philosophy to flourish in such an atmosphere. Philosophy is not in essence a technique. Its purpose is to relate and see in unity all techniques, so that the physicist for instance can relate his activity to the fact of moral freedom, the economist see the productive capacity of his nation in relation to the Love of God. The prime reason, no doubt, for this state of affairs in Canada is the fact of our short history, most of which has been taken up with the practical business of a pioneering nation. Such a society must put its energies into those pursuits that will achieve material ends. The active rather than the contemplative life perforce becomes the ideal. Anything that will effectively overcome hardship must be welcomed with enthusiasm. That concentration on material ends and admiration for the man of action continues for a long while after it has ceased to be a necessity. In a subtler way our pioneering background has affected our taste for rational contemplation. A pioneering society in which there are obvious material accomplishments open to all men of average intelligence leads to an optimism about the universe much like the optimism associated with youth. The tragedy and complexity of maturity are not so evident as in an ancient and more static society. When the spiritual difficulties of maturity arise, the cry of 'Go west, young man' can help individuals to avoid them. It is out of a sense of tragedy and uncertainty more than anything else that the need for philosophical speculation arises. A young nation in its sureness and confidence is thus basically unphilosophical. Yet, lest our short history be used as a sufficient justification of our lack of interest in the contemplative arts, it is humbling to remember that two or three generations ago when the country was small and poor, Canada in proportion to its size was far more ready to support the 'impractical' studies than it is today. Both within the Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions of English-speaking society the small and poor community struggled to establish universities in which chairs of classics, philosophy, and theology were considered the essentials. The traditions of Christian Europe which the early settlers brought with them did not allow them to believe that man lives by bread alone, even when bread was far more scarce than it is today. It is therefore necessary to look beyond the mere fact of our youth for the causes of the materialist concentration in our universities.

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It is but another truism to say that Canada has come to maturity, not in isolation but as a member of the western society of nations. Our spiritual climate is largely formed by our partaking in the ideas of that civilization, which during the years of Canada's development was being transformed by the new mass industrialism. With that industrialism went certain dominant ideas that effected an almost incalculable spiritual change in the west. In the light of the amazing power of science, men no longer doubted that they could easily perfect their societies. In the field of knowledge the slogan was 'knowledge for power,' in the expectation that with such power all would be well. In the field of education there arose the egalitarian slogans with their contempt for the 'impractical' and the 'academic' Men often forgot the need of those disciplines that once had been considered a potent influence in preventing us from becoming beasts. The more Canada has become part of the scientific world of the west, the more it has partaken of ideas such as these, and the tragedy of its youth has been that the bonds of tradition have been less strong with us than elsewhere. What can the place of the philosopher be in the mass world, when by definition, philosophic knowledge is not open to the stereotyped mass, and when the philosopher cannot believe that salvation is achieved by techniques? What is the role of the philosopher in the universities which have in general accepted the aspirations of

theirsocieties,aspirationsthatleavelittleplaceforthepracticeof

contemplation?

Tragically the scandal must be admitted that, with rare exceptions, philosophers in Western society have joined in the aspirations of the scientific age. The lie that knowledge exists only to provide power has been as much in the soul of philosophers as in the rest of society. The chief schools of thought in Canada among energetic philosophers in the 1920's and 1930's were pragmatism and positivism. What do such positions mean but that ideas are true insofar as they help men manipulate their natural environment? Along with Marxism (on the whole less potent among Canadian philosophers) they tend towards the position that all men's problems may be solved by scientific technique. Canadian philosophers indeed have joined as fully as any part of the western world in making philosophy the servant rather than the judge of men's scientific abilities. Young Canadians have quite logically drawn the correct conclusion from such an attitude. If philosophy is

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merely the servant of science, then they are better occupied studying with the master rather than with the servant. Associated with the philosopher's willingness to make his subject serve the interests of physical science has been the dream of modern philosophy - that it might free itself from its traditional dependence upon the theological dogmas of faith. Canadian philosophers have shared in this secular hope as deeply as have their fellows in the rest of the western world. This hope has been connected intimately with the gradual secularizing of those universities founded within the Protestant tradition. Philosophy was thought of as a secular study to suit the modern world and the secular university. It is not possible here to enter in any adequate way upon the ancient controversy as to the proper relation between philosophy and theology - between the discoveries of reason and the discoveries of faith. Yet it would seem that unless philosophy is to become a purely negative discipline, it must have some kind of dependence on faith - whatever faith that may be. Reason not guided by faith cannot but find itself in the position of destroying everything and establishing nothing. And though one of the roles of philosophy must be destructive and critical, if that be its only role it cannot hope to have any profound or abiding influence on society. Active men depend upon faith of some sort for their very existence. It is not surprising that the destructive philosophy that characterized western universities after 1914 led students to give up the study of philosophy as pointless. When philosophers are jejune enough to deny in the name of secularism and science the possibility of rational faith, then young men and women in their need of faith will simply bypass the philosophers. Society will suffer the tragedy of men looking for their faiths outside the rational discipline that it is the function of philosophy to provide in the search for faith. Society suffers the tragedy of their youth finding faith in such childish hopes as Marxism, in such unbalanced cults as the Jehovah's Witnesses. It would seem clear then that only as philosophy finds its roots in religious faith will it once again have a profound influence on young Canadians. The teaching of philosophy in our Canadian universities is then not only bound up with the question of what our universities are to be but also with the larger question of what our Churches are to be. To face as the primary thesis of this essay that philosophical studies are in no healthy state in Canada must not prevent mention of the

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good things that have been done and are being done. The Roman Catholic tradition in English-speaking Canada may be mentioned first because it has always been numerically smaller and because it has maintained relatively unbroken its traditional attitude to the role of philosophic speculation. It has always maintained its ancient trust in the activities of speculative reason for certain carefully chosen of its members, so long as that speculation is carried on within the limits of its closely defined faith. The Roman Catholic Colleges and Universities have always insisted that their best pupils go out into the world with some grounding in the traditions of scholastic philosophy - that is, in the reasonable framework of the theology of their Church. They have been insistent that the training of rational Roman Catholics was at least as important as the training of efficient economists or physicists. Often the technicians have made the claim that students from these universities have not as adequate a technical knowledge as students trained elsewhere. The philosopher can but ask whether this lack of technical width (if it be a fact) is not more than counterbalanced by the other ends that their education has served. A notable step in Roman Catholic philosophic activity was the recent establishment of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. This institution is connected with St Michael's College and through it to the University of Toronto. It calls together Roman Catholic scholars of the first magnitude to pursue their studies in the fields of medieval history and political thought, medieval philosophy and theology. To it come post-graduate students who can pursue their own studies in this field under scholars of first-rate calibre. Concentration is laid on the study of St Thomas Aquinas, so that students have the possibility of mastering a great system of thought. From such an institution as this, welldisciplined teachers go back into the undergraduate fields equipped to pass on something of the unity of their particular tradition. Other institutions have much to learn from places such as this, from which undergraduate studies receive their life-blood and in which different studies are so intertwined as to learn the values of each other. It is more difficult to understand what has been accomplished in philosophy among those institutions that belong to the Protestant tradition. Protestants, whether in Canada or elsewhere, have been less certain in their formulations of the relation of philosophy to faith than have the Roman Catholics. They have never been willing to maintain

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such ecclesiastical discipline as could preserve a consistent stand on the matter. On the one hand, Luther's great affirmation that the Word of God is sufficient for the Christian has ever made certain branches of the Protestant Church wary of speculation as a pagan activity that adds nothing to the faith by which men are saved. On the other hand the liberal elements that have become increasingly dominant within the Protestant Churches have sought a close alliance between philosophy and theology so that the Church would have a rational apologetic with which to face the world. Yet again certain secularist elements that have increasingly sheltered within traditionally Protestant institutions have gone so far as to seek the freeing of philosophy from any dependence upon faith, even in those very institutions founded and supported by men of the Protestant faith. The results of the first and third of these tendencies have, though contradictory, led in the same direction. Philosophy has been, by and large, taught in the universities of non-Catholic Canada as a secular study not necessarily connected with the progress of faith. As a result of this anomaly, a subject such as philosophy, which deals with the wholeness of existence, has been in no way related to the faith from which the universities sprang, and indeed is sometimes in direct contradiction to that faith. This anomaly has been left largely undebated both by men who were avowedly Protestants and by the secularists. What has happened to the universities and colleges that originally sprang from the Protestant tradition? Do these universities in any sense continue to think of themselves as servants of that tradition or do they think of themselves as secular? Clearly on the answer to that problem will depend the character of the philosophy which will develop in our colleges. The history of Queen's University may be taken as an example of what is involved in this problem. About half a century ago Queen's decided to sever its official connection with the Presbyterian Church from which it had sprung. It did this in the hope that it could thereby play a wider role in the national life. Did the men responsible for this decision visualize that philosophy would then be taught as a study unconnected with the faith? In looking at the documents of the time it is difficult to suppose that the men who advocated this course did so intend. Yet half a century later the content of the teaching in the Faculty of Arts at that university is found to be almost entirely secular. The universities controlled by their respective provin-

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cial governments raise another problem. If to be nondenominational means to be non-religious, is philosophy (as a general university subject) to be taught as a secular study? The churches themselves have a great stake in this question of the teaching of philosophy. In the past presumably they have thought of the universities to which they have sent their young members (whether laymen or incipient members of the clergy) as institutions closely related to the Church. Yet in the past, the study of philosophy in these institutions has just as often served as a destroyer of the faith rather than the creator of the rational groundwork to that faith. It must be admitted that the Protestant Churches have been remarkably unconcerned with a state of affairs which has done much to vitiate their strength. Indeed the prime difficulty in estimating what our philosophic ideas have been is that Canada during the period that those ideas were forming has witnessed the change among influential sections of the population from being Protestants to being secularists. Though this has not been true of the majority of Canadians, it has been true of a large percentage of the intellectually gifted people who shape our society and to whom reasoning is a possibility. Such a remarkable and deep-seated change in our national life has naturally confused our philosophising. Despite the difficulties of understanding what philosophy has meant within the Protestant tradition, certain real achievements must be recognized. These have been generally accomplished by men of Great Britain, educated in the Christian and classical studies of that country. Many of these scholars did noble work in revealing the value of such studies to many generations of Canadians. Two fine examples of this kind of teaching may be singled out: the work of Professor Watson at Queen's around the turn of the century,2 and the work of Professor Brett at Toronto University in the third and fourth decades of this century.3 Because these men had been trained in European philosophy with its faith in human reason's pursuit of the Good, they could bring a tradition to Canada far more profound and ordered than the pragmatisms which were influencing us from the south. They had been brought up in societies that had been for centuries Protestant and so could help keep alive in Canada those ideas out of which the Englishspeaking forms of our society had been born.

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One difficulty of having Englishmen as our leading teachers of philosophy must however be mentioned. As has been said earlier, these men were teaching at a time when the conception of the contemplative arts was being radically assailed in Canada. The fact that the men who were deeply involved in keeping this conception alive were generally men bred in Great Britain often meant that they were unable to transpose the vital issues of philosophy into sufficiently Canadian terms to make them of burning interest to young Canadians. This failure became increasingly important as the forms of life in Canada became more differentiated from those in Great Britain. To say this is in no sense to stand on the dogmas of a narrow Canadian nationalism, or to imply that Canadians have not important things to learn from men trained in Great Britain. It is however to say that a philosophy department must not only have the conservative aim of acquainting students with ideas from our past, but also the prophetic aim of showing what those ideas mean in our actual present existence. It is certainly true that in any Canadian department of philosophy there is ample room for teachers from Europe who will almost certainly understand the past of Europe better than will Canadians. But their work must be carried on within a context of Canadian teaching impregnated with our history and the form of our institutions and ideals. Often in the past, philosophy has seemed a pursuit which turned out cultured Europeans, but hardly an absolutely necessary activity for Canadians. During the last years there have appeared the first signs of an indigenous Canadian approach to the problem of philosophy. All over the western world, the multiplying tragedies that have occurred since 1914 have turned more sensitive minds to a new assessment of human existence. The dimming of the optimistic hopes that characterized the first industrial expansion has led men to seek a faith that has a fuller answer to the tragedies of experience. In the best of all possible worlds there was little need to speculate deeply. As optimism declines, there is more reason to do so. The evidence for this new awakening to our problem is indeed hard to assemble. Yet it is impossible to be with young Canadians and not feel an eager and questioning curiosity, a dissatisfaction with easy answers, out of which a truly Canadian philosophy might be born. This possible awakening is seen at a further level in the scholarly writings that are appearing. Canadian scholars are beginning to produce

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works of a profounder nature than studies of the wheat trade and the development of responsible government in Canada. It must be noted that these new works are not so much coming from men in the philosophy departments proper as from men whose studies are in one of the specialized fields. Such studies have led men to understand the limits of their fields seen in isolation, and so to an attempt to relate that field to the problem of human existence as a whole. Thus their thought has become philosophical. Too often those in the philosophy departments proper have not been to the same degree challenged by the modern world so as to face the problems of philosophy in this living way. The work of the late Professor C.N. Cochrane of Toronto may be taken as a noble example of this new Canadian interest in the problems of philosophy at their most profound and necessary level.4 His magnum opus, Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford 1940) shows how interest in a particular field of human study drives the sensitive thinker out into the very midst of those spiritual problems that beset the modern world. In his early writings it is clear that he considered the historian's job was simply to say what had happened and to leave to other men the deeper judgments as to the meaning of history. As in most of this scientific investigation, the values that sustained the society were assumed, by an implicit faith, to be certain, and therefore not the concern of the scholar to defend. Yet in Christianity and Classical Culture Cochrane goes far beyond this 'objective' tradition and raises the profoundest questions about human destiny. He questions the very possibility of the aloof scholarship that he had once practised. To read the work is to understand that the history of the ancient world has been illuminated for him by the predicaments of his own society, and that he uses the example of the ancient world to throw his light towards the solution of the modern predicaments. A work such as Christianity and Classical Culture is not one to fall under the heading of light reading, even to the trained mind. It is the kind of work that will not influence large numbers at one time, but will influence and continue to influence the few. Such indeed must always be the role of significant philosophy - to affect the spirits of the intellectually gifted and through them to filter down into society as a whole. One may cite other examples of specialists who in moving beyond the limits of their techniques see the broader questions of knowledge. In Professor's Frye's recent work on William Blake - Fearful Symmetry -

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full recognition is given to the fact that Blake's writing cannot be understood through the criteria of literary criticism alone, but must be judged within the wider reference of the interpretation of experience that Blake attempts.5 Thus his work is not limited in interest to the scholar of English literature, nor does it merely maintain that a cultured man should be interested in poetry. Rather through the study of one poet it raises basic problems about the nature of man with which all are concerned whether they will [or] not. Yet another example is Professor Woodhouse's Puritanism and Liberty.6 Even Professor Innis, who in his early work rigidly confined himself to technical questions of economic history, has expanded in his recent lectures on Empire and Communications to relate the questions of economics to their wider philosophical background.7 These examples of Canadian thinkers who have shown themselves willing to go beyond scholarship to more general questions of human import are encouraging to those who would hope for a native tradition of Canadian philosophy. There are signs that Canadians are no longer willing simply to accept from the more important nations of the western world their assumption[s] about human life. There is the beginning of a recognition by Canadian scholars that we cannot count on our spiritual tradition remaining alive automatically. There is a realization at the intellectual level that Canadians can no longer afford to play the role of debtor nation to the western tradition, but must play their part in conserving and enlivening that tradition. Even more so, there is the understanding - and here the work of Cochrane must be especially noted - of how much the wisdom of that tradition has already been trodden under foot in our concentration on developing the mass society. Cochrane makes clear that only in realizing how close the intellectual life of Canada has come to losing the wisdom of a pre-scientific age will the strength and vitality be found to work towards the rediscovery of such wisdom. At the more immediate level, these examples of a renewed interest in philosophical and theological wisdom point to some conclusion as to how philosophy could better fulfil its unifying role among our various necessary techniques. First and foremost it lights up the fact that most of our ablest teachers and students must perforce be technical specialists. Those who recognize the need for philosophical studies in Canada must work within the limits that are imposed by the hard facts

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of our situation. To put it historically, it is not possible in Canada to recreate the medieval idea of the university, or to copy the form of Classical Greats which held so great an influence over the education of the privileged classes of Great Britain in the nineteenth century. If philosophic studies are to be revived, it must be by reviving them among students and teachers whose first duty is the pursuit of some specialism such as law or history, economics or medicine. The hope is that specialists may see the interdependence of their speciality and the general questions of human existence. This philosophic interest must not be confined to those who are going to be academic practitioners of their specialism, but must include those students who are to become more active members in society, whether as judges, doctors, civil servants, or scientists in the great industries. The tragic split between the men of action and the men of contemplation must be overcome; the philosophers must recognize the relation of philosophy to the problem of society, and the spirit of philosophy must be infused into those who must act. Such an end is clearly an ideal impossible of achievement but a move towards it is the only hope of reviving the contemplative life. At the undergraduate level, something in this direction is already carried out in most Canadian universities. A majority of students who are studying for the BA are at one time or another exposed to some philosophy. To a lesser degree this is true of those working towards a BSc. Courses in philosophy for engineering and medical students are becoming more of a commonplace in our calendars. It may be said, however, that often these classes in philosophy serve as a pleasant cultural appendage rather than as something central to the business of living. The main difficulty still remains that those students in BA and BSc courses who are really capable of sustained and systematic thought are being encouraged to specialize. Our arts faculties are a series of unrelated departments, so that the students receive little sense of the unity of human knowledge. In the sciences this is perhaps understandable; in the arts it is a tragic disgrace. Our technical tradition in the arts is a narrowing circle. The students we train in that specialist tradition in time become teachers themselves and thereby further atomize the arts faculties. This narrowing circle is tightened by the fact that professors have a tendency to compete like prima donnas and to use their influence to persuade students to specialize with them rather than to help them to gain a broader education.

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The question is, how can the narrowing circle be broken? With the present state of Canadian universities it does not seem possible that the return to a more unified conception of education can be achieved by reforms in our undergraduate arrangements. Rather our hope must be to broaden our graduate studies so that the graduates thereby produced may one day be in a position to do something about our undergraduate teaching. Today it must be recognized that our society and its universities are so organized as to admit large numbers to higher education who are not capable of advanced thought, and that therefore undergraduate studies must perforce be limited in their scope and expectations. Those students who have shown themselves able to continue their studies at the graduate level in a specialized field are just the members of society who win benefit from the unifying discipline of philosophy. Also they will be older, and as Plato and Aristotle both point out, philosophy can best start when men have some experience on which to philosophize. The chief aim of philosophy in Canada should then be to see that graduate students continue their studies not simply in an ever narrowing field of specialism but within some kind of philosophic framework. Nothing else could do more to increase the strength of the contemplative tradition in Canada. It may be said that if something were accomplished in this direction the title 'Doctor of Philosophy' might once again signify what it is supposed to signify. How can something be done towards this end? First is the question of how those who teach these advanced techniques may be brought to realize the value of their students beholding their studies within a wide whole, and may be persuaded to allow them to spend some of their time on work towards this purpose. Secondly, there is the question of how the general public may come to recognize that this is an end on which time and money must be spent. In both cases it is only sensible to admit that any movement away from our present situation will be slow. A change of society seems improbable unless the first moves be made by the university authorities - both the teachers and the boards of governors. So often our university authorities have seen themselves as the servants rather than the teachers of the public. They have given way to the pressures of popularity. If the universities give a lead in this matter, they must be willing to pay the price of such a lead. The price in a democratic and industrial society such as ours will be the accusation of being 'academic' and 'impractical.' Also it may be

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said that the lead must probably come from the wealthier universities in the larger centres who are more able for financial reasons to resist outside clamours. One step would be a change in the curriculum of our graduate schools, so that advanced degrees would not be granted unless the student shows some grip of the tradition. This would require some real philosophic study. Since the curriculum of the graduate schools is in the hands of the academic personnel, a change in this direction would be an immediate possibility. How can the PhD have any meaning as a degree, or any right to its title, if it be granted to students who are not required to show any formal understanding of the relation of their subject to the questions of human existence as a whole? Toronto University does something in this direction. However, when one reads technical theses which have been accepted for the doctorate at that university, and which are devoid of the primary elements of philosophic thought, one can only be dubious of what is being accomplished. It has often been the way of modern men to laugh at the medieval student for discussing how many angels could stand on the point of a needle. Our modern laughter must be humbled by reading theses on the excreta of rats for which PhD's have been awarded. The concern of the governors of our universities is the sheerly quantitative question of number of teachers. Most philosophy departments are now staffed as if philosophy were one of the less important techniques taught at the university. If it is to be more than that, if its role is to provide some unity between various studies, then the governors must be willing to spend enough money to make this possible. Sheer quantity of teachers will by itself achieve nothing. It is nevertheless a sine qua non. A tradition of rational speculation is not something that a society can buy cheaply - a pleasant extra that coats the real business of improving the standard of living. More important than sheer numbers are the subtler questions of what kind of teachers one wants and how they may best be trained. The teachers of philosophy, if they are to have influence, must be men who are not only steeped in the wisdom of the past but who are also aware of society as it is. Above all they must be aware of the meaning of the various other studies in the university. Only in this way can they fulfil their special responsibility for making clear to the university community that their subject is not another specialism but related to all

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studies. Nothing has done the practice of philosophy more harm than the idea of some scientists that philosophy is another science of the same kind as theirs. The narrow vocabulary and approach of certain philosophers has been largely responsible for that illusion. Therefore our teachers must be men able to expose that illusion by teaching philosophy in a broad and living way. A chief step must then be in the setting up of graduate schools in which this narrow approach to philosophy can be broken down. Here the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies must once more be referred to. For of all institutions now existing in Canada, it seems to point most surely in the right direction. There one sees a graduate institution which approaches the activities of the human spirit in a unified way, and all in relation to a particular tradition. Philosophy is not seen as an isolated technique but as something related to the other facets of the Catholic life - history and theology, art and liturgy. To repeat, the students from such an institution have a wholeness about their attitude to learning not found among many of the students who have done their work in the atomized graduate schools of our country. Immediately the question arises about the cost of establishing such institutions. One advantage of the Roman Catholic Church over others is the economic saving of a celibate priesthood. But the cost in other traditions should not be prohibitive, especially when it is compared to the money spent on the researches of physical science. The enormous money spent on guaranteeing the physical health of our society would not be necessary in establishing institutions such as these which would guard our spiritual health. The question is simply whether a society gains more from its MIT's or from its Institutes of Mediaeval Studies. The difficulty immediately arises of whether these institutions in non-Roman Catholic education should be secular or professedly Christian. This however need not be a difficulty. Those universities which now admit they are simply secularist will probably be quite content with their graduate schools as they already are. If not, they could set up Institutes of Humane Study or some such title. Protestant universities or colleges that maintain their Christian affiliations could set up schools for Christian study very much like the Institute of Mediaeval Studies. From what has been said earlier there can be no doubt which of these two types of institution the present writer would expect to be the more effective. The dependence of philosophy upon theology

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makes such a conclusion necessary. From such institutions a start might be made in seeing that our spiritual traditions were once more in close relation to the life of action. Thence would come the vitality which might recreate our universities into what they should always have been - centres of rational thought about the universe. Inevitably in a young country such as Canada, one must write about the teaching of philosophy in the spirit of things hoped for, not in the pride of what has been accomplished. Upon what is likely to be accomplished, it would be folly to speculate. As in all the slow intangible accomplishments of the human spirit, its quality will depend on whether men look for the long term or the short term results. In the short view, the advantages are clearly with the continued production of technicians by our higher education. The question will be decided by whether our political leaders and civil servants, our business men and educators come to see more clearly the long term advantages of training our able youth in a contemplative as well as an active approach to life. It will depend indeed on whether they see the incalculable advantages that will pertain to any society which has a contemplative tradition strong enough to act as a brake on the rightly impetuous men of action. In the world we live in the need of such an influence should become increasingly apparent. The tragedy must be admitted that, just as the controlling forces in our western world are beginning to understand how deeply our spiritual traditions need guarding, and that some of our energy must be diverted from technology towards that purpose, our society is being challenged to defend itself against a barbaric Empire that puts its faith in salvation by the machine. This must inevitably mean that a large percentage of western wealth be spent on the mechanism of defence. As this essay is addressed to a Royal Commission, something must be said in closing of how interdependent is the progress of philosophy with the progress of the arts. The practice and enjoyment of the arts has only flourished in the past among men who have had some understanding of the wholeness of life, and who therefore could see the true purposes of art in relation to the other necessary activities of human existence. A supreme artist such as J.S. Bach could use the techniques of his craft to the full because he understood the purpose of his art within the wider range of human function. Equally the community for which Bach wrote could appreciate his music because they had some

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vision of what music meant in the total progress of the human soul. Philosophy cannot produce that intuition of the beautiful out of which art arises, but it can help to promote that unity of mind in which such intuitions will best flourish. The same may be said of letters. Though it is suggested in this essay that applied science is already overdeveloped in Canada, philosophy can give that unity of mind out of which the speculations of pure science arise. The development of the philosophical disciplines in our universities would provide the kind of integrated minds among educated Canadians through which the arts of civilization could flourish in some balanced proportion. In closing, the present writer has no alternative but to repeat once again his conviction that the practice of philosophy (and for that matter, all the arts of civilization) will depend on a prior condition namely the intensity and concentration of our faith in God. It is a great illusion that scepticism breeds thought and that doubt is the producer of art. The sceptic fails in that courage which alone can buttress the tiring discipline of being rational. Why should those who believe there is so little to know spend their energy in the hard activity of contemplation? As the late A.N. Whitehead wrote, it is in the ages of faith that men pursue truth and beauty.8 It would be impudence indeed in this essay to suggest how and when we Canadians will reach a fuller and more balanced intuition of God. It is not impudence however to point out that without such faith it will be vain to expect any great flowering of our culture in general and of our philosophy in particular.

Notes 1 'George Grant and Religion, A Conversation Prepared and Edited by William Christian,' Journal of Canadian Studies 26/1 (Spring 1991): 42-63; see pp. 42-3. 2 John Watson (1847-1939), Scottish Hegelian philosopher, taught at Queen's University after 1872. He had a profound influence over early Canadian philosophy and was noted primarily for his promotion of a rational interpretation of Christianity. His work includes Christianity and Idealism (1896), The Philosophy of Kant Explained (1908), and The Interpretation of Religious Experi-

ence (Gifford Lectures) (1910-12). 3 George Sidney Brett (1879-1944), Welsh classicist, psychologist, and philosopher, taught classics at Toronto from 1908 and was chairman of the depart-

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merit of philosophy from 1927'-44. His work includes A History of Psychology (3 vols, 1912-21) and The Government of Man (1913). 4 Charles Norris Cochrane (1889-1945), professor of Greek and Roman history in University College at the University of Toronto. See Grant's 'Charles Cochrane,' a talk given in CBC Radio's Anthology series on 26 October 1954 (this volume, 110). 5 Herman Northrop Frye (1912-91), internationally renowned literary critic and professor, taught at Victoria College, University of Toronto, from 1939 until his death in 1991. In addition to Fearful Symmetry (1947) his work includes Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and The Great Code (1982). 6 Arthur Sutherland Piggott Woodhouse (1895-1964), scholar and professor of English, taught at University College, University of Toronto after 1928, and fostered the growth of the humanities in Canada. In addition to Puritanism and Liberty (1938) on the Puritan Revolution, his work includes a book of essays on John Milton called The Heavenly Muse (1972). 7 Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952), internationally renowned political economist, economic historian, and pioneer in communication studies who influenced Marshall McLuhan, taught at the University of Toronto from 1920 until his death. His early work on economic history includes The Fur Trade in Canada (1930) and The Cod Fisheries (1940), and his later work on communications includes Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951). 8 Grant may have been referring to the discussion of ideas working in religion and philosophy to generate the desire for perfection in human history in Whitehead's book Adventures of Ideas (New York: MacMillan 1933). See, for example, section 18 of part 4, called 'Truth and Beauty.' 'Science and Art are the consciously determined pursuit of Truth and of Beauty. In them the finite consciousness of mankind is appropriating as its own the infinite fecundity of nature. In this movement of the human spirit types of institutions and types of professions are involved. Churches and Rituals, Monasteries with their dedicated lives, Universities with their search for knowledge' (272). Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), British mathematician and philosopher, wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge (1910-13). He then moved to the United States and taught at Harvard from the 1920s on. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical theory and his most famous philosophic work is Process and Reality (1929).

Canadian Universities and the Protestant Churches

The subject matter of this typescript seems to place it near the Massey Commission piece on philosophy in Canada, although it cannot be dated with certainty. It may have been an address, perhaps delivered to an audience at Queen's University judging by the references to the history of Queen's and his grandfather, George Monro Grant. In this work Grant turns to the issue that had preoccupied him since his Oxford years whether non-religious or secularized liberals in the universities can maintain the moral values they praise in the face of their equally fervent embrace of modern science and technology.

1 While the dogma of progress is seldom used now as a backdrop to European history, it is still so used in much of the writing about our Canadian institutions. The moral catastrophes of the last fifty years are somehow assumed to have happened elsewhere, and we to have been isolated from them. So we can continue to think of our history as the story of Horatio Alger, and still write about the 'development' or 'evolution' of our society.1 This is true not only of writing about politics, but also about education. How many speeches has the loyal university man had to endure about the steady expansion of his particular college! It would almost seem that loyalty can only be created these days by myths of improvement. The dogma of progress is dangerous however, as it eventually kills the critical faculty. It prevents the mind from seeing things as they are. About universities it is particularly misleading, for it encourages that depressing industrial metaphor - that all expansion is good.

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Therefore the purpose of this article will be to question the dogma of progress as it is applied to one phase of Canadian history. Can the severance between the universities and the Christian Church be considered 'a step forward'? Was the secularising of our English-speaking universities progressive or retrogressive? To understand this break it is helpful to turn back to the history of Queen's University in the early years of this century. The separation between Queen's and the Presbyterian Church may be taken as a symbol which illumines what has happened elsewhere. The severance seems to have been above all the responsibility of the Principal of that period, the Reverend G.M. Grant.2 Though Grant did not live to see the break made final, the documents of the time lead one to believe that it was his confidence in the step that persuaded many waverers, and his determination that overcame the objections of men more deeply held by religious tradition. To understand the incident, it is therefore necessary to look into Grant's mind and see why he should have considered such a break in the interests of the university, and presumably (as he was a minister) in the interests of the Church. The external motives seem to have been the following. If Queen's were to expand technologically, it required help from the rich resources of the government of Ontario. That help could not be given to a denominational university. The Presbyterian Church was unwilling and unable to support the kind of expansion that Grant felt to be necessary. This was the period of the opening up of the West, and expansion seemed imperative. In other words, Queen's could not have a proper school of applied science without the loss of its religious affiliation, and so the religious affiliation had to go. Of course, to simplify the issue in this way is to be unfair to the men of another era. Grant's decision cannot fairly be interpreted as a cut and dried case of putting technology before the Church. At that time, scientific expansion and Christianity did not seem contradictory. Grant was a theological liberal and must have taken much of his advice from men of the same persuasion, such as Watson and Jordan.3 Such nineteenth century theologians had come more nearly to identify Christianity with an optimistic humanism than they themselves realized. They had come close to believing that the good life was easily attainable. They had forgotten the stringent conditions that both Plato and Augustine had deemed necessary if society is not to become a collec-

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tion of wild beasts. Watson had turned Kant into an optimist. Jordan had eliminated the strait-gate from the Bible. Grant had written eclectically of religion. Such men never believed that a constitutional break would help to cut Queen's off from the Protestant tradition. So rationally self-evident was Protestantism that it would survive automatically in the minds of intelligent Queen's men. They must have envisaged geologists and historians, economists and mining engineers just naturally assuming the faith, and understanding its rational relation to their studies. Such hope in the automatic victory of truth and goodness over the minds of the young may sound too ridiculous to impute to our ancestors. But then we must remember that it is not the clarity of our intellects that has freed us from this naive theology, but rather the horror that God has revealed to us at Buchenwald and Moscow, at Peking and Detroit. The generation responsible for the break still assumed that all studies lay within the context of the Christian faith. This was equally true of the university leaders elsewhere. G.M. Wrong was a noble example of one who still assumed that the University of Toronto was a Christian institution.4 Not till after the catastrophe of the first Great War did a new metaphysics begin to supersede the old. Theological liberalism began to be supplanted by non-religious liberalism. The men who accepted this new faith dropped as superstition the truths of Christian dogma, and substituted for it a new dogma arrived at by the blending of scientific and idealist metaphysics. By this stage, theology had been detached from the universities, and therefore Christian metaphysics was only known in its debased form of a 'pulpit theism.' The new liberals kept the old idea of subservience to the moral law. They believed in 'the humanities.' They believed that from the study of humane subjects detached from any theological groundwork, there would naturally spring up in the minds of students loyalty to certain moral values. The inculcation of these among the educated would provide a solid basis for society. Therefore the engineer should take courses in English literature, and the commerce student be touched with a little history. Humane values, rather than theological virtues, were to be the cement that unified the studies of the university. It is impossible to look back at the history of Canada without seeing how much our country owes to this form of liberalism. It stood four square for the values of truth, responsibility, justice, and liberty. To

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sample its early bloom, one has only to read O.D. Skelton's life of Laurier.5 Here is liberalism in all its inimitable innocence. To understand it at a more sophisticated stage, one should read Professor Innis' Empire and Communications.6 However unexciting its goals, they were certainly worthy. The end of man was to become a moderately unselfish middleclass citizen in the Great Lakes region of North America. It provided scholars with decent standards and the civil service with a moderate tradition. What then was the crack in that golden bowl? Why was liberalism unable to maintain its hold over our universities for more than a generation? Why has moral liberalism not been able to put up any substantial barrier to the rule of technology? Even the Arts Faculty has become the home of specialism. The very adoption of the term 'social science' expresses the decay of liberalism. For if a study is a science, it is the study of how something works, not of its good for man. Then the primacy of value in human affairs is denigrated. What would Marshall have thought of economics as a technique?7 But even more threatening to the liberal values had been the rise in power of the new sciences in the Arts Faculty - psychology, anthropology, sociology. If anyone should doubt the decay of moral liberalism, let him hold frequent converse with students specialising in psychology. Yet this is only what is happening in the Arts Faculty. Even more powerful in numbers of teachers and students are the outright technicians ranging from the science of physics to the mythology of psychiatry. Their sheer numbers dominate the Senates of our universities and therefore our educational policy. They can be confident of providing their students with lucrative jobs. What university (in Englishspeaking Canada) is not now overwhelmingly utilitarian in its aspirations and its use of money? Engineering and commerce, chemistry and medicine may be occasionally challenged in words, but they are invariably supported in actions. All these subjects are of course useful techniques, but except to the communist, they serve only limited, not final, ends. Yet the tragedy is that each specialism is not slow to exalt its limited technique into a final end. Each subject has attempted to develop from its own resources its own metaphysics. And being so derived from science, how can these metaphysics have any place for the transcendence of liberty and justice? Psychology preaches the value of social adjustment.

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Medicine preaches the value of animal health. Commerce and engineering exalt the maximising of the national income. Where are the liberal values in such a catalogue? Yet, while the confidence and dominance of the technicians grow apace, there are fewer teachers and fewer students in those subjects competent to contemplate the Good. The new type of education is well illustrated by a new type of scholarship. In awarding this scholarship, what is first considered is a particular piece of research that needs doing. Instead of being given for a human being, the money is paid for the results. Anybody who can do the job will fill the bill. How utterly different this is from the liberal or Christian conception of education. These saw education as man's striving ex umbris et imagionibus in veritatem [out of the shadows and images into the truth - Cardinal Newman's epitaph]. To use another classical phrase, it was an itinerarium mentis in Deum [journey of the mind into God - Bonaventura]. What mattered was not concrete results but the movement of the soul. Now, results for some government or business are what matters, and the individual is merely coincidental. Of such is the kingdom of science. II The tragedy of the non-religious liberals was the dichotomy between the moral values that held their wills and the cosmology that regulated their intellects. Their respect for justice and liberty came from their Puritan ancestry. Their cosmology was generally a worldly utilitarianism, based on their 'emancipation' by science. Justice and liberty cannot be rationally justified in terms of a scientific humanism. Liberty and justice are neither useful nor efficient. They cannot help man to manipulate the natural world. They are values that transcend the natural world, and must be held in affection quite irrespective of their results. It is impossible to reach any conception of transcendence through scientific activity, because by definition science deals with what is immanent. Between the old Puritan metaphysic with its idea of transcendence based on the intuition of sin and the new scientific cosmology, there was a great gulf fixed. The attempt to hold on to the morals of the one and the thought of the other was doomed to failure. I remember a leading civil servant saying to me when I told him I studied theology, 'Can't you study anything more useful than that?'

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Behind his joke lay the full force of his emancipated belief in the useful. The modern world had taught him that the educated man cannot believe in any transcendent reality. The contemplation of that reality (which is metaphysics) is therefore a useless activity. Yet that very man was notable in the government as a firm defender of the principles of political freedom. The contradiction between the Puritanism in which he was raised, and the science worship which had educated him had evidently not become explicit. The relation between the morality men live by and the cosmology they hold is of course a two-way process. The cosmologies (call them if you will, metaphysics or theology) do indeed depend in some measure on the current ethical standards. But just as truly the ethical values depend for their survival upon our cosmologies. Where there is a conflict between the two, the morality is likely to win in the short term, but in the long run the cosmology will be determinant. So gradually the world picture was learned more effectively by the students of the liberal teachers than were the transcendent values. These latter have gradually died in the attempt to have them exist in vacuo, that is apart from the cosmology that had sustained them. Ironically the very basis of scientific humanism precluded the recognition of the contradiction between Puritan morality and scientific cosmologies. Certain moral values were considered 'natural' to man. If values were natural they could be considered to abide in men always. If they abided in men always and were not conditional, there was little point in studying their rational groundwork. This is but to say that there was no need for metaphysical study, because it could be assumed that all Canadians instinctively held a decent metaphysics. But metaphysics is the condition of discovering contradictions in one's thought. As it was precluded, the contradiction could not be discovered. Allied with the idea of 'natural values' often went two other ideas 'objectivity' and 'detachment.' One has to ask whether the university should be 'detached' about truth or the teacher 'objective' about the value of justice, to see that these ideas were merely slogans. The danger of these slogans was not that they enabled the liberal to live by them, but that they allowed the perpetration of an unconscious fraud. Certain teachers could believe that they were being objective, when they were in fact preaching dogma. The inculcation of certain ideas could be masked by the guise of detachment. I remember, as a young

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student in the Arts Faculty at Queen's, being taught the strictest utilitarian dogma as if it were objective fact. Yet the very men who systematically expounded this dogma were likely to consider Christian theology too dogmatic a study for our universities. Is it unfair to say that the criterion at our liberal universities has been that dogma is acceptable if hidden, but propaganda if openly revealed? The roots of liberalism's decline were basically, then, confusion about faith and reason. All faiths must admittedly have within them certain contradictions which reason cannot reconcile. The very condition of our lives is that the final choice between hope and despair is swallowed up in mystery. Yet men are not freed thereby from attempting to give a systematic account of the faith that is in them. In other words, their faith must be turned into a metaphysic or else become sheer irrationalism. Irrationalisms have no survival power. Tradition cannot survive if it is incoherent. The Christian faith has a flashing insight into this fact because its founder said: "The truth shall make you free.'8 Therefore Christians have never for long shirked the duty of metaphysics. They have known that however much their hope transcended the categories of reason, nevertheless without reason they could not fulfil their duty of passing on the Gospel. Nor without metaphysics could they show the relevance of that Gospel to private and public life. Non-religious liberalism, with the cleavage in its soul between a transcendent morality and a deference to natural science, could not embark on the necessary metaphysical undertakings. For if in its metaphysics it followed the rational consequences of its morality, it would have to give up being non-religious. If, on the other hand, it based its metaphysics on science, it would have to give up its liberalism. It attempted to escape this dilemma by scorning metaphysics and coherence. But by this inability of the liberals to give a rational account of their faith they were made impotent to transmit their tradition. In the universities, this led to a lack of principle by which to decide the purpose of education. Without a metaphysic, it is impossible to be clear as to what are primary and what secondary goods. Therefore the goal of education could not be defined. The incoherence of our Arts Faculties today is but a mark of this un-metaphysical liberalism. The proper ordering of studies by which students may mount the ladder of knowledge has disappeared. The importance of a subject is decided,

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not by its intrinsic value, but by the competing personalities of professors. All studies are considered of equal value. Sociology has as much claim as philosophy, economics as mathematics. In the Arts Faculty there are two types of courses, either specialism in one subject or else an uncoordinated dabbling. The result, in the first place, is to turn out specialists, and in the second, to turn out people who can show themselves cultured at cocktail parties. Under the old Puritan metaphysics the Arts studies existed as preparation for the final study of the summum bonum as found in the Bible. The highest good being given, a proper order of studies could be followed. Today, as there is no principle there can be no coherence. The Arts Faculties wonder why they are dying. Their decay clearly results from the disjointed philosophy described above. Into such a hiatus the god of technology has stepped, with his heavy and certain tread. The scientists never lack one central unified principle around which to organise education. A scientific world picture soon convinces men that only science is valuable. As utilitarian dogma increasingly triumphs over the minds of students, and as these students become the civil servants, teachers, doctors, and lawyers of the country, it is inevitable that the universities respond to the community they have helped to create. Chemistry, commerce, and engineering work. Philosophy and history do not. So one arrives at the perfectly efficient technical college. We have not yet reached in Canada the time when philosophy is replaced by empirical psychology or courses in creative living. We are only three-quarters of the way to that point. The Christian cannot but grieve over the decline of liberalism in our universities. Although its values are not final, he still can share them in a way he can never share those of the technological institute. There is however, one point at which the Christian may look back at the regime of the liberal with restrained bitterness. That is the way the liberal was apt to persuade the student not to take the Church seriously. Though failing to use the critical faculty on his own dogmas, he loosed that faculty (often quite indiscriminately) on the dogmas and traditions of the Church. Why, after all, should the vocation of the ministry be taken seriously if the Kingdom of Heaven can be built by good politicians, engineers, doctors and civil servants? The organisation whose duty it was to preach the moral Kingdom was considered redundant. The liberal teacher too often played the contradictory role of bemoaning the

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naivete and poor education of the Protestant clergy, and yet not encouraging the intelligent to take up that vocation. III Surely the great difference between Canadian society now and fifty years ago is that whereas once our traditions were largely Roman Catholic and Protestant, today they are Roman Catholic, Protestant, and pagan. This is far more important to the understanding of our history than the political and constitutional occurrences that have occupied the attention of the Grit historians. In many ways the weakest intellectually of these three forces is Protestantism. While it still sways the lives of many noble Canadians, it does not deeply shape the minds of our educated community. Ultimately of course the blame lies with the Protestant churches. Secular liberalism is after all largely an attitude of mind and consequent upon certain failures in our early Canadian Protestantism. Pioneering Protestantism had two main attitudes to education. First, there were the fundamentalists. These men argued from the true principle of 'by faith alone' to the false conclusion of the uselessness of the arts of reason. Generally therefore the fundamentalists had little interest in the establishment of universities. Their sin was obscurantism - the denial of the divinity of reason. The other group were the intellectual Protestants. They so worshiped 'education' as almost to believe that knowledge by itself could provide men with salvation. So sure were they that the intelligent man would be a Protestant that they fought for the establishment of non-denominational universities. Their sin was intellectual pride - the belief in the salvation of the intelligent. Their refutation was given at the beginning of the nineteenth century by that tough old character, the Duke of Wellington. He once said that if universal education were set up apart from a religious framework, we would produce a race of clever devils.9 Conservatism has many faults, but at least it is less naive about human sin than liberalism. Our Canadian Protestantism indeed arrived at its educational policy too much by way of reaction against the control of the Anglican Church. Because its fight was against this intolerant ecclesiasticism, it did not provide sufficient restraints against secularism. This has of course always been an incipient weakness in the Protestant tradition.

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Lutheran and Calvinist theology were written to protest against the abuses of a civilization too much controlled by ecclesiastics. But in this revolt against ceremonial legalism, it forgot that pagan secularism is just as deadly a foe. We see that freedom has only brought us enslavement by science. And enslavement by scientists is surely even more dangerous than enslavement by prelates. At the least we may say it is an unhappy choice to have to make. This weakness in the face of secularism is deep in all aspects of the Protestant tradition. To use Plato's language, it is the lie in our soul. We have wanted to eat our cake and have it too. We have wanted our universities to lead men to the truth, but we have wanted even more to spend our limited funds on great schools of engineering and applied science. It has been hoped that men would understand the ways of God, but not hoped sufficiently strongly to lead us to spend money on the studies pertaining to that end. One might look at Canadian intellectual history through the eyes of the Greek and say that our enslavement by technology is but fate. The irony of our society has been that the exigencies of our pioneering tradition united with the current worship of science. Thus the forces on the side of the machine were well nigh irresistible. However, it must always be false to see history under the categories of the determined. Roman Catholic education has done more to keep technology in its place. Is this not evidence that faith rather than fate can sway history? Whatever failures the Roman Catholic account of Christianity may have, today it is the chief force in Canada with any profound educational principle. The deepest irony we shall have to endure may perhaps be to see Roman Catholicism the inheritor of the only surviving liberalism. To look back at the past and grieve over its mistakes is not to suggest anything for the future. The sins of the fathers are indeed visited even unto the third and fourth generations. We can expect no deus ex machina to redeem us quickly and at little price. Moreover technology now has us truly in its grip, because it has been taught to the East, and we cannot defend ourselves without it. Who can possibly know what faiths lie ahead to transform our civilisation? Hegel's dictum about the owl of Minerva only flying at twilight does not threaten the individual but it must leave us sad about our institutions. The Protestant has only one advantage in watching the decline of the values he and the secular

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liberal both cherish. He knows that God sees the truth but waits. He knows it is his duty in the twentieth century to hold in affection the words of his Saviour: 'Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.'10 Dalhousie University

Notes 1 Horatio Alger (1832-99), American writer and clergyman, wrote adventure stories for boys, such as Ragged Dick (1867) and From Canal Boy to President

(1881), which were about poor boys making good. 2 George Monro Grant (1835-1902), Grant's paternal grandfather, served as principal of Queen's from 1877 until his death. 3 John Watson taught philosophy at Queen's during the principalship of Grant's grandfather (see n. 2 in 'Philosophy,' p. 20). Reverend William George Jordan (1852-1939) taught theology there after 1899. 4 George MacKinnon Wrong (1860-1948), Anglican priest, ecclesiastical historian, and historian, taught history at the University of Toronto 1883-1927. He founded the Canadian Historical Review. 5 Oscar Douglas Skelton (1878-1941), academic and public servant, wrote Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier (2 vols) in 1921, while he was John A. Macdonald Professor of Political Science and Economics at Queen's. Grant considered him the founder of Canada's civil service. 6 Harold Innis (see n. 7 in 'Philosophy,' p. 21) saw the threat to liberal ideals in the new media and communications technologies under the sway of the dominant American empire. 7 Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), one of the chief founders of the school of English neoclassical economists, was professor of political economy at Cambridge 1885-1908. His Principles of Economics (1890) was influential in the development of economics and is still in use today as a textbook. Grant is suggesting, perhaps, that Marshall (like his pupil Lord Keynes) would have been horrified at the prospect of an economics curriculum serving narrowly defined business goals. 8 'And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.' John 8:32. 9 'Take care what you are about, for unless you base all this on religion, you are only making so many clever devils.' The Duke was referring to the introduction of non-denominational education under the system of Joseph Lancaster (c.1810). See Philip Henry, Fifth Earl Stanhope, Notes on Conversa-

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tions with the Duke of Wellington, 1831-1851 (London: Oxford University Press 1938), 262. Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, (1769-1852), known as the Iron Duke, was British army commander during the Napoleonic Wars (including Waterloo) and later Prime Minister of Great Britain (1828-30). He led the moderate Tories in supporting Catholic Emancipation in Ireland, while attempting to retain Protestant ascendancy. 10 Matthew 5:4

Pursuit of an Illusion: A Commentary on Bertrand Russell1

This article appeared in volume 32, no. 2 (Summer) of The Dalhousie Review, 1952: 97-109, and was reprinted in William Christian and Sheila Grant, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 323-34. Grant saw Russell as an exemplar of a sceptical, empirical approach to philosophy and ethics that he opposed. He wrote in a letter to his mother that the article was associated in his mind with the controversy over his Massey Commission piece, 'Philosophy': 'I have not done anything about the controversy except write two articles this summer (quite unrelated) one on Bertrand Russell and the other on Plato, which will show even farther what I mean.'2 See the discussion of Grant's clash with the University of Toronto's Fulton Anderson in the introduction to this volume.

I When Bertrand Russell has attempted to formulate the principles upon which the study of mathematics rests or when he has analysed the nature of scientific propositions, he has made certain principles clearer than they were previously. Such activities are part of the philosopher's job and therefore it is possible to call Russell a philosopher. On the other hand, when Russell turns from discussing man as scientist to man as moral agent or as artist, he foregoes the philosopher's function. That is, in writing about conduct or art he makes no attempt to discover the principles underlying these activities. He freely admits this, a If anyone doubts that I have stated Russell's position correctly, I would refer him to The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell - in the Library of Living Philosophers - vol. V. 531-5;

720-7. There he will find a plethora of quotations from Russell on this subject.

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of course, and says that it is simply a necessity of the human condition. Over and over again he repeats that reason has nothing positive to say about the fundamental questions of conduct.a Yet having said that reason cannot tell us anything fundamental about conduct, Russell has spent most of his life writing at great length on this very subject. Since 1914 more and more of his work has dealt with such aspects of man's conduct as politics, education, religion, and sex. Why has he done this? This would seem less contradictory if Russell simply admitted that what he has to say about human conduct is just his prejudices; admitting, in other words, that he is making no attempt to show others what are the principles of right conduct. But in his popular writings he never makes clear this distinction necessary to his own scepticism. He never states clearly when he is speaking as a philosopher and when he is gossiping about his own prejudices. From looking at Russell's writings, I am led to the conclusion that at one and the same time he has desired to assert moral scepticism (that is the impotence of reason in the fundamentals of conduct) and has also desired to teach men about conduct, using his position of authority as a philosopher. Of course Russell cannot have it both ways. He cannot be sceptical about the positive role of the philosopher in discovering ethical principles and also expect us to take with any seriousness his statements about how we ought to live. His principle must apply to himself. If reason is basically impotent in practical matters, then he either ought to be silent about these questions or else openly admit that what he writes about them has no rational content. And of course if he admits the latter, then there is no reason why any man should take what he writes about conduct seriously. We do not listen attentively when the brilliant mathematician is talking baby talk to his children. It is this contradiction that makes difficult any systematic analysis of Russell's recent broadcast talks, Living in an Atomic Age.3 Does he claim for them any of the persuasive power of reason, or are they just intended as so much rhetoric that will stir us emotionally? As to Russell's intention, it is hard to answer this question one way or the other. Indeed the strange division in Russell's soul is particularly evident throughout these talks. If I did not know their author and was trying to describe him, I would say he must be a man with the worldly wit and cultivated style of the aristocrat, combined with a preacher's

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hatred of man's sin and desire to improve men; but that these excellent qualities were marred by continual contradictions and a failure to reduce any question to principles. Indeed, I would say that the author was a good man and a clever man, but not a philosopher. This is the dilemma in which Russell is inevitably entangled by the contradiction between the moral scepticism which he holds in principle and the moral fervour which he adopts in practice. Because of his moral fervour he wants to speak out and convince men to be good; because of his moral scepticism he cannot speak in principles and therefore cannot speak clearly. Let me illustrate what I mean from Russell's writings on the problem of conduct. First an example from these broadcasts. Russell is describing the present state of the world and discusses what should happen in the future. One of his chief points is that modern industry is 'a kind of rape,' and that men are using up the natural resources of our planet frivolously. He condemns this state of affairs and demands that men 'should' think of posterity. Now of course I am not here arguing with Russell as to the facts. I quite agree with him as to what men are doing and that we should carefully husband our resources for the sake of future generations. I am not arguing with him as an economist, but as a philosopher. Within his own philosophical position, what does Russell mean by the word 'should'? The word 'should' presumably means men ought to do this or that. It is one of the fundamental words that western men have used about their conduct. But if Russell is right and reason cannot speak about the fundamentals of conduct, then he is using the word 'should' with no rational significance. What then does he mean when he says that men 'should' think about posterity? From what Russell has written on this matter elsewhere, I would infer either that he means that he likes men to take posterity into account, or else that he commands them to do so. That is, he would say that fundamental ethical terminology such as 'should' is not meant rationally, but either emotively (that is implying like or dislike) or imperatively (that is as implying command). Accordingly there is nothing rational in saying that men should take thought of posterity. But again I ask, if these words of Russell are, on his own showing, no more than expressions of like and dislike or of command, why should anyone listen to them? When Russell writes of mathematical principles we do not accept their validity because he likes these principles rather

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than others, or because he commands us to them, but because he has convinced our reasons. If in writing of conduct he can show us no reason for acting one way rather than another, why should we agree? And what is more important, how can he convince anybody who disagrees with him? There are obviously men in the world who do not care to take thought for posterity. Russell can present them with no reason for caring. He simply holds up his passion for posterity against other men's passion for immediate satisfaction. I wish I could be sure that Russell always makes clear that he does not use such words as 'should' or 'ought' with rational content. Certainly in his writings for philosophers he has made his scepticism clear. He has done his utmost to be consistent. But the same cannot be said for these broadcasts. He uses for instance such sentences as the following: 'I have been concerned in these lectures to set forth certain facts, and certain hopes which these facts render rational.' The phrase 'rational hopes' is plainly inconsistent with an assertion about the impotence of reason in ethics. For admitting the facts as he sees them (e.g. the rape of our natural resources), there is still no reason on his view of conduct why anything follows rationally as a hope about man's behaviour either as it should be or as it may be predicted. Why then does he use such phrases as 'rational hopes'? Russell then implies one set of principles for philosophers and a quite contradictory set for the public. And he cannot here use the doctrine of economy as an excuse. For the man who applies this doctrine may rightly avoid the subtlety of principle in popular lectures, but he certainly cannot enunciate principles in his profound and popular writings. There seem to me two possible explanations as to why Russell falls into this contradiction. Perhaps he doesn't recognize he is falling into it. If this is so then we may have less respect for him as a philosopher, for it is the job of philosophers to ferret out contradictions. The other possible explanation is that he wishes to convince his popular audience that what he is saying about conduct has rational content, so that they will accept his opinions. That is, he wishes to convince his audience of the truth of a principle which he himself rejects as false. The idea that reason does play a central role is so deeply embedded in the tradition of the west that Russell perhaps thinks it is useful to foster the illusion for his own purposes. But surely, if there is anything that

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all philosophers may agree on, it is that fostering illusions for whatever purpose is not their function. Russell should have made clear in his writings that his repeated use of the word 'should' has no rational content. I, on the other hand, am quite ready to use the word 'should' about Russell, for as I will attempt to show later it is a word that has in truth the deepest rational content. Another illustration from Russell's popular writings: in a recent article on 'Gladstone and Lenin' he discusses the eminent men he has known. He ends the article with the statement that 'what I have found most unforgettable is a certain kind of moral quality, a quality of self-forgetfulness, whether in private life, in public affairs, or in the pursuit of truth.'4 He takes as an example of this quality E.D. Morel, the man who was chiefly responsible for exposing the abuses of the Belgian government in the Congo, and who later was a pacifist in the war of 1914.5 Of course I agree with Russell about the glory of the qualities he mentions. The self-forgetting man is surely the highest vision of God vouchsafed to us in this world. 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels.'6 E.D. Morel is equally one of my heroes.7 But I take issue with Russell again at this point because his moral scepticism prevents him from saying clearly why Morel was such a high type of human being and therefore presumably the kind of man we should all attempt to become. Russell can say nothing to those who would reply that Morel was a bad type of man. And the last years leave us with no doubt that there are men all over the world who would consider Morel misguided or wicked. Any consistent totalitarian would say that Morel was vicious because he considered there were principles demanding his loyalty more than the principle of loyalty to the state. The hedonist would say that Morel was misguided because he exalted self-forgetfulness above his personal pleasure. Certain modern psychologists might say that Morel's hungering and thirsting after righteousness was a sign of 'moral diabetes.' And because of Russell's scepticism, he can present no principles which will be valid against the totalitarian and which will show him why loyalty to the state cannot be a first principle of conduct. And of course the inference must be that if reason has nothing to say against the totalitarian, the non-totalitarian is as much confined by prejudice and force and tradition. For, either reason can speak about conduct, or else prejudice, force, and tradition are the deciding factors.

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In fact Russell, having been brought up in a certain section of nineteenth century English society, happens to like the tradition of charity inherited from the broad line of Christian principles, the tradition of private judgment inherited from Puritanism, and the tradition of humane conduct that comes to the west from the Greeks. As he likes these, he admires Morel who partook of all of them so beautifully. But Russell's defence of these qualities can only lie in a completely irrational acceptance of one tradition as against another. Russell, who has spent so much of his life making fun of tradition, finally must rest his case as to the central issue of human life - standards for action - on a traditionalism which reason is completely impotent to criticize or improve. The churches he has so castigated for irrationalism and traditionalism were never so irrationalist or traditionalist as that. No Protestant or Catholic would go so far as Russell. II The question then which Russell's philosophy raises is whether reason can be practical. I believe this is the most important issue of all philosophy, for if we say with Russell that our action cannot finally be regulated by principles, we are saying that in the most important aspect of our nature reason is impotent. In discussing this issue, it is first necessary to state Russell's position more fully. As I understand Russell, the place of reason in our life is to help us to find the means to achieve what our passions lead us to desire. Means belong to reason; ends to passion. If we desire riches more than anything else, the place of reason is to show us how to get rich. If our chief end is the conquest of women, reason will help us to become expert seducers. Reason can also show us the probable consequences of pursuing one course of action as against another. What reason cannot do is to tell us whether those consequences are good or bad. It cannot tell us what is the proper end of all conduct. We must rely on our emotions for that central direction. According to Russell, the role of reason is confined to logical and empirical concepts, and does not extend to the regulation of our wills by principles. In criticising this view, up to this point, I have simply tried to make clear some of its consequences. The consequences for society are clearly that, when disagreement arises over ultimate principles of con-

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duct, the issue must be decided by force or passion. If one American likes to lynch negroes and another American says it is wrong, the issue can only finally be decided by force. The American who hates lynching can indeed say with reason that such and such are certain consequences of lynch law. If, however, the other American is ready to accept these consequences and still likes lynching, there is nothing further that reason can say. In personal life there is no point in using our intelligence to judge what persons we should accept as examples. There is no meaning in saying that Copernicus or Socrates or Milton chose worthier ends than Himmler8 or Napoleon or Mickey Spillane.9 Any argument from consequences is, of course, only of limited value. It must be supplemented by some positive grounds for thinking otherwise. Clarity about consequences is however necessary, for down the ages it has led men desperately to inquire whether there is not some intellectually respectable position other than moral emotionalism. In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates returns again and again to the consequences of scepticism, so that he can persuade the young men to see how in fact reason does operate in their lives. It is necessary now to turn to the positive reasons why philosophers have believed that our practical life can be regulated by reason. In stating these grounds I would point out to those readers who are not philosophers by profession (it will be obvious to those who are) that nothing I say has any originality. It has all been said, once and for all, in that most brilliant of philosophic works, Plato's Republic. In modern philosophy much the same argument has been put by Kant. Also it will be clear that what I say on this matter is not meant as a complete statement of the case for ethical rationalism. That could only be done in greater compass than this article allows. It is simply an outline of the rationalist position, given to make clearer the difference between it and Russell's irrationalism. Anyone who wants a systematic account of ethical rationalism can of course find it in Plato's Republic, Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, or the nineteenth book of Augustine's City of God. Men act in the world to achieve purposes. We are moved to action by desire. We act because we think it will be good to achieve this or that object of our desire. The question then at issue is the relationship of desire to reason in our consciousness. To repeat, Russell's position is that reason helps us to find means to achieve what our passions lead

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us to desire. The position I maintain is that reason and desire are far more intimately bound in consciousness. The vast range of our particular desires does not appear simply as a chaos, because reason presents us with the idea of universality as an end, in which that very unity which we call the self, and not mere separate desires, will be satisfied. It is this idea of the highest good which allows the struggle between unity and diversity in our selves to seek reconciliation. Because of it all particular desires do not appear to us completely uncoordinated, but can be brought into some intelligible hierarchy, under the regulation of this principle of spirit. The union of reason and desire is even more intimate than this, because not only does reason give us this idea of a highest good it also desires to realise itself therein. This is what is meant when we say our wills are rational. We are moved by the desire for rationality itself. I would say that we see this not only in personal conduct, but also in the striving of the scientist for universality, in the desire of the lawyer for a just law. To put the same point in slightly different language, I would say that this is what we mean when we use words such as 'should' or 'ought' or 'duty.' When we say that it is the duty of man to do this or that we mean that he should follow a course of conduct not motivated by the particularities of his pleasure at any given moment, but by some principle that is universal and therefore is law for him, irrespective of the passing whims of his consciousness. What seems to us the conflict between duty and desire is just the conflict between the desire for the highest good and the desire for some less whole good which arises from the particularity of our natures. To use Russell's example of E.D. Morel, how did Morel transcend the particularities of his passing desires to hold to with sufficiently abiding desire the interests of the Africans in the Congo, unless his reason gave him this idea of a universal good, which by his formulation of it called him to the service of their proper interests? When Russell says that we 'should' take thought of posterity rather than our immediate greeds, surely such ethical foresight is only possible if reason does give us an idea of a highest good in the knowledge of which we can transcend the pressing particularity of our desires? I realize that in describing the claims of ethical rationalism, I have assumed greatly. Above all I have assumed that despite the diversity of our consciousness, there is a real unity which we call the self. The

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philosophic deduction of this fact, usually assumed by common sense, would take too long. Neither have I space to relate the place of reason in the practical life to its place in the theoretical judgment - that is, to lay the groundwork of theology. Nor have I made any effort to show how the bare idea of the highest good can be given with sufficient concreteness to regulate all the diversity of particular circumstances. Nor will I discuss the question of sin, why men act on the motives of particular desires rather than from the idea of the highest good. There are however two points I wish to make, because they always seem to arise in a discussion of the practical reason. The first concerns the appeal to the so-called facts of life. Is it not a fact, so this appeal runs, that men's conduct is dominated by force and passion? Is it not simply romantic to say that men act from principles? Just go into a big city during a heat wave and you will see that men are not ruled by reason. Just look at the African natives, the waitresses, the stockbrokers. Of course the primary answer to this so-called appeal to experience is to make clear that the idea of a practical reason does not affirm what men accomplish in this world, but rather what they should accomplish. It is a matter of definition and therefore cannot be settled by the appeal to any particular experience. I am however quite willing to go farther and meet this appeal to experience by a contrary one. I have never met a human being who does not hold some conception of the highest good, however imperfectly formulated and imperfectly followed. That is, I have never met a human being who was not capable of giving some faint semblance of order to his desires. To go even further, to deny that reason operates in the conduct of all men is to deny that most men have any chance of leading the rational life. For most men in this world have not the opportunity to develop their reasons in the practice of some art or science. The means for rationality is given to most persons only through their conduct. The slum mother has no chance for the life of science or art, but only achieves rationality by exalting her family's general good above her own. To deny that reason operates in action is then to deny that most people ever enter into the glory of existence which is rationality. To appeal again to consequences, can we dare to be so presumptuous about other men? To the contrary I would say that it is the chief wonder of human life that at the profoundest level all men are equal. All men are given in

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conduct this idea of spirit, which however imperfectly framed, because of historical circumstances, is at least sufficiently clear for them to choose whether their wills be ruled by it or not. At the same time no man is given this idea with such perfect clarity as would eliminate for him the possibility of choice. Only on such a conception of reason as I have outlined can equality, and therefore democracy, rest. To transpose into a different language, the conception of reason presenting to all men the idea of a highest good is just the Christian belief of the image of God in all men. The denial of this by Russell and others is the denial of the only possible theoretical grounds for democracy. The second point I wish to make is that the formulation of the principles of morality is in some ways similar and in some ways different from the formulation of the principles of logic. It is necessary to make this point, because sceptics such as Russell always emphasize the greater public agreement about logical principles, and infer therefore the invalidity of moral principle. Looking both at the differences among logicians and at the broad acceptance of the idea of the highest good in western philosophy, I am not impressed by any idea of total divergence. Nevertheless it is true that the formulation of moral principles is more difficult than is those of logic. It is therefore necessary to discuss in what ways I consider them similar and in what ways different. They are similar in the following sense. We can think scientifically before we have formulated the principles of scientific thought; we can act morally before we have formulated moral principles. Yet in both cases, the highest principle of the theoretical reason and the highest principle of practical reason, when they are formulated, are seen to be necessary to the proper functioning of thought and of conduct. So the idea of the highest good is a necessary idea. Yet having stated that firmly, I would also state that their formulation varies in difficulty. In the formulation of the principles of conduct our wills and our desires are more deeply involved than in the formulation of theoretic principles. When we formulate mathematical principles we can use those principles in physiology or physics (in one part of our lives), while we do not use them in our relations with our wives or neighbours or the world in general. Having formulated on the other hand, the principles of the practical reason we are committed to a total way of life. We are committed to the effort to apply those principles universally. So, in the

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practical reason, what we have to surrender for the sake of clarity is the whole body of our habits. The commitment is not partial but complete. It is therefore only by the profoundest effort of our wills, the greatest discipline of our habits, that we can sufficiently face the problem to come to the recognition of the highest good. It is just the understanding of this difficulty that led such philosophers as Plato and Augustine humbly to insist that their ability to isolate the principles of conduct was not finally due to their own efforts, but was a gift, or in other words, grace. If seeking the psychological and historical causes of other men's lives were not generally just mud-slinging masquerading as science, I might be tempted to speculate why the principles of the practical reason have been unclear to Russell. III The following are two passages from Russell's writing. The first is from an essay he wrote in 1902 called A Free Man's Worship. The basic argument is summed up in the final passage. I quote: Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.10 The second passage is the final words of Living in an Atomic Age, spoken in 1951: Man now needs for his salvation only one thing: to open his heart to joy,

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and leave fear to gibber through the glimmering darkness of a forgotten past. He must lift up his eyes and say: 'No, I am not a miserable sinner; I am a being who, by a long and arduous road has discovered how to make intelligence master natural objects, how to live in freedom and joy, at peace with myself, and, therefore, with all mankind.' This will happen if men will choose joy rather than sorrow. If not, eternal death will bury Man in deserved oblivion.11 I have not quoted these two passages because there may seem on the surface a contradiction between Russell's appeal to doom and to joy. In my opinion, when one threads one's way through the rhetoric one finds much that is true and much that is false in both passages. Even if upon analysis these passages could in no way be reconciled, a man has a right to change his mind at least every fifty years. I quote them rather because they are both about the fundamentals of human existence - what is man's final destiny, what are the motives which any knowledge about it should inspire in our conduct? I quote them because in neither case does Russell make any attempt to appeal to reason, but simply lays down propositions as dogmatically given. And in no place in his vast writings have I been able to find any attempt to argue this basic problem. Even if the existentialists are right when they assert that the issue between doom and joy can only be settled irrationally (and here my rationalism would of course disagree with them), still it is the philosopher's job to show clearly how that decision between joy and doom should consistently affect our conduct. Russell never attempts this consistency. Indeed in A Free Man's Worship he asserts the strange position that we must pursue the rational life, even though final reality is blind chance or matter. Fifty years later he is less paradoxical, but more dogmatic. He asserts the need for men to be joyful without giving any reasons why they should be. This appeal to contradiction, dogma, and rhetoric to settle the fundamental issue of life is a final illustration of how large is the irrationalism. Naturally, I have not written the foregoing to convince Russell. He has presumably read Plato and Kant (though his History of Western Philosophy might leave one in some doubt as to this). I have written it rather because I so often hear Russell talked about as a great advocate of human reason as against the obscurantism and mysticism of the

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older philosophy and theology. The fact remains however that at the centre of the old philosophy and theology there lies the proposition that man is a rational animal. This proposition meant that man can only achieve his proper end by the perfection of his reason. At the heart of Russell's thought lies the denial of this. My argument is not with those people who admire Russell and recognize this central irrationalism. It is with those who admire Russell and think in so doing they are affirming the rationality of man. This is indeed the contradiction that lies at the heart of much of the modern thought that took its impetus from our scientific achievements. Men such as Freud and Marx, starting from the claim that human reason can establish truth, end up with the conclusion that man's nature is ultimately irrational. This is of course patently obvious in crude and hesitant thinkers such as Marx and Freud. It is less obvious but equally true of subtler men such as John Dewey and Bertrand Russell.12 What final value is there in any clarity about logical principles or any appreciation of wit (both debts we owe to Russell), if men are persuaded by his philosophy that they are not rational animals, but clever beasts with a facility for mathematics? For though men are not simply clever beasts, the fact is that when they are persuaded over a length of time that they are such, they more and more act as if they were. Surely the last years are an illustration that the ground of civilized life is the assertion of our essential rationality. Of course to a philosopher the denial that man's rationality is his essence is particularly distressing, for it denies the use or indeed the possibility of his study. Philosophy means simply the love of wisdom, and wisdom means knowledge of the true end of life. If men are not rational they cannot reach such knowledge and therefore the attempt is the pursuit of an illusion. This is why Russell is such a confused thinker. Calling himself a philosopher, he has tried to convince men that philosophy is a waste of time.

Notes 1 Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), British logician, philosopher, social reformer, and pacifist. His voluminous output, in addition to Principia Mathematica

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(with A.N. Whitehead; 3 vols, 1910-13), includes The Problems of Philosophy (1912), The Scientific Outlook (1931), A History of Western Philosophy (1947),

and The Impact of Science on Society (1951), along with many works on social and ethical questions. Grant's article is a reply to the introduction to Unpopular Essays (1950). 2 See letter 115 (summer 1952) in George Grant: Selected Letters, ed. with intro. by William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 175. 3 'Living in an Atomic Age' was the general title for a series of BBC broadcast talks beginning on 4 May 1951. They were printed in the BBC's Radio Times, reprinted in the Listener, and published under a new title as New Hopes for a Changing World (21 chapters; London: Allen and Unwin 1951; New York: Simon and Schuster 1951). 4 Grant probably read the reprinted 'Gladstone and Lenin' in the Atlantic Monthly, February 1951:66-8. It had appeared under the title 'Eminent men I have known' as chapter 11 in Unpopular Essays (London: Allen and Unwin 1950), 213-20. 5 Russell's remarks on Morel are on page 220. 6 1 Cor. 13:1: 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.' 7 Edmund Dene Morel (1873-1924) is the author of Red Rubber: The Story the Rubber Slave Trade Flourishing on the Congo in the Year of Grace 1906, intr

Harry H. Johnston (New York: Negro Universities Press 1969). 8 Heinrich Himmler (1900-45), head of the SS (Schutzstaffel) (1929) and chif of police (1936) under Hitler. The SS was transformed by Himmler from Hitler's bodyguard into an elite independent organization controlling the police forces and responsible for concentration camps and racial policy. Later inside Germany and still later in Nazi war-occupied countries, Himmler was responsible for wholesale detention, mass deportation, torture, execution, and massacre, including the systematic 'liquidation' of whole national and racial groups. 9 Frank Morrison (Mickey) Spillane (1918- ), American novelist, wrote sexually explicit and violent detective fiction featuring protagonist Mike Hammer. His books, such as ,' The Jury (1947) and Kiss Me Deadly (1952), were especially popular among the young during the 1950s when this article was written. 10 'A Free Man's Worship' was included in Mysticism and Logic, and Other Essays (London and New York: Longmans, Green 1918), 46-57. The quotation is from pages 56-7. 11 New Hopes for a Changing World, 218 (British edition), 213 (American edition). 12 John Dewey (1859-1952), American philosopher and educational theorist,

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Pursuit of an Illusion: A Commentary on Bertrand Russell followed in the pragmatic tradition of Peirce and James, attempting to return philosophy to experience, eliminate absolutes, and foster the idea of control by creative intelligence. He also became the leading figure in the movement of 'progressive education.' See, e.g., Experience and Nature (1925), A Common Faith (1934), and Experience and Education (1938).

Two Theological Languages

Joan O'Donovan reported in George Grant and the Twilight of Justice (1984) that Grant delivered this paper to a group of Reformed Clergy in 1947, that he later revised and delivered it to the Maritime Philosophical Association in 1953, and published it that same year in The United Churchman.1 We have not found any evidence to corroborate or disprove the existence of a 1947 version, or a published 1953 version. William Christian suggests in a footnote that the 'terribly difficult paper' Grant said he was reading to a Maritime Philosophical Conference in 1952 could be this one, but once again there is no evidence to support that conclusion.2 Grant indicated in a letter dated January 1954 that he had given a talk to some ministers, referring to the existence of a mimeographed form.3 Several copies of that version have survived, showing that 'Two Theological Languages' was, as the letter said, probably delivered to a group of Presbyterian and United Church clergy in 1953. The mimeographed version contains questions at the end of the paper addressed to such an audience. The paper in its mimeographed form was published by Wayne Whillier in 1990 in 'Two Theological Languages' by George Grant and Other Essays in Honour of His Work (Queenston: The Edwin Mellen Press). The unrevised essay, as reprinted for the Whillier edition, is presented here along with the 1988 'Addendum' written at Whillier's request. It contains a sharp revision by Grant of his earlier principal thesis on Biblical language.

Clearly we can all agree that philosophy and theology are both faith seeking understanding. The danger of that definition, however, to modern American Protestantism, corrupted by false social democracy and bewildered by modern technology, is that it may rely on faith and

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forget the duty to seek understanding. Those of us in the Presbyterian tradition may turn away from theology by relying on a few detached, unthought, and perhaps contradictory phrases from the book; those of us from the Methodist tradition may substitute for theology evangelical fervour, and both are liable to place our reliance on a tradition of rhetoric a la Rotary Club, and hope by these several reliances to get away from having to reach an authentic theology of our own. Now indeed, though theological clarity arises from grace, it is not synonymous with grace. But though to say that is to make clear that I do not think that theological clarity is the only form of grace in the individual's life, it still is true that the Church as a communal body finds its chief power (and I use the adjective advisedly) in theological clarity. This is because the Church exists in a tradition and all traditions are at one and the same time both conditions of the good life and gates of hell. Theology is a communal necessity because of this dual nature of tradition. It is necessary so that men may not forget the truths of the past; it is necessary so that they may purge the past of its errors. Let me illustrate from the United Church. It would be sad if our ministers did not learn Wesley's theology; it would be a disaster if, as sometimes seems the case, they took his evangelical phrases as sufficient. This is why theological radicalism and theological conservatism are both empty. Theological conservatism just relies on the contradictory traditions of the past; theological radicalism forgets that without the past our theology will lose its catholicity, and I use that word in no limited sense. That is, theology is the main means of communication among members of the Church and the way the Church communicates with the world. If it is not clearly and deeply thought, it will lead to superficiality in the Church. It will also be full of obvious contradictions and therefore will appear to the thoughtful in the world as unsatisfactory. This is particularly so in a technological era when the Church must speak clearly - that is, with authority - to a population with a growing chance for education. It is a fact of the modern world that more and more people are trained as specialists, that is, men and women educated to understand one sphere of existence, but not educated to see their sphere in relation to others and to God. Now theology is that study which teaches us of the final purpose and unity of our existence. Therefore, theology must be thought in such a way that it can show its

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ultimate relevance to all specialties - medicine, science, psychiatry, law, politics, engineering, business, etc. If this challenge is not met and the theology of the Church becomes a set of irreconcilable contradictions, the result is what is happening now: such professions as the psychiatrists and the social scientists patronize the Church and set themselves up as an opposition church which peddles naturalist dogma instead of the truth of God's mystery. Two facts about theological study must be remembered. First, it is the most taxing of all studies because it deals with the ultimate. Theological truth can only be discovered in the deep waters of disciplined thought and experience. Second, theology must be rethought and relived in every generation of the Church. It arises with the crisis of the meeting of the temporal and the eternal and springs from every such meeting. With these general ideas in mind, I have written a paper this morning about one of the great theological questions which confronts our Reformed tradition. What is the relation between the language of traditional rational theology and the language of the Bible? This is, of course, a basic theoretical question and may seem far from the pressing practical duties which surround you. But finally practice is determined by theory. As we theologically sow, we reap in action. The theoretical questions raised have, therefore, a basic relevance to the relation of the Church to a world growing increasingly secular. I call my paper two different theological languages (though I will particularly illustrate them with ethical terms). That is, I am going to discuss two different languages which are used to describe human conduct in our western tradition. At this point I insist on the word languages, because I do not want to prejudice the issue whether these languages are really expressing the same truth or whether there is a radical difference between them. One language is that of the perennial rational theology which finds its first clear expression in Plato and Aristotle and which carried over into the main body of philosophy in the west. The two key words of that language are, of course reason and desire. Man's proper end is one to which he is directed by his nature. Reason is not merely the slave of the particular passions, but gives us the idea of the highest good, or God, wherein not only this or that particular desire will be satisfied, but that very unity which is ourselves will find felicity. Reason not only gives us the idea of the highest good

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but makes us desire that good. Though the clarity with which Plato insists on the transcendence of God, as against Aristotle's willingness to define God in terms of our aspirations, makes him emphasize the place of desire in our souls in a way that Aristotle does not, nevertheless, according to both of them, man finds in his reason that which is most akin to God. In this language, the word 'freedom' means the individual's acceptance, conscious and intelligent, of what he most truly is. Freedom is recognition, affirmation, and acceptance of necessity. Freedom, in this sense, is the gift of truth. This view of freedom is also that of great medieval theologians, who are accepted as theological authorities by the Church of Rome. Though St Thomas and Duns Scotus may disagree as to the way in which the will necessarily and perpetually desires the last end, that the will is a natural appetite to self-perfection they do agree. Now the other language - the ethical language derived from the Bible - uses words such as: 'responsibility,' 'guilty,' 'sin,' 'temptations,' 'remorse,' 'disobedience,' and, above all 'rebellion.' Let me illustrate at least the superficial difference between these two languages from the idea of responsibility. In the Biblical language this notion means that I could have done at one time or another what I did not do. That is what I mean by responsibility. Now, of course, according to the first, a rationalist language, that is an absurd and meaningless notion, for in that language the self determines self. I think, indeed, this Biblical language rests upon a totally different use of the word 'freedom.' Freedom in this second language is not here the gift of truth - something inferred from our reason. It is given to us apart from reason. Freedom is not here dependent on goodness and perfection of life. In this second view of freedom the wicked are fully as free as the good. It is an absolute freedom. When this second language uses the word it doesn't mean the conscious and intelligent acceptance of principles - that is, the acceptance of necessity. It means the unfathomable and irrational - an abyss into which our reasons are swallowed up. If we are interested then in using this second language we must very carefully distinguish between two ways of using the word 'freedom.' First, the intelligent freedom which is involved in our achievement of self-perfection and which is deducible from our rational nature, and second, that irrational freedom which is prior to good and evil and which eludes the categories of reason and can only be

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known experientially. What I mean when I use that hateful word 'experiential' is well illustrated by the Republic. In the famous passage about the three forms of the soul you will remember how Plato deduces from our rational nature the fact that we are free in the way the first language means it. What I mean by experiential is that no such deduction would be possible about the way freedom is used in the second language. Of course the claim of the first language is that the two are not really different. The first or rational language of natural theology has always said to the second, or Biblical language, 'If you attempt to understand yourself you will find that you are really me. Part of you will just disappear, but the rest of you will come out purified and ennobled by selfunderstanding.' That is, faith will be purified in seeking understanding. Let me illustrate. Those who stand by the first language say that if anybody really understands the full and proper meaning of the term 'ignorance' they will understand that everything that needs expressing in the word 'sin,' is more fully comprehended in that word 'ignorance.' 'Do go on using the word "sin,"' they say, 'because no harm is done by it. If you are smart enough, however, you will know it really means "ignorance." So equally go ahead using the word "freedom." It is a word which is a help indeed in the modern world to clear men of all the errors of mechanical determination which are abroad because of confused scientists and ignorant psychologists ... But please remember that when you speak of freedom you only mean a superior sort of determination.' To speak of freedom as an unambiguous open possibility beyond the categories of reason is just an appeal to the worse sort of irrationalism. 'Freedom is not,' they say, '"caprice."' Then the users of the first language get sterner with the irrational children who use Biblical language. 'Yes,' they say, 'as you cannot get any clearer, we will allow you to use such words as "sin" and "freedom" as a poor substitute for our clearer language, but really, if we are tolerant enough to allow you that much, then you must promise to forgo a full libertarian language and stop using nonsensical words as "responsibility" and "rebellion" because they have no meaning at all.' On the other hand, as against the intellectual superiority of the users of the first language, the users of the second proclaim superiority of existential depth (Barth, Brunner, and such folk).4 The voice now

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changes from the patiently superior accents of the tired teacher dealing with the recalcitrant child to a superiority of fervour which talks of how deeply it has lived and suffered and how that suffering is experientially validated. Its vocabulary is full of abysses, tragedies, and mysteries. 'We cannot explain or understand,' they say, 'what our language means.' It quite transcends the language of the merely academic philosopher and his abstractions and depends on experience to be understood. Decide to know and you will know. Wait upon the transcendent and you will know its infinite qualitative difference from the petty abstractions of traditional metaphysics. I once heard this type of language called 'existentialist screaming,' and, at its worst, it does seem to me just that. There is a lot of it in the5Reformed tradition. If the users of this second language hold on to it, together with a belief in God (and, of course, Sartre is an example that this is not necessarily the case), then they may say er redet mich an and look about with pitying contempt at those who have not heard that inexplicable voice. Those of us who have been formed by a tradition part liberal and part Protestant seemed to be inclined to play the game of using one language when it suits us and the other when that suits us. We speak of men as blinded by the fall and then berate them for this blindness. But, of course, it is obvious that we do not consider a man responsible when he is born blind. How often one meets men who understand and accept the language of the traditional metaphysics and yet, when talking ordinarily, speak as if men were responsible. Recently I have been reading Harnack's History of Dogma.6 The thesis of his book, as you know, is that apostolic Christianity was gradually corrupted by Greek metaphysics. Yet I find that, on the one hand, he uses the Greek account of personality to show what he means and, on the other, says that certain dogmas were concessions to Greek metaphysics when indeed they seem to me an attempt to resist it in the name of the second language. As most Canadians are a strange and confused mixture of the traditions of liberalism and Reformed theology, one meets all kinds of confusion between these two languages at all levels of our society. One of the strangest of these confusions [is one] which I have been meeting in certain ministers recently among those who, when they speak theoretically, use the language of neo-orthodox theology (Barth, Niebuhr, et al)7 and yet when they speak practically, speak with the assumptions

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of progressive capitalist democracy. It is not my business here to discuss what is true in the assumptions of either neo-orthodox theology or of progressive social democracy. One thing is, however, certain. The assumptions of these two ways of thought cannot be reconciled. When a minister combines both these languages, he is exposing a great rift in his own soul and probably creating rifts in the souls of others. The Roman Catholic Church, though more respectful to theology than ourselves, seems to have a basic confusion also. I sometimes think that Roman Catholic writers accept the language of rational theology as true in their more theoretical books, and then use the language of guilt, and responsibility, etc., in their works which emphasize the practical. Certainly, from what St Thomas says about the intellect and the will in the Summa Theologica, it would seem to me he leaves no place for Biblical language. I think he made a valiant effort to reconcile the doctrine of creation with rational theology. But I think that he was so held by the Aristotelian conception of potentiality that in his writings he was unable to understand the second kind of freedom I have described. And, as I will say later, I do not see what the doctrine of creation means unless one posits that second kind of freedom. Now at the moment within the Reformed tradition there is an influential body of theologians who simply meet this problem by turning their back on it. I refer, of course, to such men as Barth, Brunner, Niebuhr, Nygren, etc., who draw a tight division between these two traditions, ask us to turn our back on rational theology, and accept pure Biblical religion (whatever that may be).8 Niebuhr often speaks about the antithesis between Greek and Biblical thought as if the whole matter were a war between heaven and hell. But to go in for this extreme biblicism is to cut off Reformed Christianity from being able to speak consistently, because it may be remembered that the Bible never attempts any systematic theology. It is simply content to stress certain essential insights. Therefore, whenever one attempts to speak consistently, one must turn to thinkers of another tradition. The result is that Niebuhr's theology - despite its brilliant sociological insight - is at bottom unclear and purely negative. He asserts simply a few unrelated Biblical catchwords which he places beyond thought and which, therefore, must be accepted on authority. The same position is found in even more extreme form in a modern Biblical philologist such as T.W. Manson who accepts these catchwords and refuses to think them theologi-

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cally in any manner at all.9 Indeed, the modern Biblical theologians are quite useless as positive theologians because they leave one with an inevitable split between Christianity and reason. They simply rest on the authority of the book - no longer, indeed, in a literal sense - but in a way which is quite impossible for modern technological man. One has only to compare them with Tillich to see the difference I would draw between authentic and empirical theology.10 Tillich makes the deepest and most serious attempt to bring into unity the language of rational theology and the language of the Bible. He speaks in the same way as St Augustine did when he said that Plato knew the whole of Christian truth, except 'that the word became flesh.' Yet though I scorn the authoritarian biblicism of the neo-orthodox, I equally eschew the directly opposite tradition of rational theology which cuts itself off from the insights of the Biblical tradition. This unbiblical tradition one meets at its intellectually ablest in such modern rational theologians as F.R. Tennant and A.N. Whitehead.11 One finds it at its sloppiest in the optimistic secular religion of such men as N.V. Peale in the USA.12 It stands for a theological position which has detached itself from the basic terminology and speaks of the relation between man and God in a way quite foreign to the Bible. I thought this morning it might interest you why a philosopher should find this unbiblical theology inadequate. That is, I would like to say for a few moments why I believe that rational theology must never detach itself from Biblical tradition. For my first consideration I repeat that all theological traditions but the biblical one have conceptions of freedom which seem to me inadequate, because they cannot explain an absolute responsibility. And, by responsibility, I mean that at certain times the individual should, and could, do other than he actually does. Such an idea must remain a mystery to our reasons. Yet, without it, and its consequent idea of guilt, the essential seriousness of the human condition is lost. I can see no escape from affirming these two seeming contradictories - my trust in reason and equally my certainty of what I have called primary freedom. And yet in no theology I know are these two conceptions clearly and consistently related. But let me go on from mere assertion, and try to draw out how the failure of the traditional natural or rational theology to take into account the impotence of reason to comprehend this freedom leads

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that metaphysics into positions that appear to me untenable. Let me start by asserting that the traditional rational theology always seems to me to disregard the problem of evil or to trivialize it. As Professor D.M. MacKinnon, of Aberdeen, has said of traditional rationalism on this point: There is a steadfast refusal to acknowledge discontinuity in human life, to bear with its surd elements, to take those surd elements seriously in themselves and not simply by virtue of what is expressed and achieved in and through them.'13 Now, of course, it is certain that whichever of the two languages one uses, it is clear that when one comes to the problem of evil, obviously one cannot say anything intelligible. Here, at least, we can talk about abysses with good cause. To put the same problem in a different way, it is impossible (if one uses the first language) to say why infinite mind differentiates itself into finite minds; or to use other language, it is impossible to understand why God created the world. But here is the point - don't those two statements mean something quite different? For doesn't the first imply that the world is continuous with the infinite - while the second implies that the world is discontinuous with and in some mysterious sense independent of the infinite. And isn't the idea of creation an analogy drawn from that unfathomable freedom and, therefore, when we say the world is created, we mean the idea as a mystery into which our minds are swallowed up, just as they are when we try to understand what it is for us to be responsible. And isn't this idea of creation necessary if we are going to meet the problem of evil with the right agnosticism? Otherwise, without this agnosticism we try to answer the problem of evil, and when we do that, don't we in fact say that good is evil and evil is good - rather than the very different affirmation that the thing is as it is?14 And, of course, the full force of the argument that the believer must always maintain a full agnosticism before the problem of evil is only seen as we face the fact that the acts of one man are the cause of tragedy for others. Let me illustrate. When I look around at the salesmen's and stockbroker's world that we are making in North America, it seems to me very far from the good, and the ambiguity of this is intensified by the fact that the souls who are being born into that world are not only responsible for its making but will be shaped in their souls by it. Now as we look at our society, as the duty of all theologians must be, which one of two things should we say? (1) Though it is difficult to under-

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stand what meaning this world has, we do, however, know in principle the kind of meaning complete insight would reach, of course admitting that what we know in principle we cannot know in detail, or that (2) We do not know what this ultimate meaning would be either in principle or in detail, and must simply live in hope and faith that there is such an ultimate meaning, and that we are always free for that hope to die and that faith to disappear. I think that if we say the first, we are not only being trivial about sin, we are also making God a tame confederate for our petty adventurings. On the other hand, if we say the second, we seem to be coming close to sheer irrationalism. As a final illustration of the difficulty of resting solely in the first language, let me take what we are given in the Bible of the story of Golgotha and Gethsemane. I, of course, do this in all oblation and also with a certain hesitation; for there is often something very irresponsible about appeals to Scripture in philosophical arguments. I must also be excused from any philological analysis and simply accept these stories naively as they are given us. Under the first language, what possible meaning could be given to 'Not my will, but thine'?15 Under the first language, would the cry of desolation on the cross be interpreted to mean that Jesus was confused in his mind and that he showed an imperfect adherence to the sovereignty of universal rational good? The cry, it must be remembered, was not 'God does not exist.'16 Here again the traditional rational theologian might say that at the moment Jesus was epistemologically and metaphysically confused. My answer to that must be the same remark about moral seriousness and which is, of course, no proper answer. I say if there is any scene in history with which rational theology must fully come to grips, it must be this. If it cannot be brought within the scope of rational theology then I have no understanding of what that science is. Having said all this I quite realize that far more considerations have been left unsaid. For instance, I have made no attempt to justify the doctrine of transcendence. Perhaps in this matter my hesitation between considerations should be illustrated. For were I to attempt to justify my doctrine of transcendence, I would employ the very arguments I have learned from Plato in his Parmenides. What I would have to do would be to show that transcendence can be postulated in one way so as to be unknowable in another. Whether this can be reconciled with postulating an unfathomable freedom, I am not yet certain.

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But this takes us back to the heart of my paper. Members of the Reformed Churches in Canada must rethink their theological tradition. We cannot rest in unthought and unrelated biblical metaphors of evangelical neo-orthodox theology. Even less can we rest in any theology cut off from the basic insights of the Bible. Neither can we accept the Roman Catholic attempt to unite Biblical and rational thought as found in St Thomas Aquinas. We must go forward to think an authentic theology of our own, theoretically facing the deepest problems of reason, practically facing the dilemmas of contemporary technological society. The achievement of such a theology will not be the work of a few men, but a massive job for many men. For authentic theology is only practised in much sweat, agony, cooperative thought and loneliness. Yet just at a time when this work is so necessary for the Church, the Reformed tradition in Canada seems to have turned its back on any strenuous theological life, replacing it by rhetoric, organization, evangelical excitement, and democratic cliche. There is, for instance, no single journal of theological studies in Canada. The question Reformed churchmen must ask themselves is, 'Have we excluded theologians from the Church?' If we have, we must know that it is the infinite mercy of God that a true synthesis between faith and reason will be sought by those outside the Church. Faith is not mocked - any more than God is mocked - and will therefore seek understanding elsewhere. But in the short run such a division between the Church and theology would be tragic.17 Addendum (1988) Rereading something I wrote thirty-five years ago produces saddened laughter. This is so even when the rereading is done at the request of a trusted friend. How could I have made so many mistakes; how fragile is the attempt to have knowledge of the whole. When one is writing down present thoughts about past thoughts, the principle of such a procedure must be stated firmly. The important question is the truth of the matter at hand, not the vagaries of my particular personality. It is important to say this in a society the vulgarity of which is intensified by the journalism of 'personalities.' Why I have changed my mind is only of interest in so far as it clarifies what is under discussion. At the great heights, for example Mozart's music,

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what still matters is his music, not the details of his life. It is only at the greatest height that the universal teachings and the particular life are at one, so that we learn from both together. But this central fact of Christianity is no reason not to be suspicious of the historicist personalising of thought. To put it from the author's point of view: the mistakes are 'mine'; the truth is not 'mine.' The chief mistake in this piece is that in describing what I called Biblical language, I was in fact describing the language of modern existentialism. The egregious confusion vitiates the substance of the paper. This is apparent in what I say about 'freedom.' To quote: 'The Biblical language rests upon a totally different use of the word freedom. Freedom in this (the Biblical) language is not the gift of truth.' But this is clearly not true. It is only necessary to quote: 'The truth shall make you free.'18 Whatever differences there may be between Platonism and Christianity as to how and when truth is given us, it is clear that in both freedom is given us through truth. Therefore we do not stand before good and evil choosing as it were between equal alternatives. Such a position is related to an entirely different use of the word freedom. In the same connection, Augustine's insistence that evil is the absence, not the opposite of good is essential if we are not to fall into a false dualism. To put the matter in language not easy for moderns, Platonism and Christianity are at their centre concerned with grace - if that word is given its literal meaning. Grace simply means that the great things of our existing are given us, not made by us and finally not to be understood as arbitrary accidents. Our making takes place within an ultimate givenness. However difficult it is for all of us to affirm that life is a gift, it is an assertion primal to Christianity. Through the vicissitudes of life - the tragedies, the outrages, the passions, the disciplines, and madnesses of everyday existence - to be a Christian is the attempt to learn the substance of that assertion. Therefore, freedom cannot be used (as I did in this piece) as human absoluteness of choice, both in doing and making. For myself, I would now define 'freedom' as the liberty to be indifferent to good. This is of course a quite different use of the word from the authentic 'freedom' of modern existentialism which at its heart is an expression of heroic atheism. How it was possible to make such an egregious confusion is of interest in as far as it illustrates the power of the modern ambience to enfold us, even when one becomes Christian. I had been brought up in

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secularised Protestantism which in the English-speaking world generally expressed itself in some form of liberal progressivism. Canadians held on to that latter faith much longer than people in more sophisticated centres. As that liberalism becomes positivistic, under the influence of modern science, it becomes simply a desire to make the world as we want it. And when positivism tries to express itself as a way of life it almost inevitably uses the language of authentic existentialist freedom. (It hardly needs saying that these very general descriptive words often do not enter the heads of those to whom this is happening. But consistent languages are abroad in modern mass societies, even when they appear as unthought cliches.) In my own case this positivist-cum-existentialist language was what I took for granted, and through it I attempted to express the Christianity to which I had been converted. When I went back to Oxford after the war to study theology, I was taught it largely by people who believed in 'all this and heaven too.'19 They persuaded me to do my thesis on a philosopher of religion who took for granted that Christianity went well with the program of modernity. (Nietzsche and Heidegger were of course not talked about. Hadn't the Germans just lost the war?) It has taken me a whole life time to begin to free myself from the language of modernity. It was hard to recognize that such thinkers as Rousseau and Nietzsche, and even at a lower level J.S. Mill, thought they were digging the grave of Christianity. It took me less time to see that bourgeois Protestantism in Canada was largely made up of people who considered religion simply as a buttress for certain cherished moral ideas. Fewer and fewer of these people were continuing to consider it a useful buttress. Multiform delusions about society and about myself held me from the real task of expressing Christianity in a nonantiquarian way, which at the same time did not leave it a simple flatterer of the spirit of the decadent age. Obviously nothing in the foregoing denies that when we look, in this time of deep uncertainty, at what we are as western people, the central task of thought requires us to be aware of some tension between what comes to us from Athens and what from Jerusalem. I prefer to say what comes to us from Socrates and from Christ. These beings were both condemned by their cities and in those condemnations and consequent deaths we touch the 'beyond' - use if you will the difficult word 'eternal.' At least till recently 'transcendence' has

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been the source of both the peace and the agnosticism which supported the very being of western peoples. Anyone who wishes to partake in philosophy, and also hopes that he or she is made with the sign of Christ, must be aware of some tension in the relation between thought and revelation, though at the same time knowing that finally they must be at one. Western civilization has torn itself apart in the disastrous wars of this era and now in its shallowest forms pushes itself throughout the whole world. Therefore we cannot but ask ourselves what we have been, what we are, and what we shall be, historically. To do that must be to look upon Socrates and Christ. To state this puts one in profound opposition to the most profound thinker about modernity. Heidegger has rejected the above account of the necessary rethinking. He wishes a return which goes back behind Socrates and he makes plain that revelation, in the sense that Christianity means it, did not take place. Concerning Socrates, Heidegger is not entirely explicit, because he does not come to written terms with the relation between Plato and Socrates. Nevertheless, in his cautious and highly professorial way, he seems to be accepting the basic Nietzschean teaching about Socrates. This was that Socrates, in his terror before the abyss which underlies existence, imposed on thinking that rationalism which united reason and virtue and happiness. According to Heidegger it is from that Socratic rationalism that western technology came forth. Now in the full presence of the sway of technology, we must seek our origins in the Greek thought which came before that Socratic rationalism. Heidegger has also spoken too often and too contemptuously of 'the moral God of Christianity' for anyone to believe that he found in the Gospel the revelation of perfection. (I use here together the subjective and objective genitives.) In the light of Heidegger's genius, those of us who reject his rejections (if rejection is indeed possible within the masterly historicism) of both the Gospels and the Platonic dialogues, must be able to say what is inadequate in To Be and Time.' The fact that what is given us in Socrates and Christ leaves us in tension does not say anything as to the primacy between the two. But revelation is, after all, revelation. And we may say again what has been said so often: either Christ is what He claims to be or is misguided to the point of lunacy. Indeed as we must agree at some evident level with the central truth of existentialism - namely that we are beings

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towards death - we cannot but compare the two executions. Whatever must be said about the consummate serenity and beauty of Socrates at his execution, that scene is not as comprehensively close to the very heart of being as are Gethsemane and Golgotha. The appalling admonition 'Take up your cross and follow me' cuts to the heart of our existing and indeed to the heart of both being and goodness. 29 June 1988 Halifax, Nova Scotia

Notes 1 Joan O'Donovan, George Grant and the Twilight of Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1984), 15,181. 2 William Christian, ed., George Grant: Selected Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), Letter 115, pp. 175 n. 7,176. 3 Ibid., Letter 119, p. 183 4 Karl Barth (1886-1968), Swiss reformed theologian, was the leading exponent of crisis theology, or dialectical theology which emphasizes the contradiction between God and the world as revealed in scripture. Emil Brunner (1899-1966), Swiss Protestant theologian, taught at Zurich. In contrast to Barth's crisis theology, he held that humans, though unable to provide their own salvation, were able to respond to God. 5 'He speaks to me.' 6 Adolph von Harnack (1851-1930), Lutheran church historian and liberal theologian. History of Dogma includes 7 volumes (London: Williams and Norgate 1894-9). 7 Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), American socialist theologian whose theology was called 'neo-orthodox,' taught that God is wholly other than human beings. See his Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (2 vols, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1945) (Gifford Lectures, 1939). 8 Anders Nygren (1890-1978), Swedish theologian, distinguished Eros and Agapeand identified the latter with the essential content of Christianity. His work includes Agape and Eros: Part 1, A Study of the Christian Idea of Love, Part 2, The History of the Christian Idea of Love, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press 1953). 9 T. William Manson (1882-1958) published The Incarnate Glory, an Expository Study of the Gospel according to St John (1923), The Gospel of Luke (1930), and

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Jesus the Messiah, the Synoptic Tradition of the Revelation of God in Christ with Special Reference to Form-Criticism (1943). 10 Paul Tillich (1886-1965), German Protestant theologian, moved to America (1933) and taught existentialist theology at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard, and Chicago. His work includes The Courage to Be (1952) and Systematic Theology, 3 vols (1951-63). 11 Frederick Robert Tennant (1866-1957), Cambridge theologian and philosopher of religion, in Philosophical Theology (1928), interpreted faith broadly as the volitional element in all knowledge, but argued it is insufficient by itself to give knowledge of reality. Alfred North Whitehead - see note 8 in 'Philosophy' (21). Grant wrote in 1975 that Whitehead's writings inadequately affirmed God 'as subsidiary to process' and tasted 'of secularized Anglicanism seeking a Harvard substitute for prayer' ('Justice and Technology,' 1984, written 1975; reprinted in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader [Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1997], 441). 12 Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993), popular and influential American clergyman, wrote the best-selling book The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). 13 Donald MacKenzie MacKinnon (1913-1980), British theologian, taught at Cambridge and Oxford when Grant was studying there, as well as at Aberdeen. MacKinnon uses the notion of 'surd' elements in his theology by analogy from the phonetic and mathematical use, referring to those truths of existence and experience such as affliction that cannot be expressed rationally or logically but must be acknowledged nonetheless. It was of great importance to Grant that providence is inscrutable, that we do not understand in detail why God's providence includes human affliction. 14 Grant is here paraphrasing Luther's 21st Heidelberg Thesis: 'The theologian of glory says that evil is good and good evil; the theologian of the cross says that the thing is as it is' (trans. John Baillie in Our Knowledge of God). For a discussion of Grant's connection to the theology of the cross see Sheila Grant, 'Grant and the Theology of the Cross' in Arthur Davis,ed.,George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, and

Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 243-62. See also the editorial introduction to Grant's DPhil thesis in volume 1 of the Collected Works, 157-66. 15 'Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.' Luke 22:42. 16 'And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' Matt. 27:46. 17 The original 1953 version included the following questions at the end of the

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text: ('I was asked to include some questions with this paper. They are large questions and included in all humility.') 1. What role should the study of theology play in the life of the ordinary busy minister? 2. Are the Reformed Churches training theologians who will be able to speak clearly about the relation of theological truth to the truths of modern natural and social sciences and their related techniques such as psychiatry? 3. Should the Reformed Churches make a clearer division than at present in the training and use of ministers between those whose calling is to the practical life and those whose calling is to the contemplative life? 18 John 8:32. 19 Grant seems to have attached to this book and movie title the tendency of Christianity (including some of his teachers at Oxford) to compromise too much with the modern world, as if one could 'have it both ways.' But All This and Heaven Too was also one of Grant's favourite movies according to Sheila Grant. Made in the USA in 1940, starring Bette Davis, Charles Boyer, and Barbara O'Neil, it was based on the best-selling 1938 romantic novel of the same title by Rachel Field (1894-1942). It tells the story of a French nobleman who falls in love with his governess (due to their mutual love of his children), and who then, in tragic circumstances, ends up murdering his wife and dying himself. 20 German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) published his most famous work, Sein und Zeit, in 1927. It is usually translated as Being and Time, but Grant wished to draw attention to the infinitive verb form with his translation To Be and Time.

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This article appeared in volume 14, issue 1, of Food for Thought, September-October 1953: 3-8. According to Sheila Grant, her husband always tried to respond when asked by the Adult Education people to write something. His thought about philosophy added a note to such writings that had been absent when he was working for the CAAE in 1943 and 1944. The article was reprinted in the journal of the National Institute of Adult Education in London, England: Adult Education: A Quarterly Review 26/4 (Spring 1954): 247-53.

On the cover of the November 1952 FOOD FOR THOUGHT, these words appeared: 'What Does Democracy Demand of Education and Philosophy?' This reminded me of General MacArthur saying how communism threatened God.1 As the word God means that infinite being which is the source of all finite being, the one thing we cannot do to God is threaten Him. So equally the one thing that cannot be done with philosophy is to demand something of it. To say that it serves something other than itself, for example the Church or democracy or the Parent Teachers Association, is just to say that it is not philosophy. For finally truth alone is able to make demands. It is, therefore, philosophy that makes demands on democracy and not vice versa. I start from this platitude because the forgetting of it has done so much harm to adult education in Canada. The practical certainty of adult educators has made them pursue a series of ends without much thought of the proper ordering of these ends in a scale of importance. Thus limited ends such as democratic citizenship, economic prosperity, or sexual normality have been exalted into idols because they were not thought in proper subordination to what was more impor-

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tant than they. The subtle causes for this confusion can only be hinted at here. First, of course, a pioneering and expanding society like ours was naturally taken up with the pursuit of immediate goals. Secondly, most of the adult educators (other than Roman Catholics) seem to have been people who just recently had lost faith in the old Protestantism, under the influence of scientific and philosophic criticism. They had ended up in some form of humanism varying all the way from a stern Marxism through pragmatism to an attenuated theism. Like all revolts, these liberalisms carried over much of what they had revolted against and therefore their ethical concepts became an unsystematic blending of the old Protestantism and the new scientific mythology. Such words as 'democracy' and 'the course of history/ 'progressive/ and 'the felt needs of the common man' served as the governing ethical vocabulary. The idea of cultural determinism produced its obvious corollary, the shaping of masses through political and economic manipulation. The fact that the absolute was conceived no longer as transcendent, infinite, and free, but as immanent, finite, and determined meant that the job of the social engineer became the most important in society. Education began to be thought of as a species of social engineering. Anything that would serve that liberal faith was used as an ally. Only one school of philosophy could be used - the pragmatism of James and Dewey, because that position was nothing but a hidden attack on philosophy from within.2 That pragmatism is not philosophy at all but the denial of philosophy can, of course, be seen in its central contradiction, namely, its making of theory subordinate to practice. For a theory which asserts the subordination of all theory to social usefulness has no way of knowing whether its own theory is true. This tendency also allowed the adult education movement to make use of the sciences, and particularly the less rigorous of these which are known as social sciences. Thus, the tracts of Margaret Meade, Ruth Benedict, Brock Chisholm, and the Institute of Child Study could be distributed as scientific fact, when they were mostly covert [peddling] of dogma.3 Modern psychology was found especially useful. Because it can present us with every fact about man, it can tell us anything about man we want to believe. For instance, it has been used up to now to adjust the middle class to a moderately monogamous life in the suburbs. Of course, as the going gets tougher with the Asiatics it can

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equally well be used to adjust men to the jobs necessary for that situation (jobs that are not carried out in the suburbs).4 Social scientists could be successfully used because they were generally in the same situation as the adult educators - emancipating themselves from Protestantism to humanism and using their science as a means of showing they were right to do so. Now in saying that democracy cannot demand anything of philosophy I do not mean that democracy is the enemy of philosophy. In no way do I wish to associate myself with those who disparage democracy by looking back longingly to the old rule of landlords and clerics. But what I do mean is that our democratic forms cannot be judged valuable for themselves. They are but means, only valuable in as much as they leave men freer to pursue their proper end than do other political and social forms. If democracy has no right to demand anything of philosophy, neither can it demand anything of education. Education is a more comprehensive term than philosophy. It includes all the activities of the human mind of which philosophy is only the crown. The very word education reminds us of Plato's archetypal allegory of the cave, wherein human existence is described as the movement out of the shadows and imaginings of ignorance into the sunlight of knowledge. I do not use the word knowledge, as is generally done in our pragmatic age, to mean the understanding's manipulation of the world for its own purposes. I use it rather as any means that brings the human spirit to self-consciousness. All our activities - from our most primitive perceptions and playings as children, through our first use of the understanding in science, through art and practical activities, to religion and philosophy - are but steps leading us to that great light. The highest moment known to finite mind is the activity of a saint such as Socrates, wherein the knowledge of his own mind leads him to the presence of the absolute mind. The job of education is to cultivate in all people, at whatever stage they may have reached, that receptivity to the infinite which will not allow them to rest. Indeed political activities may be for many men the most educative moments of their existence in this world. They can sometimes lead men to partake of the concrete reality of justice as no other experiences can. And in so far as democracy is the form of organization which opens these and similar experiences most widely to

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men, it is the best form of government. But it is only the best form of government as education's servant, not as its master. It has, I think, become the great glory of adult education in Canada to remind the academics that the classroom is but a small corner of education and that learning to bear responsibility in a union or freeing one's mind of racial prejudice or playing about with water colours on a beach is equally education. But this broader vision has often been vitiated by the denial that education is of intrinsic use to the human soul, and the assertion instead that it serves some extrinsic purpose. I remember that when Dr Corbett suggested that the supreme words of Socrates' Apology, 'the unexamined life is not worth living,' should be put on the masthead of FOOD FOR THOUGHT, it was objected to because the words sounded too academic, too cut off from 'the feltneeds' of Canadian society.5 What, it was implied, do Farm Forums and PTA's care about the examined life - what people want is to know how to live in their communities. But, as so often, Dr Corbett's genius saw the central point. He saw that adult education stood for no limited social ends, but for that highest end, the self-liberation of the human soul by the systematic examination of its own activities; and that all the programs of teaching business men to be good business men and farmers to be good farmers and parents to be good parents and all to be good citizens were just preliminaries to that end. To put Socrates on the masthead was not a denial of democracy, but a splendid affirmation of it, because it implied that this infinite self-examination was open as much to the coal miner and the bank president as to anybody else. Indeed, it is the curse of education in Canada not to take itself seriously. I do not mean by this that we have not had enough platitudes about its importance by university presidents, politicians, and speakers at adult education conferences. Any fair minded person will admit that Canada is not poor in such platitudes. What I mean by not taking it seriously is the willingness of us who are responsible for it to surrender to the pressure of those who want to use it for some limited end. Thus, we in the universities give way to the tyranny of the rich men who control us, and let them turn our universities into instruments for their cheap version of the expanding economy. Teachers in the schools give in to the democratic mass and the provincial administrators, and allow our schools to be turned into homes of intellectual security and complacency. Well-meaning enthusiasts in the PTA have often been the

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shock troops of this enslavement. The adult education movement, younger and less a vested interest than our tired schools and universities, has often resisted courageously these outside pressures when they were applied openly. But in subtler ways it too has given in, allowing it to be thought that education's purpose may be its usefulness to some class, some form of government, or to some pattern of behaviour judged normal by bourgeois psychologists and housewives. The question should be reversed: What do education and philosophy demand of democracy? And as the democratic elements in our society are not as influential as the plutocratic, it also should be asked what is demanded of plutocracy. The answer is clear in principle. The definition of man as a free rational being is one that the philosopher can affirm with some certainty. This definition, though it cannot be entirely justified in thought, can be known as the only possible one because all others make knowledge a function of something else and therefore have no way of justifying themselves, that is, of showing themselves to be knowledge. Involved in this definition is the idea that man's profoundest activity is the desire to know. An analysis of this desire involves a conception of infinity, because the faculty of knowing is one of continually transcending ourselves, and there is no limit to the possibility of that self-transcendence. If such is the only true definition of man, all the activities of society may be judged by how far they lead men on the journey of continual self-transcendence. I would be the last to minimize the value of such activities as the Farm Forum, the Banff School, the St Francis Xavier movement, the Community Life Training Institute, or in certain contexts the work of parent education.6 But all these programs are only concerned with the early stages of the mind's journey to reality. It is often said that this is necessary and that the higher reaches should be left to others, to the universities and even to the churches. My reply would be this. First, it is a plain fact that the universities and churches are falling down in the performance of this job. (Note: In speaking of the churches, I speak solely of the Protestant tradition, the only one of which I have direct experience.) At least in the circles I move in the practice of rational contemplation is not being widely encouraged by the churches. The church in Canada has lost the intellectuals and is falling more and more into non-intellectual control. It is but to state the obvious to say that the cultivation of the higher reaches

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of art, morality, religion, and philosophy is a dying phenomenon in Canadian universities. Therefore, as the adult education movement cannot rely on others for its spiritual power, it will have to provide it itself. Secondly, the adult education movement in any case would have a responsibility to carry on the work started at the universities. Youngsters generally are not ready to understand and partake in the deepest experiences of art, morality, and religion. They are certainly not ready to ponder upon those experiences, to see the ambiguities involved in them, and to attempt to think them as a whole - that is, for philosophy. These are activities of which most men are capable only when they have long passed the university level. Thirdly, though not all education is concerned with the end of the journey, yet if the nature of that end is opaque to those who give leadership in the early stages, these stages will be wrongly pursued. The issue at stake is whether many people are capable of more than a mediocre education. The truth or falsehood of this cannot, of course, be known empirically. The dogma of the incapacity of the majority is certainly held by pseudo-aristocrats at our universities, as an excuse for their laziness or despair. The abiding truth of the Protestant Reformation was that the highest life could be lived in any circumstances. Though today we may put this affirmation in rather different language some equivalent is necessary if we are to hold any rational faith. As such it must be the premise on which adult education proceeds, however much the sad facts of practice may teach that this ideal is not easily incarnate. Against such an optimistic view of adult education, it is often affirmed that our civilization is now entering an ice age in which all spiritual forms will increasingly disintegrate. Certainly the signs of chaos are all around us. But there are other signs which point to hope and which are of particular significance for adult education. We may recognise the spiritual desert in which the worship of motor cars, deodorants, and the passing sensation turns our industrial society into a group of externally directed men.7 But it must also be recognized that we are presented with the undoubted fact of leisure. The attention consequent upon work is probably for many men the condition of the good life, and it would be folly to speak of leisure as an unconditional good. Still, it is true that before industrialism many had to work so

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hard that no energy for education was left. The present use of leisure and wealth in Canada is not inspiring. Still it must be remembered that the depression is only fifteen years away, and that people who in one generation are freed from skimping are not liable to use their abundance wisely. The 'ifs' are immense and if a sane man must bet, he might well bet on disaster. But if we do not fight the Asiatics in full scale war, and if prosperity continues, then people will have a surfeit of external stimulation over a long period and boredom with the superficial may perhaps arise. The second ground for optimism is the very confusion about ultimate issues. The old Protestantism, which was the formative tradition in the lives of most English speaking Canadians and which began to be doubted by intellectuals two generations ago, has now almost entirely lost its hold. Indeed, it is hard to look with anything but sadness at that process, in which so much wisdom has been forgotten. Nevertheless, a lot of error has been discarded too. And the chief ground for optimism is the fact that we are now in a stage where the negative side of that revolt can be replaced by a positive assessment. The agnostic humanism which was a temporary substitute can now be seen in all its emptiness. For the last two generations sensitive men have been able to revolt and revolt against the tradition of the west and still find grounds for hope by holding inconsistently to a detached fragment of that very tradition. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the emancipated said: We can show you that God does not exist, but after all that is not important because we can still give you grounds for believing life valuabl.' Today the evidence against hope and against God's existence piles up before us, and yet as that evidence increases it becomes clearer that if God does not exist, then the difference made is not unimportant but total. All partial grounds for hope have been wiped away. This is what makes Sartre such a power over men's minds.8 In his philosophy and his art he has marshalled the arguments and evidence against God's existence and has said that God does not exist. But he does not judge this unimportant, rather he says that this being so, the human condition is anguish. As despair becomes an open possibility to the sensitive and intelligent of our society, the opportunity for a profound adult education will become unlimited. When men encounter nothingness they are at last driven to seek reality. As in the pointless universe the days are spent in the beauty parlours, at the

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cineramic feelies, or in the search to prolong a dying virility, in the days when there is always economic plenty and even cruelty has become tedious, then will be the moment to speak to men of education, of the journey of their minds to liberation.

Notes 1 Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) commanded the American forces in the southwest Pacific theatre in the Second World War, administered Japan during the occupation, and led the United Nations forces during the first nine months of the Korean War. We did not find the statement about God and communism. 2 William James (1842-1910), American psychologist and philosopher, developed the pragmatist ideas of Charles S. Peirce: beliefs are true if they work in practice. See Pragmatism (1907) and The Meaning of Truth (1909). John Dewey - see note 12 in 'Pursuit of an Illusion' (p. 47). See The School and Society (1899) and Experience and Education (1938). 3 Margaret Mead (1901-78), American anthropologist, was connected to the American Museum of Natural History in New York from 1926 on. She wrote 23 books on 'cultural conditioning' among the peoples of Oceania, including the controversial Growing Up in New Guinea (1930). Ruth Benedict (1887-1948), American anthropologist, taught at Columbia University, and was a leading member of the culture and personality movement. Her work includes Patterns of Culture (1934) and Race, Science and Politics (1940).

George Brock Chisholm (1896-1971), Canadian psychiatrist, was the first director-general of the World Health Organization. He received many awards and also criticism for his attacks on the use of myths, superstitions, and indoctrination in the teaching of children. The Institute of Child Study, known for its 'progressive' approach, is run by the Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto to carry out the social and psychological study of pre-school children. 4 The Korean War had begun on 25 June 1950 and by 1953 American defence expenditures had risen to over $53 billion, four times the pre-Korean level. 5 Edward Annand Corbett (1884-1964), adult educator who worked under Henry Marshall Tory at Khaki University and the University of Alberta. As first director of the Canadian Association for Adult Education (1936-51) he was instrumental in the setting up of the CBC's Farm Forum and Citizen's Forum, as well as the founding of Food for Thought. He hired Grant as national secretary of the CAAE in 1943.

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6 Farm Radio Forum (1941-65) was a national rural listening-discussion group project sponsored by the Canadian Association for Adult Education, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, and the CBC. The Banff School of Fine Arts began in 1933 as a special summer program sponsored by the University of Alberta's Division of Continuing Education and was intended to provide cultural enrichment for beginners and serious amateurs in drama, music, and art. St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, established its Department of Extension in 1928. Father Moses Coady was the leader of the liberal Catholic 'Antigonish Movement' that used adult education as a means towards social improvement and economic organization in the fishing, mining, and agriculture communities of eastern Nova Scotia. The Community Life Training Institute was a rural education project in Barrie, Ontario, begun by Dr E.A. Corbett and a group from the University of Toronto interested in the development of the economically depressed Simcoe County area. 7 Grant is referring to the concept of the new 'other-directed man,' developed in a sociological best-seller of the day, David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New York: Doubleday 1953). 8 Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), French philosopher, dramatist, and novelist, was the most popularly known 'existentialist' philosopher in the 1950s. He was a disciple of Heidegger, but recast Heidegger's thought and claimed existentialism was an atheistic humanism. See Grant's 'Jean-Paul Sartre' in this volume, 123, and a discussion of Grant and Sartre in the introduction (xxx and note 31).

Plato and Popper

In his controversial book The Open Society and Its Enemies philosopher of science Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902-94) drew a distinction between 'Utopian social engineers' (such as Plato, Hegel, and Marx) and 'piecemeal social engineers' (liberal social scientists who eschew metaphysical truths). The former he accused of legitimating totalitarian forms of politics. Grant's critical review of Popper's thesis, defending Plato's idea of the contemplative life, appeared in volume 22, no. 2, of The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, May 1954: 18594. Grant said this article, along with his article on Russell (see 000), would 'show even farther what l mean' in response to the controversy over his article on philosophy for the Massey Commission. See the introduction to this volume for an account of Grant's encounter with Fulton Anderson of the University of Toronto (xxii-xxvii).

In 1945 Professor K.R. Popper published a work on political theory called The Open Society and Its Enemies.a It extols the 'open' as against the 'closed' society and criticizes those thinkers who have supposedly advocated the closed society. The first volume is concerned with criticizing Plato, whom Popper believes to be the chief totalitarian theorist of the ancient world; the second volume with the criticism of Hegel and Marx as the chief totalitarian theorists of modern Europe. This article sets out to refute what Popperb says about Plato. Space forbids a defence of Hegel, although such a defence would be valuable these a This article makes use of the 1949 English edition of Popper's work. b I have to use Professor Popper's name so often that it would seem pedantic to affix a title to it each time.

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days when some men choose a few political sentences from Hegel, detach them from his central philosophic position, and put him in the same category as Marx. Nevertheless, Plato is a greater genius even than Hegel, so that the refutation of Popper's position can rest on what he says about the greatest of philosophers. Such a defence is incumbent on a philosopher in these days, when no adequate understanding of Plato can be assumed. Indeed in North America, where the fides implicita of the social scientists has been empirical and pragmatic, Popper's thesis is liable to convince; for it is in essence a justification of that pragmatic tradition against the rationalism of Plato. Men who want to believe that there is such a thing as an independent 'social science' can find in Popper reasons for doing so. I Popper contrasts those whose principle of political action is 'piecemeal social engineering' with those who advocate 'Utopian social engineering.' This distinction means that the 'piecemeal social engineer' is concerned with improving certain aspects of society without establishing general laws about society; while the 'Utopian social engineer' first makes general laws about social development and then infers the particularity of action from these laws. In this sense the Utopian social engineer is an 'historicist.' These general laws become chains binding men's minds, so that they are no longer free to manipulate society for their own ends. Therefore, the Utopian becomes the basic totalitarian, who believes in the closed society; while the piecemeal social engineer is the democrat who believes in the open society. The closed society is for Popper that in which the grounds for action are found in taboo or uncriticized dogma; the open society is that in which the grounds for action are always under the control of the critical faculty of man. Plato is represented as the archetype of the totalitarian in the classical world. The determining motive behind his philosophy was his hatred of Athenian democracy. He lived in a period when the closed tribal society of Greece was threatened by the new open democracy developing in Athens. The stress of that period so frightened him that his deepest desire was to return to the safety of the tribal community. His political theories - indeed all his philosophy - are merely an

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attempt to justify the ancient society so that men will be persuaded to turn back to it. His theory of ideas, that is, his belief in a transcendent reality upon which the world of our senses depends, is just an extrapolation by his metaphysical imagining so that the changeless tribal society can be held up in its glory against the free democracy of Athens. Popper writes: It seems to be a consistent and hardly refutable interpretation of the material to present Plato as a totalitarian party politician, unsuccessful in his immediate and practical undertakings, but in the long run only too successful in his propaganda for the arrest and overthrow of a civilization which he hates.c Or again, after describing the dualist character of Plato's philosophy, Popper writes: And this whole dualistic philosophy originated, as I believe, in the sociological domain, from the contrasts between a stable society, and a society in the process of revolution.d All Plato's praise of the rational life is just a pretence, behind which he masks his deep hatred of the free play of human reason in democracy. It is necessary first to point out that if Popper's statements about sociological determination are taken seriously, it is impossible to philosophize at all. Just as the Freudian says that men believe in God because they are dominated by the father image and so refuses to discuss the truth or falsity of the statement 'God exists;' so Popper concentrates his attack on the doctrine of ideas by saying it was motivated by social tension and he is therefore spared the tiresome job of discussing its validity. I might myself pick up this two-edged sword and refuse to discuss the truth of Popper's thesis, and content myself with c The Open Society, 1,149.

d Ibid., 1,73.1 would disagree with the interpretation of Plato as a dualist. I believe that Plato's philosophy centres on the conception of a transcendent good and thereby overcomes the dualism between universal and particular, the one and the many, soul and body, etc. In other words I accept in broad outline Plotinus' interpretation of Plato. However, to justify this would require many pages and is not necessary for this article, because Popper does not discuss Plato's metaphysics as true or false.

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embroideries on the theme that his book was motivated by his hankering after the bourgeois society of Europe and the instability of his life as a refugee. It would be ruder to use such methods about a living man than about one dead twenty-four hundred years, but the principle is the same. Popper cannot deny the freedom of Plato's intellect and expect us to accept the objectivity of his own conclusions. From Marx to Mannheim, the sociologists have been denying the possibility of metaphysical knowledge by asserting the principle of sociological determinacy.1 If they do not want us to accept this principle simply on faith, they need philosophy to establish it. The impossibility of philosophy is always being proved by philosophy. With that as preliminary, I would hold that Popper's misinterpretation arises from taking what is secondary in Plato and making it primary. Popper thinks that Plato's chief interest is in political means. I would say his chief interest is in the question of ends, and his chief point about that is that man's end cannot be found in political life. What else can the transcendent Good of the Republic and the transcendent One of the Parmenides mean but that? I would maintain that Plato understood that political methods can only be judged in their dependence upon man's proper end. Indeed, if Plato's primary interest was politics, why was it that in the classical world men with such utterly different approaches to politics as Julian, Plotinus, Origen, and Augustine could all accept the Platonic philosophy as true?2 This was possible surely because they found in Plato not chiefly a political programme, but answers to questions which they considered took precedence over political philosophy. To justify and illustrate my interpretation of Plato, it is necessary to present an alternative analysis of Plato's part in Greek History, to replace Popper's cops-and-robbers thesis of 1848 democrats and absolutists. In doing this I hope never to imply that my historical causes have caught the soaring freedom of Plato's intellect. The generality of my analysis must also be excused by the limits of an article. Plato came of a family which for generations had helped to shape Athens in its glory. Yet he reached maturity just as the results of the Peloponnesian War became catastrophically clear both for Athens and its enemies. Plato believed that disaster had been brought on and

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prolonged by the folly of both sides.6 Also, in the domestic political struggle of Athens, both parties, oligarchs and democrats, were responsible for the policies that dragged Athens to disaster. It was, after all, the party of democracy which had chiefly advocated imperialism and held Athens to the policy of fighting the other Greek states to the death. It was the party of democracy which had been guilty of appalling atrocities against the people of its own empire in the name of imperial power. By Plato's lifetime the leaders of democracy were in no sense men of Pericles' calibre. On the other hand, Plato makes clear in his famous letter how contemptuous he was of the crimes of the oligarchic party when it came to power. He reminds us in his dialogues that the chief political action of Socrates' life had been a refusal to be involved with the crimes of the oligarchs. Plato was surely right in his affirmation that Athens had been ruined by class war at home and by expansionist ambitions abroad. The very tragedy of the political circumstances forced on him the question of life's meaning beyond politics. The chief fact that was to take Plato beyond the question of political means was the trial and death of Socrates. Just as it would be impossible to conceive Paul's letters if Jesus had not borne the crucifixion in the way He did, so the Platonic dialogues are dominated by the memory of Socrates' bearing of his affliction. The Word had been made flesh for Plato. The tragic words at the end of the Phaedo ring out in their austerity.3 What dilemma is more likely to drive a man to thought about the purpose of politics than the execution of a saint by the democrats? The central factor in Plato's historical situation (indeed the one Popper misses entirely) was, however, that Greek polytheism had lost all claims to intellectual respectability, largely because of fifth-century science and philosophy. This polytheism had in general provided the principles of private and public action for the Greeks. But the science which had destroyed these mythological grounds for action was unable to replace them. Yet as men are both rational and active, clarity e This is not the place for a detailed historical analysis of the causes of the Peloponnesian War. Suffice it to say that Popper's justification of Athenian imperialism seems to forget a large part of the history.

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about the principles of conduct is the crucial issue of life. This was the situation which Socrates and Plato were concerned to meet. Men's inability to reconcile the traditional polytheism with philosophic and scientific reason surely appears in all the records of the day.f The confusion in the minds of educated Greeks is brilliantly described in the characters of the Republic. Thrasymachus believes that education will lead to a self-interested cynicism. Glaucon and Adeimantus accept this cynicism with part of their minds and yet want Socrates to show them that it is not true. Popper claims that figures such as Thrasymachus are just bogies whom Plato created to scare men back to the old certainties. Of course, whether Thrasymachus is a bogey or a real exemplar of a certain state of the soul cannot be answered by an appeal to historical evidence, but to the present. Is the man whose only principle is a denial of principle a figment of the philosopher's imagination? I can only say that Popper's experience in the twentieth century must have been very different from my own. Also, if Plato's descriptions of unprincipled men are just bogies to scare men back to the old certainties, why does Plato continually bring in traditionalists and expose the inadequacies of their principles? Why, if Plato desired a return to the old mythologies, did he write with such clarity about the distinction between myth and truth? If Popper says there was no deep confusion in Greece about the grounds of right action, then he must show where men found such clarity before the Platonic philosophy. Popper puts forward Protagoras as having provided that clarity. Where in the records of Protagoras does he find it? Indeed, Protagoras made clearer than previously the negative side of morality, that is, the idea of man's responsibility, but he said nothing about the positive side, namely, what are the principles of right action. This is the centre of Popper's misinterpretation. He criticizes Plato's philosophy, while avoiding this question which is central to Plato. Of course the doctrine of ideas will seem arbitrary imagining, if it is cut off from the question it is posited to solve. It is impossible to write a fair history of the New Deal without mentioning that there was an ecof As that evidence cannot be presented here, I would refer the reader to two recent books largely concerned with the question: E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, Calif. 1951), and F.M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiae (Cambridge 1952).

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nomic depression in 1932. In the light of the order in which the dialogues were written, how can one doubt that the role of reason in the practical life is Plato's chief question? The first dialogues are concerned with defining such concepts as goodness, holiness, desire, and such. The middle dialogues (of which the Republic is the fullest) take the problem farther by showing that the only possibility of such definition is to postulate the doctrine of ideas. The last dialogues then attempt to relate that doctrine to the current knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, cosmology and theology. I give two illustrations of Popper's failure to understand that the operation of the practical reason is the central question with which Plato is concerned. First, in trying to show that Socrates was a democrat and Plato a totalitarian he writes: Socrates seems to have kept away from metaphysical theories as much as he could. His appeal was a moral appeal, and his theory of individuality (or of the soul if this word is preferred) is, I think, a moral and not a metaphysical doctrine.g What does Popper mean by this distinction between moral and metaphysical? For morality to exist, reason must play the fundamental role in human conduct. What then is metaphysics but an attempt to show systematically how that is possible and to show how reason's operation there is related to the human activities of science and art? What then can a moral appeal, detached from a metaphysical doctrine, be, but an appeal to irrationalism? Does he accuse Socrates of being simply an emotional preacher and not a philosopher at all? It is surely true that Socrates was chiefly concerned with definition and particularly the definition of moral terminology. How can such definition be carried out without metaphysics? As Popper cannot show how that is possible, his distinction between moral and metaphysical must be considered meaningless. As a second illustration I take what Popper writes about the doctrine of ideas in his chapter on Aristotle. It is only here that he discusses the truth or falsity of the doctrine. Popper advocates a nominalism against what he calls the 'essentialism' of Plato and Aristotle.h g The Open Society, 1,167.

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That is, he takes the position that general ideas are no more than convenient ways of relating phenomena. He points out that modern natural science is 'nominalist' and that its successes are due to that 'nominalism.' He says that social science has been 'essentialist' and if it desires success must become 'nominalist.'1 But in his discussion Popper never recognizes that the case for 'essentialism' in Plato does not rest chiefly on an analysis of reason in science, but on reason in the practical life. Plato continually returns to the point that unless one gives ideas a realistic status morality cannot be said to exist. This is surely true. If moral concepts such as duty, justice, freedom, are simply empirical, then how can we say that one action is better than another? For those who distrust Plato, the argument on this point has been brilliantly given in Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Popper

can only make his appeal for nominalism stick if he can show how nominalism and morality can be reconciled. As he does not attempt this, his defence of nominalism must be either a denial of man's moral nature or a lack of interest in it. Because Popper fails to recognize that Plato is concerned with the end of life and that his strictures about political means are only subsidiary, he is willing to accuse Plato of historicism. The fact is that Plato would entirely agree with Popper's attack on historicism. In his last chapter, Popper shows with clarity the absurdity of attempts such as that of Toynbee to formulate laws about history.4 Plato would agree with this criticism. He implied that the form of the historical judgement is so unclear that no laws of history are possible. His account of reason in the practical life has nothing to do with the pretentious nonsense of Spengler or Toynbee.5 Indeed, Popper is much more of an historicist than Plato, because Plato certainly would never have accounted for another man's thought in terms of sociological determination. h I believe Popper's argument would be clearer if he used the traditional terminology which distinguishes between Plato's and Aristotle's position as to the ontological status of ideas. That is to call Plato's position 'realism/ Aristotle's 'conceptualism,' and his own 'nominalism.' To lump Aristotle and Plato together as he does makes it impossible to distinguish the different positions the two philosophers take about human conduct, individuality, and God. i I must admit that I can find little evidence that modern social science is essentialist. It has always seemed to me nominalist in the extreme.

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Why then does Popper accuse Plato of the Mumbo Jumbo of historicism? Popper singles out as evidence that passage in the Republic which describes the fall of the ideal state from perfection to despotism. But this interpretation of the passage takes it out of its place in the Republic as a whole. To answer the question, "What is justice?/ Plato has been led to describe the ideally good man and to show that justice can only be defined in relation to the highest Good. After describing the journey of the soul towards this ever-transcendent Good, he proceeds to the passage about the fall of the ideal state. He does this to show the ideally bad man and the ideally bad society in contrast to perfection.j What Plato repeatedly makes clear, for instance, in the last paragraph of the ninth book, is that the best state and the worst state are only described as regulative ideals for conduct. They are meant as standards of ethical attraction and repulsion but can never exist in this world. The fall of the ideal state is then in no sense meant as a description of empirical history. Man's finitude always means that he must use analogies from time and space in his attempt to describe the nontemporal. But that does not mean that Plato thought that the Kingdom of Heaven is of this world. If I were to look for weakness in the Platonic philosophy, it would not be historicism, but the exact opposite, a tendency at certain places to underestimate the importance of the historical process. II It must now be asked what Popper says positively about right conduct. For if he condemns Plato's philosophy he must either show that he has an alternative and more consistent account of morality or else rest in an entire scepticism. Sections of Popper's book, for example his attempted justification of nominalism, might lead the reader to believe that he is just such a sceptic. For if, as nominalism holds, all ideas are either empirical or tautologous, then we have no principles which can be the basis for right action. If Popper kept consistently to this position the grounds of his attack on Plato would be clear and so also the point at j It is strange that if, as Popper says, Plato's chief enemy is democracy and his chief joy totalitarianism the ideally bad man is the despot and the ideally bad society despotism.

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which to take up the defence of Plato. Negatively, such a defence would involve asking Popper what can possibly be meant by morality in such a position and asking him to face the consequence of denying the existence of morality. Positively, it would involve the systematic exposition of Plato's metaphysics - particularly a careful analysis of what Plato meant by mind in its practical function. However, it is untrue to say that Popper consistently holds this scepticism. He uses again and again concepts such as 'freedom/ 'meaning/ 'good/ 'evil.' For any communication to be possible these words must come before the court of reason. He attacks those 'who undermine man's faith in reason,' so presumably he does not want to assert a scepticism about reason at the most crucial point in man's life, conduct. The problem then is to try to understand what Popper does mean by his use of ethical language and how that language can be given any communicable meaning if he believes nominalism to be an adequate theory. This is made difficult because he has so little to say on the matter. The only clue I can find as to what Popper does mean is in his last chapter where he speaks about 'the dualism of facts and decisions.'k But to understand what Popper means by this, some definition or account of 'fact' is first necessary, and that he does not give us. What are these facts which we know independently of theory and decision? The question is particularly cogent as Popper is writing about the facts of the social scientist. Is Popper's dualism between fact and decision itself a fact? If it is a fact, then how does he know it to be a fact? If it is not a fact and he is a nominalist, how does he know this dualism to be true? Yet without expatiating on the difficulties of this dualism any further and simply accepting it at a common-sense level, the basic question of existence still remains. How should a man make a decision and what role does reason play therein? Popper's statement that we make decisions differently from the way we gather facts may be true but it does not tell us how we make them. It is purely negative. It, therefore, presents no alternative answer to the problem of morality. It is Popk Popper has also mentioned this in Part I of a Symposium, 'What Can Logic Do for Philosophy?' in Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XXII, 'Logical Positivism and Ethics' (London 1948), 141-54.

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per's ambiguity at this point which leaves his criticism of Plato up in the air. It is perhaps profitable to ask why Popper is so ambiguous about this central issue. In doing so, of course, one leaves philosophy and indulges in that psychological analysis that Popper has used in dealing with Plato. Popper's ambiguity seems to arise because he takes for granted that the problem of moral certitude is not a difficult one. And he assumes this because he believes that the truths of morality are somehow immediately intelligible to all men of good will. The basic thesis of his book is that all sensible men have sufficient clarity about ends to get on with the job of realizing those ends, without spending their time thinking about what the job is. 'Let's get on with it' would indeed be a proper sub-title to this book. When Popper ridicules Plato as the first professor, and for saying that man's end is in eternity not in time, he but makes explicit the smile on the business man's lips when he speaks of philosophy. Why waste our time on metaphysics when we all know what is worth doing? Popper's scorn for the contemplative life can be seen in his appeal to Christianity as against the metaphysicians.1 It is particularly interesting that he uses Karl Barth as the exemplar of Christian thought.6 For Barth's theology is entirely based on the idea of revelation and is taken up with the total corruption of the human intellect. Popper's praise of Barth is but another illustration of the strange contemporary alliance between those who doubt the capacity of human reason in the name of scepticism (probably scientific in origin) and those who denigrate its capacity in the name of revealed religion. It is only necessary to study the thought of Ockham to see how ancient this strange alliance is.7 For in Ockham can be seen how philosophic nominalism, unable to face the question of practical certainty, solves it by the arbitrary hypothesis of revelation. The will detached from the intellect (as it must be in nominalism) can seek certainty only through such arbitrary hypotheses. And, after all, are not Popper's given moral certainties and Barth's revelation really the same thing - undigested lumps in the intellectual stomach placed by the thinker outside the rigour of his thought? With clarity about practical questions reached in this arbitrary way, systematic thought becomes an unnecessary activity. 1 The Open Society, I, the final chapter.

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The interesting fact historically is that these two anti-rationalist traditions - that of the liberal sceptic and the Protestant revelationist should originally have come from two such opposite views of man. The Protestant dependence upon revelation arose from a great pessimism about human nature. The immediately apprehended values of the liberal originate in a great optimism. Yet Popper's use of these very different traditions is probably the reason why he is so widely admired by social scientists in North America. For, after all, is not the dominating tradition in North America a Protestantism which has been transformed by pragmatic technology and liberal aspirations? The Protestant boy from the farm who was emancipated at the university by pragmatic social science and a few vague criticisms of dogma, and then became a professor or a Liberal civil servant almost inevitably finds Popper a forward-looking thinker. To repeat, Popper does not attempt to meet Plato's philosophy with an alternative. He is simply denying the need of consistent thought as the basis for right political action. The truth or falsity of Popper's case depends then on whether society can really do without the contemplative, or whether a chief end of all political organization must not be the encouragement of contemplation among the social engineers. Coleridge once said: Whatever the world may opine, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earth-worm, but will most indubitably make a blundering patriot and a sorry statesman.8

Popper considers this statement false and Plato considered it true, and there lies the difference between them. This statement must now be considered. III The action of social engineers has always been partially hit or miss.m m I use Popper's phrase 'social engineer' for those men taken up with political responsibility. The word, however, has a distasteful ring because the analogy between men and pieces of steel, efficiently put together into a bridge, is hardly a pleasant one. It is unfortunate that Popper uses this phrase for he obviously has a more libertarian view of personality than his metaphor would imply.

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Nevertheless, the pragmatism of rulers has been limited by some assumed agreement about principles. That agreement has, of course, been only partially explicit and has rested largely on the acceptance of tradition. The chief instrument of tradition in the West has been a revealed religion, changing in its long history, yet nevertheless providing a source of clarity for the engineers. But all traditions, even when based on revealed religion, are full of gross inconsistencies. As these inconsistencies are exposed to the minds of an increasing number of the social engineers, the tradition necessarily loses its authority. The break-down occurs slowly in traditions as fused with wisdom as European Christianity; quickly with obvious irrationalisms like Marxism. The inconsistencies and lack of clarity in traditional Christianity have become so evident to so many social engineers that it can no longer be the operative principle of political action. Many men, such as Niebuhr, try to persuade us to the old authority,9 but its weaknesses have been so exposed as to make a return impossible.n In such a time as ours when the weaknesses of our tradition have been so radically exposed, men not only revolt against its inconsistencies, but against much of its truth as well. Having lost one ground of practical certainty, they look desperately around for another. All kinds of partial principles are imported from the sciences which appear to the unthoughtful to supply frameworks for action. In that confusion many deny that principle is possible at all. Cynics like Sorel would have us replace one irrationality by another.10 When traditional loyalties no longer hold the most intelligent, will not political activity grow increasingly chaotic unless a sufficient number of those responsible give themselves to systematic thought about the final purpose of their engineering? The less complex the decision for which the social engineer is called upon the less need has he of systematic thought. Psychiatrists do not need the same theoretical clarity as the Minister of Justice. As the tradition disintegrates, the worst tragedies will occur where great responsibility operates in metaphysical confusion. To rely on the rulers' natural intuition rather than on the reaching out to universal principles is to assume that the rulers will know automatically what is worth doing and see in a proper hierarchy the n I must make clear that I am not referring to Christianity per se, but to one historical manifestation of it.

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manifold finite ends that are open to them. This immediate vision is evidently not achieved by any effort of attention, but in some inevitable way. To those who hold this view it must be simply an accident that this innate good practice appears in some societies and not in others. It also assumes the complete unimportance of theory. But is the relation of theory to practice quite so innocent? Take the case of Bentham. Who can deny his fine achievements - particularly when they are seen against the rule of landlords and clerics which had dominated Europe so long and which faced the industrial revolution in greed and obscurantism and impotence. Yet Bentham's theory now stares us in the face as the principle under which many of the worst crimes of the twentieth century have been committed.11 The use of inadequate theory for decent practical ends is also evident today in much of the work of the psychological engineers. They say with Popper: let us not worry about 'essentialist' definitions of man, let us get on with the job of adjusting people. That is, they explicitly assume a nominalism. But in practice they are defining man and that definition often seems to contradict our traditional ideas of freedom. It certainly contradicts the theory which underlies the work of another class of engineers - the lawyers. How is the argument between them and the lawyers to be worked out if there is not some appeal to principles, and how is that possible without metaphysics? The final justification of the life of philosophy among the social engineers cannot simply be its efficiency for their craft. In our period of disintegration authentic despair presents itself to men. More and more would define consciousness as anguish. The existentialists have shown that scepticism is not an intellectual game to be played in the study as the positivists do, but a possibility which, if accepted, makes existence an absurd joke. Even in North America where the expanding economy has filled our social engineers with animal faith, the beast of nothingness slowly appears. The liberal psychologists may tell us that despair is unhealthy or abnormal, but their words are empty because they can give us no reason for what they say. No natural or animal faith can meet such free despair. It can only be met, if at all, by that free faith which is the consequence of reason. Lord Keynes once remarked that in the early years of the century he and his friends held the illusion that the destruction in detail of the

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Western tradition would leave it in general alive to uphold them.12 Popper seems still to live in that early illusion of Keynes. He thinks he can hold on to the good practice of the Western reformers while attacking its groundwork. In denying the possibility of metaphysics, he denies that existence can be known to be meaningful and yet he exhorts men to find the activities of piecemeal reform meaningful. Why should we? Perhaps social reform is as meaningless as all other activities. Is he simply, like the preachers, telling us to have faith without giving any reason? With despair a real and present experience, the life of philosophy must become the possibility of existence for the free man. This is what Plato knew so well. He laid down the principles of rational faith. And in the light of those principles his limitations do not seem important. His tendency towards theocratic means, his failure to estimate properly the finite world, these limitations can be judged by the very principles he lays down. In so far as Plato was a fifth-century Athenian, we cannot expect him to have entirely transcended the limitations of that position, any more than we expect Jesus Christ not to have been a Palestine peasant. To say this, however, is quite different from implying that his rationalism was just an epiphenomenon of that position - a turning back to the darkness of myth and taboo. It was just because he could not fall back on that or on the dogma of natural good feeling that he was impelled to discover why existence was meaningful and consciousness more than a blight. He saw that without such knowledge existence must be anguish and impotence. All this is surely true today. Only after finding such knowledge do men have the light to go out and, piecemeal, change the world.

Notes 1 Karl Mannheim (1893-1947), German sociologist of knowledge and education, taught in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and London. He is known for his distinction between substantial and functional rationality, the former leading toward reality, the latter fulfilling predetermined institutional ends, and for his generalizing of Marx's concept of ideology to include Marxism itself as 'utopia.' In his last work he tried to reconcile his dislike of totalitarianism with his belief that planning was needed to sustain freedom. His work includes Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1935), Ideology and

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2

3

4

5

Plato and Popper Utopia (1936), Diagnosis of Our Time (1943), and the posthumous Freedom, Power, and Democratic Planning (1950). Julian, Flavius Claudius Julianus, 'the Apostate' (c.331-363), Roman emperor (361-6), lost his Christian belief, studied philosophy in Athens, and worked in Constantinople for the restoration of the dignity of the old pagan religion, though he was tolerant of Christians and Jews. Plotinus (c.205-290), Neoplatonic philosopher, settled in Rome after studying at Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas. He tried unsuccessfully at the age of 60 to found a 'Platonopolis' modelled on Plato's Republic. He lectured and produced a prolific amount of writings, later published by his pupil Porphyry in six groups of nine books or Enneads. Origen (c.185-254), Christian theologian and church father, taught in Alexandria and later Caesarea. He studied Plato and the later Platonists with Plotinus under Ammonius Saccas. His exegetical writings extended over nearly the whole of the Old and New Testaments. They include Scholia, Homilies, and Commentaries. '"Crito," he said, "we owe a cock to Asclepius: please pay the debt, and don't neglect it.'" Socrates' last utterance meant to give thanks to the god of medicine for the cure of death. Plato: Phaedo, trans. David Gallop (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975), 117c. Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1965), historian and philosopher of history, taught at the London School of Economics. In his ten-volume A Study of History (1934-54) he attempted to analyse the rise and fall of twenty-one civilizations in the history of the world. Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), German historian and political philosopher, argued in The Decline of the West: Outlines of a Morphology of World History

(1918-22) that our destiny in the twentieth century is the death of the soul of Western civilization. 6 Karl Barth - see note 4 in 'Two Theological Languages,' 63. 7 The movement of thought associated with the Oxford-trained Franciscan nominalist William of Ockham (1290-1349) included criticism of the scholasticism of Duns Scotus, an emphasis on empirical method, and a heightened appreciation of the role of religious faith. His most well-known work was a set of lectures and a commentary on Peter Lombard's Book of Sentences. 8 Grant's source is The Friend, where Coleridge, at the conclusion of his essay XV, is quoting Bishop Berkeley's Siris. Coleridge is defending his recourse to old metaphysicians, like Plato and Aristotle, adding Berkeley's words of similar defence: 'Those great men, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, men the most consummate in politics, who founded states, or instructed princes,

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or wrote most accurately on public government, were at the same time the most acute at all abstracted and sublime speculations: the clearest light being ever necessary to guide the most important actions.' Grant's quoted sentence then follows, emphasized in italics, concluding the essay. Barbara E. Rooke, ed., The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Friend,

vol. 4, part 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Bollingen Series LXXV, Princeton University Press 1969), 113. 9 Reinhold Niebuhr - see note 7 in 'Two Theological Languages' (63). 10 Georges-Eugene Sorel (1847-1922), French socialist and revolutionary syndicalist, developed a theory on the role of myth in the historical process. He was a passionate defender of Alfred Dreyfuss in 1897. Sorel advocated the use of 'social myths' like the idea of the general strike, to inspire and focus the necessary collective action, sometimes violent, to oppose the violence of the established order. His best-known work is Reflexions sur la violence (1908). 11 Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), English jurist and philosopher, was one of the world's most effective reformers. His synthesis became known as utilitarianism, although he himself preferred to call it the 'greatest happiness principle.' He equated happiness with pleasure in the broad sense, and he believed it was possible to calculate the best possible course of action, including legislation, with a view to maximizing 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number.' His work includes A Fragment on Government (1776), and lntroduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). 12 'My Early Beliefs,' in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume

X, Essays in Biography (London: Macmillan 1972), 433-50. Keynes recalls D.H. Lawrence's disapproval of Bertrand Russell, himself, and their Bloomsbury circle of friends under the spell of G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica. 'We were among the last of the Utopians, or meliorists as they are sometimes called, who believe in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devises, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good ... We were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence, as Lawrence observed ... It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life (as it now seems

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Plato and Popper to me to have been) or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order' (447-8). John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), English economist, journalist, and financier, was known for his economic theories on the causes of prolonged unemployment, in which he advocated a remedy for economic recession based on a government-sponsored policy of full employment.

Training for the Ministry

A letter to the editor of the United Church Observer 13, no. 6, 15 May 1954: 16.

Dear Sir: As a lay member of our Church and as a teacher at a university closely associated with one of our theological colleges, I would like to state my profound disagreement with your editorial which advocates a shortening of the period of training for our ministers. The following are my reasons for that disagreement. All members of our Church must agree on the primacy of faith. The duty of ministers is to go out and preach the simple Gospel - the glory of which is that it depends for its speaking and its hearing not on the quickness of our intellects but on the tenderness of our hearts. To draw the inference from the simplicity of the Gospel to the proposal you have made is, however, not valid. It fails to recognize that though we are justified by faith alone, we must use our reasons to understand how that faith can be made relevant to our present Canada. The dogmas of our faith are indeed of a kind to be put on the back of a postcard. The difficulties of theology, however, arise as we attempt to see how these dogmas are to be made flesh. Our young ministers need time to distil that very simplicity and then to see the full subtlety of applying that simplicity to the world. Unless young ministers have undergone the painful discipline of theology, they are prone to make the Gospel merely the repetition of sentimentalities. The Gospel will then lack that concreteness which is necessary if our Church is to meet the needs of practical Canadians. It will become a thing of ethical platitudes and of optimistic psychology. If that be the case how will it not succumb to the Rotary Club and the mental health clinic.

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The argument is raised that there are physical frontiers where the need for ministers is intense. The sadness of this situation must be fully admitted. But the short term gains of meeting that situation in the way you suggest are not worth the long term losses consequent on a ministry lacking in intellectual fibre. Fifty years ago the important frontier of this continent was physical; today the more important frontier is spiritual. The Gospel must be preached to men who find themselves indifferent and despairing - to whom Christianity has become a respectable form. Such frontiers of indifference and despair can only be met by men who give cogency to the Gospel by the strength of their theological clarity. St Augustine, Luther, Wesley, are all examples of men whose greatness arose from that unity of intellect and faith. If the United Church scorns intellectual discipline and cuts off the faith from its subsidiary reason, we must face the consequence of becoming a sect which cuts itself off from the demands of men caught in the awful responsibility of time. I cannot believe that that is what we want. Yet if we are to reach out to the world we must use the arts of the world. The chief of these arts is reason. We have, indeed, much to learn on this point from the authorities of the Roman Catholic communion. That Church is wide awake to what is happening on this continent and confident that now is the hour to win North America to their interpretation of the Gospel. Yet for all their urgency they never forget the need of careful and conscientious training by their clergy. They are not only expanding their facilities for primary theological training but setting up schools for advanced thought in theology (e.g., the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto). Are we then to do less? Are we to face the battle for the soul of North America so much on the defensive that we send untrained troops into the front line? God forbid. Rather we should expand our primary training facilities and also set up in Canada at least one great centre of advanced study in Reformed Theology in which the scholars of our Church - laymen and ministers - could think deeply about the theological problems of the relevancy of the Gospel. In the intellectual strength of such a centre, our Church would find new life to flow into its immovable roots. George Grant Dalhousie University Halifax, N.S.

Turning New Leaves - Review of Henry Marshall Tory: Beloved Canadian by Edward Annand Corbett

Henry Marshall Tory: Beloved Canadian, with an introduction by Robert C. Wallace, was published at Toronto by the Ryerson Press in 1954. This review appeared in volume 34, no. 403, of The Canadian Forum, August 1954: 112-13. Edward Corbett founded the Canadian Association for Adult Education in 1936 and was a primary force in the creation of the Farm Radio Forum and Citizen's Forum radio broadcast series on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He had worked for Henry Marshall Tory (1864-1947) both at Khaki University in England in 1917 and at University of Alberta in 1925. He was a good friend of Grant's mother, Mrs Maude Grant (nee Parkin), and had hired Grant to work for the CAAE in 1943. Sheila Grant remembers: 'I gathered he wasn't the easiest person to work for, but George loved him, and learnt a lot. He always said Corbett was the greatest storyteller he had ever known - he used to reduce Mrs Grant [Grant's mother] to tears of laughter.'

Henry Marshall Tory by Dr Corbett takes one right to the core of modern Canadian history. For Tory was not only the founder of three Canadian universities (the University of Alberta, the Khaki University,1 and Carleton College) but one of the founders and first president of the National Research Council. Tory is the very archetype of the liberal Protestant, democratic tradition in Canada, which put its trust in the spread of education and particularly in the spread of scientific education. And surely it is indubitable that the practical optimistic Protestant mind engrossing itself in what science could do for humanity and thereby laying the foundation of modern technological Canada is the basically formative tradition which English speaking Canada has produced. The natural resources were indeed there, but it was spirit in this

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form that so developed them and made us what we are. Tory lived and worked when this hope seemed most beautiful, 1910-1939. Therefore, we are indebted to Dr Corbett for this fine and careful book, and must recognize that history such as this takes us to the reality of the Canadian tradition in a way that much of the work of our university historians does not. So much university history has been written as if the activities centred around the state were the really formative aspect of our history. Thus, in O.D. Skelton's Life of Laurier, you have the implicit belief present that the broadening down from precedent to precedent of our institutions through the work of the Liberal Party is Canadian history.2 In a more brilliant and sophisticated way than Skelton, D.G. Creighton shows up much of his political mythology, but leaves the essential primacy of politics intact.3 What is inadequate in such a view is that it forgets the tragedy of the politicians, namely that though they have some power to prevent evil, they are impotent to bring about good. It assumes a kind of stability of faith among the Canadian people, that basically Canadians remain always the same and that institutions like the university or the church are constants. But the life and faith of a man such as Tory meant that Canadians were to be changed not simply at the superficial level of political belief, but radically in their ultimate faith. For Tory was one of the chief influences in changing our universities to their modern democratic scientific form. And a man who is a leader in the change of the education in a country is far more important to its history than men such as W.L.M. King or R.B. Bennett who, as it were, simply hold the ring while that change is going on. It is this which makes Dr Corbett's biography of Tory far more important than the biography of some passing university administrator. It is a book describing the central faith of liberal Canada. Dr Corbett is just the man to write this book, for he loved H.M. Tory and sees the man with a fine and tender vigour. Dr Corbett understands nineteenth-century rural Protestant Nova Scotia (as we know from his previous book, Father, God Bless Him).4 He understands pre1914 McGill and post-1918 Alberta. Therefore he can show Tory in all the tones and quantities of the worlds in which he moved. What is more important, Dr Corbett really catches the faith that moved Tory the certainty of a liberal religion breaking away from Biblicism, the trust that scientific progress would serve the people, the belief in

Turning New Leaves - Review of Henry Marshall Tory 97 democratic universities which would bring the free tradition to all the capable youngsters in the community. Dr Corbett worked with Tory at the University of Alberta to build an adult education movement which would bring the university to the people. It is, indeed, the measure of Tory's real genius in incarnating his dream that he chose people such as Dr Corbett to work with him. Dr Corbett has carefully blended these various elements in Tory's life and thought into the picture of a whole man - a man with great faith and energy. Yet once the strength of Tory's faith and its importance to our history are seen, the limitations of that faith must be mentioned. The limitations indeed are shown in the ironic fact that the very change in our education for which Tory worked has helped destroy the liberal world of which he was a symbol. After all, the turning of our universities to natural science and its allied techniques does inevitably mean that we won't be ruled for long by politicians like Pearson or civil servants like Skelton or Wrong, but by men like Howe and Solandt.5 However inevitable and valuable the foundation of the National Research Council, its existence has spelt a doom (perhaps only temporary) for the liberal tradition in our universities. To ask an ironical question: what would a freedom-loving liberal like Tory think of the new men who more and more will come out of the institutions he created? And yet what else could he have done, but create them? Dr Corbett's able and interesting chapter, 'The Scientist as Philosopher,' makes clear what was the lack in Tory's faith. Dr Corbett wisely gives long quotations from a letter Tory wrote to a colleague who was frightened by the destruction of the old traditions of education. That letter makes clear that the lack in Tory's faith was that he took for granted that the old traditions would naturally go on existing, whatever happened. He did not recognize that they were bound up with the continuance of the very pattern of education he was helping to destroy. Indeed the faith, as enunciated in that letter, is of a prodigious innocence. It seems quite unaware of the intricacy of maintaining the traditions of human freedom. Perhaps this was the inevitable weakness of his peculiar blend of Protestantism and liberalism. Perhaps the very enigma of historical existence is that to fit one's age as Tory did must prevent one from seeing the dangers in what one does. That such questions should arise is the measure of Dr Corbett's book. He has undertaken Tory's life as part of a broad and fascinating

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view of Canadian history. He has written of that life not only with love but with subtlety and imagination. The outward actions of Tory's life are blended in care and clarity with the man's thought. This is a book of profound consequence to anybody who really wants to think about what happened in our country in the first half of the century.

Notes 1 Khaki College was set up and managed by the Canadian Army in Britain (1917-19 and 1945-6). The planning and organization of the institution was the work of Tory. 2 Oscar Douglas Skelton - see note 5 in 'Canadian Universities and Protestant Churches' (32). Grant is referring to Tennyson's lines in stanza 3 of 'You ask me, why, though ill at ease' (1842): 'A land of settled government,/ A land of just and old renown,/ Where Freedom slowly broadens down/ From precedent to precedent.' 3 Donald Grant Creighton (1902-79), professor of history at Victoria College, University of Toronto (1927-71), wrote The Commercial Empire of the St Lawrence (1937). Following in the tradition of Harold Innis, he set out the relation between the St Lawrence and the transcontinental economic and political system. For his two-volume biography, John A. Macdonald (1952, 1955), he won the Governor General's Award. 4 E.A. Corbett, Father, God Bless Him (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1953). 5 Lester Bowles Pearson (1897-1972), prime minister of Canada from 1963-8, formulated Canada's foreign policy in the post-war period, introduced the Canada Pension Plan and universal medicare, revised the transportation system, and unified the armed forces. In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his proposal of a UN peacekeeping force that provided a means for easing the British and French out of Egypt in 1956. Humphrey Hume Wrong (1894-1954), distinguished Canadian diplomat, was considered responsible for crafting Canada's diplomatic stance in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in relation to Washington. Clarence Decatur Howe (1886-1960), the most successful businessmanpolitician of his day, provided a link between the Liberal Party and Canadian industry. He entered politics at the cabinet level as minister of transport (1936), was minister of munitions and supply during the war (1940), and minister of reconstruction after the war (1944), when he reconverted the Canadian economy to a free-enterprise system with minimal government controls.

Turning New Leaves - Review of Henry Marshall Tory 99 Omond McKillop Solandt (1909-93), research director and superintendent of British Army Operational Research Group during the Second World War, was a founding member of the Canadian Defence Research Board in 1947. He worked for the Canadian National Railways (1956-63) and DeHavilland Aircraft (1963-6) and later became Chancellor of the University of Toronto (1965-71) and Chairman of the Science Council of Canada (1966-72).

Adult Education in the Expanding Economy

This article appeared in volume 15, issue 1, of Food for Thought, September-October 1954: 4-10 and was reprinted (without the single footnote) in volume 10, issue 7, of The Anglican Outlook, May 1955: 811. It was originally an address delivered to the National Conference on Adult Education on 27 May 1954.

All clear thought arises in and through a concrete situation. In thinking about adult education in Canada in 1954, clearly the situation may be most quickly defined under the phrase 'the expanding economy.' That is the given, the inescapable situation within which we work and have our being. 'The expanding economy' is, of course, just a quick phrase for a very complicated state. Basically, it is a society which holds that the control of nature by technology is the chief purpose of human existence and so from that belief a community is built where all else is subordinated to that purpose. Now, of course, this has always been a crucial end of man's existence and in the western world in the last three hundred years it has grown in importance. But the point about North America today is that in the last years we have come to as pure a vision of the expanding economy as has ever been known in history. It is only necessary to look at any of our institutions - government, the schools, the universities, or the churches - to see how more and more these institutions are unified around this religion - the religion of the manipulation of nature for short-term economic gains. The chief importance of this fact for education is this. Never before in history have the majority seen so clearly the possibilities of realizing a multitude of practical purposes, and in their rapture at the achievement of these immediate finite goals, the idea that there is for human

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beings an infinite goal has become darkened as perhaps never before. This concentration upon finite ends is indubitably the supreme spirit of the modern world. One sees it concretely in the ordinary life we live whether in Vancouver or Toronto or Halifax. We see it theoretically in the great philosophies of the world, in Marxism, in pragmatism, in scientific humanism or utilitarianism. We see it lived out in the two great empires which now compete for power. For, after all, how deeply different is Malenkov's atheistic materialism from General Eisenhower's theistic materialism?1 The ideal of a vast adjusted suburban world stretching from New York to Seattle, is not very different from the same thing stretching from Leningrad to Khrushchevgrad. Do you think that that great technical college, the University of Toronto, can be so very different from the University of Moscow? Yes different, thank God, because we still pay here a small half-hearted token to the tradition of freedom - that is, the tradition of the infinite. The bland indifference of the bank presidents, the engineer politicians, and their servants in the universities to anything but the expanding economy is, I am soft enough to believe, better than deportations and tyranny. For it still allows some little freedom and revolt and agony - the very stuff of the infinite - to grow. Above all, let us admit there is a basic virtue in this modern spirit with its great care about the achievement of limited finite purposes. If my duty here were to work out this philosophically, I would say that this process is, and may continue to be, both the effect and cause of a better recognition of the proper relation between finite and infinite ends in our existence. Indeed, let us recognize that when people (for instance, a great theologian like Marx or a clever one like Dewey)2 denied that there was an infinite end (and indeed said that the only reason men had ever believed in such a destiny was that they had found this world so difficult and frustrating that they invented this infinite as a myth to make up for their finite frustrations) - that this false philosophising arose from the desire to give reality to finite existence. Indeed there is something dreadful about archaists who despise the very real freedom that men have found in the modern scientific world. I do not only mean freedom at the practical level, but also the theoretical freedom which has arisen with modern thought. However one may agonize over the silliness of scientists like Darwin or Freud or Einstein

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through which they took a limited view of the world as object and used it to speak ex-cathedra about reality, still we must remember that along with that silliness the great scientists have at the same time pushed back the limits within which the problems of faith and freedom arise for us. Even the techniques of social science - despite their vacuous jargon and implicit use as instruments of tyranny - have within them the hope, that by their careful use, social discipline may be less ruthlessly imposed than it has been in the past. Both theoretically and practically the scientific society can make possible our fuller humanity. Yet as soon as this has been said let it be faced with absolute clarity, as equally part of our situation, that in our concentration upon finite ends, the knowledge of the infinite - that is, the world as freedom - has disappeared in North America to a degree most of us cannot even begin to guess. There is not time to justify that generalization at length. Suffice it to say that in two institutions - the church and the universities, where the idea of spirit or freedom has a good chance to incarnate itself - one sees it smothered and dying. Rather than justify this generalization, I want to speak of how it expresses itself and is deeply justified by a new theory of education which is in the very soul of the expanding economy. In all the great traditions of the world, both western and eastern, which arose about 500 BC, education was defined in the following way. It was the way that men became free - that is, the journey of the mind beyond all myths out of the shadows and imaginings into the truth. This freeing of finite mind from the chains of illusion was the purpose of life and by definition its goal was infinite. And at its best, western society recognized that this freedom could only be achieved by anguish and rebellion, because the freeing of the mind from illusion meant above all the freeing of it from the partial and tiresome traditions we call society - that great beast. Now this view of education was often abused and it was often confused and it was limited to the few - but it was in the practice of that ideal that men did anything by which we can call human existence meaningful. But let us admit that in Canada that view of education is practically dead. It is replaced by another theory of what education is. This new view considers that the end of education is to make people comfortable and adjusted members of the world; or, to put it in the language of glorious affirmation, to make them relate to their total life situation. That

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is to say, education is to make men the most successful of the apes. Of course, the most important stages in adjustment are economic prosperity and physical health. Anybody who works in a university soon finds that the democratic parents think the universities' first job is to guarantee that their children are in a prosperous economic bracket, and will rebel against their children being taught anything which might limit that prosperity. The same thing is true of our schools. I saw this in all the argument there was about Miss Neatby's book.3 I was glad at first when I saw that a lot of the wealthy parents in Halifax liked what Miss Neatby said. I was glad because Dewey's view of education is so obviously an attack on human freedom. But then I suddenly realized what the motive of these wealthy people was in praising Miss Neatby. It was that they were afraid that if the anti-intellectual tendency in the schools continued their children would not become smart enough to be prosperous technicians. They were not backing Miss Neatby because the intellect was necessary for the liberation of their children's souls, but because they were afraid their children might be excluded from the professional classes. I suddenly realized I had more in common with the good-hearted enthusiasts of progressive education - because however vacuous and foolish progressive education is, the motive of egalitarian kindness behind it gives it at least more of the spirit than does middle-class success-seeking. Of course this view of education as comfortable adjustment goes beyond economic adjustment. When spirit arises at the level of sex we now have the whole complicated apparatus of modern psychiatry to see that we conform. Even art can be reduced by this new view of education. A Dean of Engineering, suitably representing English-speaking Canada on the philosophy of education at a universities' conference, summed up his views in the anecdote of a man who, when he had two loaves of bread, sold one and bought a lily! Beauty thus becomes a nice pleasant extra added on to the basic business of the expanding economy. The engineer, the salesman, and the doctor are really necessary to society, and when there is a little something over we can afford a few artists or philosophers. Such a view, of course, kills art, because it takes all the transcendence out of it and makes it a nice, sudsy mixture added to the stern realities of commercial existence. Whenever I read of these attempts in central Canada to build a Canadian culture, I

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always think of the nineteenth century German middle-class. How cultured they were. They went home from Krupps or the foreign office to revel in Goethe and Wagner. But when the chips were down their spiritual realities were those of nationalism, aggression, and greed. So today Funk plays Bach at Spandau.4 Whenever I come to Ontario and am appalled by what is going to happen to a city such as Toronto whose ruling principle is economic gain, I am told by some optimistic friend that there is more chamber music in Toronto than ever before. Sexual or artistic beauty can be a wonderful means whereby the imagination liberates itself from the finite to the transcendent. If it is thought of as a pleasant coating to worldly existence, it becomes a very real idolatry. This view of education as adjustment kills not only all real art, even worse it kills our relation to God, by making the idea of God a servant of our security and comfort. Our mental health experts are all for 'values' and 'religion.' Religion is just the thing to make people accept their group relations with the proper integration - that is, with complacency. In the religion of the comfortably-off and their priests the psychiatrists, God just rounds out security like a proper insurance policy for eternity. The infinite is made a tame confederate of our petty adventurings. In his novel Nausea, Sartre tells how his hero talks around a gallery full of the portraits of nineteenth century business men and he says how they thought they deserved wealth, prestige, sexual happiness, family life, comfort, success, power, and finally eternal life. Is it unfair to call this the religion of the American Senate? The very use of that hateful word 'values' in our culture with all its subjective connotations shows how far we have gone from the reality of the infinite. And the most important thing to notice about this new view of education, in whatever of the multiple modes it may appear, is that it always makes of education a means, something to serve some other good which is the end. Education for good citizenship, education for a proper sexual life (call it, if you will, mental health), education for economic prosperity, etc., etc., etc. Truth and freedom are the servants of normality and adjustment. This is basically why the educational profession is looked upon with such contempt in Canada and why fewer and fewer young people are going into it. Because if education is simply a means, then the people who teach these means to other ends are

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not very important. I always find it funny to hear Professor Phillips of OCE say that teachers should have a larger place (a fuller role) in society. Because from what I gather from Professor Phillips' writings, his view is that education must serve life - not life serve education.5 And, of course, if this view is right, then the expanding economy is also quite right to treat teachers as servants. Professor Phillips can't have it both ways - he can't degrade the purposes of education in his philosophy and then expect teachers to be respected. Canadian society is being logical about education. Its philosophy is that comfort and conformity and power (a good definition of life) are important, and education is not. Therefore we find ourselves where we are. This, as I see it, is the situation that adult education faces in Canada. On the one hand, an expanding economy has given us a society in which more people than ever have the chance for education. On the other hand, in building that economy we have created a world in which the idea of real education is darkened in the human soul as perhaps it has not been since the end of the Roman Empire. What then has this to say for adult education work? There is only time to make two generalizations. (1) Adult education must pass beyond useful but superficial functional education into the intensive job of making men free. What I mean by this distinction between real education and useful functional work, I illustrate by a pamphlet which came to my desk the other day from an adult education organization. This pamphlet tries to persuade people to be tolerant and not held by a lot of nonsense about racial origin. Now that is obviously a good purpose. To do this, however, it uses all the myths and half-truths and untruths of scientific humanism. There is everything in it from evolution to something a social psychologist has supposedly proved on a project. Now perhaps these myths and dogmas may really go over big among the people to whom it is directed and may persuade them to some social discipline. But by feeding people myths for useful short term results you may corrupt their minds for real education. What I mean is this. I read this pamphlet one morning when the paper was filled with the horror of Dien Bien Phu and Senator McCarthy, and realized that the pamphlet was leading people from reality into a rosy dream.6 It was telling people that evil is superficial, that it can be explained away, that it is easily changed, that its origin is somehow

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exterior to man. Now to deny the reality of evil may give one a short term optimism about man, but ultimately it involves categorically the denial of freedom. The theoretical implications of this useful pamphlet are the denial of all worth to the human spirit. Ultimately, it implies (indeed unwittingly) a view of man which destroys the very possibility of any education. Now, of course, in a mass society people calling themselves adult educationalists have to do a lot of this creation of right adjustment attitudes. Organizations - those of the farmer, labour, and business - have to spend a lot of time making people loyal members of their organizations. Government departments (e.g., the Department of Health and Welfare) have to turn out a lot of stuff persuading women to train their children and adjust them to mass living. But for God's sake, let's not call all this adjustment propaganda more than the merest preliminary to real education. When you try to persuade a young business man to be a loyal member of the Chamber of Commerce, or a unionist how he should vote, or a Home and School member to bake cakes regularly for the club, use any myths and dogmas you like but recognize (a) that you are using myths and dogmas and propaganda, and (b) that you aren't trying to educate the fellow concerned, but rather you are trying to persuade him to act in a way you like. You are not trying to make him free, because you want him to be governed by some myth. Now you may say that what I call education is really higher education and belongs to the universities and not to adult education. I would answer to that two things. First, the universities are no longer much concerned with making men free and therefore perhaps the adult education movement will have the courage to fill the gap. Second, education is an infinite process and we only have youngsters at the universities. Who then is going to carry on really profound education among older people if the adult education movement does not? Take, for instance, the study of philosophy - that is, the study of the meaning of existence. People over thirty are capable of that study in a way twenty year olds cannot be, and as our religious traditions become increasingly emptied of intellectual content there will be thousands of people hungering to face existence freely - that is, to study philosophy. Who is going to give them any help or direction in that study if adult education does not provide that trained help and direction? In the kind of mass world we are entering the only hope of holding back the apes

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is the really free man, and even if the apes are not held back the free man is an end in himself. (2) The second main point I want to make for all of us in adult education is that if we are to do anything worth while for anybody else, we must have a transcendent world of thought and imagination of our own, in which we are constantly struggling to create our own being. For if we are content to rest in some useful myths which give us security and give us a safe base from which to get on with the job of manipulating others, we all will become trapped caged limited people, who won't know what it is to be educated and therefore won't be able to educate others. And as I have said, the journey to liberation is an infinite journey in which there is no stopping place and where no formulations are adequate. Therefore, we must discipline ourselves so that we all have a constant life of controlled study from which our public life flows. To achieve this is hard because the modern world presses men into the life of manipulation and organization and considers contemplation a waste of time. To combine the life of thought and responsibility in the modern world is almost an impossibility. But it is obvious that thought without responsibility becomes attenuated, while responsibility without contemplation becomes vacuous and diffuse. The agony of combining the two is the good life. On this point Simone Weil says something which takes one to the very heart of the matter.a She points out that the purpose of all education is the cultivation of the faculty of attention so that ultimately attention can be paid to the infinite. As she says, the attention one learns as a child in Geometry or Latin may be just what will allow one someday to pay attention to one's neighbour at some crucial moment.7 And, after all, loving one's neighbour is just this paying of attention to him. That is what is empty about Rotary Club love of one's neighbour. It's all good fellowship, but nobody is really paying attention to anybody else, as they are in themselves, in their own unique individuality. And Miss Weil says that in most of the world's history attention has been learnt by the majority through hard physical labour. People who have to beat out the daily discipline of hard physical work learn that attention. And among those people who don't have to do that physical a See Simone Weil, Waiting on God (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul 1951). Essay 'Reflections on the Right Use of Studies.'

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work the only substitute for it is the rigorous discipline of study. That is why prosperous people who have not had to work physically or who are not really given to thought are such poor creatures. Now technology has brought in a world where physical work is partly disappearing. Therefore, it is crucial that we should cultivate the life of disciplined thought. Otherwise we will lose the faculty of attention. And the faculty of attention is just our freedom. In short, what I am saying is that blatherskites and good-willed busybees will produce education just of the kind they are. If we aren't constantly recreating ourselves in thought and in imagination, the people we come near won't learn anything from us. In other words, when I am asked the question adult education for what? I answer the only end that education can ever have - to lead men as Augustine said ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem or, as Our Lord said, 'The truth shall make you free.' Education is not to make us happy or secure or adjusted or properly related to our total community pattern, as the boys say today - but free. After all, the man we call supremely free was sufficiently maladjusted to his community to die on a cross, and there is no reason to believe that we are so much better than the people who put him to death. Education is to take men into the unlimited, where there is no security, no rest, and no peace - except perhaps, to make a joke, the peace that passes all understanding.

Notes 1 Georgi Maksimilianovich Malenkov (1901-88), Soviet political leader, was Stalin's personal secretary and became involved in the purges of the 1930s. He was a member of the politburo following 1941 and Premier of the USSR (1953-55). 2 John Dewey - see note 12 in 'Pursuit of an Illusion' (p. 47). 3 Hilda Marion Neatby (1904-75), Canadian educator, wrote for the Massey Commission and was best known as the author of a critique of Canadian education called So Little for the Mind (1953). Neatby called for a return to basics in primary education and an emphasis on traditional education for the best students in high school. Her arguments were strongly criticized by educational bureaucrats and widely debated throughout Canada. 4 Walther Funk (1890-1960), economics minister of the Third Reich (1938), was

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president of the Reichsbank after 1939. He was found guilty of war crimes at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg on 1 October 1945 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He served his sentence at Spandau Prison on the Wilhelmstrasse in West Berlin until his release in 1957. 5 Charles Edward Phillips (1897-1982), professor at the Ontario College of Education (University of Toronto), taught at the University of Toronto School from 1923-39. His writings include New Schools for Democracy (1944), Public Secondary Education in Canada (1955), and The Development of Education in Canada (1957). 6 The battle of Dien Bien Phu was the decisive engagement in the first Indochina War (1946-54) in which the Vietnamese Communists and Nationalists, known as the Viet Minh, defeated the French, ending the French involvement in Viet Nam and contributing to the downfall of the Fourth Republic of France in 1958. Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy (1909-57) of Wisconsin charged members of high American government circles and other officials and citizens with Communist subversion. He presided over hearings on these same charges, cross-examining and damaging by innuendo these mostly innocent persons, often with full television coverage. He was finally censured on 2 December 1954, bringing the inquisitions to an end. 7 Simone Adolphine Weil (1909-43), French thinker, was considered by Grant to be a modern saint. In her short life she was a philosophy teacher, a leftistmilitant, an essayist on philosophical, social, and religious issues, and an unusual, afflicted mystic. (See 'In Defense of Simone Weil,' by George Grant [1988], a review essay of Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage by Robert Coles; published in The Idler no. 15 [Jan.-Feb.]: 36-40, repr. in Douglas Featherling, ed., Best Canadian Essays 1989 [Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers].) In addition to Waiting on God (1950), the book Grant cites, her work includes Lectures on Philosophy (1933-4), Gravity and Grace (1947), The Need for Roots (1949), and Oppression and Liberty (1955).

Charles Cochrane

This half-hour talk was delivered by Grant in the CBC series Anthology on 26 October 1954. It was published in William Christian and Sheila Grant, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 214-18. Grant had known of and appreciated Cochrane's work, at least as early as his Oxford years, when he wrote a memorial piece that was never published and has been lost. See also his tribute to Cochrane in 'Philosophy' in this volume (13).

Profound thinking is not an activity which we associate with Canada. Our country is certainly not organized for the encouragement of thought. The type most typical of our early days was the pioneer and the explorer; the type of our modern society is the engineer - businessman - politician - who pushes on at economic expansion and does not think much beyond it. It is not surprising, therefore, that where our economic success has been great, our spiritual contribution to human history is almost nil. It is therefore a great pleasure to speak about a Canadian who did achieve greatness of the spirit in thought - indeed, who, in my opinion, is the most remarkable thinker Canada has produced and as the movement of the mind to ultimate reality is the most important human activity, I therefore place him as one of the rare men of our country. His name was Charles Cochrane. As is true of men who give themselves to the spirit, the externals of Charles Cochrane's life sound commonplace enough. He was born in Western Ontario, went to the University of Toronto and then to Oxford in England. Like so many of his generation, he was caught up in the holocaust of the world war of 1914. Between that war and the next big

Charles Cochrane 111 one in 1939 he taught at the University of Toronto - taught the history of Greece and Rome. He died at the end of the second world war. Most people who met Charles Cochrane probably said: Here is a pleasant professor living out his life inoffensively in a backwater of Toronto University - quietly married, raising his children - a nice and witty hangover from older days. Because that is what most people think of classics professors - archaic survivals. During his lifetime indeed his genius was not recognized even in the Canadian university world. Only men of rare perception, such as Harold Innis, realized that here was greatness. I have heard it rumoured that a university in central Canada (I am too ashamed to mention its name) turned Cochrane down for an honourary degree, and when one thinks of some of the people who have received honourary degrees from that institution one indeed is left breathless. But, as usual, the judgment of the world was wrong, for in that seemingly quiet life was going on a supreme struggle for the truth - in that backwater the very foundations of human existence were being examined at the limits of judgment. We know now that this was the case because in 1940 Cochrane published a book called Christianity and Classical Culture. It is about that book and its indubitable greatness that I want to speak this evening. Christianity and Classical Culture is an account of the impact of Christianity on the classical world of Greece and Rome. Looked at in even a superficial way the story to be told is a fascinating one. The faith centred around a crucified Palestine peasant penetrated to the very centre of the powerful and sophisticated civilization, and by doing so, moved on to dominate the early years of our civilization. The history has been written about often, but never, in anything I had read, with the penetrating insight which Cochrane brings to it. For he recognized that what happened in those first four centuries after the death of Jesus could only be made meaningful if it was seen not simply as a battle of organizations, but as an attempt by human beings to fathom the meaning of our existence. That is, he raises up the simple facts of history into the highest questions of philosophy and theology and knows that they can only be illumined in those terms. What Cochrane sees in Augustus, the first Roman Emperor, is the effort to create a civilization that should be an end in itself - a community which would be eternally safe and secure in the world. Already a

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very noble civilization had been built in the Roman republic, and Augustus hoped by creative political action to turn Rome into an everlasting community in which all civilized men could cultivate the good life. This was, of course, not only the hope of a politician such as Augustus but was the dominant ideal of the philosophers of that time. Their ideal was that wise men should strive to build a perfect earthly city through political action. This ideal was incorporated in its richest form in the poet Virgil. He used all the seductive power of his art to convince men that the destiny of eternal Rome was to build this perfect earthly city. That is, men such as Augustus and Virgil claimed for Rome a uniqueness and finality - that it was the incarnation of the divine purpose in the world. The history of Christianity is in Cochrane's eyes largely a criticism of those claims of Rome. It was quite impossible, said the Christians, to attain this perfection through political action and trust in political leadership. To them the state, so far from being the supreme instrument of human emancipation and perfectibility, was a strait jacket to be justified at best as a remedy for sin. To think of it otherwise they considered the grossest of superstitions.'1 Against the idea of eternal Rome - the city of the world - they raised up the city of God. A city which could not be brought in by the superficial methods of politics, but by the wills of men as illumined by God through the vision of the crucified Jew. But Cochrane sees that this difference between classical and Christian thinkers about political questions originated in a difference that was far deeper than politics. It lay in the very difference between the two visions of the nature and destiny of man. It lay in what Cochrane calls the defective logic of classical naturalism - the view of man and his place in nature constructed by classical science. What the Christians claimed was that the Roman world was defective at the very deepest level - the level of the first principles - and what they demanded was a revision of those first principles. As Cochrane writes: 'The basis for such a revision they held to lie in the meaning of Christ, conceived not as a revelation of new truth but of eternal truth - and saw in it the illumination which would be the basis for a new physics, a new ethic and, above all, a new logic - the logic of human progress. In Christ, therefore, they claimed to possess a principle of understanding superior to anything existing in the classical

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world. By this claim, they were prepared to stand or fall ...'2 They formulated this principle in the doctrine of the Trinity which they saw as no obscurantist mystery (as do most of our present day theologians) but as that in terms of which all else could be understood. The main part of Cochrane's book is concerned with the gradual formulation of this principle and its use as an instrument whereby to criticize the failures of the Roman Empire as they became increasingly apparent. He traces the story from the early cruder thinkers such as Tertullian - through the attempt of Constantine and his advisors to use Christianity to buttress the empire - to its consummation in the thought of Augustine.3 In Augustine the principles of Christianity are laid down in a philosophic system of the first magnitude, in which the first principle of Christ is seen in all the subtlety of its relation to every aspect of human existence - ethics and art, cosmology and science, politics and history. The last three chapters of Cochrane's book are just an analysis of Augustine's philosophical system. Though it has been the practice in recent years of optimistic and simple minded American psychologists such as William James or Gordon Allport to berate Augustine as an abnormal personality, even a psychotic, it is surely truer to see Augustine as one of the two or three greatest minds in all the history of the west.4 I do not know where else the essentials of his position are as brilliantly expounded as in Cochrane. Of course the story is not all of conflict between Christian and classical ideas. For, on the one hand, the Roman world was more and more forced to turn to the Christian community for support. On the other hand, the Christians, if they were to expound their position beyond the barest outline, had to turn beyond the Bible to the more sophisticated language of classical philosophy, and in using that language the great truths of classical philosophy were incorporated into Christianity. That indeed is the accomplishment of Augustine that he did not scorn truth wherever it was to be found, but took the truth of Platonism and gave it new illumination through the light of Christ. Indeed, if I have one criticism to make of Cochrane it is that he draws the line between classical and Christian philosophy too sharply. There was such a line, and a distinct one at that - but Cochrane seems to underemphasize the side of Augustine which was ready to say that Plato, though he lived four hundred years before Jesus, still knew the whole of Christian truth except that the word had been made flesh.

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Now you may well say, yes, this is probably a very learned book about the past, but why should it be considered so important for us who live with our own difficulties in the 20th century. How can a book about events so many centuries ago be as important as you say it is? The answer to that lies in the very condition of our present civilization. It is surely true that our civilization - the civilization of the west - has reached a point where the signs of its intellectual, religious, and moral disintegration are present at every point. Internally we have only to look at the breakdown of our educational and religious traditions - our desperate trust that the problems of the human spirit can be faced by psychological manipulation or political arrangement. Externally we are threatened by determined opponents who, on the whole, we must class as barbarians. What a ring the word 20th century once had, and think what it sounds like now. And the root cause of that disintegration is clearly that the ideas that have shaped our society can now be seen as radically deficient. It is becoming increasingly clear that our modern scientific view of nature and man is quite unsatisfactory. As Cochrane says, it was the failure of the logic of classical naturalism which lay at the root of the failure of Rome; so we may say it is the failure of the logic of modern naturalism which lies at the root of our failure. To remake ourselves, therefore, as individual persons and as a society, the most radical investigation of our first principles becomes necessary. Now it is here that Cochrane's book comes in - for it gives us something around which we can think. In the first place, it takes us to the people of another civilization and their struggles for the truth. It exposes what ideas are shown to them once and for all to be dead end streets and we can learn from that not to charge down them once again. For, after all, it is the central truth of education that the best approach to truth is through the study of error. But Cochrane goes way beyond the exposing of the errors of classical naturalism; he lifts up the struggles of that particular time so that they become eternal questions - that is, questions valid for everybody at any time in history. Above all, what he so brilliantly sees is that men reap in practical action what they have sown in their philosophy. Of course, there are other books written in the last years which have raised the same problems. Arnold Toynbee has just completed his mammoth Study of History.5 Reinhold Niebuhr has written his Nature and Destiny of Man.6 But in Toynbee there is always a fuzziness about

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philosophical questions - a failure to analyze deeply. In Niebuhr there is a lack of subtlety - his answers are decisive but too easy. Beside either of them Cochrane is like a clear deep river, winding certainly to the sea. He goes right to the heart of the matter. Patriotism may indeed be not enough, but patriotism which honours what has been best in own society is a virtue. Therefore, we in Canada can rejoice that a man such as Cochrane, who hungered and thirsted for the truth, was raised up in Canada and that at least once, intellectual greatness was in our midst.

Notes 1 Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press 1944), Preface, p. vi. 2 Ibid. 3 Tertullian, properly Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (c.l55-c.222), African Church Father, posed the famous rhetorical question What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? in De Praescriptione Haereticorum, 7, meaning Christians do not need philosophy and should stand apart from the world and its ways of thinking. Constantine I, properly Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus (c.274-337), was Roman Emperor and called 'the great.' During his reign Christianity became a state religion in 324, and he called the Council of Nicaea in 325. He himself was baptized shortly before his death, though he credited his political success to an early conversion to Christianity. 4 William James - see note 2 in 'Philosophy and Adult Education' (73). For James's discussion of Augustine as a 'divided self see, for example, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor 1958), 143-5. Gordon Allport (1897-1967), American psychologist, founded the trait approach to personality theory. He wrote Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (1937). 5 Arnold Joseph Toynbee - see note 4 in 'Plato and Popper' (90). 6 Reinhold Niebuhr - see note 7 in 'Two Theological Languages' (63).

What Is Philosophy?

The words 'Maritime Comment, George Grant' are written on the first page of this typescript found in Grant's papers. This may have been a radio talk broadcast by the CBC or by the Halifax station CJCH in 1954. The date is known because Grant mentions the ages of two of his children in the text.

This evening I want to try to describe what philosophy is. My job is to teach philosophy to youngsters at Dalhousie University. Just what is this subject that we try to teach them, and which is taught at all the universities of the world? Why is it that in all the great civilisations there have always been philosophers and that indeed we often judge the greatness of a society by the greatness of its philosophy? The word 'philosophy' comes from two Greek words, love and wisdom. Philosophy means the love of wisdom. Now most of us have some knowledge of what it is to love. Parents love their children - that is, the children are infinitely precious to them. Some of us at our worst moments love money in the same way. Money is what is infinitely precious to us. That is, to love somebody in the real sense, not the Hollywood sense, is to say that that person is not of relative but of absolute worth to one. People who love themselves think themselves of absolute worth. They are for themselves the centre of the universe. But if it is fairly easy from our own experience to say what love is, it is far more difficult to know what we mean by the word 'wisdom.' It is indeed quite easy to say what wisdom is not. It is not, for instance, knowledge in any specialised sense. We know people who have a great deal of knowledge about mathematics or medicine, of fixing radios or selling insurance, who despite that knowledge we would not call wise.

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The great atomic scientist in the United States, Dr Oppenheimer, obviously is a man of vast knowledge but nobody who has followed his career could easily call him a wise man. Just like Einstein, outside his specialised field of physics he talks like a child. On the other hand most of us have met people who have very little specialised knowledge and who one would yet call wise. For instance, I know a retired minister in Halifax who is no great specialist in any field, but is one of the wisest men I have ever met.1 Now I think that gives us the clue to what wisdom is. We call people wise if they know how to live - if they know what is important in living. And when we speak about living we mean something to do with the whole of the person - that which goes to the very roots of an individual's life. And that is what we mean when we say philosophy is the love of wisdom. It is the desire to seek that which will give purpose and meaning and unity to life. That is the difference between philosophic and scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is always concerned with some part or aspect of life; philosophic knowledge is always concerned with the whole of human existence. In other words, philosophy begins when we ask the questions: 'How should I live? What is life for? Why do I exist in the world?' Now of course for many people such questions as these do not arise as real questions. They think they know what life is really for. They think they know what is important. For instance in North America today more and more people think they are certain what is of prime importance to living. It is to get more money, to buy a more expensive house, to have wider and more varied pleasures, to be a social success - that is what is known as getting on in the world. Once one has got a Chevrolet, get an Oldsmobile; once one has got an Oldsmobile, get a Buick. Among such people - and of course this kind of mood is present in all of us - there is little desire for wisdom, little desire to think what life is about. The practical getting on in the world is their philosophy - so they don't feel the need to think farther. In a nobler and deeper way the same thing is true of people who are held very simply by some clearly defined religion. If they take that religion seriously it tells them directly what is important about living. It gives them such certainty that they feel no need to think deeply about the meaning of life - that is, to ask philosophic questions. They live in tradition. And when I speak about religion I do not mean only as

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ancient and wise a tradition as Christianity. It is equally true of the great political religions of the twentieth century. In Soviet Russia for instance there is practically no philosophy for the religion of communism provides for many people a simple Sunday school faith which tells them how to live. Philosophy is for those who have moved beyond any simple certainty. It is for those who have come face to face with the mystery of existence and who have seen how profound a mystery it is. Philosophy is the attempt to fathom that profundity - that is, to find the wisdom that will enable us to live as we ought. Now the sense of mystery arises for people in two ways; first from just plain wonder at the world around them, and secondly from the anguish of their own lives. That glorious man, Plato - the greatest of all philosophers - said once that philosophy begins in wonder. We look at the immense spaces of the night - the worlds beyond worlds beyond worlds that the astronomers tell us about, and how can we not wonder what it is all for, where it all came from. We look at human history - at all the vast numbers of civilisations and billions of people who have existed, the traces of whom have entirely disappeared from the world, and we ask what human life is for. Has it any meaning at all? I think this wonder exists deep down in everybody. Certainly it exists in all children. When I say to my six year old daughter that God made the world, she looks up in wonder to ask who then made God. When we meet a blind person my four year old son asks why did God make some people blind - or why did God make mosquitoes or sharks? Of course the tragedy is that we kill that wonder in our children. We fill them with complacent conventional opinions and tame them to accept unquestioningly. We make them adjusted little members of the ant community. But still that spontaneous wonder in children is evidence that it is deeply in all of us. It is just our humanity that we desire to know, and that desire to know is the very root of philosophy. Of course this sense of mystery comes to us not only in this natural spontaneous way - but also rises in the anguish and suffering which is so near the heart of all our lives. This anguish arises for us when people we love are dead or going to die - when we face the fact that inescapably we too must die. It faces us in all the suffering we undergo when we are disappointed in what we have desperately wanted. It arises for us most deeply in the guilt and shame we rightly feel when

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we have treated some other person cruelly or let some other person down. That is, when we see our shoddy little selves for what we truly are. Most of us will try to do anything to avoid that anguish. We will do anything to forget that someday we shall die; we try to push aside the thought that we have treated people unfairly, by dubbing all our guilts 'neurotic' We try to surround ourselves with pleasant thoughts - the next cigarette, the next dance, the next promotion, the next act of love. But inescapably the fact of our situation is there. At some moment perhaps when we lie awake at night, perhaps when we are in pain, perhaps when we face the fact that somebody we love has no real care for us, perhaps even at our greatest moments of happiness when we know this happiness is bound to pass - at such moments we admit our situation and experience anguish. The whole mystery of human existence arises for us and we start to philosophise - to fathom that mystery in thought. For instance, these days if any of us really faced what the cobalt bomb may mean - that human existence perhaps will cease to exist on this planet - that is, you and I and our children - we might really begin to face that mystery. Has the human story then been meaningless? Is my life, are my children's lives meaningless? It is in such moments that philosophy in its deepest sense arises. Of course the practical man will say, get on with the job - why think about such things - earn your living, bring up your family, do your duty, make the world more comfortable for other people. All one can say in answer to such practical people is that those who feel this anguish, meet this mystery, have no alternative to philosophy. It is what God has called them to do. Perhaps we may say even more. After all an ape or a bee gets on with the job, earns his living, procreates and cares for his children, accepts his existence, adjusts to his society. Only man is capable of this attempt to understand the mystery of existence. It is only man who can rebel, feel anguish, think. Perhaps then in a very real sense, it is the ability to philosophise which gives man his real dignity, which makes him more valuable than a clever ape. One of the finest philosophers of all time, a Frenchman named Pascal, once expressed this brilliantly. He said: Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but a thinking reed. It does not need the universe to take up arms to crush him; a vapour, a

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drop of water is enough to kill him. But, though the universe should crush him, a man would still be nobler than his destroyer, because he knows that he is dying, knows that the universe has got the better of him; the universe knows nothing of this.2 This means that philosophy is something inescapable to being a man. It is an activity rooted in the very nature of our humanity - not a pleasant academic exercise reserved for a few professors and students in a university. The farmer must find himself as much as the teacher; the business man as much as the coal miner. It also means that philosophy is something that a man must do for himself. Nobody can make another man's philosophy for him. Other people can grow our food for us; other people can make our atom bombs for us; somebody else can cure us when we are sick - but nobody else can do our thinking for us. This is the ultimate truth of freedom. A man must do his own believing as he does his own dying. This indeed takes me to one of the most commonly heard criticisms of philosophy - that there is no development in it, as for instance there is in the progressive development of the natural sciences. Science it is said is always growing in knowledge, philosophy is not. But to say this is to miss the whole point of philosophy - to fail to see what it is. It is not concerned with how men manipulate the public objects of the world - it is concerned with the journey of each individual's mind into the infinite. Therefore philosophy must be lived through again and again in the life of each person. In science we are further ahead than the ancient Greeks or people at the time of Jesus. But philosophically our minds are not far ahead of the minds of Socrates or Jesus. Indeed even the best of us only begin to touch at the hem of their garments. We must live through the same thought, the same agony they lived through, if we are to come to the majesty of their vision. That is why there is no progress in philosophy as there is in science. It is an activity which each new generation - indeed each new person - must live through for himself that he may find the ultimate vision for himself. This again is the very truth of freedom. Another commonly heard criticism, related to this one and based on the same misunderstanding of the nature of philosophy, is the old cry: All philosophies contradict each other. Philosophy is blamed for being at once too diverse and too much the same. But in fact the major phi-

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losophies seldom contradict each other on fundamentals; the effect of doing so is a result of necessary differences of standpoints, emphasis, and idiom. The way I have described philosophy has been as a very intimate and personal activity - something dealing with the core of the human mind. Of course in the university it is presented to students in a more formal way. We try to put before the students what has been most illuminating in the great philosophising of the past. The students study the writings that incorporate the fullest wisdom of the greatest philosophers. This study of the past is necessary, for after all each generation does not come into a new world - it comes into a world made rich by the tradition of the ages. Therefore one of the things a man must do if he is to be wise himself is to partake of all that accumulation of wisdom. This study of the history of philosophy is the raw material out of which men can begin to build a philosophy of their own. After all any man who has even elementary humility will want to find out what Aristotle and St Paul, Kant and Calvin, said about a problem, and see in the great man's solution of that problem the beginnings of a solution of his own. For instance, to such a central problem as 'what is truth?' we cannot expect any easy answer, and we need all the help we can get from those in the past who have had clearer minds and greater vision than ourselves. Do you remember Francis Bacon's wonderful description of the meeting between Pilate and Jesus. '"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate and would not wait for an answer.'3 If we are not willing to wait for answers in philosophy, if we are not willing to learn from the wisdom of the past, how can we expect to get anything but a cheap answer to the problem 'What is truth'? And if we have a cheap answer to such a problem we are liable to have a cheap life. Indeed it is the superficial flip way that we on this continent are bringing up our youngsters to have no respect for the wisdom of the past and to say that truth is what works and teaching them our rushing restless life, which makes one wonder what is going to happen to our society. Indeed one of our major tragedies is how little true philosophy there is amongst us. In our personal life, wisdom as an ideal is more and more replaced by success and wealth and adjustment. In our universities philosophy is being replaced by the study of natural science and useful techniques studies which are popular because they lead to comfort and power. It

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is a sad fact but it must be admitted that we are a continent which has almost entirely given up the idea of philosophy. Yet we must never despair, for none of us are slaves to our society. The life of philosophy is open to all of us. And its reward is in truth infinite. For as we face the mystery of existence and pass in thought beyond a superficial view of the world, there will come to us out of the mystery and the anguish the certainty which is rooted not in foolishness but in truth. There will come to us indeed God - not God as he is so often thought of, as an insurance policy for the next world, or as a comforting drug - but God in his real and terrible presence. For that is finally what philosophy is - the practice of the presence of God.

Notes 1 Grant is referring to his retired friend Reverend J.W.A. (John William Angus) Nicholson (1873-1961), a member of the CCF from Cape Breton, and the last man to be tried for heresy by the United Church. During an induction service in Dartmouth in 1911 he was asked, 'Do you believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ?' He replied, 'Yes, in the sense that I believe there is something divine in every man.' A charge was brought against him before the Church Courts, but the Presbytery accepted the argument that he had in his induction reply said nothing that contradicted his ordination vows, absolving him of heresy. Grant considered Nicholson a saint because of his practical good works. 2 See Blaise Pascal (1623-62), Pensees, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin 1966), 95 (sect. 1, part XV, 'Transition from knowledge of man to knowledge of God,' 200 H3 [347]). 3 Francis Bacon, Essays, 'Of Truth.'

Jean-Paul Sartre

This article was originally a talk delivered on CBC Radio on 9 November 1955 for the series CBC Wednesday Night. It was later published in Architects of Modern Thought (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1955), 65-74. Grant also wrote about Sartre in 'Acceptance and Rebellion' (1956), a three-chapter projected book that was not published and appears for the first time in this volume (221). Then in 1985 he wrote a 'retraction' attacking Sartre and revising the position he took in the CBC talk. The retraction he wanted appended to any re-publication of the talk is included here.

Since the Germans were driven out of France in 1944, one voice has spoken with greater force and clarity in that country than any other Jean-Paul Sartre. In his novels and his plays and his philosophy, Sartre has put forward a view of human existence which has held the attention of Europeans more deeply than that of any other writer. Before the war Sartre was an unknown school teacher, then suddenly at the end of the war, he emerged as the chief intellectual influence of modern France. And in France, of course, the thinker is listened to with the greatest care. His philosophy has been one of anguish and despair and nausea, intoxicated with the problem of human evil and decrying mankind as a useless passion. So people have said that here was the final product of nihilism, perfectly representing the decadence into which Europe had fallen. Why then should Sartre be chosen as one of the makers of the modern mind? Shouldn't he just be treated as one of the more interesting products of Europe at the moment of its defeat, a voice which will cease to have influence now that France has been won back to normal-

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ity by the United States. This is indeed the way that most American and English journalists do speak of him. Just read Time. It is, however, wrong to see Sartre simply as a momentary voice arising from the nausea of France under the occupation. He is more important than that. He is the most eloquent of all the existentialist philosophers. And of one thing I am certain, existentialism is no passing intellectual fad - for it expresses something true about the very heart of human life and has expressed that truth with greater clarity and certainty than any previous philosophy. What the existentialists say is something which any educated man must come to grips with, if he wants to live beyond the superficial. Therefore, as the most influential of the existentialists, Sartre is a maker of the modern mind. It is extremely hard for Canadians to understand Sartre, because he thinks in entirely different patterns from those which Canadians are used to. We think in a mixture of two different patterns. Most of us think within the modern world view dominated by scientific and pseudo-scientific concepts. From the past we keep some remnants of a different way of thought - the view of philosophy and Christian theology. We are a confused mixture of these two patterns, with the scientific world view ever moving towards a total mastery. Sartre has attempted to break from both these ways of thought. On the one hand, he criticizes the modern world view of science as quite inadequate to understand human existence; on the other hand he criticizes the language of philosophy and Christian theology. Therefore as he does not speak in the patterns familiar to us, it is difficult for us even to begin to understand him. The presentation of Sartre in capsule form is therefore not possible. Indeed the existentialist movement as a whole is difficult to understand, because there are so many of them and they seem to differ so much among themselves. There are the original nineteenth century founders of the movement, the Dane Kierkegaard and the Russian Dostoevsky, both of whom are Christians.1 On the other hand such modern existentialists as Heidegger and Sartre are avowed atheists. Yet also within the modern movement there are Christians, a Catholic such as Marcel, Protestants such as Jaspers or Bultmann.2 By what principle are they then all grouped together as existentialists? I would say that the question which unites them is their common concentration on the problem of subjectivity. This is why they are called existential-

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ists, because they are concerned with human existence as subject in a world of objects. The word 'subjectivity' sounds very technical and academic, and I am therefore loath to use it. Yet there is no avoiding it, if one is to see what these men are saying about human existence. When we start to think clearly we see that the world is something apart from us. Things in the world are objects - chairs, tables, etc. And what we mean by science is to study the world as object. But what so many of us forget, though it is obvious once we think of it, is that the looking at the world as an object is done by an active subject, the person doing the looking, the myself or yourself who is implied in knowing what is other than ourselves. To use the technical philosophic phrase, all acts of knowledge presuppose a subject-object distinction. And the more we think about subjectivity the more mysterious it becomes. On the one hand, it is always there, we cannot escape ourselves. On the other hand, though we can never escape ourselves, we can never find ourselves. For when we think about ourselves, we turn ourselves into an object thought about, while of course there is still the I who is doing the thinking about the I. We can think about ourselves thinking about ourselves and we can think about ourselves thinking about ourselves thinking about ourselves. But we must always remain a mystery, for in the very attempt to grasp our inwardness we place ourselves outside it. Man is therefore an infinite depth to himself. This is the ultimate fact of being a man, to be free. Freedom and subjectivity mean the same thing, the ability to transcend ourselves. This is man's total qualitative difference from the animals. He is, like the animals, a determined object in the world, but he is more than that. He is a free person who must choose how he shall live. This can be seen in the issue of suicide and death. We are not like animals dominated by the will to live, we are at every moment free to deny that will to live - that is, in freedom to commit suicide. We stand in a relationship to death entirely different from that of the animals, because we can so transcend life as to know with certainty that we must die. In our freedom we are always faced by our own extinction. It is with this ultimate problem of human existence that the existentialists are concerned. As I have said, they are concerned with man's existence as a free subject in an alien world of objects and what this tells us of the human predicament. Now I don't think it possible to understand the existentialist's con-

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centration on the problem of freedom, unless one sees it as a protest against the way modern civilization has regarded man as an external object, and denied his freedom. It is not difficult to describe the spirit of Europe in the last centuries, for it has found its apotheosis in the externalized society we now have in North America. In outward action that spirit transformed life by creating the new technological society. In thought, this spirit built a world which put its faith in the external and raised up myths such as evolution and progress which glorify the external and state that man can be entirely understood as object. Man was not a problem to himself, for his difficulties, like those of other problems, would be solved automatically as he manipulated nature. Another scientific discovery, another hospital, another committee and gradually all would be well. This objective spirit of the European and North American middle classes has been a remarkable phenomenon. Nobody should fall into the trap of despising it lightly. It did much to reform and transform the external world. It had, however, a deadly weakness; it came more and more to deny human freedom and subjectivity in both its thought and practice. It is against this superficial view of human existence that the existentialists have brought their indictment. Kierkegaard, the first of them, who lived in Denmark in the 1850s, directed a total indictment in the name of the inwardness of Christianity against the nineteenth century middle class worship of the external, and particularly the kind of Christianity it had erected. His thought was so foreign to his age that his writings were totally unknown and he died with the world thinking him a madman. Dostoevsky, the Russian, inveighed against western Europe's scientific humanism. In his wonderful phrase 'If God does not exist, anything is permissible' he summed up the failure of that humanism as a basis for any serious morality.3 But it was not till after 1918 that existentialism arose as a serious philosophic movement and not until after 1945 that it became a public way of thought. I do not need here to describe the history of Europe since 1914. Suffice it to say that the horrors that have occurred there have broken the faith of externalized bourgeois culture. Here was a civilization of the highest technical advancement and with the deepest trust in progress which indulged in history's most terrible perversions.

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And what was hardest for the European humanist to take was that the de-humanity was not something outside the culture but arose logically from its own premises. Scientific experiments on conscious human beings against their will were practised by doctors - by that profession which is the very symbol of middle class faith. And why not? If men are only objects why not experiment on them? And it was more than the enormities of war. The very industrial society of which the middle class was so proud was the breeding ground of de-humanity. In that prophetic book, Mein Kampf, Hitler, without knowing it, shows how the mass city, the perfectly externalized world, can be the foundation of perversion. So after 1918 it became harder and harder for the intelligent to take seriously the old optimistic scientific humanism. It is in terms of such a situation that Sartre's thought must be understood. On the one hand, his thought attempts to justify the reality of human freedom against the depersonalized scientific thought which would deny it; on the other hand his partaking in the evil of the modern world has convinced him of the meaninglessness of human life and broken him from the old theological tradition, so that he must justify freedom with no appeal to purpose - that is, to the idea of God. This is the paradox of Sartre's thought: Out of the absolute negation of denying all meaning to our life, he attempts to illuminate the reality of freedom and subjectivity. It is possible to see how this paradox has come out of Sartre's own life. He was born in Paris in 1905. After the first war he studied at the Teacher's Training College at the University of Paris. He then studied philosophy in Germany and returned to France to teach it at a school. In 1939 he joined the French army and was captured by the Germans in the collapse of 1940. In 1941 he was released on medical grounds and spent the next years of the occupation as head of a group in the resistance and produced his great series of plays and novels. Since the war he has continued as a writer in Paris. What better life could there be in which to discover that existence is absurd than to live in Paris in the very midst of the decadence and disaster; and as a school teacher, that profession which has suffered more than any other from the dehumanized society. If you want to see Sartre as a human being, read his great trilogy The Roads to Freedom.4 The leading characters in it always seem to me a composite picture of him, that is, of a man who has lived with every despair and every perversion. What an epitome of the modern

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world these novels are. Yet the ambiguity in Sartre is that he sees this decadence only partially from within and partially from without as in the freedom of the spirit he transcends it. After all, he had partaken of the highest European tradition of philosophy. Therefore at one and the same time he asserts the anguish and absurdity of the world and also the absoluteness of human freedom. This absoluteness of freedom appeared for him with certainty during his experience under the Nazis. He writes about it: We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one protest or another, as workers, Jews, and political prisoners, we were deported in mass. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our suppressors wanted us to accept. And because of all this we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our thoughts every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment. The circumstances, atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live in the hectic and impossible existence that is known as the lot of man ... The basic question of liberty was posed, and we were brought to the verge of the deepest knowledge that man can have of himself. For the secret of man is not his Oedipus complex or his inferiority complex; it is the limit of his own freedom, his capacity for resisting torture and death. Total responsibility in total solitude - is not this the very definition of freedom?5

These are the two central categories of Sartre's thought - freedom and negation. And I think one can see what Sartre means by negation or absurdity if one looks at what he says about the existence of God. Sartre is an uncompromising atheist. I do not mean by this that he is an agnostic - a person who is uncertain about the meaning of the world. Sartre is certain. He knows it has no meaning - God does not exist. Yet how different is this atheism from the pleasant scientific humanism of the nineteenth century in which well cushioned Victorian gentlemen such as Huxley denied the existence of God but said it didn't matter

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very much.6 To Sartre, God does not exist and it matters absolutely. It means that life is totally anguish. And Sartre's atheism is also different for he proclaims it immoral to believe in God. The belief in God is a drug which makes men secure and therefore prevents them from being authentically free. It is a myth which places responsibility for what happens outside ourselves and so turns us away from the full anguish of choice. This view is wonderfully brought out in Sartre's greatest play, The Flies - a modern edition of the Greek legend of Orestes and Electra. Their mother Clytemnestra has killed their father. Now Orestes has come back to take revenge and kill Clytemnestra. In the play there is a character called Zeus (that is, God) who every time anybody wants to be free performs a miracle so as to keep people afraid of him. At the climax of the play Orestes has killed his mother and God is trying to persuade him he should feel guilty and retire to a life of repentance. Orestes cries out that at last in deciding to kill his mother he has awoken from a dream. He used to believe that the world was a cosmos and that God existed. Now he has awoken from that illusion and he is authentically free. Free because he has put away the final myth, namely that the world is a rational place and so at last is free to make himself and his world as he chooses. This is what Sartre means by negation and freedom. As a person tries to discover the meaning of life in continual acts of self-transcendence, he finds himself less and less able to rely on any objective authority at all - be it eternal values, political creeds, or the dogmas of science given by physics or psychology. Men only come to their freedom as they find they cannot rely on anything. And as they find there is no valid reason for doing or believing anything they become alienated from the world and from themselves. That is, they encounter nothingness. And of course the encounter with nothingness is an encounter of anguish. It is despair. But this is what it is to become a man, to become free: to purge the self from all myths and legends, to be alienated from belief in anything, to know that existence is without meaning. Therefore, man finds himself condemned to be free in a pointless world. Over and over again in Sartre's novels the hero or heroine at last become themselves when they recognize this nothingness. This freeing of the mind by its encounter with nothingness arises for Sartre particularly when a man faces the reality of evil. Indeed it is Sar-

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tre's account of evil which is to me his greatest achievement, both as a philosopher and as an artist. As I have said, the optimism of nineteenth century scientific humanism was at its most superficial when it came to the problem of evil. More than any other writer I know, Sartre has brought back this question into European thought. He continually refuses to trivialize evil. I am going to read a passage from Sartre's What Is Literature? which is concerned with evil. It is a long passage, but I read it not only for what it says about evil but also because it shows what a brilliant writer he is: We have been taught to take evil seriously. It is neither our fault nor our merit if we lived in a time when torture was a daily fact. Chateaubriand, Oradour, the Rue des Saussaies, Tulle, Dachau, and Auschwitz have all demonstrated to us that Evil is not an appearance,7 that knowing its cause does not dispel it, that it is not opposed to Good as a confused idea is to a clear one, that it is not the effects of passions which might be cured, of a fear which might be overcome, of a passing aberration which might be excused, of an ignorance which might be enlightened, that it can in no way be diverted, brought back, reduced, and incorporated into idealistic humanism, like that shade of which Leibnitz has written that it is necessary for the glare of daylight. Satan, Maritain once said, is pure.8 Pure, that is, without mixture and without remission. We have learned to know this horrible, this irreducible purity. It blazes forth in the close and almost sexual rapport between the executioner and his victim. For torture is first of all a matter of debasement. Whatever the sufferings which have been endured, it is the victim who decides, as a last resort, what the moment is when they are unbearable and when he must talk. The supreme irony of torture is that the sufferer, if he breaks down and talks, applies his will as a man to denying that he is a man, makes himself the accomplice of his executioners and, by his own movement, precipitates himself into abjection. The executioner is aware of this; he watches for this weakness, not only because he will obtain the information he desires, but because it will prove to him once again that he is right in using torture and that man is an animal who must be led with a whip. Thus, he attempts to destroy the humanity of his fellow-creature. Also, as a consequence, in himself; he knows that the groaning, sweating, filthy creature who begs for mercy and abandons himself, and who yields everything and is even so carried

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away that he improves upon his betrayals because the consciousness that he has done evil is like a stone around his neck dragging him still further down, exists also in his own image and that he - the executioner - is bearing down upon himself as much as upon his victim. If he wishes, on his own account, to escape this total degradation, he has no other recourse than to affirm his blind faith in an iron order which like a corset confines our repulsive weaknesses - in short, to commit man's destiny to the hands of inhuman powers. A moment comes when torturer and tortured are in accord, the former because he has, in a single victim, symbolically gratified his hatred of all mankind, the latter because he can bear his failing only by pushing it to the limit, and because the only way he can endure his self-hatred is by hating all other men along with himself. Later, perhaps, the executioner will be hanged. Perhaps the victim, if he recovers, will be redeemed. But what will blot out this Mass in which two freedoms have communed in the destruction of the human? We knew that, to a certain extent, it was being celebrated everywhere in Paris while we were eating, sleeping, and making love. We heard whole blocks screaming and we understood that Evil, fruit of a free and sovereign will, is, like Good, absolute. Perhaps a day will come when a happy age, looking back at the past, will see in this suffering and shame one of the paths which led to peace. But we were not on the side of history already made. We were, as I have said, situated in such a way that every lived minute seemed to us like something irreducible. Therefore, in spite of ourselves, we came to this conclusion, which will seem shocking to lofty souls: Evil cannot be redeemed.9 And of course if Evil is like Good, absolute and irredeemable, as Sartre has said, then finally thought must be known as impotent. It is in the light of this vision that Sartre calls out for action and social commitment as against philosophy and contemplation. This is to me always the weakness and paradox in Sartre; he uses philosophy to overcome philosophy. Philosophy, by definition, must be an appeal to thought and contemplation. Yet Sartre has used philosophic argument to decry thought and contemplation and to exalt the will and the irrational. Surely this is an obvious contradiction in what he says. To decry the value of reason by the use of reason is inescapably nonsense and Sartre is guilty of this very contradiction.

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Sartre continually says that the free man must commit himself in the situations he finds himself. This is what matters, not thought. Indeed I think this explains why he has been backing the Communist Party in France in the last years. This was so difficult to understand from Sartre because he had written brilliant philosophical criticisms of communism and a clever anti-communist play Red Gloves. It is perfectly obvious that he knows how full of corruption communism is in theory and practice. But commitment is absolute in his philosophy. The lines are drawn in Europe between Russian and American imperialism. A free man knows that both are guilty, that the choice between two evils is anguish, but still as a free man he must commit himself. To stand aloof is to deny his freedom. Therefore in the dreadful choice Sartre commits himself to involvement with communism. This is to him the awful responsibility of time. What I have said about Sartre hardly begins to touch his philosophy. I have said nothing about his chief philosophic work, Being and Nothingness, where the ideas of negation and freedom are worked out in detail. I have not mentioned his first novel, Nausea, where he explains most graphically what he means by the anguish of existing. But, of course, a great writer can only be understood by reading his works. What can I finally say about Sartre and about existentialism? Of Sartre, first and foremost I would say, that though he is an able philosopher he is a brilliant artist. Among existentialists both Heidegger and Jaspers are greater systematic philosophers, and Marcel ultimately wiser. But Sartre is one of the supreme artists of this century. I think his fame will rest on the way he has made the central insights of existentialism unforgettable in this art. For instance his play The Flies made me understand as no other writing I have ever read what it was to see life as meaningless, to doubt the existence of God. It is so powerful that it permeated all my dreams throughout one winter. And I would have no hesitation in saying that there is no greater modern novel than The Roads to Freedom.

But is existentialism truly this philosophy of freedom and anguish? Of the freedom there can be no doubt. It is the breath of life after those visions of man, dominated by the images of natural science which say that we are manipulable animals. Against such enemies of freedom existentialism proclaims the fact of the human spirit.

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But what of negation and nothingness? Is it ultimate as Sartre says? As a Christian, I would, of course, say no. Alienation is not final: nothingness is not absolute. Nevertheless there is a profound truth in what Sartre says of negation and alienation. Mind must continually live in its negative moment, if it is to be free. And for our generation particularly this nothingness it encounters must be, to speak paradoxically, a real presence. The debt for our worship of the world must now be paid and it must be paid in real coin, not in popular returns to secure religion. Our generation must pay by being faced by the absence of God and particularly among those who find that absence most frightful. It is after all, the truth of The Cross that the anguish of the soul must be made absolute before God can make it His own. It has been said of existentialism that it takes one to Golgotha to find there only two thieves dying on their crosses. Certainly I would not be content with such a vision of what happened there. Nevertheless to be at Golgotha, in despair and without vision, is better than not to be there. The following is a 'retraction' Grant wrote in 1985, intended, as he expressly wrote, to be appended to any future publication.

If one puts one's writings in the public sphere, it is good to include an example of which one is ashamed. How could I have ever taken Sartre's thought seriously? How could I have so praised this French litterateur masquerading as a philosopher? His long philosophic work Being and Nothingness is just a poor plagiarizing of a truly great book Being and Time. Sartre had studied with Heidegger and I suppose academic necessities required that he try to transpose Heidegger's thought into progressivist French. What is a sad commentary on life in the western world after the American victory is that when this thought was transposed into Sartre's clever plays and novels, 'existentialism' became a kind of popular faith among 'intellectuals.' Heidegger's thought was in its origins a wonderful account of what it is to be human in the light of the end of rationalism; in Sartre it became 'existentialism' - a clever cafe atheism. I have never been sure what intellectuals do (in the sense that builders build houses), but I am sure that it is not philosophy.

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Sartre's practical espousal of many leftist causes meant that he was often correct. When there are two unpleasant empires running the world, if one supports the eastern side, one is likely to see the unpleasant side of the American empire. On the other hand the French 'left' and 'right' have both records of public violence and cruelty. In the few years after 1944, the French left went in for a massacre of its opponents and during this time Sartre was leading the pack in crying for blood. Having spent a comfortable literary resistance he became the man of affairs calling out for revenge - particularly against Celine. Luckily the French military freed Celine from all charges. But if Sartre had fulfilled his ideological passion, he would have destroyed a great artist before he wrote his masterpiece. As a Protestant I find it well to remember that Sartre was in origin a Protestant. It is up to Catholics and Jews to lament the self-righteousness of secularised Catholics and Jews. Protestants should remember what happens to their own when the call to hunger and thirst after righteousness is detached from its supernatural end. One's own life is more interesting to oneself than to other people. Therefore it would be boring to discuss why I was such a fool as to admire Sartre thirty years ago.

Notes 1 Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55), Danish philosopher, theologian, and critic of rationalism, wrote Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Dread (1844), and Sickness Unto Death (1849). Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-81), Russian novelist, had a profound, universal influence on the twentieth-century novel. His novels include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Devils (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). See Grant's CBC talk on Dostoevsky in this volume (408). 2 Grant had only read a few of the essays of Martin Heidegger (see note 20 in 'Two Theological Languages,' 65) at the time of this broadcast. Later he would learn that Heidegger, unlike Sartre, claimed to be neither atheist nor theist. Gabriel Honore Marcel (1889-1973), French philosopher, dramatist, and critic, became a Catholic in 1929. His work includes Being and Having (1935) and The Mystery of Being (1951).

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Karl Theodor Jaspers (1883-1969), German doctor who became a philosopher, taught philosophy at Heidelberg (1921-37), and then Basle (1948) (his work was banned during the Nazi period). His main work is Philosophy (3 vols., 1932). Rudolph Karl Bultmann (1884-1976), German New Testament scholar and theologian greatly influenced by Heidegger, attempted to 'demythologize' the New Testament with his existentialist interpretation of it. His work includes Jesus and the Word (1934), Kerygma and Myth (1953), Theology of the New Testament (2 vols., 1952-5), and Existence and Faith (1964). 3 Grant often referred to the famous passage in which the devil in Ivan Karamazov's dream explains: '[S]ince there is neither God nor immortality, anyway, the new man has a right to become a man-god, though he may be the only one in the whole world, and having attained that new rank, he may lightheartedly jump over every barrier of the old moral code of the former man-slave, if he deems it necessary. There is no law for God! Where God stands, there is his place! Where I stand, there will at once be the first place "everything is permitted" and that's all there is to it!' Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David Magarshak (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin 1958), 764. 4 Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), The Age of Reason, originally Les chemins de la liberte, trans. Eric Sutton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1971). 5 'Jamms nous n'avons ete plus libres que sous l'occupation allemande. Nous avions perdu tous nos droits et d'abord celui de parler; on nous insultait en face chaque jour et il fallait nous taire; on nous deportait en masse, comme travailleurs, comme Juifs, comme prisoniers politiques; partout sur les murs, dans les journaux, sur l'ecran, nous retrouvions cet immonde et fade visage que nos oppresseurs voulaient nous donner de nous-meme: a cause de tout cela nous etions libres. Puisque le venin nazi se glissait jusque dans notre pensee, chaque pensee juste etait une conquete; puisqu'une police toutepuissante cherchait a nous contraindre au silence, chaque parole devenait precieuse comme une declaration de principe; puisque nous etions traques, chacun de nos gestes avait le poids d'un engagement. Les circonstances souvent atroces de notre combat nous mettaient enfin a meme de vivre, sans fard et sans voile, cette situation dechiree, insoutenable qu'on appelle la condition humaine... Ainsi la question meme de la liberte etait posee et nous etions au bord de la connaissance la plus profonde que l'homme peut avoir de lui-meme. Car le secret d'un homme, de n'est pas son complexe d'Oedipe ou d'inferiorite, c'est la limite meme de sa liberte, c'est son pouvoir de resistance aux supplices et a la mort.' Jean-Paul Sartre, 'La republique du silence,' (from Lettres Francaise, 1944), in Situations, III (Paris: Gallimard 1949), 11-13. Grant may have translated the passage into English himself. For another

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translation, see Robert Denoon Cumming, ed., The Philosophy of John Paul Sartre (New York: Vintage 1965), 233-4. 6 Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95), zoologist, anatomist, and essayist, contributed to the elevation of the science of biology and especially the Darwinian theory of evolution to public prominence. Huxley is credited with the term 'agnostic' to express a position of suspended belief, arguing as he did that one ought not to believe beyond the evidence. 7 Sartre is naming places where the Nazis interned, tortured, and sometimes exterminated their enemies: Dachau and Auschwitz are well known. Rue des Saussaies was the Gestapo headquarters in Paris. Hostages were taken and then executed at Chateaubriand. The SS carried out reprisals against civilians at Oradour and Tulle for acts of sabotage committed by the Resistance. At Oradour 100 men were seized at random and killed; at Tulle SS troops murdered 642 villagers, including 190 schoolchildren. See Martin Gilbert, Second World War (Toronto: Stoddart, 1989), 536-7. 8 Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), leading neo-Thomist philosopher, taught in Paris (1914-40) and later in Toronto, Columbia, Chicago, and Princeton (1948-60). 9 Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library 1949), 211-13. Grant quotes this same passage in 'Acceptance and Rebellion' (289-90).

Canada - History

This essay appears in Chambers' Encyclopaedia (London: International Learning Systems Corporation 1955-), vol. 3. Grant is the sole author of the section of the article up to the heading 'Home Affairs from 1918.' From that point on, he is co-author with Henry Stanley Ferns, at that time Professor of Political Science at the University of Birmingham. Sheila Grant thinks it likely her husband was recommended for this contribution by Gerald Graham, an old teacher of his, and a great friend throughout their lives. Graham was a distinguished historian, mostly of the British Commonwealth, and Grant wrote an essay, 'Ideology in Modern Empires,' for Graham's Festshrift, edited by John E. Flint and Glyndwr Williams, Perspectives of Empire: Essays Presented to Gerald S. Graham (London: Longman; New York: Barnes and Noble 1973), 189-97.

In Canada, one sees a small nation of some eighteen million people stretched across the larger part of the North American continent; a nation friendly to the USA, yet a distinct political entity; the oldest and largest of the British dominions, loyal to the British crown, yet self-governing and with a national culture of its own based on two languages, English and French, and on several racial and religious traditions. The French and English Colony (1497-1867) Early Explorations. Though there is good evidence that Norse explorers from Scandinavia touched the Atlantic seaboard and perhaps journeyed inland into the North American continent about the year 1000, the dawn of authentic Canadian history begins with the golden age of

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European exploration at the end of the 15th century. Explorers set out from Spain and Portugal, England and France to find a new route by sea to the legendary wealth of the orient. In the course of these efforts Spain established itself in the silver- and gold-producing region of the Caribbean and Central and South America and was able by reason of military power to resist the encroachments of foreign states for the whole of the 16th century. Hence England and France turned elsewhere, to the less superficially favoured regions of the north-western Atlantic. In 1497 John Cabot exploring for Henry VII of England claimed Newfoundland and the area of what is now Nova Scotia for his king. In 1534 Jacques Cartier, a French navigator, journeyed to the gulf of St Lawrence and landing on the Gaspe peninsula claimed the surrounding areas for Francis I of France. He returned in 1535, hoping to find that the St Lawrence was a great waterway to China, and journeying up the river landed first at an Indian village, Stadacona (later the site of Quebec), and then higher up the river at Hochelaga (now Montreal). With his band he spent the winter under conditions of grave hardship at Stadacona. During the rest of the 16th century France was too occupied with internal dissension and European wars to extend the exploration of this new territory. It was not until the beginning of the 17th century under the strong monarchy of Henry IV that French imperialists became interested in the New World. In 1604 attempts were made to found a permanent settlement under de Monts at Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal) on the Bay of Fundy. Bitter winters made the colony short-lived. From this early experiment, however, a man of genius and vision, Samuel de Champlain, had arisen, and in 1608 he founded a new settlement at Quebec in the St Lawrence valley. During the next years under Champlain's untiring leadership the new colony was consolidated, fortifications built and trade with the Indians extended. Champlain explored the interior of the country, travelling by canoe as far as Georgian Bay, still hoping to find some passage through to the orient. Traders followed him, going westward to seek the beaver furs rather than waiting for the Indians to bring them. At the same time heroic Jesuit missionaries set up mission stations among the Indians to convert them to Christianity. Champlain's work was stopped in 1629 when Quebec was captured by the English under Sir David Kirke. But it was restored in 1632 and a year later Champlain was sent back to Canada by the Com-

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pany of New France, organized under the powerful patronage of Richelieu. In 1642 another settlement was founded at Montreal. During the rest of the 17th century the French empire gradually expanded. With its base on the St Lawrence it stretched westward along the Great lakes and south down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to the gulf of Mexico. In 1663 New France was declared a royal colony and a policy of organized development and immigration was started by the imperially minded Colbert, minister to Louis XIV. A threefold governmental system was established with a governor in charge of political and military affairs, a bishop for ecclesiastical and religious matters and an intendant for justice, police and finance. As the Indian menace declined, the fertile farmlands of the St Lawrence were developed for cultivation under a modified form of the old feudal seigneurial system imported from France. Anglo-French Rivalry. The hegemony of France in North America was however by no means undisputed. In two different sections of the continent England staked out its claim. On the eastern seaboard of what is now the USA large settlements of English-speaking peoples grew and prospered. Also in the north English merchants sought the prized beaver on the route to the Canadian west via Hudson's Bay. This great waterway to the centre of the continent had been discovered by such men as Frobisher and Hudson in their search for a north-west passage to the orient. The hope of such a passage had proved abortive, but the area was found to be rich in furs. In 1670 Charles II granted a royal charter to the Hudson's Bay Company with exclusive rights for trade in the huge area drained by the rivers running to the bay. Hence there was continued in a new theatre the fight between England and France for the riches of North America, a conflict that carried on through the 17th and 18th centuries. France under imaginative leaders such as Frontenac established chains of forts from Quebec to New Orleans hoping to hem the English into the Coastal area. Raids were led by French and Indians against the settlements of New England to destroy them. The struggle was long and bitter, culminating in the final victory of Britain in the Seven Years war. Four decisive advantages won North America for England: the victories of European coalitions including England over the armies of Louis XIV and XV; the genius of William Pitt; the superiority of English sea-power over French in the 18th cen-

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tury, which enabled England to maintain uninterrupted military aids to its colonies while often the French colonies were cut off from such help; the far greater number of English settlers in North America as opposed to French. In 1763, there were approximately 60,000 French settlers as against a million English to the south. Against these odds the gallantry and daring of the French could not hope to triumph. Four years after Wolfe's capture of Quebec in 1759 Canada was ceded to England. The dream of a French empire in North America was at an end. It is well to remember how low the economic worth of Canada was judged in England in 1763. Certain influential sections of public opinion wished to keep the sugar island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean rather than Canada. After 1763 the English were left for the first time in their history with large numbers of Europeans of differing religion, language and culture from themselves. The colony had lost its natural leaders of government, for all the official and many of the educated members of the country except the local cures had returned to France after the conquest. For several years under governors Murray and Carleton various temporary expedients of government were tried. In 1774 parliament in London tackled the problem in long-range terms by passing the Quebec Act, under which the French Canadians were guaranteed the right to their own religion and traditional civil law. At the same time the Ohio valley was attached to the colony to protect the fur trade and its natural geographical connexions with the St Lawrence. Both these actions infuriated the English colonists to the south and were a prime grievance promoting the revolution, for the granting of privileges to their old enemies the French seemed to the colonists to prove that past feuds were forgotten. To the French Canadians, however, the Quebec Act stands to this day as the charter of their liberties. American War of lndependence. The seeds of modern Canada were planted in the American war of independence. With the defeat of British arms and the ruthlessness of the victorious Americans to those colonists who had backed the British cause, thousands of these United Empire Loyalists poured north to escape the penalties of defeat and find shelter under the British crown. To the east of Quebec, thousands came to Nova Scotia and to New Brunswick, building new lives for themselves in the wilderness. To the west of Quebec, others settled

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what is now Ontario, that is the area bordered on the east by the Ottawa river and on the south by lakes Erie and Ontario. Canada was no longer to be only French-speaking but also English. At the same time the loyalty of the French Canadian to the British crown was being tested. Despite the deputations sent up by the Americans in 1775 under Benjamin Franklin and the invasion of the colony by two armies in 1776, the French peasant remained sullenly neutral. The invasions were repulsed under the able leadership of the governor Guy Carleton (later Lord Dorchester). British North America was composed of two stocks, both of which were gradually to learn that only through allegiance to the British crown could they hope to guard their independence and particular way of life from absorption into the USA. The influx of such large numbers of English-speaking settlers into the colony made necessary a new political settlement. In 1791 the Constitutional Act was passed at Westminster and accepted the division of Canada into Upper and Lower Canada (today Ontario and Quebec). A governor-in-chief was appointed for all the colonies with a lieutenantgovernor in each. Each of the colonies was given an assembly, elected on property qualifications, with an appointed legislative council. In the Atlantic seaboard colony of Nova Scotia the large number of loyalist settlers in the St John valley necessitated the splitting off of New Brunswick in 1784 as a separate unit. Prince Edward Island had already been made into a third colony. Nova Scotia had an assembly before the American war of independence and new assemblies were set up in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Internal Development, 1791-1867. During the first half of the 19th century the new colony of Upper Canada grew from small and scattered settlements, struggling against the wilderness, to a prosperous agricultural and commercial community. In 1815 its population was only 80,000, by 1841 it was 450,000 and by 1861 1,396,000. The loyalist settlers were followed by Americans from the south following the expanding frontier to find new land. Land companies formed in the British Isles established organized communities on grants of government land. In the 1840s and 1850s, particularly, immigrants poured in from Great Britain, especially from starving Ireland. A large percentage of these immigrants were (as has always been the case in Canadian

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history) merely transients on the way to the USA, but many remained. Land settlement meant agriculture and the colony became an exporter of foodstuffs, especially before the repeal of the corn laws in 1846 when it had a privileged market in Great Britain. Timber was exported down the St Lawrence. Infant industries and indigenous commercial organizations were established at the capital York (its name was changed to Toronto in 1834). Canals, roads, and later railways brought increased prosperity. Most of the capital for such development came from England through the agency of such organizations as Baring Brothers. The social life of the colony grew with more schools and colleges. In all counties, the church, Presbyterian or Methodist, Church of England or Roman Catholic, became the centre of local life. Lower Canada, already a settled and substantial colony in 1791, did not expand at the same fast rate. The French population, isolated from France, particularly after the French revolution (which, Roman Catholic and conservative, it abhorred) had little immigration and increased mainly by natural means. The French part of the colony remained, by and large, a community of habitant farmers led by the bishops and cures and leaving the large-scale commerce of the colony to the English-speaking merchants of Montreal. Montreal became the economic capital with wealth based on the expanding trade of the Great lakes and of the St Lawrence. During the 19th century the colonies of the Atlantic seaboard, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, grew in prosperity. Geographically, economically and culturally they were more closely bound to the New England area to the south than to the rest of Canada, as they were cut off from the latter by the Maine salient, impassable before railways. Their trade was with New England and the British West Indies, supplying the latter with fish, grain and timber in exchange for molasses and rum. During the Napoleonic wars when England was cut off from Scandinavia, the source of its essential naval supplies, it turned to these colonies to supply its wants. This brought with it economic prosperity. Close to Great Britain and to New England these colonies developed an advanced educational and cultural life. As settlement and civilization advanced farther westward, the beaver retreated farther into the wilderness and so the fur traders were drawn after them. From 1731 to 1745 under French rule La Verendrye and his sons had established posts on the great plains and had jour-

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neyed right across them, possibly to within sight of the Rocky Mountains. In 1793 Alexander Mackenzie was the first explorer to cross the northern half of the American continent from sea to sea, journeying from Montreal across the great plains, over the great barrier of the Rocky Mountains to reach the Pacific Ocean. His journey was the last stage in the attempt at a discovery of a north-west passage to the orient from Europe. Employees of the Hudson's Bay Company explored north of the plains to the arctic and the company extended its activities into the Columbia valley and the Pacific slope, meeting Russian and American rivals. Unfortunately the development of the west was marred by the fierce rivalry between the North-West Company from Montreal and the Hudson's Bay Company operating via the bay from London. The traditional rivalry between these two competing routes did not end when both were under British control. The rivalry reached its worst pitch of violence when in 1811 Lord Selkirk, a Scottish landowner, through his interest in the Hudson's Bay Company attempted to found a colony of settlers in the Red river district. The North-West Company traders, fearing the effect of the settlement on the fur trade, attacked the settlers with Indian help, making the early years of the colony dangerous and unproductive. Finally, however, in 1821 the two fur-trading companies were merged and the development of the west proceeded on more peaceful lines. Towards Responsible Government. The increasing maturity of the colonies brought with it a desire for self-government - an integral part of the British heritage which most of the colonists were to share. The split between the popularly elected assemblies and the executive councils, appointed by the crown, brought a growing demand for real self-government from the 1820s onward. The ideas of democracy, alive in the mother country, Europe and the USA during the 19th century, found their echo in the new and struggling colonies. In Lower Canada the struggle for self-government was accentuated by nationalism as the popularly elected assembly was French, the governor and his appointees mainly English-speaking. In Upper Canada it was accentuated because the lieutenant-governor gathered around him as his executive a small, closed group known as the 'Family Compact' which used its power for its own control of land and for the aggrandizement of the Church of England at the expense of the other churches. Popu-

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lar dissatisfaction in both parts of Canada during the 1820s and 1830s culminated in the rebellion of 1837. In Upper Canada the rebellion was led by William Lyon Mackenzie, editor and political reformer, but was easily put down and its leader temporarily exiled to the USA. The province, though disliking the abuses, did not sanction rebellion. In Lower Canada, the rebellion under Louis Joseph Papineau, was more serious because of the racial cleavage, but the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the mass of the people did not support the rebellion and it was defeated. The abortive rebellions, however, awoke the imperial government in London to the seriousness of the colonial grievances and the need for reform. A prominent Whig politician, Lord Durham, was appointed governor-general in 1838 to investigate and report on the situation. His famous report is the origin and keystone of the second British empire, for in it he laid down the principle of effective responsible government for the colonies in domestic matters. The lesson of the AmericaAn revolution had been learnt and a new empire could be built on the basis of self-government for its component parts. In his report Lord Durham also advised the union of Upper and Lower Canada, for he believed that through this union and the expansion of the English-speaking population, the French section of the community would gradually lose its especial identity and the colony would become a homogeneous political state. So in 1840/41 the two colonies were united under the Act of Union, each to have equal number of members in a joint assembly. Immediate responsible cabinet government was not introduced after the Act of Union, but the struggle for it continued and under the governor-generalship of Lord Elgin (son-in-law of Lord Durham) it was finally put into force in 1848 when the popular leaders of the assembly, Baldwin and Lafontaine, were chosen as heads of a cabinet for the colony. Lord Elgin, with the backing of the colonial office in London, pushed this measure through despite the disapproval of many of the entrenched and powerful elements among the colonists themselves. Increasingly from the time of the Durham report and especially after the establishment of a Whig ministry in London in 1846, the imperial government encouraged rather than impeded the colonies in their desire for self-government. At the same time in the colonies by the sea, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, the same struggle for selfgovernment was in progress. During the 1840s the fight was carried on in Nova Scotia under the brilliant leadership of Joseph Howe and

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was finally successful in 1848. New Brunswick followed in the same year and Prince Edward Island in 1851. Relations with the USA, 1783-1867. The development of the British North American colonies in the 19th century was naturally deeply influenced by political, social and economic relations with the new republic to the south. These relations were bound up with the wider relations existing between Great Britain and the USA. Canada even at this early date was the third corner of an Atlantic triangle, pulled between the ancient power of Great Britain and the expanding strength of the USA. The colonies depended on Great Britain, if they were to defend themselves from the USA. Great Britain found Canada a useful and sometimes embarrassing stronghold in North America. In the war of 1812 between Great Britain and the USA, Canada became the focal point. By the time of the outbreak of the war the issues over shipping and impressment occasioned by the Napoleonic conflict were not solved; and the desire of the American expansionists in the new northwestern states to conquer Canada as a new field for 'manifest destiny' was another cause of the American declaration of war. The expansionists believed that the people of Canada would rise against the British yoke and thus make the conquest easy. They were mistaken in this hope and the loyalty of the United Empire Loyalist and FrenchCanadian stocks in the colonies, combined with the efficiency of the British regulars, prevented the success of the invasion. In 1815 the peace of Ghent left Canada much as it had been before, but the American invasion in 1812 had cemented the loyalty of the colonies. During the 19th century the boundary between the USA and Canada was continually in dispute, and in the consequent arbitrations the more powerful part usually got the better of the bargain. In 1831 there was an abortive settlement about the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick which was finally decided in 1842 by the WebsterAshburton treaty. During the 1840s there was agitation in the USA to take over large areas of territory from Great Britain on the Pacific slope. The slogan in one American election dealing with the latitudes was to take the border up to 'fifty-four forty or fight.' In 1846 the Oregon border was defined by treaty; and, while neither of these adjustments was entirely satisfactory, it is clear from the history of each of these negotiations that Canadian interest would have fared far worse without British power to support them.

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In the expansion of the economic life of the colonies trade increased across the border. But it was not until the repeal of the corn laws by Great Britain in 1846 ended the colonies' protected market in the mother country that it became vital for the colonies to find markets in the USA. The effect of the repeal of the corn laws on the Canadian economy was such that it gave rise to the Annexation Manifesto of 1849 in which many of the wealthier commercial elements in Montreal advocated annexation to the USA as a solution to Canadian economic problems. Lord Elgin, then governor-general, realized the solution to this problem was a new market for Canadian goods and it was through his effective negotiations that a reciprocal trade agreement was signed in 1854. This brought new prosperity to the colonies, particularly those on the Atlantic seaboard, and its abrogation by the USA in 1866, bringing with it economic distress, was a prime cause in leading the colonies to look for economic security in a larger union. The Dominion of Canada (from 1867) The Foundation of the Dominion. The Act of Union of 1840 between

Upper and Lower Canada was never a satisfactory political settlement even with the introduction of effective responsible government, for it held together in uneasy union two differing societies, one English, one French. In 1841 the French-speaking population had been in the majority and the equal number of seats in the assembly granted to each section had been to the advantage of the English-speaking. But after the large immigration from the British Isles in the 1840s and 1850s the boot was on the other foot and the English-speaking parts of the colony began to clamour for increased representation of their increased numbers. The two societies, one French, peasant and Roman Catholic, the other English and Protestant, both intransigent to the claims of the other and with equal numbers of representatives in the government, made political deadlock an inevitability. During the 1850s and early 1860s constant governmental breakdown and the continual formation of new ministries hampered the development of the provinces. Some new political settlement was clearly necessary. At the same period the colonies on the Atlantic seaboard, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, were discussing the possibility of some local union among themselves. They had been hit economically by the abro-

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gation of the reciprocity treaty by the USA in 1866. Also at the same time the defence of British North America was a question in the minds of the imperial government in London and in the minds of the sagacious leaders of the colonies. In the USA, the armies of the North, having won the civil war, seemed a threat to Canada, especially as voices were being raised once again in the American congress calling for the 'manifest destiny of the whole continent.' Private raids had been made across the border by American Irish known as Fenians. Also concentrated steps had to be taken if the western plains north of the 49th parallel of latitude were to remain British, for increasing numbers of American settlers were pushing up from Minnesota and might annex the area to the USA by right of possession. Political leaders such as Macdonald, Brown and Cartier in Canada, Tupper in Nova Scotia and Tilley in New Brunswick saw the possibility of a solution to their problems in the creation of a new nation. The imperial government through its colonial secretary Lord Carnarvon realized the advantage to British interests of establishing a united British North America. After preliminary conferences at Charlottetown and Quebec, the leaders moved to London for the final conference. In 1867 the British North America Act was passed at Westminster and the dominion of Canada came into being. The provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were joined together into a federal union, shaped on the lines of the USA, whereby each province remained in control of matters of local interest and the central government had power over matters of general concern. The term dominion to describe the new nation was taken from the biblical quotation 'his dominion shall be from sea to sea.' There was considerable opposition to the new union from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick but it was overcome by skilful political handling and the promise of financial subsidies from the central government. In 1869 the Hudson's Bay Company agreed to relinquish its exclusive rights over the western lands, in return for a sum a £300,000 and a large grant of lands. The Red river settlement entered Canada as the province of Manitoba in 1870. In 1871 British Columbia joined the dominion, and in 1873 Prince Edward Island became a province. A dominion had been created from sea to sea. The Transcontinental Railroad. The primary problem that confronted the government of the new nation under the first prime minister Sir John A.

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Macdonald was to see that this group of separate provinces spread out across a great continent should be united by the iron bond of a transcontinental railroad. Without such a bond the country could not hope to remain united. The Maritime provinces had entered confederation on the promise of a rail road to transport their goods to central Canada and as a link between their winter ports and the goods of the west. Equally, British Columbia had been promised a railway to connect it with the east. Lines of communication had to be built to counteract the natural tug of each area to its neighbouring part of the USA. A nation stretching east and west would fall apart if each part of it had no connecting links with the others but very close links with the south. Yet such large railway building projects were tremendous undertakings for a young country even with the aid of capital from the mother country. The intercolonial railway between central Canada and the Maritime provinces was completed by 1876. The railway from the east to the Pacific created greater difficulties. In 1869 with the arrival of new governmental authorities from Ottawa, a rebellion of half-breeds under Louis Riel broke out in the Red river. The rebels feared that the new government would endanger their holdings of land upon which they had squatted but to which few had clear legal titles. The rebellion was however easily repressed in 1870 when a military expedition under Colonel Wolseley arrived from the east. In 1873 the Conservative government at Ottawa under Macdonald was defeated when it became known that party funds were involved in the contracts for the railway to the Pacific. A Liberal ministry under Alexander Mackenzie succeeded and proceeded slowly with railway plans. British Columbia openly spoke of secession if building was not speeded up. In 1878 the Conservatives once more returned to office under Macdonald. In 1880 the contract for the completion of the railway was signed and in 1885 the final spike was driven home in the Canadian Pacific railway. The great undertaking had been carried out by such men as Donald Smith (later Lord Strathcona) and William van Home. Canada was united from coast to coast by the firm bands of steel. In 1885 once again there was a rebellion against the encroachments of civilization by the half-breeds under Louis Riel. Once again the rebellion was suppressed. Riel was tried and executed. Political and Economic Development, 1885-1918. The completion of the

transcontinental railway in 1885 made Canada more than a 'geograph-

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ical expression/ and Macdonald, the first great architect of the dominion, remained prime minister until his death in 1891. In 1878 he initiated a national policy to encourage Canadian industry to develop under the protection of tariffs. Economic nationalism was equalled by a growing political patriotism and Macdonald realized the necessity of fostering this spirit if Canada was to maintain its independence on the North American continent. After his death, the Conservative party declined in strength and in 1896 the Liberal party came to power. They had a brilliant leader in Wilfrid Laurier, a French Canadian and Roman Catholic. The specific issue on which the Liberals were returned was the right of the province of Manitoba to legislate about its own schools without the interference of the dominion government. The Liberals had always emphasized the rights of the local provincial governments while the Conservatives had emphasized the power of the central government. On this issue Laurier won the election, sweeping his own province Quebec even against the influence of the Roman Catholic bishops. Laurier's long stretch of power from 1896 to 1911 was chiefly notable for the remarkable development of the prairie area of Canada. The stage had been set for this by the railroads which had brought thousands of new settlers from the British Isles and eastern Europe into the plains and with the discovery of new, faster-growing wheats, large tracts of the northern prairie were made capable of cultivation. This area became one of the world's great granaries with its high product of hard, highly glutinous wheat, necessary for good bread. Clifford Sifton, minister of the interior in Laurier's cabinet, began a large-scale propaganda campaign for even more settlers with the encouragement of land grants for homesteading. Lured often by false and exaggerated hopes, thousands of new settlers poured into the west. The population of Canada mounted from 3,600,000 in 1871 to 7,200,000 in 1911. The growth of settlement made necessary the creation of two more prairies provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta, in 1905. New railway development began and two more transcontinen-tal railways were built. The collapse of railway finance in Canada during later years was to substantiate what earlier critics of Laurier had maintained, that he had allowed a greater development of railways than the thinly populated country could afford. But in the first flood of prosperity in the west anything seemed possible. Prosperity in the west brought wealth to eastern Canada which

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became the industrial and financial supplier for the other parts of Canada. In 1911 the liberal government under Laurier was beaten at the polls. It had advocated commercial reciprocity with the USA and this policy became unpopular in Canada when indiscreet voices in the USA spoke of this as the first step to a fuller union. Also in 1911 Laurier lost seats in Quebec to a new nationalist movement under Henri Bourassa which claimed to defend French-Canadian rights from infringement by English-speaking Canada. In 1911 a Conservative government under Robert Borden came to office. This government was facing the beginnings of an economic depression when all its energies were diverted by the first world war. The declaration of war by Great Britain against Germany in 1914 turned Canadian interest outwards from its own domestic problems to the wider issues of world politics. By 1915 a Canadian contingent was in France and a Canadian corps became part of the British forces. The courage and tenacity of Canadians in that war can be remembered by such names as Vimy Ridge and Passchendale. Though many times smaller in population than the USA, Canada lost more men than the larger country. Support of the war effort was not however given to the same degree in the French-speaking parts of Canada. The habitant civilization, cut off from its roots in Europe and turned in on itself, was traditionally isolationist and uninterested in world politics. When in 1917 conscription became necessary for military purposes, it was widely opposed in Quebec. Laurier took his stand against it and the Liberal party was split, the majority of its English-speaking members joining a Unionist government with the Conservatives to support conscription. This government was successful in winning the election of 1917, though most French-Canadians were in opposition. Conscription was enforced against the will of Quebec and the seeds of an extreme French-Canadian nationalism were planted. G.P. Grant Home Affairs from 1918. The outstanding Canadian leader of this period was W.L. Mackenzie King, who occupied the office of prime minister for twenty-one years (1921-30, 1935-47), and the dominant political influence was the Liberal party of which he was the leader from 1919 until 1947. The first world war had increased the social and economic

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tensions of the Canadian community. They manifested themselves in racial and class conflicts which took a violent and riotous form during the years 1918-19. Anti-conscription and anti-English riots afflicted Quebec and in Winnipeg there was a general strike in 1919. In the Prairie provinces and in Ontario farmers' movements emphasizing the need for direct democracy in politics and co-operative ownership of commercial and industrial enterprises flourished, ousting the older parties from power in some of the provinces. In the presence of these restless developments Mackenzie King advocated policies of moderation and conciliation on the part of all. He sought to relax tensions by pursuing further Laurier's policy of conceding wide powers to the provincial governments and by insisting on Canadian independence and non-involvement in the politics of the great powers. In order to relax class tensions he made small concessions in the shape of an old age pension scheme, but mainly he relied upon economic expansion, particularly in the field of raw material production, to solve difficulties. During the years 1921-29 Canada experienced rapid development in the production of electric power, wood pulp and paper, non-ferrous metals and light engineering goods, particularly cars. The heavy fall in commodity prices in international markets and the drying-up of international investment which characterized the world depression of the 1930s affected Canada severely. Farm incomes collapsed and were rendered even lower by drought in the Prairie provinces. Unemployment was heavy, and incomes from investment declined. The Conservative party under the leadership of R.B. Bennett won the election of 1930. Bennett's policy consisted of stimulating industrial production by raising tariffs on manufactured goods and extending markets overseas by the defensive tactic of 'empire preference.' The Ottawa agreements among the commonwealth countries gave Canada sales advantages in British markets in return for concessions to British producers in Canadian markets. In spite of his policies Bennett was unable to obliterate the image in the public mind of a rich, pro-imperialist opponent of the wage-earning class, and his 'new deal' in imitation of the programme of F.D. Roosevelt was launched too late to affect the extreme anti-government sentiment generated by five years of heavy depression. In the election of 1935 the Liberals under Mackenzie King were returned to power, which they retained for nearly 22 years. Shortly after this all the 'new deal' legislation of the

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previous government was found unconstitutional by the judicial committee of the imperial privy council. By the time Mackenzie King returned to office economic recovery was under way in response to massive international spending upon armaments. The remainder of Mackenzie King's period of leadership in Canada was thus dominated by preparations for the second world war, the war itself, and its aftermath. Although the Liberal government undertook to expand the almost non-existent Canadian armed forces, Mackenzie King tried as far as possible to prevent Canadian involvement and to support attempts to conciliate Nazi Germany. In domestic politics Mackenzie King preferred inquiry to action in the matter of providing the central government with full authority to deal with economic problems. An employment insurance system soundly based constitutionally was, however, set up and put in operation. When war came in 1939 the Liberal policy of conciliation of conflicting interests manifested itself as a 'balanced war effort.' Attention was paid to the rapid development of industrial production of aircraft, ships, weapons and explosives as well as food, clothing and transport equipment. A Commonwealth air training system was established. Compulsory military service for home defence was instituted, but overseas service remained voluntary until late in the war. In order to mobilize the financial resources for this expansion and to exercise sufficient control over the economy, the government devised a number of ad hoc expedients on the basis of the omnibus grant of authority entitled the War Measures Act. An impressive proof that the Liberal government under the leadership of Mackenzie King had succeeded in keeping together the antagonistic elements in Canadian life during the war was seen in the three electoral victories scored by the Liberal party in 1945,1949 and 1953. In terms of policy Mackenzie King's successor, Louis St Laurent, changed very little, and the regime remained conservatively devoted to formulae which had been tested and worked. For example, co-operation between the central government and the provinces worked out on a voluntary basis during the war continued after the war, but no effort was made to give the system a permanent character by constitutional amendment. On the contrary its temporary nature was emphasized. The years 1957-62 saw a break-up of the hegemony of the Liberal party. In the 1957 elections the government was defeated, and in 1958 it

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was overwhelmingly crushed by a landslide majority for the Conservatives, led by John Diefenbaker. But the Conservatives' hold was weakened by persistent economic difficulties (high levels of unemployment and decreased rates of capital investment), and the 1962 elections reduced the party to the position of providing the largest minority in the house of commons, with the Diefenbaker government dependent on the support of other minorities. The Liberals resumed their position as leading party after the April 1963 elections, but failed to win an independent majority. Their leader, Lester Pearson, replaced Diefenbaker as prime minister. Thus far the two traditional parties of Canadian politics have shown the skill to keep their leading position in public life. Canada has not, however, been wanting in minority movements, many of which occupy commanding positions in provincial politics. The Social Credit movement has controlled the government in Alberta for a quarter of a century, and it has governed in British Columbia for some years; it achieved importance as a balancing factor in federal politics in 1962, when it won 26 seats (30 at dissolution; 24 in the 1963 elections). The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation had governed Saskatchewan for many years before its leader, T.C. Douglas, became the leader of the New Democratic party which in its intimate association with organized labour resembles the British Labour party. For nearly two decades until 1960 the Union Nationale, of Maurice Duplessis, dominated Quebec politics. External Relations since 1867. Between the formation of the dominion in 1867 and 1926 Canada changed from a colony with self-government in domestic matters to a nationally sovereign state within the commonwealth. The change was not brought about by any formal enactments but by a gradual transference of power so that the crown, acting through its representative in Canada, the governor-general, took decisions on the advice of its Canadian ministers rather than of those at Westminster. Under Macdonald and Laurier, Canada assumed greater control of its external relations but it was during and after the first world war, under the Conservative government of Sir Robert Borden, that the essential steps were taken. In 1917 an imperial war cabinet was formed in which Borden sat and helped to shape imperial policy. In 1919 at the Versailles Conference Borden, backed by Great Britain and

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the other dominion leaders, insisted that Canada should sign the peace treaties in its own right, and should enter the League of Nations. This change of status was recognised explicitly by the imperial conference of 1926, and in 1931 the Statute of Westminster put into legislative framework the new structure of the British Commonwealth. The entry of Canada into the war of 1939 was indicative of its new status. It could legally have remained neutral as Eire did. But it preferred to enter the conflict as a member of the British commonwealth by its own sovereign declaration. Consultations begun in 1947 between delegates from Newfoundland and the Canadian government about terms of union were successfully brought to a conclusion, Newfoundland (with Labrador) becoming the tenth province of the dominion on 1 April 1949. After the treaty of Washington (1871), Canada's relations with the United States became increasingly based on the assumption of permanent peace and friendship, particularly since the turn of the century when the growing friendship between the United Kingdom and the USA culminated in the co-operation between the English-speaking nations in two great world wars. The last great boundary dispute between Canada and the US was settled in 1903, when the Alaska boundary was established; but the breakdown of the reciprocity agreement between the two countries in 1911 marked continuing Canadian suspicions of American expansionist aims. In the great depression of the 1930s the USA protected its domestic industries by the SmootHawley tariffs of 1930 and Canada replied with the Ottawa agreements of 1932. But in 1935, under the friendly American leadership of Roosevelt, a new trade agreement was negotiated. When all Europe seemed prostrate before the Nazis in 1940 Canada and the USA signed an agreement for the defence of North America and a joint defence board was established. The exploits of the Royal Canadian Navy in the north Atlantic; of the RCAF over Europe and Africa; of the Canadian army in Sicily, Italy and western Europe were a substantial contribution to victory. During the first world war there had been some legal as well as political doubts about Canada's position as an independent member of the community of nations. During the second world war there were none. The Canadian armed forces were part of the armed forces of the Allies. Canadian diplomatic missions represented Canada around the

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world. Canada made free contributions of war materials and industrial equipment to its allies, particularly Britain, the Soviet Union and China. In 1945 Canada became a foundation member of the United Nations. After the second world war Canadian external policy was directed towards close co-operation with the United States within the framework of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance. Canadian troops joined the United Nations forces in Korea. During the Suez crisis Canada supported the United Nations action for peace, and the Canadians played a leading role in the United Nations force superintending the 'ceasefire.' Canadian public opinion has sometimes questioned the wisdom of too close a dependence economically and politically upon the United States. There is not much evidence that this questioning has seriously modified Canadian external policy.

The Minds of Men in the Atomic Age

Grant delivered this talk at the Couchiching Conference 13-20 August 1955 and it was published in Texts of Addresses Delivered at the 24th Annual Couchiching Conference (Toronto: Canadian Institute on Public Affairs and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1955; repr. 1985), 3945, and then in Canadian Home and School, also in 1955. The talk was reprinted in 1985 in H.D. Forbes, ed., Canadian Political Thought (Toronto: Oxford University Press), 284-9, and once again (in an abridged version) in 1998 in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 51-8. Sheila Grant recalls: 'I was there. George's speech was somewhat of a thunderbolt. Not popular. People were having a nice weekend in beautiful surroundings and didn't want to be made uncomfortable. It was appreciated more later. l think it was a far better expression of George's thought than the first chapter of Philosophy in the Mass Age.'

I don't intend to discuss whether we are going to be blown up or whether the human race is going to be sensible enough to survive. Whether we are going to destroy ourselves by Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles or slowly corrupt the very basis of our animal existence -I do not know. At this conference I've noticed so far an assumption that all is well if only we escape these external menaces. General Phillips talked of the horrors of atom war and asked are we going to sacrifice the happy and free life we have now.1 When there was talk of underdeveloped countries it was just assumed that what the West had to give these countries was an unreserved blessing. That is, if all the world became one big prosperous suburb like those in Toronto or Detroit or Manchester - then all would be well. Last night Mr Parkinson and the

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other speakers talked of the dynamic economy of expansion - a polite word for the boom - and just assumed that naturally this was to be taken as an undisputed good.2 But can these assumptions be made? Have we such a wonderful society in Canada and the States? Is the great problem of our world how we can escape simple animal destruction as General Phillips said - or is the question what is there about the human race that makes it worthwhile that it should survive? I can imagine a prosperous society, without war, of healthy animals adjusted to worshipping their machines which could be so disgusting that one could will that it should be destroyed. Therefore what I want to talk about is the quality of mind or soul which exists on this continent. In other words, if we aren't smashed in an all-out fight with the Asiatics, what kind of society is developing here at home? The great fact of Canada today - indeed the great fact of the whole modern world - is that we are now living in the mass scientific society and this is something totally new in the experience of the human race. All the forms of our life - sexual, economic, political, artistic, moral, and above all religious - must be seen within this new situation - the world of the big city, automation, and the atom. When I want to think of what the mass society is, and how much it has come to be in Canada I think of Don Mills development in the north of Toronto. Thousands of comfortable, simple homes thrown up within a year from which hundreds of white collared workers go forth to the new clean factories and offices. A community whose centres are an enormous Dominion store and Brewers warehouse - a community where families are co-operative enterprises to get the latest in electrical equipment and where children in mass schools are taught to be adjusted to their total life situation, watch the same television programmes, drink the same drinks, and go charging around in the same over-powered automobiles, the bumpers of which are now decorated with phallic symbols. Now of course, not all Canada is the mass world yet. But gradually and surely we move towards it. For instance the farm community as it once existed, is bound slowly to disappear - for even if people are farmers by profession they must become more and more town people with the automobile, the radio and television, the machine and mass education. Indeed of one thing we may be certain, the economy of organized obsolescence, and high returns for the sales-

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man, the broker and the engineer, public technical education and social standardization, mass stimulated sexual life and mass popular entertainment, this is the world which must find an ever fuller incarnation in Canada. I do not know what forms of the human spirit this new world will produce, but one thing I do know - no sensible person can believe that the same kind of people are going to come out of this environment as came out of the old Canadian towns and farms. Now there is no doubt that the mass society is here to stay - unless the bombs really start falling. Nor have I any doubt about the great good it has brought. It is obviously good that women should have automatic washing machines; it is almost as good that we men should have cars. The fact that machines do our work means we have more free time and human freedom requires this time. In the old days leisure was something reserved for the privileged. Now it is open to more and more and surely what we need for ourselves we must see as necessary for others and this possibility of leisure for all does involve the machine. Even modern medicine, however much of a sacred cow it has become, we must judge as good. Let anyone who has a child in pain doubt that. Indeed at the profoundest level we must welcome the mass scientific society, despite all its horrors. For it has put us in a new relation to nature. We can now as never before choose to make our world, to use nature and abuse her, but less than ever before need we submit to her as necessity. More and more life becomes an open decision of the spirit. But let us also be certain what a terrible price is being paid over all North America for the benefits of the mass society. And what that price is can easily be stated. Economic expansion through the control of nature by science has become the chief purpose of our existence. It has become the goal to which everything else must be subordinated, the God we worship. Indeed for the last three hundred years there has been a band of thinkers telling men to worship the world. Now at last in North America this has become the dominant religion, which shapes our society at nearly every point. What is wrong with this religion? The plain fact that man's real purpose in life is not this. The goal of human existence is not to be found in the world of nature - but in freedom. Indeed to be a man at all and not just an animal who looks like a man but is not, is to strive to become free. And a free man is a person who is not ruled by fear or passion - or the world around him - but by the

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eternal world of truth and goodness which is there to be realized by every thought and action in our lives. The freest of all men once said: 'I have overcome the world.'3 And this is what life is for, to overcome the world, as we live in it deeply. This is our human destiny, because our environment of nature depends upon an absolute environment - call it if you will God - and to live in the presence of that absolute and to judge the world by it, is what it is to be free. I do not mean by this that a free man will turn away from the world in aloof isolation - after all the man I have called freest lived in no ivory tower - but met the world most directly on a cross - but what I do mean is that the free man is he who does not abandon himself to the mood of his age - but who lives at the point where the passing moments of his life are met by the urgent present of the eternal. Such a man is not sheer animal or, worse, a machine. Therefore, the price we have paid for the expanding economy is that by making it God men turn away from their proper purpose in this life. There is nothing wrong with automobiles and washing machines, but they must be known as simply means - means of richness of life for individuals and society. But the expanding economy is no longer a means to us - a means for the liberation of the spirit - it has become an end in itself and as such is enslaving us. It so sets the tone and pattern of our society that the standards it imposes close people off from knowing what life is for. Look at the wives of our executives; look at the young men in the sack suits who have taken the vow to success; look at the girls in Woolworth's selling all day till they are exhausted and then being peddled a dream of heaven from Hollywood and NBC. The boom world creates like an aura its own standard of success - of what really matters in life - and that aura lies over everything choking people with the fear of failure in terms of those standards, and cuts us off from any truer vision of life. Is the philosophy of 'bigger and better' the way to freedom and truth? If you want to see just how much the expanding economy has become our God read a book called Canada's Tomorrow. It is an account of a conference the Westinghouse Company called together to discuss the future of our country. Leaders of all kinds from business and labour

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and government, from the universities and science and journalism were present. Well, the unanimous report of that conference was just more and more of the expanding economy - more trade, more production, more scientific research, more people. Its motto was the bigger the better; or size is greatness. The book should have been called The Messiah Machine. There was no attempt to look at what all the expansion is for or what kind of people are produced by such a world. It was just taken for granted that the true happiness of persons is always to be found in short term economic gain. No questions of quality were asked; only questions of quantity. No ultimate questions were asked at all. If this is Canada's tomorrow, count me out of it.4 And why I mention this book is that the people at this conference were the leaders of Canada - the men who are making our society and whose thoughts about our future are therefore really important. If these people think this way, this is the kind of Canada we are going to have. For let's have no soft democratic soap. It is the powerful and the influential who shape the short term destiny of a country. If this 'the bigger the better' spirit prevails among these educated leaders, it gradually shapes all of us. One comic side of this conference 'Canada's Tomorrow' was that though there was the usual talk about the dangers of communism and Russia, the kind of society outlined at it doesn't seem very different from the society the Russian leaders are building for their people. If a conference of this sort had been called among Russian managers and university presidents and officials, the pattern of Soviet Tomorrow would probably have been very much the same - the same quantitative judgment of success. Indeed one of the communist myths which most of our business men and government leaders wholeheartedly accept - though they would loathe it to be known as a Marxist myth - is 'seek ye first the kingdom of the boom and all shall be added unto you.'5 What they say is that economic development must come first and it will inevitably bring in its trail the pursuit of truth and beauty. Indeed the very words 'truth and beauty' are seldom used now to denote realities, but rather a confused blend of sentiment and culture. Nice for those who have the time, but less real than the 'hard facts of life' - 'the business of living.' Just as it takes a while for the new rich to learn to spend their money with taste, so it will take time for culture to flower in our new rich

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society. The frosting of the cake is put on last. Like much Marxist theory this is so much liberal illusion. What should be perfectly obvious is that if you pursue economic prosperity at the expense of everything else, what you will get is economic prosperity at the expense of everything else. To see our minds in the atomic age, it is particularly necessary to look at our schools, our universities, and our churches. For the schools, the universities, and the churches are the chief institutions which can lead men to freedom in the truth. Love and art, thought and prayer are after all the activities which distinguish men from the other beasts, and it is the school, the university, and the church upon which we are chiefly dependent for stimulation of these activities. Our political and economic institutions have a function which is largely negative - they exist to prevent bad things happening: the schools and universities and churches have the positive role - they exist to stimulate the good. Now our schools have been going through a terribly difficult period. When I criticize them I do not mean to lay all the blame on any particular shoulders. All of us, our ancestors and ourselves, are corporately involved in the guilt of what our schools have become. The mass democratic society has insisted on mass education. This, of course, has been the only possible and right course. But let us have no doubt that this process has meant a falling away of quality. What has happened is that the schools have been trying to carry on their job in a society which by and large does not think that education is important. What parents in the mass society are interested in is that their children should be fitted for success and adjustment, not educated. And what has been particularly sad is that so many educational administrators have not only given in to that pressure but have accepted the philosophy of worldly success and adjustment as a true account of what the schools are for. This is where I agree one hundred per cent with Hilda Neatby.6 The acceptance by so many educationalists of the philosophy of John Dewey7 has in general meant the surrender by the teacher and the school of their proper function. If you say with Dewey that the intellect is solely a servant of social living, then you are saying that human beings have no transcendent purpose beyond society - no need for liberation of the mind. Indeed such liberation is now no longer considered even a respectable goal. How can it be since it is almost the exact opposite of the adjustment which the psychologists and the pro-

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gressive educators teach us to aspire to? Nowadays, who really minds about prejudices, illusions, myths, and superstitions, as long as they are the right ones, the socially acceptable ones, the mentally healthy ones, the good Canadian ones? What is meant by successful democratic living is conformity to the lowest common denominator of desire in our society. With such a philosophy the schools exist to pander to that mediocrity of desire - rather than to lead children to know what is truly worth desiring. No wonder school teaching is a despised and underpaid profession. Teachers are seen as servants of the desires of the multitude. To go a step downward, the surrender of the universities to the boom spirit is overwhelming. I watch it every day of my life. Universities are now places where young people can insure their entrance into the prosperous part of society by learning some technique and where staff employees (once known as professors) increase the scope of some immediately useful technique. Intellect is respected, if at all, as a tool which can help one to do certain things in the world more efficiently. It is no longer valued for its relation to its proper object, truth. For there is no truth which it concerns us to know, there is only the truth with which we are concerned to do things. Indeed the three powerful forces in our society, business, government, and the democratic many, all have used their power to kill the university as a place of truth seeking and turn it into a successful technological institute. The business men who rule our universities naturally see them as places to perpetuate in the young the desires of the market place and of competition. Governments break down the balance of the university by encouraging those studies useful for defence and prosperity. It would be foolish for instance to blame the government for setting up the National Research Council - an institution perfectly valid in itself - but let us face the consequences of its existence for the university and the nation.8 It means we are channelling our ablest students into a narrow training in physical science and this will mean finally a nation which knows how the physical world works and knows nothing else and believes there is nothing more to know but this. Perhaps the disappearance of the liberal university was an inevitable accompaniment of the expanding economy but let us not fool ourselves as to what this disappearance means to the kind of world that is coming into existence. Last and saddest we come to the churches. Let me say immediately

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that when I speak of the churches I speak only of my own tradition, the Protestant. And here we come to the heart of the matter. For what men believe to be ultimately true is what makes them what they are and through them their society. And Protestantism is the basic issue because North America has been more deeply formed by Protestantism than by any other influence. Indeed, the central riddle of our history is why Protestantism, centred as it was on a great affirmation of freedom and the infinite, has been the dominant force in shaping a society which is now so little free and so little aware of the infinite. To answer that riddle is not possible here, but what must be said clearly is that whatever the present outward success of Protestantism, it is faced by a deep inward failure. That inward failure is seen in the fact of its surrender to become a tame confederate of the mass secular society. The ideal minister has become the active democratic organizer who kept the church going as a place of social cohesion and positive thinking a la Norman Vincent Peale.9 If he can promote building, increase organization, provide inspiration, on Sunday and convince young people that there are more socially acceptable activities than sex and drinking he is a success. Best of all, if he knows a little empirical psychology, he will understand that when a church member gets into real spiritual difficulties he should be sent to a psychiatrist (the man who can really get things done in the world of the spirit). What is however wrong about it, is that it is a soft substitute for the real work of the church, which is to teach people through thought and prayer and worship, to seek the ultimate truth, and to live by it. In my opinion to this, their real job, the Protestant churches are largely indifferent. I do not want to be pessimistic, but when asked to give a diagnosis, one must be honest. Nothing has done us more harm in Canada than that aura of self-congratulation with which we surround ourselves. "This great country of ours' or 'the Kitimat and democracy' routine which now goes the rounds in pulpits, service clubs, and political platforms. 'Take what you want, said God, take it and pay for it.' Let us not doubt what we have wanted, what we have taken, and how we are paying for it.10

Of course, this is not to say that we can or should turn back from the technological society. What I am saying is that the great job in Canada now does not lie in further economic expansion and quantitative progress, but in trying to bring quality and beauty of existence into

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that technological world - to try and make it a place where richness of life may be discovered. And of course some people in Canada are realizing this in their lives right now. I think of a brilliant architect who is not interested in making a fortune but in seeing how the city of Toronto can be more than an efficient machine of sewers and superhighways, rather a place in which human beings can lead a good life. I think of ministers who are making their churches places of adoration rather than issuers of eternal insurance policies. I think of the man who runs a small garage where the repairing of cars is made a work of excellence and interest rather than greed. I think of young people who have the courage to be school teachers when to the world it is a mark of their failure. I think of people in broadcasting and TV who use all their intelligence and integrity to see that these instruments are used for the dissemination of truth. I think of artists who give themselves to reality and beauty rather than quick financial success. I think of philosophers who practise the presence of God. Whether freedom and love will be realized into the technological world who can tell? Or will our society pour into its emptiness the bare idea of pleasure in all its manifold, fascinating, and increasingly perverted forms - till force and mediocrity come entirely to rule us? I do not want to be pessimistic. However, what is certain, beyond doubt, is that whether we live at the end of the world or at the dawn of a golden age or neither, it still counts absolutely to each one of us that in and through the beauty and anguish, the good and evil of the world, we come in freedom upon the joy unspeakable. Notes 1 We were unable to identify General Phillips with certainty. 2 Joseph Frederick Parkinson (1904-84), Canadian political economist, economic consultant, and civil servant, was a member of the League for Social Reconstruction, and a contributor to Social Planning for Canada (1935). 3 John 16:33. 4 The conference was sponsored by Canadian Westinghouse Company Ltd in Quebec City in November 1953. The proceedings are published in G.P. Gilmour, ed., Canada's Tomorrow: Papers and Discussions (Toronto: Macmillan 1954).

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5 The allusion is to Matthew 6:33, 'Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you.' 6 Hilda Marion Neatby - see note 3 in 'Adult Education in the Expanding Economy' (108). 7 John Dewey - see note 12 in 'Pursuit of an Illusion' (47-8). 8 The National Research Council of Canada (NRC), formed in 1916, is a federal Crown Corporation responsible to Parliament through the minister of state for science and technology. Under the leadership of H.M. Tory (192335), General A.G.L. McNaughton (1936-9), CJ. Mackenzie (1939-52), and E.W.R. Steacie 1952-62), the NRC became very influential in furthering scientific and technological research in the universities and in industry. 9 Norman Vincent Peale - see note 12 in 'Two Theological Languages' (64). 10 This proverb, 'Take what you want, said God. Take it and pay for it,' expressed an important truth for Grant that individuals, nations, and even whole civilizations make choices (the embrace of modern technology) that have fateful consequences (the loss of democracy) for the generations that follow. He first mentioned the proverb in his Journal of 1942 - Collected Works 1:17, 30. Much later in 1986, he featured the 'Spanish proverb' in his preface to Technology and Justice.

Kitimat was the great symbol of massive technological progress in the 1950s. The Aluminum Company of Canada built a major aluminum smelter in British Columbia, creating a new community of 10,000 people in the middle of wilderness and harnessing power by diverting the course of a river through two tunnels ten miles long and creating a fall of water 16 times that at Niagara Falls.

The Paradox of Democratic Education

Grant delivered the Second Ansley Memorial Lecture on 1 October 1955 at Assumption University, Windsor.1 The lecture was published in volume 35, no. 6, of The Bulletin (published by the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation), November 1955: 275-280, and reprinted in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 174-87. Sheila Grant recalls that some of the teachers may have known Grant through Adult Education. 'I think the main connection would have been his close friendship with Gene Morrison (later married to Henry Hicks). She was a brilliant teacher at the High School in Halifax who worked very hard in the Teachers' Federation. I think she represented Nova Scotia at the beginning of the National Federation of Secondary School Teachers and helped to get it going. She would have mentioned George to other members. We were very close friends till she died about a year before George. (She is not Jean Morrison, who worked with him on Food for Thought.)'

It is a great privilege to be asked to give a lecture in memory of J.W. Ansley. We all know that he was a remarkable school principal, and we also know what a great and subtle art it is to be a successful school principal - successful, that is, not in the eyes of the city of the world but in the light of that more abiding city, the judgment of which alone matters. My father was a school principal and I learned early from him that there is no more honourable or skilled profession, nor any more open to temptation in a society such as ours which does not see clearly the true purpose of education. Therefore it is necessary to honour the memory of Ansley; and I am conscious how poor my words are beside his life. The duty of the philosopher is to formulate principles and that

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is a difficult task - but not as formidable as the gradual incarnation of principles within an institution which Ansley so evidently achieved in his life in York County. It is also an honour to be giving this lecture at Assumption University. We are all sure that now that Assumption has full university status it will play an even greater role for the truth. No university is worthy of its salt which does not have a strong tradition of philosophy at its centre, which is never surrendered to more peripheral interests. Assumption's Christian loyalty guarantees that this will be so and it is of course further guaranteed in the person of Father Garvey.2 To meet him is to know that he has tasted of the divine love which is the source of all truth. What do I mean by the paradox of the democratic educator? The paradox seems to me this: On the one hand, there is much in democracy to which we must give loyalty; on the other hand, isn't there something in democracy which we must fear as the enemy of true education? It is of course impossible in short space to give a close definition of democracy. In the present context I mean simply the kind of society we have here in Canada. By so defining it, I do not intend to describe all the forms of our society as democratic, for that is clearly contradicted by our economic forms. Nevertheless in a general sense we can speak of our society as democratic. Now to state the one side of the paradox, I for one am clear about giving loyalty to that democracy, particularly as it is seen against possible alternative systems of society abroad in the world. This allegiance must be limited, of course, for it is idolatry to give more than limited allegiance to anything as relative as the ordering of society. And when I speak of loyalty to that democracy, I do not only mean to its political forms, but to its social forms as well. For instance, the idea of social equality, which is so much a product of the North American as against the English tradition, is something to which I give wholehearted allegiance. It is necessary to make this distinction between social and political democracy for these days there is a new conservatism abroad which supports the political forms of democracy while attacking its social forms. This conservatism has a great appeal, for it is based on the truth that men are not equal in talents. And this truth certainly needs stress-

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ing as against certain vacuous talk of our more naive progressive democrats. It has, however, been the genius of Christianity, at its richest, to hold together in tension both sides of the truth at this point. It has remained clear that men are not equal in talents and yet has insisted on the more mysterious truth that all persons being called by God to salvation are equal before His majesty. If I may say a word in praise of the Puritans, who have been so cheaply abused in recent years by the humanists, it was this mystery of equality that they so well understood. It is, indeed, at this point as much as any that I find the secular democrat difficult to understand. If, as they do, one holds that man's destiny is only in this world, how is it possible to believe in equality? In a worldly sense, men are so obviously unequal. Therefore, if one is a consistent secularist one should certainly not believe in social democracy. Social and educational democracy is a doctrine which only has meaning when seen to be rooted in a theological mystery. That mystery is the recognition of both sin and love. Aristocratic forms of government are rejected because the Christian is at once cynical of the ability of the ruler to free himself from corruption, and hopeful of the possibility of the love of God in the life of the ordinary person. The value of the ordinary person, socially and educationally is recognized because he is an object of the divine love. A tradition which knew that the Saviour of the world was a crucified Palestine carpenter and his disciples certainly not aristocrats, was one which recognised that the love of God can pour into the hearts of the many. It is ultimately in terms of this idea alone that any allegiance to social democracy can be maintained. Nevertheless, once this side of the paradox has been stated, it seems to me that the other side must be stated too. Is it not equally true that democracy can openly and obviously be an enemy of true education? I think this side of the case can be put most clearly by stating what Plato says about the matter in his Republic. You will remember that at the end of the Republic Plato describes the decline of society and the soul. Having described the ideally good society and the ideally good soul, he now describes the ideally bad, which he calls despotism. He does not believe that the ideally good or bad are possible in this world. They are described simply as ethical principles of attraction and repulsion. And in the scale between the good and the bad he places the democratic society and soul very low - as indeed the

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last step before the descent of man into the depths of despotism. He describes democracy as that state in which the lowest common denominator of desire rules and where every institution is dominated by this lowest common denominator of desire. By lowest common denominator of desire, he means that the desires arising from the appetites have taken over the person, and have become the ruling principle. Reason has been dethroned. Democracy must therefore destroy itself because it will become a chaos. It will become a chaos because as people give themselves ever more and more to the pursuit of the immediate claims of appetite, the ordering power of reason disappears. In short, by definition democracy is the purest and most blatant love of the world as an end - that is, secularism. And surely once we look at the present educational situation in Canada, don't we see how true is what Plato says. I have not time here to describe in detail the situation in our schools and universities as I see it. Of the universities, suffice it to say that in general they have become servants of the expanding economy. They are places where our youngsters go to be taught certain techniques which will allow them to enter or remain in the more prosperous part of society. They are largely servants of that appetite which is dominant in the cleverer part of our society - namely greed. Any idea of education which transcends that, is the merest minority report. And though I cannot speak of the schools from inside knowledge, my view of them, certainly those in Nova Scotia, is that in large measure they are places where youngsters are taught to adjust themselves to the lowest common denominator of achievement. I will allow myself simply one example to illustrate how our modern education leads us to take this distrust of democracy seriously: the degree to which the philosophy of John Dewey has been influential. Only a society which already accepted a very low view of human nature and destiny would have responded in the way it did and does to what Dewey said about human existence and the purpose of education.3 For whatever is valid in Dewey at the level of practical techniques, the philosophy which underlies it is nothing more, finally, than that worship of the lowest common denominator of appetite which Plato describes. This is explicitly spelled out in Dewey's position. The world of space and time is seen as the ultimately real. Reason is, therefore, defined as the instrument whereby we learn to adjust ourselves to

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that world. And if adjustment to the world can in effect mean anything else than adjustment to the lowest common denominator of desire, then I wish somebody would show me. What Plato sees as the tragedy of democracy, namely the gradual abdication by the higher faculties of their rule over man, Dewey accepts as the true end of education. About one thing I am crystal clear, if as the Deweyites claim their philosophy of education is the truly democratic view, then democracy is a state of society in which true education cannot flourish. And what I must emphasize again is that the very fact that pragmatism should have had such power over the minds of so many people influential in our democratic school system could only have been possible if our view of man had already degenerated under democracy; and that shows us how seriously we must take the claim that such a low view is implicit in the system. To return to the paradox: what I have said I hope illustrates how much it is a real paradox and not just a dilemma I am putting up to knock down. The more I think about the question, the harder it is to find reconciliation either at the level of thought or action. How does one reconcile one's deep loyalty to the tradition of democracy with the undoubted debasement of education that our democracy brings? Of course one can get out of the dilemma in two ways - by dropping either side of the difficulty. One can simply just not recognize the tendencies towards debasement and so see the democratic system as a glorious progressive affair - broadening down from precedent to precedent. This is what so many school and university teachers and administrators do. They simply get on the bandwagon of vulgarity and ride it with varying degrees of success. On the other hand, one can solve the dilemma by simply discarding all faith in democratic education. But that is wrong in principle because it surrenders for all practical purposes the Christian mystery of love. It is also apt to mean that one just retreats out of the modern world and to do that is to forget one of the supreme principles of ethics, namely that though we may dislike the world in which we are placed, it is the only one we've got - that is, it is the society into which God has called us to act. The only alternative therefore to escaping the paradox is to live in its tension. I want to illustrate this paradox further in relation to a certain philosophy of the modern democratic school which seems to me to exert great influence in our midst. In the mixture of truth and falsity which

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that philosophy represents, I think one sees more clearly what democratic education is. I heard this theory expressed over and over again this summer at a conference on the philosophy of education held by the Ontario Teachers' Federation which I had the great good fortune to attend. The exponents of this theory say something like the following: 'The democratic society of North America is based upon certain moral values which were first formulated in the Judaic-Christian tradition. Therefore, because one of the chief aims of our school system is to teach allegiance to the democratic society, we must try by any means appropriate to inculcate those values into the minds of our youngsters. Nevertheless this must not mean that the schools should touch the field of ultimate reality - that is the field of religion. This is a personal matter with which the schools cannot interfere. Indeed it would be against true democracy to teach about religion, for as people disagree as to what is ultimately real, to teach about it would be to infringe the personal freedom of the individual to reach his conclusions on this matter. In short, ethical values are a common ground where the public schools can act with authority - that is, endeavour to inculcate; religious truth, however, is a personal matter and thereon the public schools must not be allowed to speak.' If you want to see this position expressed fully you can find it in a report of the National Education Association in the USA called Moral and Spiritual Values in the Public Schools. Let us not doubt that

this document expresses a position powerfully operative in North American society, for this report not only comes from the National Education Association, but also bears the imprimatur of such names as J.B. Conant lately President of Harvard and Dwight D. Eisenhower lately President of Columbia.4 Now the position outlined in this report recognizes certain unforgettable truths about our society. The mass society is here and therefore we are committed to the problem of mass education. Moreover the report maintains that we should be committed to that task in joy because of the value of each person, and as I have said earlier I entirely agree with that. It predicts that technological advances will give the majority more leisure than ever before in history. It recognizes that in a society of such varying traditions it is inevitable that the state, as the only common institution, should play a central role in education. I

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have not time to discuss in detail the extraordinarily subtle question of church and state in a society which is religiously pluralist, and though I disagree with much that the report says on this matter, it is still right when it says that North American democracy is committed to pluralism and that therefore the state schools must respect it. This respect will insure that the school shall not encroach on the duties of the church and the home. Lastly we can even admit that this document expresses one side of the truth when it says that one's religion is a personal matter. This is true in the sense that final reality, being spirit, can only be encountered in a free act of the spirit. However that is only half the truth as traditions, education, institutions, and authority are, of course, also necessary to that encounter. Nevertheless as soon as one has stated the truth in this report, it is necessary to state with full force its basic falsehood. I am going to illustrate this falsity in two ways (1) with regard to the proper ordering of studies; (2) with regard to the divorcing of values from reality. First, then, why is this position shown to be false when we look at the question of the proper ordering of studies? To prove this I will have to lay down certain basic propositions. The school is the chief instrument in our society for the cultivation of the human reason - particularly the theoretical reason as distinct from practical reason which is cultivated at all points in our life. Now why do we count it good to cultivate the theoretical reason in ourselves and others? There are many subsidiary purposes for that cultivation, but the fundamental purpose is as Aristotle says that all men desire to know the real and that therefore the final object of the cultivation of reason is that we may know what is ultimately real - that is, God. Now this proposition, which is obviously central to the philosophy of education, cannot be justified at length here. It is the ultimate truth of human existence and therefore the hardest truth to prove to oneself or to others. I may say, however, and this will seem to some of you extreme arrogance, that I do not count this truth to be mere opinion, something of which I am not certain. I am certain of it in the sense that though I cannot prove it to be true, I can prove all differing positions to be false and therefore must assume this as necessary. It is a truth which is assumed in all rational activity - scientific, philosophic, artistic, or moral. But if this proposition is true, then it will shape our schools at all points particularly as to the proper ordering of studies. How can we do

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a proper job of education unless we have some clarity as to what education is for? How can the purpose for which we study not determine what studies are carried on? Let me illustrate this from contemporary education. There doesn't seem to be much doubt from anybody in education that careful study of certain traditional subjects, whether at the university or school level, is dying out. Now the progressive educators tell us, and I think rightly, that this is not a necessary result of the new methods. The traditional subjects can be well taught under the new methods. So much of the old discipline in the school and the home was quite wrong. But when the progressive educators have said this they have not freed themselves from the charge of being deeply responsible for the decline of the old studies. Their responsibility is not, however, at the level of practical method but of theory. Their philosophy is that the purpose of education is successful living in this world; they deny any transcendent end to education. This is explicitly and continually stated in Dewey. Therefore as the end is different, different studies are necessary. Why was classical language and history studied in the old schools? It was not studied only to give exactness in language or to give examples from history so that men would be the better able to manipulate their present. After all as the progressive educators have said time and again these purposes could be equally well served by modern language and modern history. It was studied so that the ablest in our society - those who were going to have responsibility in church and state and education - would be able later to learn those philosophic truths which are found in the classical thinkers. These truths, indeed, were known to be basic to any later understanding of Christian theology, the knowledge of which was recognized as the pinnacle to which all education aspired. Mathematics was not taught primarily so that we could have enough capable engineers but because through it the intellect could learn to isolate concepts and so be ready later to ascertain universal truth at a higher level. Now of course when you think there is no transcendent truth to be ascertained, no God to be known, when you think that the purpose of education is adjustment to this world as Dewey does, then the emphasis of your curriculum will be entirely different and what students think important to study will be entirely different. I am sure you all see this everyday of your lives as I do. One of the reasons for the existence

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of the university in which I work is that it is a great exporter of commercial lawyers to the temples of Bay Street in Toronto. Now to be successfully adjusted to the world of Bay Street you do not need any knowledge of classical history or philosophy (a certain attenuated culture may be necessary but that can be picked up at a session of the Harvard School of Business Administration and by careful attention at cocktail parties). Therefore classics and philosophy are not considered important either by the administration or students. The same example could be given by our export of research physicists or chemists to the government laboratories in Ottawa. How are we to speak to students clearly outside some philosophy as to what is ultimately real? Are we to encourage students to study this or that and yet not be able to tell them the purpose of studying this or that? Now of course the answer we give to younger students may have to be of an indirect or even allegorical kind. We may have to say to them you can't yet see why mathematics is important if one is to advance to higher studies, but trust me that it is. Yet all the same we have to be clear in ourselves or else the brighter the student the more he will see education as pointless and chaotic. There is a popular modern position which tries to escape any statement about ultimate reality by that wonderful platitude that the purpose of the school is to teach people to think. A Dean of Education from western Canada was down in Halifax saying this to our teachers last week and I hear it from many quarters. This position has the advantage of seeming to be a compromise which appeals to both the traditionalist and the progressive. But, of course it entirely breaks down as soon as one asks the simple question - why is it good to think? And I find that these days students ask me this all the time. They say: why is it good to think? Won't I be happier if I don't think, if for instance I don't go near the study of philosophy? And when one tries to answer that question one is forced to some view of what really matters in life. Either one says one should think because it will help one to get on in the world and that is what matters; or think because it will teach you what is real, it will give you the vision of God. And I would point out again that only the second answer has any value in persuading youngsters to study any subject which takes one beyond the palpably useful. What I have been saying is that a philosophy is necessar[il]y implied

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in the schools. Students will study subjects, institutions will teach subjects according to their view of reality. This is an inescapable fact of education. People who believe what Dewey says are in fact shaping the curriculum by their metaphysics; my criticism of them is simply that they have a false metaphysic. Therefore when this report says that the democratic school must not be based on any view of what is ultimately real, aren't the writers of it just fooling themselves or trying to fool the public? For surely what the report is saying is rather that the schools must indeed take a view of reality but a very inadequate one; namely reality as it appears to the common sense of the mass. And if this is so then doesn't the report illustrate exactly what Plato says, that democracy is the rule of the lowest common denominator and as such an enemy of true education? This indeed takes me to my second point concerning values in which the central fallacy of the position advocated in this report is exposed. As in regard to the ordering of studies, so in this question the falsity of the theory is inseparable from its disastrous results in practice. Values depend on what is real. It is a simple fact that what actions we think to be good depend on what we think is ultimately real. Therefore to have right values we must have a right apprehension of the real. To put it technically, ethics depend on metaphysics. For example, if a man believes that the struggle for animal existence is the underlying truth of all nature and history, obviously the virtue of brotherhood will not seem valuable. Or again, if we believe that persons are but instruments of the life force, then of course chastity is not the supreme value of the sexual life. For Christianity the highest activity possible for man is redemptive love, which of necessity includes in itself suffering. But of course we cannot see why such an activity is valuable unless in some sense we recognize the truth of Christian theology about the purposes of the divine love in the world. If indeed in some sense we do not see history in this pattern then remedial suffering will seem to us just queer - as the psychologists say, the kind of thing which masochists indulge in. To repeat, what one believes to be ultimately true, not what seems nice, will determine what actions one really thinks valuable. I see this fact in the universities. For example in the Dalhousie medical school there are many professors who themselves believe and

176 The Paradox of Democratic Education imply in all they teach that man can be totally understood as animal. Yet these professors are horrified when one of their students cheats, or when they see the old medical ethics breaking down before the growing love of money among the doctors. But why should they be? If man is simply an animal, morality is an illusion and then why shouldn't students cheat, why shouldn't one try to amass more nuts than the other squirrels? And what always seems most amazing to me in this is how little these professors see that what they have been teaching students over the years about ultimate reality (namely that man can be fully known as a biological object) has had a direct effect in producing the kind of doctors they now dislike. Obviously the same thing applies in the schools. If you have schools where the best teachers assert that what is real is the world of space and time, as so many teachers do, then it is foolish to try and impose in that school a set of values which come from a very different view of reality. All you do then is to produce chaos. The clever children see the inconsistency and the stupid are meanly tricked. One is saying to them that brotherhood matters in terms of this world. When they go out into the world they soon find that brotherhood does not bring success in worldly terms - that it just means they get taken. Then the inference from that is that the value of brotherhood is just part of that pious nonsense which schools put over but which nobody means. This is the basic failure of this document of the National Education Association. Its failure is at the level of philosophy and theoretical consistency. There is nothing wrong with the document at the level of practical virtue. (It has, indeed, more pious exhortations to virtue per square inch of print than any other document I have ever read.) But the proposition that we can hope to inculcate Judaic-Christian values while eliminating any systematic teaching and thought about what is real, must be criticised philosophically. For if what I said is true: namely that values are the flowers, the roots of which are our affirmations about metaphysics, then this document is telling us that the flowers can be kept alive when they are cut off from their roots. If you can believe that, you can believe anything. But though this is what this report states explicitly, really what is implied is a deeper philosophy than that. What is implied in every line of this document is a profound irrationalism. Positively, this irrationalism takes the form of saying that the natural and social sciences are the

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way we find out what is real, while religion and values are concerned with subjective preferences arising largely from the emotions. Religion is thought of as a kind of emotional certainty and volitional commitment a la Billy Graham, and values are thought of as the right emotional attitudes the democratic society wants to inculcate.5 Reality is thought of as the sensuous world of space and time, and truth about reality as the accumulation of facts through the sciences. Negatively, that is, the document denies the basic proposition of western thought that the reason, practical and theoretical, is the faculty by which man apprehends ultimate reality and that therefore that reality is supersensible. The assumption throughout is that values and religion are matters of opinion, not matters where truth can be discovered by the proper use of the mind. The position is something like this. On the one side you have a world of facts or reality gained by the sciences; on the other hand you have an emotional world of value and religion. The human being is broken down the middle. Reason operates for dealing with the world but not for giving one truth for how one should act or what one should worship. In other words, however much this report tries to escape any accusation of Deweyism, by an avowed friendship to religion and values, it really is in exactly the same position. For the basic proposition of Dewey is still there - namely that the reason is only an instrument for manipulating the world. The religious, ethical, and metaphysical questions of mankind are a realm where reason cannot operate. And of course, if this presupposition of the document is true then all its practical proposals logically follow. But this proposition cannot possibly be justified in thought. You cannot by reason show that reason has no power. I have spoken of the position advocated in this report at length because it illustrates a truth which tends to be forgotten in a society such as ours. That truth is this: a position which, practically, seems both decent and feasible in the short run, may still be false philosophically and so can only be disastrous in the long run. But of course, if the philosophy of education is to be of service it must not put itself outside the awful responsibilities of time. And that means that the short run and the long run must be brought together. In relation to the position in this report the tension of our minds must be to see in unity its short term truth and its long term falsity. How are we

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to recognize that mass democracy is here and that in love we must care about it? How are we to take that seriously and still recognize that the purpose of education is the movement of the mind to God and that therefore all activities in the schools must be seen in that context? And as I have said, this question presents to me no easy solution. I do not see any coordinated plan of group action (the kind of thing that we in North America are so fond of) that can take us off the hook of this predicament. It is a tension which all of us have to live through. Therefore I am in no position to end this talk by introducing some deus exmachina.AfelowMaritimer,whoisnowveryprominentinuniver-exmachina.AfelowMaritimer,whoisnowveryprominentinuniversity circles in central Canada, always seems at this point to come up with the proposition, 'Give me five million dollars and I will save western civilization.' I do not mean to say anything of that sort. For one thing nobody can know how others will live out the tensions and agonies of this life. And how this situation is met in North America will depend on how thousands of us live out those agonies. There are however two things which do not seem to me pretentious to say. First and foremost, I must repeat the platitude that what matters above anything else in this situation is that there should be teachers who know deeply what education is for and whose wills are committed to what their intellects have seen. Only such people can lead the young to reality. Only such people will have the courage to be teachers in a world which does not take the intellect seriously and which therefore thinks teaching is unimportant besides medicine or engineering, stock-broking or salesmanship. And the first consideration of such teachers must be to be steeped in the reality they teach about. Those who teach mathematics or literature or classics or history or natural science must know deeply the reality with which these subjects are concerned. That is why method must be known as subordinate to subject matter. Of course, methods are important but to lift them up as sacred cows is obviously to lose sight of what they are for. They are a means through which young people may be brought to partake in reality as given in the subject taught. But the teacher must have more than simply a knowledge of reality at the level of his subject. He must see reality at that level in its proper subordination to what is ultimately real. That is, he must have given his mind over seriously to the philosophy of education. And this is necessary, because if reality is only known in segments, the segment

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which is known cannot help but be distorted. For instance, if the teacher of literature, however much he is steeped in the poets, has not thought about the relation of poetic beauty to the final beauty, his teaching is liable to end up in a rather insipid aestheticism. And even more important, if the teacher of science does not see that the reality of nature must be seen in its relation and dependence upon other realities, the teaching of science can lead youngsters to the cheapest kind of materialism. And as soon as one has said this, it is clear that the teacher must have thought about philosophic truth. I do not mean by this simply a few pleasant aphorisms picked up on the side (for this I am afraid is what the philosophy of education comes down to in many of our colleges of education) but that he must strive to think things as a whole not only as a student but throughout his life. This seems to me particularly important in these days. All of us in the modern world are dominated far more than we know by the world view given us by empirical science and pragmatic philosophy. It distorts our thought at all points, and we find it of incredible difficulty to think beyond it - let alone outside it. Now I do not want to say that philosophy is the only way of preventing that world view from gradually taking us over completely, because art and love, prayer and worship are also important. Nevertheless philosophic thought is crucial. If we can take the domination by this world view up into our rational mind by seeing it in the light of the great philosophers and theologians of the past and present, we can then hold this scientific, pragmatic world view in perspective - see it for what it is, a partial and inadequate truth which is not final and therefore something which must not become an idolatry. Only if we ourselves are not swamped by the modern world view can we hope to lead youngsters to the truth which is beyond that view. I know this is not easy. All of us are pushed hard at work and the better the youngsters we have the more our minds are pushed to keep up with them. We are pushed to make a go of it economically for ourselves and our families. We are pushed to wash dishes and spend time with our own children. We are taken up into the busyness and social life which is typical of Canadian communities. Despite all these other duties, however, one thing is clear; to be a good teacher one must have a private life of study and thought of one's own. Otherwise we are simply pulled into the mediocrity we are trying to change.

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We must have, then, a life of loneliness. One of the clearest statements in the Old Testament is: 'Be still and know that I am God.'6 Indeed one of the dangerous half truths of progressive theory is its attack on the idea of loneliness. I often meet teachers who take so seriously the emphasis on the group and on social adjustment that they criticise the more aloof children as immature for not participating in the group. That aloofness may be a mark of maturity, of having discovered at even a very young age the riches of aloneness. This is not to deny the idea of community - but if the community is to be more than a beehive it must be made up of individuals who are in themselves something. A group is not by definition good. We must remember that a group of a million could still be nothing. For nothing plus nothing plus nothing (even a million times) is still nothing. That is, as teachers we must cultivate our aloneness so that when we come to a group, we come as somebody. Secondly, I would like to say that the temptation we must watch above any other is despair. In England there is a tombstone of a seventeenth century Puritan divine who lived through the agonies of the civil war and on his tombstone is written: 'He did the best things at the worst times and hoped for them in the most calamitous.' Let that be written on ours. Despair for the teacher these days may so often lead to what I would call a Brahmin view of education - that is, the view that we can touch a few choice spirits, but that the rest of the world is lost in ignorance. A figure out of our history whom I like to contemplate in this connection is St Augustine - the African philosopher and theologian. Augustine lived at a period when it was hard to believe that history was to some purpose - the dissolution of classical society was all around him. He saw clearly that the principles abroad in that society necessarily meant its degeneration into increasing chaos. But in that situation he did not despair; nor, what is more important, did he take a wrongly other-worldly view. It was, indeed, in this terrible crisis of the classical world that Augustine affirmed with greater clarity than had ever been stated before that God is not alone the God beyond the world, but is also working in each moment of the historical. So from his hope the seeds of new meaning in the world as well as beyond it were planted not only for himself, but for others. He knew that despair

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was wrong, because despair always assumes that the issue of history lies finally with ourselves. But clearly it is not with ourselves that the ultimate issue lies. Our hope lies rather in One who is power and reason and love, Who has indeed most manifestly shown us that power and love and reason are in Him, One - eternally.

Notes 1 The annual J.W. Ansley Memorial Lecture was established by the OSSTF (Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation) as a service to public education in Ontario and as a tribute to the memory of John Wesley Ansley. He was principal of York Memorial Collegiate Institute (1929-49) and active in the OSSTF. 2 Father Edwin Charles Garvey (1907-96) broadcast a talk, 'Approach to an Integral Philosophy of Education' on the CBC that was published in Education Past the Crossroads (Windsor: Assumption University of Windsor 1957). 3 Dewey - see note 12 in 'Pursuit of an Illusion' (47-8). 4 James Bryant Conant (1893-1978), diplomat, author, chemist, and critic of American educational practices, was president of Harvard 1933-53. In 1957 he began a comprehensive study of American public high schools under a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, reporting in The Education of American Teachers (1963). Other works include Education in a Divided World (1948), Education and Liberty (1953), and The Citadel of Learning (1956).

Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th President of the United States 1953-61, was president of Columbia University in 1948 before he became the supreme commander of the combined land forces under NATO in 1950. He had been Commanding General, Allied Powers, in the European Theatre of Operations 1943-5. 5 Billy (William Franklin Jr) Graham (1918- ), American evangelist whose large-scale preaching tours, called 'crusades,' and friendship with Truman, Eisenhower, and other presidents as guest, confidant, and golf partner, won him international prominence. 6 Psalms 46:10.

The Teaching Profession in an Expanding Economy

This unpublished talk was probably delivered to a group of Nova Scotia teachers in 1955, judging by the similarity to the published talks from that year. A typescript was found with Grant's papers.

When you paid me the great honour of asking me to come to your banquet, I hoped you would not mind me being serious. To talk lightly to a group of people such as this would be silly. For clearly the possibility of the good life in Nova Scotia depends more upon what happens among the teachers and the clergy than upon any other professions. What I want to talk about is the teaching profession in the expanding economy. Now first it must be understood that by the teaching profession, I mean all the profession whether in the schools, the universities, or in adult education. For it is clear that the ills which affect Canadian education are present at all levels. Now the expanding economy is the central fact of North American life. It exists because scientists discovered the way nature works and technicians have applied this knowledge for our economic good. In the last forty years it has changed the very basis of Canadian society - you may say less in Nova Scotia than elsewhere in Canada - but still enormously and it is bound to affect us more and more. Now obviously the expanding economy has brought us good things. Above all it has liberated the majority from the curse of slogging physical work and given people leisure as never before in history. In the old days my wife would have been a drudge or lived off the labour of servants, today the washing machine and electrolux means she has some little time for the pursuit of truth and beauty - she has the energy to read a book.

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But let us not forget the other side of the expanding economy in Canada. By the black side I do not mean only the threat of total war which might mean our physical extinction - but something worse that may lead - indeed is leading - to the destruction of our souls, of our very humanity, that is, the way that economic prosperity and suburban middle class life is coming to be thought of as an end in itself. This again is less prevalent in Nova Scotia than in Ontario but I see enough of Halifax to know that the worldly materialism of the expanding economy - which exalts the salesman and the engineer above the teacher and the minister - is creeping into our midst. To put it philosophically, men are so intoxicated by the achievement of finite ends that the idea of any spiritually infinite end is fast disappearing. And, of course, with the disappearance of the idea of spirit, of the idea of the infinite from consciousness, men fast become apes. This very accusation I am making would be accepted in many quarters as a mark of progress. (Evening at the Technical College, etc.)1 It is a strange phenomenon of North American society that where never before in history have so few been denied the pursuit of the spirit through crippling excess of physical labour, yet in this very society the idea of spirit is fast disappearing. The very word 'spirit' has softened and decayed in meaning almost beyond recognition. Its suggestion these days is largely one of vague good feeling. It is the icing on the materialistic cake, rather than the very nature of the cake itself - the very groundwork of reality. Now this change over has led to an entirely new definition of education. The very word education comes, as you know, from an allegory of Plato's. He describes human beings as chained in a dark cave, and their lives as the struggle to free themselves by knowledge from the chains of ignorance which bind them, and to struggle up out of the cave into the sunlight of knowledge which is the radiance of God. Educo - to lead out. As Jesus put it brilliantly, 'The truth shall make you free.'2 Now this was the traditional idea of education in the western world at its best. Education was the end for which free rational men existed. Education was the purpose of life. A good society was one in which as many people as possible came to that liberation of the soul. Society existed to promote the education of persons, not vice versa. Now, of course, the trouble with this old tradition of education (the Christian tradition) was not only that it was abused but that it never could be

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sufficiently universal - because of economic necessity it was often confined to pitiably few. Nevertheless, theoretically it knew what was the real point in educating people. Now in the new capitalist democratic society dominated by the pursuit of economic success this old idea of education as the way men were freed to come into the light of infinite truth has largely disappeared. Education exists today to make one an economic success, a technical expert - to adjust children to society as our new priesthood, the psychiatrists, tell us. Where the end of the old education was to free men so that they were out of the cave; the purpose today is to equip them to be successes in the cave. That is, education is no longer that for which society exists; it has become the servant of society. I, of course, see this at the university level more than at the school level and I daresay the forces of middle class materialism have taken over at the university more than in the schools. But at Dalhousie (and I know this to be true of other universities as well) we are just becoming a factory for technicians - engineers, scientists, accountants, doctors, etc., and I don't think any of us can gather how almost completely the old free rational traditions of human dignity are disappearing among those technicians. They are just barbarians. (Miss Stewart and the student and the Holy Spirit.)3 Even in these days so many of us are held by that hoary old lie of liberalism that men are easily and naturally good, that we think that the old spiritual traditions which made our society as good as it was will continue automatically. But, of course, that is sloppy optimism. Traditions - truths - are only kept alive when they are consciously perpetuated by careful education, and that is not being done. We are caring about teaching men to make money, to build bombs and refrigerators - we are not caring about the careful training of teachers and ministers, philosophers and artists. Yet it is through these latter professions that the spiritual life of a society is perpetuated and enriched. The tragedy and paradox of modern Canadian life is that just as we are reaching in many areas a level of economic prosperity in which true education could really grow, we have made of economic prosperity and worldly success such idols that we have forgotten the true end for which education exists. There is a great deal of talk about John Dewey and his view of education (it cannot be called a philosophy of education for its very

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essence is a denial of the life of philosophy).4 But what else is Dewey's view of education but a justification of the expanding economy and the secular society and an attack on the old traditions of education which made the end of education spiritual. What Dewey is largely interested in is turning men away from any transcendent spiritual end and making the careful adjustment of people to successful economic, sexual, and social life in society, that is, to make men healthy animals. And the good side of Dewey is just like the good side of the expanding economy - that it is important that men should be encouraged to achieve finite ends, the bad side of course is also the same - these finite ends are turned into objects of idolatry in Dewey so that man's spiritual destiny is quite forgotten. This is why Dewey is such an important writer on education, because he expresses so forcibly the revolt of the expanding capitalist economy against the old Christian tradition of the west. That is why he has had such influence in the United States, a society where the new patterns of the secular post-Christian world are arising. Now what has all this got to do with the immediate needs of our profession and the difficulties that all we teachers continually find ourselves in? Well I think this question goes right to the heart of the matter. For in a society where wealth and power and comfort and success are more and more exalted as the ends for which life should be lived, and education and knowledge are only thought of as useful means to achieve these other ends - in such a society there can be no possibility that the teaching profession will be considered seriously. This is basically why the teaching profession is not considered of great importance in Canada today (despite a lot of pious platitudes to the contrary) because education is only a means to most members in our society, a means, therefore, to be got as cheaply and quickly as possible. After all, it doesn't take much education to become a salesman and enter the world of prosperity. To produce an engineer you have to have a few skillful mathematicians around - but they need only be technical experts - they need not look at all at the profound spiritual implications of mathematics. Our society will need to have technical reason developed - but it will not need men of rich imagination and of spiritual reason. It really isn't important to see deeply into human history or taste deeply of human art or think of the ultimate mysteries of human existence philosophically in order to be a success in the expanding economy. Indeed, one may be very much better off if one

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does not. Most families in Canada are not interested that through education their children's spirits should be raised out of the shadows and imaginings into the truth - rather what they want from education is that the teacher should pump enough techniques into the youngsters for them to be able to manipulate their environment successfully. Or, if you prefer the more passive definition, for them to be integrated comfortably into their society. And after all, if this is the job of the teaching profession, it doesn't require that highly trained, spiritually minded people should be in the profession. Therefore, the salesmen and the business men do not think the teachers need much pay, and do not give them much prestige. You see, commercial community does respect the doctors and pays them extraordinarily well, because it believes that what the doctors are doing is important. They do not know what education is really about, they judge it by their own mirror of economic success and therefore do not think it important. I think one can see this very well mirrored in that ghastly half-truth which the Home and School Association puts abroad, 'Education is everybody's business.' Can you imagine a lot of laymen putting abroad the slogan 'Surgery is everybody's business.' Now in a certain sense education is everybody's business - it is everybody's business to see that their children are well looked after. But everybody does not know what education is. The person who has seen deeply into the nature of history or English literature or mathematics - that is, the person who has thought philosophically - will know what these subjects do for the human soul in a way that the parent who is a salesman or an engineer just cannot know. But in the expanding economy everybody thinks they know automatically what is good - power, success, and wealth - and as I have said, all else is seen as subsidiary to those ends. Therefore, the teaching profession does not seem important and is not treated as important. Now please do not misinterpret anything I am saying as meaning I am against any efforts to get status, economic or otherwise, for the teachers immediately. We must all work for that for our own and our families' sake. We have an organization at Dalhousie which is de facto a union and I am a very keen and active member of it. We must work now for better economic conditions. We must eat and we must have leisure. I see every year how good students of mine just do not think they can afford to be teachers when, of course, they would be doing

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something much greater for society if they went out as teachers than into commerce, medicine, or law. Nevertheless, though, economics are inescapable; the teaching profession must never forget that what is beyond economics is that the status of the profession will finally depend on whether men and women understand that the life of the spirit is ultimate. The teaching profession can only become what it should be if the spiritual end of education is consciously known and held. That is, we must recognize that we are at a bad time in human history. We must recognize that the very values that we as teachers affirm are largely denied by society as a whole. What then can we do about this? First and foremost we must do things with ourselves. We must have the courage to be. What do I mean by that? Men and women do not automatically become human. We have to make for ourselves the decision to be human unless we are to slip back into being clever (or less clever) apes. To affirm, that is, in every situation the values that we know to be true. And that affirmation may mean in a very real sense the taking up of a cross. Well this is, I think, what teachers must do they must have the courage to be teachers even when that does not seem important to the world. Let me illustrate what I mean by the courage to be a teacher. (Story about old student, B.S., who is nominally a teacher but not really) [This story again not recounted in the text.] I find the same lack of courage in myself. In a society such as Halifax dominated by the values of the expanding economy, in which practically nobody I meet would consider it important to be a teacher of philosophy, I find myself, when I am tired or depressed, taking their view of the matter, really unconsciously believing that the teaching profession is a haven for those who are not tough enough to pursue power or make money. I find this lie creeping like a nasty cancer into my soul. Now I think it is the fight against that lie which I mean by the courage to be a teacher. Now how can that courage be held in the mind like a bulwark against temptation? I think first and foremost by consciously and continually holding onto a proper philosophy of education. By that I mean two things: (1) Holding in one's mind that the end of all life is the journey of the mind into God (that is, into reality) and (2) the holding in one's mind the value of each step of that journey as means in that journey. Let me be specific. If one is a teacher of Latin, continually being

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aware of how important it is for youngsters to use a beautiful language with care and precision - knowing indeed that beyond the language itself the very act of attention required by the youngster in that study may be exactly the act which may make the difference for him between being a slovenly beast and a child of God. And, of course, the same would apply to the awakening of the mind in history or mathematics or English literature. Let me digress for a moment about this faculty of attention. Apart from the actual awakening of the child's soul by contact with subjects such as mathematics or English or History, it is through such attention to these subjects that the soul finds its dependence upon infinite mind. (In the old days hard physical work among the poor - nowadays) [The specifics of 'nowadays' not explained in the text.] That seems the first duty of the teacher these days. To hold constantly in his mind the purpose of what he is doing for children and the necessary means of doing it. To have such an adequate philosophy the teacher herself or himself must have a real life of study and prayer of his own. This is why we must assert that teachers must have enough money for leisure so that they can have this time for a real spiritual life of their own. If a teacher is so hard up that he or she has to dash away to some commercial job after school, no great teaching will come forth. For great teaching only comes out of the riches of a spiritual life. Do you know that great phrase in the Old Testament? 'Be still and know that I am God.'5 That is why teachers need leisure. And, of course, that constant holding in our souls of the true end of education will enable us to cast out all those false philosophies of education which so corrupt us and lead us away from being what we properly should be. What is so dangerous about Dewey is not the immediate changes his thought has largely brought about, but that by defining education in a cheap utilitarian way he has led teachers not to take their profession with great enough seriousness. In the end, if Dewey is right, then the commercial classes are justified in believing that education and the teaching profession are not very important. I don't know if any of you have ever heard Dr C.E. Phillips of the Ontario College of Education speak.6 But I always find a contradiction in what he says. On the one hand, he continually cheapens education by his advocacy of the anti-intellectual position - his jokes about the uselessness of Latin, etc., but at the same time, he expects that teachers

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should be highly respected in society. But, of course, Dr Phillips cannot have his cake and eat it too. He cannot define education in a cheap pragmatic way and then expect that teachers will be considered important. Only if endless teachers everywhere cast out these false views of education and hold consciously in their minds its true purpose will our profession be what it ought to be. In the expanding economy which has turned so many Canadian minds away from their proper end, it is the 'courage to be' among teachers which will largely be operative in bringing our society back to a deeper holding of the truth. I came across a wonderful Latin quotation the other day. Qui Verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam

Verbum hominis. 'Those who have despised the word of God, from them shall be taken away also the word of man.' I would apply this to the teaching profession in this way. If teachers accept the values of the salesman and the technicians - that is, if they despise the word of God - then they will find that in the cheap world of the expanding economy they are despised slaves, serving the rich and looked upon with contempt.

Notes 1 Grant refers to the Nova Scotia Technical College, at that time a small college on Spring Garden Road. The text does not give any indication of the lesson Grant drew from the 'evening' mentioned. 2 John 8:32 3 Miss Stewart was apparently a good friend of Grant's who made a living coaching students in mathematics, but here again he did not explain in the text what he evidently said during the lecture concerning the Holy Spirit. 4 John Dewey - see note 12 in 'Pursuit of an Illusion' (47-8). 5 Psalms 46:10 6 Charles Edward Phillips - see note 5 in 'Adult Education in the Expanding Economy' (109).

The Uses of Freedom A Word and Our World

This essay appeared in volume 62, no. 4, of Queen's Quarterly, Winter 1956: 515-27. According to Sheila Grant, Grant was teaching St Augustine and Kant and was therefore thinking about freedom constantly. This interest in the idea of freedom led eventually to the project of writing a book about 'the freedom of the will.' (See the letter Grant wrote to President Kerr of Dalhousie University in preparation for the sabbatical leave of 1957. It can be found in the head-note to 'Acceptance and Rebellion' [222-3]). 'The Uses of Freedom - A Word and Our World' was reprinted by Queen's Quarterly in 1993 in vol. 100, no. 1:185-97.

Nearly all English-speaking people use the word 'freedom' when they communicate to others about matters of importance. Yet even the most elementary analysis of these uses, whether in practical affairs, in philosophy, or in the new sciences about persons, makes evident both the disparities of meaning among different people and the contradictions within its use by one individual. Indeed a man's use of this word is a touchstone of what elements in our tradition he deems important. For all elements of our tradition - the secularist and the theist, the liberal and the existentialist, the capitalist and the socialist, etc. - claim freedom as particularly their own, and their interpretation of the word as the 'true' meaning. Above all, the word is used loosely by the shapers of opinion in the mass democratic world, who are either sufficiently uneducated to believe or sufficiently unscrupulous to pretend that the common sense of ordinary people will directly grasp the proper meaning of the term. Obviously, it is the human lot that words should be such a source of confusion. Nevertheless, philosophic faith must hold that such confu-

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sion works against the good life. Therefore, in this article I intend first to look at the predominant use of this word in our society and secondly to formulate certain problems which arise from that use. It is not surprising that we should be deeply confused, since the manifold and subtle sources of our tradition have been so expanded and disrupted in the last centuries. In the sphere of ultimate conviction, that strange blending of the Greek and the Hebrew which was the basis of western society and because of which the existence of the infinite was assumed, came to be radically questioned by those who believed the world of space and time to be its own explanation and end. Clearly the word 'freedom' would mean something very different in two such interpretations of existence. And as most educated people, consciously or unconsciously, have been divided within themselves by this conflict, their uses of the word 'freedom' are a product of their own division. Nor is the confusion caused only by the conflicts about ultimate theory. The changes in the immediate world have confused us as to the expression of freedom in complicated situations. That careful interest in the objective world, which we call science, and the practical application of the knowledge thus acquired, has built an industrial society with its totally new conditions. Thus the theoretical question about freedom has been both accentuated and hidden by pressing practical difficulties, which are indeed breathtaking in 1955. It is even less surprising that this confusion should be especially manifest in North American society. For even though we have escaped so far the direct disruption of scientific war, still the causes of confusion can be seen to lie deeper here than in Europe. A large continent was opened up by pioneers, just as scientific technique combined with natural resources to produce wealth undreamed of before in history, and more widely diffused than ever before. The people who did this and to whom it happened were not likely to have the time or concentration to watch carefully the changes such happenings were effecting in their minds or a fortiori in the minds of their children. Pioneering and technological optimism fixed their minds upon the world of nature and so created in our society that concentration on the external which may be called the objective spirit. When Europeans deplore the very existence of towns such as Toronto or Los Angeles they would do

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well not to forget what the people of those towns have done and how concentrated has been the experience they underwent. Moreover, those who came to this continent were seldom persons who had deeply partaken of the spiritual life of European civilization. However nobly spirit was incarnate in that civilization, there were always large segments of its population who were to varying degrees excluded from the riches of its tradition. And it was largely from these segments that the immigrants came - particularly those in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, the lower middle class from the United Kingdom, for whom Toronto was an Eldorado in the early years of this century, were not the British who understood most deeply the religious and political liberalism which has been the glory of that society. The Irish peasants who were starved out of their country brought to the United States Catholicism in one of its most primitive modes. The relation of the North American situation to the immigrant can be seen at its subtlest in the case of the Jews. Here were a people penetrated deeply by a noble theological tradition, yet today most of these people are the very exemplars of our secular faith. And this change has been occasioned not only negatively by the fact that long centuries had taught the Jewish people to accept necessity, that is, to excel within the values of any society they entered (in this case the world of economic expansion), but also positively by the fact that there was much in the new world that seemed to them truly liberation. The society restraints of the old world had after all been particularly repressive towards the Jews. The new society wiped away those restraints in its overriding interest with objective ends. Thus it meant freedom to the people of the book and the law, even if that freedom was to destroy the book and the law. In the field of education the decisive victory of technical over older studies meant that the open-Sesame to success came to depend more and more on pure skill, and no longer required the subtler forms of the older society which had made the gaining of success more complex. Indeed, among those for whom secularism meant freedom, whether economic or social, the higher forms of thought and imagination came to be hated as limitations on freedom and as associated with the restrictions of the old aristocratic culture of Europe. In this situation the word freedom has come to mean for the majority the opportunities afforded to realize an increasing number of objec-

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tive desires. The world of the motor car and the thirty hour week, the economy of organized obsolescence and high returns for the salesman and the technician, the society of public technical education and social equality, the personal life of sexual fulfilment and ever more diversified and simpler popular amusement, this is what generally we mean when we say we live in a free society. Freedom for man is the ability to get what he wants. This vision of freedom finds in our society its ever fuller incarnation. To understand the form and influence of this faith in North America, however, is not as easy as some Europeans claim. So often they look at it simply as a crude hedonism, which they interpret as a product of industrialism and the world-centred philosophy of the last centuries. North America is interpreted by them as the mass society without the leavening of culture. To take this view of the faith of North America is to miss the central point. It is to be unaware of the subtlety of our origins. What must never be forgotten is that the secular faith of our society has not arisen in the same way as the secular faiths of Europe, because it is the end product of a certain form of Protestantism - namely, Puritanism. To understand North America, it must be remembered that an equivalent Puritanism was never a dominant force in any European country and that Puritanism was never long dominant even in England. It must also be remembered that the Puritans came to North America escaping religious rather than economic persecution and therefore brought with them an intense theology. More important, they had established societies before the break with England, before the movement west and before industrialism, and thus were the formative influence in the new society. Indeed the central question of our history is why the Puritan tradition, centred as it was on inwardness and the infinite, has been the dominant force in a society which has become so little inward and so little aware of the presence of the infinite. Whatever noble achievements and essential legacies Protestantism may be responsible for amongst us, one fact cannot be avoided - namely, in doing what it did in North America it has destroyed its own spirit as a directive force. Whatever its relics, whatever outward obeisance is paid to it, Protestantism in its own authentic form has become the merest minority report.

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Therefore, to understand our present definition of freedom and how it has come to be, it is necessary to understand the truth and falsity in that Puritanism. That would mean seeing the effects of the inadequate biblicism in its theory and the surrender to greed in its practice, and following through the results of these two failures in its inability to hold the minds of intellectuals and industrial workers. One would have to look still further back and show how Luther's very proper rejection of Aristotelian scholasticism led too many Protestants to a false denigration of reason, so leaving their tradition wide open to the vicissitudes of history. One should go behind the superficialities of R.H. Tawney and see truly why the noble attempt to bring the secular and sacred into unity resulted in failure.1 It is not, however, possible in this article to trace out those subtleties with care. What must be mentioned here, however, is the way in which certain biblical categories of thought have shaped the development of our idea of freedom. Whatever else biblical faith involved, it was a belief that God acted in history and that as a consequence history was a series of meaningful unique events, and that men were called upon to act so as to bring in God's kingdom on earth. In contrast to the Greek exaltation of thought, the biblical view turned men to reformist action. As against the Greek theology in which the finite was quite swallowed up in the infinite, Hebraic thought attempted to give the finite a fuller independence. The medieval attempt to find a way which would take into itself the truth in both these traditions and unify them around the doctrine of the Trinity was never a successful synthesis. Its insufficiency theoretically can be seen in the distinction between natural and revealed theology and practically the distinction between the monastic and the secular life. Medieval thought and practice, whatever assent it paid to biblical categories, can hardly be said to have treated finite existence with sufficient respect. Protestantism, with its renewed emphasis on the simply biblical, brought into the western world a fresh interest in action through its intense desire to shape the world to God's purposes. Indeed, it is the biblical interest in the concrete event and the reform of the world which has created the relationship between Protestantism and science - a relationship vouched for in the fact that the scientific spirit has held sway above all in predominantly Protestant countries, England, Germany, and the USA. Catholic philosophers point out quite rightly that Catholicism has given reason a more central place

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than has Protestantism, and they therefore insist that their tradition can more adequately account for scientific reason within the whole range of reason. In saying this, however, they forget how much scientific thought is concerned with the contingent and is brought into being by an attempt to improve men's lot. They forget how these interests in earlier days were in close connection with a Protestantism which because of its biblical faith theoretically emphasized the contingency of the world and practically was interested in its reform. Indeed, this relationship between Protestantism and natural science is seen in a broader setting in that between Protestantism and the whole tradition of liberal humanism. Despite obvious theoretical differences (which in a certain sense make liberal humanism farther from Protestantism than from Catholicism) the practical interest of the liberal in reforming the world for man's sake and the Protestant's desire to bring in the Kingdom of God brought them often into unexpected associations. The history of reform in the English-speaking world cannot be understood outside this relation. The hold exerted by Protestantism on the masses allied them with reformers who were sometimes far from Protestant in theory. Because of this alliance, there was no such event as the French revolution, and no tradition of the secular revolutionary. The New England reformers of the nineteenth century are archetypes of the strange blending between Protestant and liberal reform. Therefore, to understand why freedom will increasingly come to mean a simple hedonism (the ability to get what one wants) it must be recognized that this hedonism stems not primarily from pure secularism, but also originates in the reformist Protestant spirit. It comes into existence as the reformist spirit loses any sense of the transcendent and begins to take the world ever more as an end in itself. The idea of freedom as the ability to change the world exists in our minds as dependent in part upon an attenuated altruism - the last remnant of the Protestant vision of the Kingdom of God on earth - and in part upon a growing self-centred hedonism. The incarnation of this mixed vision of freedom can be seen clearly by looking at two important groups in our society - the business men and the scientists. The scientist or scientific technician, one generation away from the Protestant or Jewish home, incarnates this faith in its purest form. Scientific knowledge is true knowledge because it teaches one how to change the world. This is the faith, met in so many scientists, that all

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other study is vain because theirs alone is really solving the problems of mankind by freeing men from the curses of pain and work. It was the mixture of science and the Bible in Marxism which in more optimistic days led so many of our scientists (often the more thoughtful or sensitive) to place their faith in the communist party or to flirt in its environs. A young Protestant or Jewish scientist, having seen theoretical inconsistencies in his old tradition, yet held by its ethical intensity more than he consciously knew, could find in Marxism a faith that took into itself (albeit crudely) science and reformism. To the specialist mind the theoretical crudity of Marxism was often not a difficulty. Today in a less easy hour when even the specialist mind can see that the problems of politics are not simple, this old scientific reformism finds it difficult to summon its earlier rapture. The more naive of this faith may find still some positive outlet in reverence towards Point Four Programmes2 or negatively in rage at the security measures of the American government. Freedom as the ability to change the world can be seen in the onward and upward ethic which is so characteristic of American business. Despite endemic greed and power seeking, it would be unimaginative to see the reformist note in American business as entirely cynical as does the Marxist or professional academic sceptic. Admittedly there are different levels of sophistication to be found in Mr Hoffman of Studebaker, ECA, and the Ford Foundation, as compared with Mr Murchison of Texas oil, fundamentalist sermons, and a scheme for nation wide boys clubs to keep America clean.3 But this should not prevent us from seeing in them both exemplars of that onward and upward activism. The energy which is poured into organisation at home and abroad cannot be interpreted in simple secularist categories. The European psychologist may talk of substitutions and immaturities which make the business man's work his pleasure, and thus be able to interpret American life as an undeveloped form of a European counterpart. That, however, is to miss what really shapes the self-made American businessman who has come out of the old Protestantism. Of course, in business as elsewhere, this spirit will, of necessity, become openly hedonistic. The Protestant self-made men are being replaced by the new slick and cultured. What, after all, is the Harvard School of Business Administration but an academic organisation to take the simpler men with a tradition of their own and deracinate them

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for the new smart world? The scientist plus businessman is General Motors; the scientist plus government official the New Deal or Pentagon. Harry Hopkins could change over from mass welfare to total war.4 It was easy to convince himself that the same reformist spirit could be operative in bringing in an international kingdom of the four freedoms. In these less hopeful days, those who plan our intellectual strategy against the Russians often justify our society in a mixture of biblical and scientific language which is not fundamentally different from the language of the tyrannous priests in the Kremlin. Though the old fashioned scientist and self-made man were the perfect embodiments of this form of freedom, so greatly has the same faith dominated our world that to give adequate illustrations of it would be to describe our society. It appears in our exaltation of the administrator, in our willingness to subordinate all else to the expanding economy, in our growing trust that when individuals or groups prove recalcitrant they can be made 'mentally healthy' by the psychiatrist (the man who gets things done in the world of the spirit). It is seen in progressive education in the way that intellectual softness arises from the belief that the end of thought is to adjust us to the world. Even our universities and churches, whose traditional aim should make them of all institutions the least suited to this spirit, are now largely dominated by it. 'Knowledge is that which teaches us to change the world' should be the motto of our universities. Perhaps Harvard was striving for this when it changed its motto to Veritas. At least Mr Conant was the most single minded exponent of this theory.5 Indeed, in the surrender of its universities to this aegis, Protestantism exposed most clearly the chink in its armour. Here it paid its greatest price for its denigration of reason. By its concentration on 'faith, 'it detached the educational process from our infinite end and so more and more left 'faith' as something to be inspired in church, while the university could be turned over to useful studies about the world. Because of this theory, the break between Protestantism and the universities it founded has not been a sad surrender to the spirit of the age, but a joyful acceptance carried out by generations of ministers turned university presidents. And indeed the denominational colleges have often been most thorough of all in relying on emotional inspiration for faith and turning over the intellectual part of the university to the purest secularism. Our universities are under the control of business men

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while the men of thought are simple employees. Thus, universities are thought of as places where young people are trained in some remunerative technique, and where staff members increase the scope of some technique by their researches. The three essential forces of our society, business, government, and the mass, all use their power to shape the universities to this end. Government and business openly offer bribes in a variety of ways. The public uses the less obvious force of sending their children to the institutions most appropriate for fitting them for the manipulative world. And here it would be wrong to be cynical. The parents who want their children to be doctors and engineers believe that these occupations are the truly important ones, because they involve doing something in the world. To help others at twenty-five thousand a year is both the apotheosis and paradox of the American dream. In the universities, even the study of man is primarily pursued as the source of power over other men. The growth of the social sciences and the claims made for them, particularly in such newer branches as empirical psychology and sociology are but evidence of this. The consequence of saying that changing the world is what matters is to deny that there is anything to know which will not lead to such changing. Thus the old studies are grouped together under the strange category 'humanities' and they are thought to be concerned not with knowledge but what is called culture. Even the churches, whose only possible function lies beyond manipulation, are more and more organized around this principle. The ideal minister is the active democratic organiser who keeps the church running as a home of social cohesion and 'positive thinking.' If he is clean limbed and can encourage basketball, so much the better. If he can promote building, extrapolate organisation, provide inspiration on Sunday, and convince young people there are more socially desirable activities than fornication, he is a success. Best of all, if he knows a little empirical psychology, he will understand that when a church member gets into spiritual difficulty he should be sent to a psychiatrist. To do all this the systematic study of theology is hardly necessary. Indeed theology both for the liberal and the biblicist (the two positions into which Protestantism has divided) has become not much more than a set of ethical and emotional data, to be accepted as early as possible so that the minister can get on with improving the world. Beyond that,

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thought may be a tool to refute the unbeliever or show up other communions. The irony of this love of activity is seen in the way that Protestants, certain of their own truth and salvation, have felt free to turn outward in works at home and abroad, while their own minds and those of their children were losing all sense of the unchangeable. This view of freedom appears most clearly in a negative form, that is, in the dying out on this continent of personal relations, art, philosophy, and prayer. For these activities have respectively less and less to do with changing the world. If there is freedom to be gained from them, it is not a freedom to manipulate the world. And so these activities are in decay. Personal relations are seen as serving ends beyond themselves; art is turned into making life pleasant. Linguistic analysis and petitionary prayer become the archetypes of thought and desire. It is not surprising that the philosophy which has had the greatest influence in North America is pragmatism, for this is the theoretical justification of the spirit I have been describing. Indeed linguistic positivism (call it what you will) is a more careful justification of this worldly spirit, but as it has never been a popular gospel, it is more important to consider the less intellectual pragmatism. Dewey's philosophy must be taken seriously, not as a system, but as it expresses the desire of the prospering democratic society to free itself from the transcendent and ironic elements of its Protestant heritage, without losing any of the old ethical ardour.6 In writing about the word 'freedom' Dewey states the American faith. What men have esteemed and fought for in the name of liberty is varied and complex, but certainly it has never been a metaphysical freedom of the will.a

The very phrasing of this sentence portrays the American dream. 'Esteemed and fought for' are placed together and so imply that something cannot be esteemed unless it is capable of being fought for unless attempts can be made to realize it in the objective world. The freedom of the will, however, as conceived in the metaphysical tradition, was not an existent of the objective world and therefore not something that could be realised by external struggle. Of course, the hated a John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, p. 303.

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word 'metaphysical' adds to the appeal of Dewey's sentence because it is used with all its aristocratic and impractical undertones. What, after all, has the sensible down to earth American to do with theorising? His job is to get out and live, that is to leave his mark on the world; and as we are all good democrats, it must be taken for granted that he will do this with a good will. Dewey, as a man, was more held by the transcendent than his philosophy allowed (e.g., his part in the Trotsky affair),7 but still it is difficult not to interpret his thought as the previous generation's preparation for the clean desk man of International Business Machines. Superficially it would seem that art is more respected in our society than prayer or philosophy, and will be still more so as our practicality becomes more hedonistic. Among the simpler, who maintain some roots in Protestantism, the gospel of work and economic power is maintained; but the children who have tired of the aridity of this in their parents turn to a sensuous culture as an object of worship, often bringing to this culture the organising power of their ancestors. Indeed this love of the sensuous is not confined to the rich, because the general level of techniques and popular education allows an interest in culture among the democratic many. The view of art, as making the world pleasanter, leads temporarily to an encouragement of art, particularly in reaction against the authentic Protestant suspicion of the images. Nevertheless, it is ultimately destructive of true art. For if art is seen chiefly as an imaginative coating to existence rather than as the recognition and statement of reality, then necessarily it is a less fundamental activity than the science which then becomes the only gate to reality. Because of this theory, art of the first rank has not and will not be produced amongst us. The liberals indeed expected that with greater wealth true art would necessarily arise. In doing so they forgot that though some economic freedom is necessary for the artist, what is crucial is a theory which considers the nature of his activity important, and this democratic liberalism could not provide. It is hardly necessary to mention what the end result of a manipulative view of freedom must be on personal relations. The substitution of manipulation for contemplation turns other people into objects instead of subjects like ourselves. The loss of adoration of the other must here be most seriously corrupting. Mr and Mrs Dale Carnegie may be but parodies of the personnel officer and the practical psychologist, but the

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popularity of their techniques among the simpler success-seekers must not be forgotten.8 The institution known as 'Personnel Laboratories' may be laughed at by educated business executives, but they still use it to gage their employees' advancement. Dr Kinsey's use of the categories of climax and outlet and the popular interest in his work show how the most intimate aspect of personal relations can be reduced to the objective.9 At the level of popular mythology the idea of sex as manipulation is growing. When taken out of its total context, and thought of as the ability to arouse the purely erotic in others, sexuality must be self-defeating. The idea of serious otherness is lost and without such an idea the true fulfilment of sexuality is impossible. The sexual gods and goddesses of adolescent America stimulate sensuality only to frustrate it. Moreover, these manipulative personal relations owe much of their origin to a certain side of Protestantism. There is an obvious relation, though difficult to define, between the dying of contemplation in Protestantism and that insensitivity to other people which is so marked a feature of the activist Protestant congregation. It is not possible in a short space to trace the long and subtle history by which the ethic of changing the world gradually lost all reference to the transcendent and became a worldly reformism which in turn becomes ever more a democratic hedonism. Nor must that history be seen simply as loss. Our continent in this century has had its moments. For example, a generation ago, when the medical profession was still touched by the old Protestantism and yet had reached a scientific optimism about the removal of pain, we had in our midst a splendid aspect of the human spirit. Or again, the radicals who took the Kingdom of God seriously in terms of social and economic reform may have been a naive lot, but their spirits were lovely and their accomplishments great. That the liberal democratic faith severed from the transcendent should inevitably fall into the vulgarest pleasure seeking must not prevent one from recognizing the good in that hope. Nor is it possible to know how far the debasement has gone. The present efforts of the elite in the USA to revive their broken tradition, whether by the stimulation of 'the humanities' in the universities or by public pronouncements concerning the sovereignty of God, may seem naive and desperate and compromising. Nevertheless, it would be arrogant simply to brush them aside. What can be said with some certainty, however, is that as the presence of the infinite fades from our

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minds, a society which has concentrated its energies on changing the world will more and more demand the immediate motive for so doing, and thus our society will become increasingly ruled by pleasure and force. In the next years, if we are not destroyed by war, we will watch the domination of the elite by the pleasure of personal power and the domination of the more submissive by the pursuit of those less strenuous pleasures which alleviate boredom. As thought about our proper end disappears, the busy specialists and the lazy whom they serve, will, almost without thought, pour into the vacuum the idea of pleasure, in all its manifold, fascinating, and increasingly perverted forms. Beyond this chaos it is only possible to guess and to hope. How God shall reconcile the world to Himself is not a matter we can comprehend.

Notes 1 Richard Henry Tawney (1880-1962), Christian-socialist economic historian, taught at London. His philosophy of reform markedly influenced the British labour movement in the early twentieth century. His most famous work, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), Grant thought superficial in comparison to the work of Max Weber on the same subject. 2 The Point Four Programs came about as a result of a proposal by President Harry Truman (the fourth point in his inaugural address of 20 January 1949) to share American skills, knowledge, equipment, and investment capital with developing nations in the areas of industry, agriculture, public administration, health, and education. 3 Paul Gray Hoffman (1891-1974), American corporate executive and public official, assisted in organizing the economic recovery of Europe after the Second World War. He was administrator of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), the special US government agency that carried out the Marshall Plan from 1948 to 1950. He worked for the Studebaker Corporation from 1919 on, becoming president in 1935. He was chairman of the Committee for Economic Development 1942-8 and later became president of the Ford Foundation and chairman of the Fund for the Republic. Clinton William Murchison (1895-1974), president of Delhi Oil in Dallas, held interests in cattle, railroads, steamships, and real estate as well as in oil and gas. 4 Harry Lloyd Hopkins (1890-1946), social worker, New Deal administrator, and presidential aide under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, established the Civil

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Works Administration and was head of the Works Progress Administration in 1935. He undertook several important missions to Russia and Britain for Roosevelt during the Second World War. Grant is perhaps arguing that Harvard's motto 'Veritas' was given a new and different meaning during the presidency (1869-1908) of Charles William Eliot (1834-1926), who transformed what had been primarily an undergraduate religious college into a centre of research on the German model, with an emphasis upon pure and applied science. During the presidency (1933-53) of James Bryant Conant (see note 4 in 'The Paradox of Democratic Education,' 181) Harvard research in both science and the social sciences became imfluenced by the policy objectives of the American federal government. See Richard Norton Smith, The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster 1986). American pragmatic philosopher John Dewey, known as the leading advocate of 'progressive education,' encouraged the inculcation of morality without religious grounding. See A Common Faith (1934) and note 12 in 'Pursuit of an Illusion' (47-8). In 1937, at the age of 78, Dewey headed a commission of inquiry that went to Mexico City to hear Leon Trotsky's rebuttal of charges made against him in the Moscow trials of 1936 and 1937. Dale Carnegie (1888-1955), American author and teacher of public speaking. His book How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) was translated into

more than 30 languages and has been called the most popular work of nonfiction in modern times. 9 Alfred Charles Kinsey (1894-1956), American zoologist and student of human sexual behaviour, taught at Harvard and then Indiana and was the founder-director of the Institute of Sex Research. His works include Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953).

Morals in Nova Scotia

We found this radio typescript containing three broadcasts with Grant's papers, but we could not find any record of such broadcasts at the CBC. There is a possibility the broadcasts were aired on CJCH, a local Halifax station.

First Broadcast

The other day when I was talking about the principles of morality, a young fellow who is going to be a minister came up to me and asked 'This morality you talk about, you mean by that something to do with sex?' I think this is very typical of what so many people think is meant by morality - it has to do with sexual conduct and if you are a United Churchman or Baptist it probably also includes whether you drink wine and spirits - or as they are called in the ghastly new language of the prohibitionists, beverage alcohol. For instance at a dinner for charity not long ago I sat next a heavy tough man who sells motor cars. In his conversation, he showed himself much taken up with making a packet of money and with bullying the weaker brethren who got in his way. Yet I am sure he would have thought himself a very moral man. Before dinner he did not take a drink. Nor from the way his wife seemed to have him in hand would I gather that he often strays to other less official embraces. This way of limiting the use of morality to these two aspects is a corruption of a beautiful word. For morality is really concerned with the question of all human conduct - personal, social, sexual, religious, economic, political. It has to do with how a man ought to live, with what is really worth doing in this strange life of ours. The trouble with limiting

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the word to sexual matters is that when we do this we generally intend by it to make morality negative, to make it, for example, a series of prohibitions against sleeping with our neighbour's wife or daughter. But morality should be concerned with positive life-giving principles and not merely with stopping us from doing something we want to. Therefore when I talk of morality in Nova Scotia, I mean my picture of what Nova Scotians think is right conduct over the whole sphere of life. I do not mean the principles by which we do in fact act, but rather what we think is the way we should act. To use a rather crude phrase, what are 'the ideals' of Nova Scotians. I should also say that when I speak of Nova Scotians, I probably really mean Haligonians. To know the ethics of a community you have to know that community well and the only community I know well in Nova Scotia in Halifax. Of course, I do meet a lot of youngsters who come up to Dalhousie to get what we rather loosely call an education, but by and large these youngsters are from the more prosperous families - the professional and commercial classes of the province. Therefore I'm really talking about the moral ideals of these kind of people. Nevertheless, this is not a bad limitation - because it is surely true of human societies that what the more prosperous part of a society believes gradually becomes the dominant standard. Whatever nonsense Karl Marx talked about at other points, he is surely right there. And this is particularly so in our society because it is a capitalist one. We have exalted the economic motive (call it if you will greed) to the highest place it has ever had in human history. Therefore the economically prosperous are particularly objects of veneration to us and thus their moral ideals are very likely to be the dominant ones in our society. Also, it must be remembered that the distinction between town and country is dying out everywhere because of the machine. More and more country people are coming to be very like town people. In the summer I go down to a fishing village near Peggy's Cove.1 The older generation there have a way of life of their own, worked out for their own community - but the young people are more and more becoming poor imitations of town people and imitate their values. I think the story of the boy who thought that morality was concerned with sex is indeed a key to what is happening in our society just because the boy who asked it was going to be a minister. As the

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Church ceases to have hold over the centre of men's minds, it becomes more and more concerned with their outward conduct and as it dares less and less to touch really controversial areas of conduct it concentrates on simple personal questions. And this I think gives us a key to what is really taking our moral standard at the moment. The old premachine Nova Scotia was made up of farm people and the commercial and professional classes who made their living from the farmers and fishermen. The moral values of this society w[ere] shaped by its faith in a firm biblical religion - the Presbyterians of Pictou County, the Baptists of the Valley. And these values held not only the simple people in the country, but the clever children who came up to the city to become lawyers and doctors and ministers (yes in those days the ministers were an important profession). It was this spirit in men like Howe which made our political institutions; it was this spirit in men like McCullogh which made our educational system.2 Now of course this was not only true of Nova Scotia, it was true of the whole of North America. Pioneering Protestantism shaped the early history of this continent. What makes Nova Scotia special is that this old biblical Puritanism has continued to have influence with us for a much longer time than elsewhere. The Maritime provinces are after all an isolated little peninsula cut off from the main stream of life in the rest of the continent. Therefore we haven't been till lately affected by those influences which smashed the power of the old Protestantism in the rest of Canada and the United States. Elsewhere the old religion has gradually faded away before the immense technological progress and the semi-scientific education necessary to that progress. But down here with us these influences have only recently begun to work and therefore our old Protestantism is still quite alive. I don't see how anybody can doubt this. My ancestors had come from the Maritimes and had gone to live in central Canada. Coming back here to live was like returning to my past. It was to meet people who still thought as my grandfather - a minister from Pictou County had thought. To know people who took the old Puritanism seriously in a way I had never met in towns like Montreal or Toronto. And please do not think that I mean this as an insult to the Maritimes. I am not such a believer in progress and therefore do not assume that the thoughts of a generation ago are less valid than ours. Life in Newfoundland is an example of what I mean. It is further away from the

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new Great Lakes culture than is Nova Scotia. Therefore one finds the old religious traditions even stronger there. This is, indeed, what makes Nova Scotia so fascinating as a study in moral change. The old Protestantism is still operative and the more operative the farther one gets from the big centres such as Halifax and Sydney. But it is dying fast as the new mechanized culture, bringing with it mechanized morality, comes in from central Canada. And nothing can stop this new culture from becoming ever stronger in our midst. For one thing most of us want it. The world of the motor car and the washing machine, the world where the salesman, the engineer, and the specialist doctor are the leaders, the world of mass technical education, the world of ever simpler popular entertainment through the movies and television and radio - this culture is with us and it is quickly destroying the remnants of an older morality. As we buy our foods from Eatons and Simpson-Sears so we will become more and more morally like Toronto and Chicago. And our leaders will become like pale shadows of the prosperous Toronto executive or salesman, doctor, or engineer. Our institutions will take on the same tone. For instance in the nine years I have been at Dalhousie that institution has continuously grown further away from its early roots and become more and more like an American state university in the middle-west like Michigan State for instance. Now I do not mean to imply that this process is necessarily good or bad. But what cannot be doubted is that it is happening. As I get to know the new insurance company executives and heads of department stores who are more and more influential in running Halifax, some of their moral standards seem to be better than the old Protestant lawyers and ecclesiastics and naval men who ran Halifax for so long. Though of course they are less educated and their standards less subtle. But what concerns me here is not to emphasize the better or the worse but simply the difference. These people will produce quite new moral ideals and these will produce new kinds of institutions - different schools, different churches, different universities, different homes. For instance, if anybody can believe that a school like Queen Elizabeth High School, centred as it is around the emotional needs of teenagers, is going to produce the same kind of moral ideals as did the old Halifax Academy - then they are mistaken. People who can believe that can believe anything.3

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And I think what I have been saying shows the first thing which must be understood about the pattern of morals in any society. What we think is morally right is formed in us by what we believe about the universe. We think we ought to act in a certain way because we think that by so acting we are somehow in tune with the very purpose of life. Human beings are not simply animals who act because of a law of nature over which they have no control. They are conscious beings who have ideas about the world (however poorly formulated) and those ideas form our conduct more than anything else. This is what we mean by men being free. And this is what I meant by the old Nova Scotian world being so shaped by the Bible. In those days Nova Scotians really believed that the Bible told them what the world was about and so they took their principles of action from that source. Now I don't mean for a minute to say that in the old days people in general lived up to what they saw in the Bible. There were lots of people who cheated and stole and committed adultery and gossiped etc. But when they did so, most of them thought they were wrong, thought they were sinning. That is, they thought they were going against the purpose of the universe. Now the breakdown of the old Biblical religion in the minds of North Americans is a long and complicated story which cannot be described here. Whatever the causes, vast masses of men and especially those with some education became unable to take the Bible literally. Moreover they drew the conclusion (which does not necessarily follow) that the Bible was an old-fashioned collection of myths and moral tales - rather than something which told us the truth about the world. Anybody who has much to do with the new technicians - the engineers and salesmen and doctors who are our new leaders - must admit that most of them no longer believe that biblical religion is true. Many of them indeed are held, even more than they know, by the moral precepts they have learnt from the Bible. But that is another thing from thinking it true. When they want to know what the universe is like they turn to the new sciences such as biology and psychology. And who can doubt that these lead to a very different view of the universe from the Bible? For a while the old morality continues to hold men even after its religious groundwork has gone. In this stage people still think it is wrong to commit adultery even if they don't know why. But this stage

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can't last long, for the moral values are the flowers which come from religious roots and when the roots die the flowers die also. Gradually new beliefs about the world take over and with them new moral ideals. We are just in that changeover now in Nova Scotia. All stages of the changeover are present simultaneously. At one end you still meet people who are thoroughly held by the old religion - I think for instance of a group of young people from a remote section of Pictou County. At the other end some of the advanced technicians in Halifax have almost entirely thrown off even the old ethical values. In between you have all shades of intermediate opinion. You have the large number of people who still go to church because its good for the community and for their children, though they think what the minister is talking about is really an illusion. At another part of the scale you have those who in private will admit that the biblical values seem to them nonsense, but think it politically wise to pay lip service to them. Our educational institutions seem to me to mirror this state of mind. But gradually the process in individuals and in institutions moves faster and faster away from the old biblically inspired moral values. What the moral values of our new technician-rulers will be who can say. But one gets a dim vision of them as one looks at the engineers and salesmen, the doctors and advertising agents in our midst. It is not a vision which greatly inspires me but that may be because people like myself are a race of dinosaurs - who cannot adapt to the new world and so face extinction. Second Broadcast If we want to understand the changes taking place in the moral standards of Nova Scotians, it will be helpful to look at one group - the medical profession. The doctors have indeed become a kind of priesthood of the new technological middle class. Through many parts of our society they are objects of awe and respect. I see this very clearly at the university because so many parents think that the highest thing their children could become is a doctor. Where a generation ago you had the intense mother who made her white headed boy a minister, now the same intensity is applied to make her darling a doctor. I have indeed another way of knowing how much the doctors are looked up to. I have the right to call myself Dr Grant. Generally I do not use the

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title, because it is a word better reserved for the medical profession, but if I want the best service from a store or garage, I give my name as Doctor Grant and then really get service. This is, of course, largely economic, as the doctors are much the best paid profession in the Maritimes; nevertheless it goes beyond mere economic respect to a kind of veneration for the profession itself. And indeed a generation ago how deeply the doctors deserved this respect. What great things medicine has done for the world. When twenty years ago the medical profession was still touched by the old Protestantism and yet had reached a scientific optimism about the removal of pain, what a splendid aspect of the human spirit it was. Even today of course this spirit still lives on in many doctors who dedicate themselves as deeply as any others to hard work in the service of their fellow men. But if we look at our society clearly we must recognize that the old fashioned doctor is dying out. The immensely prosperous specialists crowd the towns, turning their profession into a business. The other day I was at a banquet at which there were a lot of doctors - some of the older type and some of the new. One of the new ones got up and in proposing a toast said that the medical profession was the only one whose sole aim was to be of service to its fellow men. If I had not been a guest I would like to have pointed out that the average income of the doctors in the room was vastly higher than any other profession in the province. For instance ministers or teachers. Helping others at twenty five thousand a year is indeed the apotheosis and paradox of the new morality. But the thing to see about the doctors as an example of the new world is not only that they have been corrupted by wealth, or by the adulation the world has given them for their magnificent accomplishments. The change in ethical standards has come from something far more profound than that. Ironically it has come from the very thing which has brought the great accomplishments of medicine. The doctor's job is to understand the working of man's body and the advances in modern medicine that have come in the last hundred years by studying that body scientifically. Whether we like it or not we must recognize that medicine came of age when it was dominated by mechanistic ideas about man. That is, the modern scientifically trained doctor must because of his education look at man as a machine. And as

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medical education is such a concentrated business, the busy doctor has less and less time to think of him in any other way. Now in time this vision of man cannot help but have an effect on doctors and what they think are right moral values. If you think of man as essentially a body and his life as essentially part of nature your ethics cannot fail to be different from the old Biblical ethics which saw man to be essentially a spirit with a transcendent end beyond nature. I meet doctors often for whom this conflict is a real and serious war in their minds. Because of their background they would like to believe in the old tradition, but their new scientific education has so taught them to think in another way that they come to believe that the old Biblical thought is nonsense - even if they won't admit it to others or sometimes to themselves. Of course as with others, the old biblical morality maintains its sway even after the truth on which it was based has ceased to have any power. For example in the Dalhousie medical school there are many professors who themselves believe and imply in all they teach that man can be totally understood as animal. Yet these professors are horrified when one of their students cheats, or when they see the old medical ethics breaking down before the growing love of money. But why should they be? If man is simply an animal then the old morality is an illusion and under those circumstances why is it wrong to cheat? Why shouldn't one try to amass more nuts than the other squirrels? And what always seems to me most amazing in this is how little these professors see that what they have been teaching students over the years about man (namely that we can be known as biological objects) has had a direct effect in producing the kind of doctors which their old moral standards do not approve of. Of course this new view of man will lead to particular moral confusions now that the medical profession has entered into the control of the human mind in such a big way in psychiatry. And for this reason people like myself who see much truth in the Biblical tradition are often so wary about the claims and techniques of much modern psychiatry. After all the words psychiatry and psychology both come from the Greek word psyche which means mind or soul. Yet so much modern practice and theory in psychiatry springs from the idea that mind is not what it traditionally was supposed to be - the ruling part of a man - but rather that it is ultimately explainable and manipulable like

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a machine. That is, the medical profession now stakes its claim not only to heal the body but to heal the mind and yet it does this still within its mechanistic assumptions. Such assumptions, if accepted by society, must bring a truly immense change in moral values. For one thing is certain, if the mind can be fully understood in terms of the body, then the old categories of responsibility and sin and redemption are so much eyewash. The new language is motivation and neuroses and integration - a quite different account of human experience. This is what I mean when I say that a world where the psychiatrist is the specialist of the soul will evolve a new morality. These days there is a lot of soft talk that there is no real conflict between religion and psychiatry. This it seems to me comes on one side from woolly-headed clergymen who want to appear modern and want to reconcile Christianity with everything; and on the other side from determined psychiatrists who want to convince religious people that what they are doing is to be taken without criticism. But the conflict is inescapable so long as the psychiatrist claims that the mind is part of the natural order. For instance the other day a Nova Scotian psychiatrist was reported to me as teaching that sin was a medieval concept. What is important about this in the present connection is not which of these views has more truth, but rather how deeply our behaviour is being changed by this new view of man. Looked at simply as a battle between two competing ideologies, I have no hesitation in which is winning. One of the things that convinces me is the way that simpleminded ministers have come to identify Christianity with this new psychologism. I heard a psychiatrist the other day telling some ministers that their real job was mental health. The ministers were really in touch with the people and therefore were sort of field men to deal with people by simple psychological techniques, but when a person got in bad psychological trouble he should be summoned before the real priesthood, the psychiatrists. What amazed me about this claim is how many of the ministers seemed to accept it. I don't know how many people read 'The Mirror of Our Minds,' which is a syndicated popular column in the Halifax morning paper.4 It makes fascinating reading. It is entirely the new view of man describing us as animals with certain urges which we have to satisfy. When it wants to speak ex cathedra it uses the words 'a psychiatrist says' to show that it is defining dogma. Now if you said to the owners

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and editors of the Halifax paper that in this column they were spreading an interpretation of man in direct contradiction to Christianity they would say one was a crackpot talking through one's hat. But if it is read seriously it is seen to be just that. I have spoken at length about the medical profession, because they are so immensely influential in forming the new morality. But of course other groups also are of great influence - for instance the engineers. These last weeks we have been told from all quarters, from Winston Churchill down, that if we are to compete with the communist world we must train a vastly increased number of engineers. Already we are pushing a high percentage of our young talent and ambition in that direction and as we increase that push from fear of the Russians, we must inevitably produce a society in which the values of the engineer become more and more dominant. Now the education and work of an engineer is intensely immediate and one in which the idea of quantity is an absolute. Therefore from it spring the moral values of efficiency and getting things done, a morality which is concentrated on the exploitation of the natural world as man's highest end - while other subtler and more personal values inevitably decline. The idea that man's highest end is to change the world around him already dominates not only our economic but our political life, as shown for instance by the power of men such as Mr Howe and Mr Winters.5 And there is every evidence that the morality of the engineer is going to become central with us. To understand the new morality it would also be necessary to speak of the idea of salesmanship - that what matters in life is to sell your product and yourself. At its worst you see this in a fellow such as Dale Carnegie, where even the winning of friends is turned into a kind of salesmanship.6 And it is certainly true that our capitalist society has to push more and more rewards toward the salesman if it is going to keep the economy of organized obsolescence going, and this will mean that the morality of salesmanship cannot help but grow. The idea of selling is indeed everywhere. Recently the United Church set up a new Board the purpose of which is - I quote - 'to push, promote and sell the Church, using the same methods and media of any other sales force.' The secretary, Dr Herbert Pottle, pointed out the significance of the new board: He said: 'The Church must prove its continuing nature by keeping up with these methods, just as any other business would.'7

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Here indeed is one of the new moral ideas associated with salesmanship; everything even the Church is a business and must sell itself. (Though of course the idea of selling yourself has other associations.) My temptation is to condemn rather than try to understand this new mechanized morality. And that is of course quite wrong. All we must do is to say that society is rapidly changing and with it the morality of our society. The worst blindness is not to recognize that we are entering a new moral world - to believe that you can have all kinds of changes in society without changing the very fabric of the way men think and act - to believe that somehow the old virtues just automatically survive. We must have faith that the technological world can be shaped to richer ends than now seems likely. But the first thing necessary to that shaping is to see the transition we are in. Third Broadcast

What are the moral problems we in Nova Scotia are going to have to face and what are the principles with which we will seek to answer them? I think the questions we are going to have to face will be those common to the whole world; while the way we face them will be dependent on our particular tradition. As technology gives us an ever greater power over nature, Nova Scotia will become gradually indistinguishable from the rest of the Continent. Indeed it will be more than a sameness across North America. With the coming of an electronic industrialism the whole world is going to become more and more of the same pattern. Though we are so often told how different our way of life is from that of the communists, in fact our two worlds are becoming increasingly similar. After all, both the Russians and the Chinese have like us thrown over their ancient cultures in their desire to worship the machine. Indeed it is simply to state the obvious to say that the supreme moral decisions in the twentieth century - in Nova Scotia as much as anywhere - will all centre around technology and our use of it. It has been said so many times but it still needs saying: are we going to master technology and make it a means to a free life or are we going to become robots and slaves. On the one hand, the machines are such a blessing. If my wife did not have an automatic washing machine, she

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would be a drudge or have to have servants. I do not will she should be a drudge; I do not will there should be a servant class. Therefore I will the automatic washing machine and the machine age. But on the other side let's not fool ourselves as to how much the machine age has limited our freedom. Freedom is to be directed by one's own inner light - not by things external. Yet in the great cities of this continent how life has become for many an externally directed affair - people living for what kind of car they have, the next mass tv show, pushed around by propaganda from the advertising agents and general myth makers. And if anyone knows the kind of life growing up in Halifax, can one doubt that the same world is coming here? The other day I was, for my sins, at a home and school meeting, discussing television. Most of the people there were wildly optimistic about what television was going to do for our society. And they kept saying look at our generation we got radio twenty years ago and it didn't do us any harm; why should television affect our children. I kept wanting to say 'well look at us.' Is our generation so perfect or are we a restless lot full of the noise of advertising and entertainment. Can we doubt what a vast power the mass world has to destroy humanity, to make us less than persons - a world where people remain fixated at the stage of childhood, intoxicated with playing with toys. And this technology will raise moral problems at every part of our existence. Take sexuality for instance. The scientific discoveries in contraception and in curing venereal disease means that a whole new approach to sex opens up. Will we use these to build sexual lives which are creative, controlled, and beautiful or will these new discoveries turn us to a disordered pursuit of quantitative pleasure? I think most of the wisest people in the world recognize this is the greatest dilemma of our time. We must control the technological world we have created, or we will become decadent and corrupt apes. But behind this dilemma there is an even deeper moral question and one which is rarely mentioned. It is this: can man go too far in controlling nature? Does there come a point in our control over nature where it becomes disastrous and where we begin to corrupt nature and ourselves? For the last hundred and fifty years this question has hardly been asked at all - even to ask it would have seemed ridiculous. Science was the mark of man's particular genius - the thing which eliminated poverty and famine and disease. Hadn't every obscurantist who

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wanted to limit human progress spoken against control of nature over such issues as anaesthetics? Can we turn our back on human progress? This attitude has been evident since the development of atomic energy. People have been horrified by the results of the bombs - but not by the power itself. About atomic energy itself men have been filled with proud wonder at what they had discovered. All our talk, from General Eisenhower down, has been about developing its benevolent uses and trying to prevent its destructive ones. That is, it has been implied that there are no limits to the power we should seek over nature and no thought that there could be a real subversion of the natural order which could become truly demoniac. But then one hears bits of news which make one wonder. For instance England's greatest physiologist E.D. Adrian says that too many atomic explosions, even if they are simply for experiment, may corrupt the very basis of our heredity.8 I was reading the other day about United States air force pilots who are being taught to live under such pressures that their skulls almost collapse. Their consulting psychologist says if men don't know how to live under such pressures its time they were adjusted to them. Then one really asks oneself aren't there any natural limits. Is there a point beyond which progress becomes perversion? I do not yet know where the truth of this matter lies. On the one hand, one hates the thought of placing limits. On the other hand, aren't there some things we shouldn't do to natural beings? The answer lies only in very deep thought about the relation of man to nature and both to God. The chance that man will really seek for an answer in North America is confused by the instinct of short term greed which finds such quick fulfilment in any manipulation of nature. It may seem foolish to speak of controlling technology in Nova Scotia when there is so much poverty in our midst and when our economy is much less developed than the rest of the country. Isn't our first duty to have more technology in Nova Scotia so that we can eliminate the immorality of poverty? Yes I think there is a short term moral problem in our midst. Nevertheless it is inevitable that the fabulous wealth of the electronic age will increasingly spill over from the rest of Canada to us. In the long run we must become as much a technological civilization as the rest of Canada and then our chief moral problem will be the control of that technology so that it doesn't master us. (PAUSE) Far more difficult to see are the resources with which we will meet

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these great moral problems - what are going to be the principles directing our lives. As I have said earlier the old Biblicism is dying out in our midst. What is going to take its place? Now I am sure it is inevitable that the old Biblicism should die - for two reasons. First, we can no longer believe that the Book is a sufficient and final authority. Secondly, the old Biblicism has gradually degenerated into a set of rules don't drink, don't steal, etc. And when something has become a set of ethical rules it has lost its true power. It cannot endure because it has become sterile and rigidly legalistic. Now I do not mean by this that the Bible should no longer be a source of authority for us. The Bible is the cradle of Christ and that figure will cast illumination wherever men live. But what I do mean is that the Bible can no longer provide religious and moral principles in the old way it was thought to do. It can no longer be claimed to be selfsufficient and outside the claims of reason. Man has come of age and in that coming of age he should not turn away from the Bible, but he should recognize the Bible as simply one tool which reason and faith and desire must use in finding ethical and religious principles. This is what is so sad about men like Billy Graham and other fundamentalists.9 Men turn to them in their great desire for religious leadership and what they are given is an uncritical return to a literal fundamentalism. But it can't work. You can't rebuild the old certainties once it has been seen they are not so certain after all. You can't reverse the process and say that the questions men are asking are just not real questions. Indeed a return to an outdated certainty gives some people a sense of passing security. But if Christians as a whole were to retreat in this way it would simply be like building a fortress in modern war. Men retreat into their secure fortress and believe that all is well but the opposition armies just go around the fortress and forget it and conquer the world. For a while the little isolated outpost remains but the world as a whole is lost. Fundamentalists like Graham seem to be asking religious people to retreat into such isolated fortresses of the intellect and that is why they seem to be such nonsense to a true and living religion. If not from a retreat into the past, from where is a new and creative pattern going to arise? I said earlier that all moral codes come from what we think human life to be about, and what we think human life to be about comes from what we think of nature, man, and God. Therefore I think the new ethics will arise from those who strive with all their

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thought and insight to understand these matters. The old world views have proved themselves to be partial and therefore inadequate. Neither the Biblical nor the scientific world view is finally adequate to the full range of what our faith and reason demand. What we are called to do is to take from both of them and other visions as well as all that is true and from these to find a new vision of God and man which will liberate us. How can we know whether this will happen or not? How the actual present day is to find its way out of its state of disruption is of course a question which must be left to the efforts of thousands to settle and about which no philosopher can be certain. What can be said with certainty is that if this vision does not appear in our midst, our society will come more and more to be ruled by the silliest pleasures and the most unintelligent force. We will have a world of busy and powerseeking technicians ruling an inert mass who spend their lives playing with any childish toy which alleviates boredom for at least the passing moment. If the idea of the infinite (call it if you will God) is not recreated in our minds in a new and life-giving way, we will degenerate towards the sub-human. This might indeed be the end which God puts upon the human experiment. As they say in the English pubs: Time gentleman please.' On the other hand, if the hunger for a new vision of the infinite is met, mankind might again be on the march - controlling his machines and using them for wonderful manifestations of the human spirit. And if indeed we do control our control over nature, it would mean that all men - not just the few as in the past - would have open to them as possible the infinite riches of art and thought and prayer. This is, of course, a long-range question. In the meantime we in Nova Scotia go puttering on, hoping for the best, making a great parade of our past as a substitute for any living culture. Nova Scotian tradition can be good (both my father and grandfather wrote lives of Joe Howe so I was steeped in that tradition), but it often seems to me that our present talk of tradition in Nova Scotia is but a facade. People who never read poetry from one year to the next have a banquet at which they wax sentimental about 'Rabbie' Burns (a fellow who wasted his talent on singing the praises of fornication) and if at these banquets good contacts are made so much the better. We dress our children up in Highland costume and try to revive the study of that

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primitive and archaic language, Gaelic. This even touches our religion. At the time of the formation of the United Church, there were men who thought the truths of Christianity nonsense, but fought the union just to keep the old traditions of Presbyterianism alive. We make a certain outward display of deference for the cloth, but would be furious if our children thought of becoming ministers rather than doctors or lawyers or engineers. It is this deference to the past as only touching the frills of life which shows that our conservatism is shallow. But it may sufficiently fool even those who practise it, to prevent any real culture being built. It perhaps may show that there is decay at the heart of us and that it won't be here that the new being will appear.

Notes 1 Grant is referring to his family's summer cabin by the Atlantic Ocean in the village of Terrence Bay. 2 Joseph Howe (1804-73), journalist, politician, premier, and lieutenantgovernor of Nova Scotia, led the Reform Liberals in Nova Scotia (1836; 1847) and helped Nova Scotia secure responsible government (1848). He led the unsuccessful movement against Nova Scotia's entry into Confederation (1867) and then entered the federal cabinet (1869). Thomas McCulloch (1776-1843), educator, theologian, and author, immigrated to Nova Scotia in 1803. He founded Pictou Academy in 1816 and was named first president of Dalhousie University in 1838. His works included The Nature and Uses of a Liberal Education (1819). 3 Queen Elizabeth High School was built in 1942 to replace its predecessor, the Halifax Academy, where the curriculum had placed a heavy emphasis upon classical languages. The curriculum of the new school followed the pattern throughout North America of introducing more 'modern' subjects such as social studies. 4 The morning paper is the Halifax Chronicle Herald, in which the column 'Mirror of Your Mind' appeared daily under the byline of 'Joseph Whitney, Consultant.' The Wednesday 19 January 1955 column, for example, answered the following questions: 'Are some people incapable of expressing emotion?'; 'Should you punish your child for cruelty?'; and 'Do girls like men similar to their fathers?' 5 Clarence Decatur Howe was for Grant the foremost example of the integration of corporate power and Liberal Party politics (see note 5 in 'Review of Henry Marshall Tory' [98]).

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Robert Henry Winters (1910-69) was another example for Grant of a man who moved easily back and forth between business and the Liberal party. After being at Northern Electric (after 1934) he sat in the Liberal cabinet under St Laurent (1948-57). Later he became president and chairman of Rio Algom Mines (1963-5), was minister of trade and commerce under Pearson (1965), and then president and director of Brazilian Light and Power Co. Ltd (1968-9). 6 Carnegie - see note 8 in 'The Uses of Freedom: A Word and Our World' (203). 7 Herbert Lench Pottle (1907-), social scientist, poet, and politician, in addition to being secretary of the United Church was minister of public welfare in the government of Newfoundland under Joey Smallwood. 8 Edgar Douglas Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian (1889-1977), one of the founders of modern neurophysiology, was professor of physiology at Cambridge (1937-51) and master of Trinity College Cambridge (1951-66). 9 Billy Graham, American evangelist - see note 5 in 'The Paradox of Democratic Education' (181).

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Grant produced this unpublished and untitled typescript in England during a sabbatical leave in the 1956-7 academic year. He clearly intended it to be his first book. He hoped 'to show the substantial truth in the historical spirit and also why that truth is only partial and therefore must be transcended. It is my purpose to say that in North American society this spirit has most completely come to be and in so coming to be exposes both its great accomplishments and the necessity of its transcending. But to see how it can be transcended, it is necessary to see it first in the force of its persuasion' (269). Two years later he developed many of the same lines of argument in a series of broadcast lectures for the CBC, published in 1959 as Philosophy in the Mass Age. The introduction to the present volume contains an account of these two writings in the context of Grant's life and work during the late 1950s. 'Acceptance and Rebellion' also contains some topics not covered in PMA, including substantial treatments of Sir Isaiah Berlin and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as of Freud and Herbert Marcuse. Part of the latter discussion was later incorporated into an article published in 1962 called 'Conceptions of Health.' It will appear in volume 3 of the Collected Works. Grant called the first of three chapters 'Acceptance and Evil,' the second 'An Account of American Civilisation,' leaving the third untitled. In the absence of a title for the whole typescript we have chosen to call it 'Acceptance and Rebellion,' which reflects its argument as well as the tension in Grant's approach to moral philosophy at Dalhousie in the 1950s. In an introductory ethics lecture he stated: 'What we will do is to try to discuss the ethical thinkers of the modern spirit - and I would call that spirit the spirit of rebellion ... [A]nd I compare it with what I call the old theological spirit of acceptance.' Grant then read out the first 7 pages of this typescript, calling it 'a book I am writing.' He concluded with a short list of some of the thinkers who exemplified 'the spirit of rebellion,'

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David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, the modern English linguistic philosophers, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Grant included 'a personal note' in another ethics lecture, stating that he himself stood with the ethic of acceptance, albeit in a special way: 'Yes, I accept the ethic finally which can best be described as submitting oneself to the will of God - that is, an ethic of acceptance against an ethic of rebellion. That is, that our freedom is the recognition of God in us - (though of course to say that is in no sense to say that God is simply in us - that is, pantheism).' The end, he said, is absolute constraint - but only the end. 'The end is "Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." But this is only an end achieved by the Cross. And in the meantime while our constraint is only partial - love is necessary.' He followed with an outline of the various ways and occasions in which we must submit to the will of God: 'We must try somehow to hold God lovingly in our heart through and beyond the horrible events of history (such as the mass crucifixion of the Roman slaves). We must carry out whatever appears to us manifestly to be our duty, and if not duty, we must follow arbitrarily a certain clearly defined moral code - that is, rules chosen in such a way that they are in conformity with the best moral law of our society, and this may have to be very arbitrarily imposed. And finally we must have the faith to hope that when we think on God with attention and love, he rewards us by exercising upon the soul a constraint which is exactly proportional to that attention and love. In the state of perfection, this constraint is total (Gethsemane). Below this state it is partial.' Grant expressed his rebellious side, on the other hand, in his attitudes to Marx, Sartre, and Marcuse. They are praised for their attempts to fight evil and change the world. In the lecture 'Religion and Ethics' he said: 'If the world is God's, why do we have to change it? - Do you see that what we may call the language of religion is the language that all is well - while the language of morality asserts that all is not well - that the world needs changing.' Grant wrote a letter to President Alex Kerr informing him of his plan to go to England (with a Nuffield Traveling Fellowship) to study the concept of freedom in the western tradition and especially in the thought of Hegel: I wish to write a book on the freedom of the will. The reasons for writing such a book are: (a) among the philosophers and in the general tradition

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of the west there is a great variation in what is meant by this concept; (b) the freedom of the will is, in my opinion, a concept central to the logic of the social sciences. Among those in our tradition who think the freedom of the will is a meaningful concept, there has been a basic division between the rationalist and existentialist use of it. In general it may be said that in the rationalist tradition freedom has been conceived positively. It has been described as the individual's acceptance, conscious and intelligent, of what he truly is. It is understood as the gift of truth. On the other hand, the existentialist account of freedom is negative. It is the positing of an absolute responsibility which cannot be inferred from reason. The rationalist account finds its first systematic expression among the Greeks, while the existentialist tradition enters western thought from Hebraic sources. As a result much of our modern ethical terminology is a blending of these two traditions, often not very satisfactory. This language has been further complicated by the recent infusion of concepts from the social sciences. I would like to make a study of the philosophical issues involved in our varying ethical terminology, centring around the attempt to understand what is meant by the freedom of the will. At my stage of development, I cannot hope to make any more than preliminary comments on the philosophical issues involved. Nevertheless, I would like to have sufficient time (a) to write down a statement of the various usages of the concept of freedom in the philosophic tradition, (b) to show how different usages of this concept are related to differing conceptions of morality and different ethical languages, (c) to attempt some preliminary comments on the philosophical issues involved in the question of freedom, centring particularly around the meaning of the word evil. Under this last heading I need time particularly to understand certain parts of Hegel's philosophy. I believe England would be a good place to carry out this work because there are many philosophers who have thought deeply along these lines: e.g. Hegelian scholars such as Mure, Foster, and Knox.1 The schools of linguistic analysis at the universities are doing brilliant negative work on ethical language. I would like to test some of my positive conclusions against their logical techniques. I have followed English writing in this field closely during recent years and have formulated questions I would like to discuss with philosophers of various persuasions.2

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CHAPTER 1 - ACCEPTANCE AND EVIL The traditional idea of God demands from man the spirit of acceptance. To believe in God is to affirm that all events fall within an ultimate purpose so that the believer, to be consistent, must strive to accept all the events of the world in joy. This must be the ideal of such faith, whatever the details of any particular theological system and whatever degree of difficulty individual believers have in making that act of acceptance or interpreting it. Even those theologians who assert the illusory character of the finite event are not thereby asserting an ultimate pessimism about the finite because they imply that this illusion is a veil necessary to the infinite meaning. In the western world all the great theological systems owe something to the Biblical spirit, even if on the surface that debt seems one of reaction; here, therefore, the spirit of acceptance cannot fail to embrace the details of existence, because the doctrine of creation is an affirmation of the ultimate goodness of the finite order. Indeed the vision of God (and this obscure phrase is used to avoid for the moment the issue of faith and reason) is a total insurance policy against any of life's vicissitudes which might eliminate the possibility of joy. Of course, the immediacy of the gratification ensuing has varied greatly, according to the degree to which the believer has been driven by the fact of evil to assert the transcendence of God. Nevertheless, even an extreme transcendentalism, found for example, in the Deus absconditus of the Calvinists, allowed a fierce (albeit unthinkable) joy to those stern and noble people. It is the very mark of religion that its account of evil in theology (whatever that account may be) is able to show the believer, not perhaps completely, how he can be reconciled to evil and so be able to accept existence as joy. The religious spirit of acceptance has always had within it the element of mystery. If it were not to disregard evil it had to assert in some sense the transcendence of God. To deny transcendence was to deny evil; to assert transcendence was to assert mystery. Theologies which claimed to be completely rational foundered on the reef of evil and their attempts at theodicy seemed but unsuccessful rescue expeditions. This has always been the inescapable dilemma of the religious life. Religious joy had to be either an immanent realization which complacently disregarded evil (often by calling it good) or else a joy which

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held, in some mysterious sense, that the ground of its possibility was beyond the world. Because of the cross the Christian religion, if it were to be true to itself, could never hesitate but choose the latter. But transcendence and mystery implied the ultimate reliance of the believer on faith which was beyond any intellectual foundation. In Europe, during the last centuries, the full force of criticism has been launched against the theological spirit of acceptance. Indeed the last four hundred years of European history can plausibly be seen as a rebellion against the old theological spirit and the gradual arising out of that rebellion of a new view of the world which seeks a spirit of acceptance not founded on faith in a transcendent mystery. And, of course, this phenomenon of European origin has now spread far beyond the geographical confines of Europe. Nehru, Chou En-Lai, Eisenhower - to take only the politicians - all express facets of the European progressive enlightenment, as the major creative force in the world. To call this modern spirit 'rebellion' is in no sense to imply 'rebellion against God,' and therefore covertly to describe the modern as essentially negative. It is obviously possible to rebel without implying God rebelled against. This spirit is called rebellion for two reasons: first, to bring to mind the historical fact that it arose in a society dominated by the theological vision and therefore, in seeking to express itself in new forms of morality, science, art, etc., it always tried to show the inadequacy of that vision, and so formulated itself as opposition to it; and secondly, because it affirmed that there was no need to accept evil and that only by rebelling against it could a true joy be attained. Rebellion against the theological acceptance of evil was inescapably related to rebellion against evil itself and to the faith that man could make the world into his home. The idea that theological acceptance was superstitious and intellectually untenable turned ever more into the idea that it was morally wrong in that it held man from seeing the need to change the world. Rebellion was positive, as it alone served to place the responsibility for the overcoming of evil entirely with man, and saw man, therefore, the creator of himself and nature. It was rebellion against any acceptance which was not based on the realised or realisable conditions of the world. It has often been said by those who wish to decry the modern spirit that there is a basic contradiction within it. At one and the same time, it

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has exalted man's status by insisting that it is man who makes the world, while it has also shown the unimportance of human beings as but passing products of a meaningless nature. And it has been said that this contradiction appears in the modern criticism of the theological tradition. Belief in God has been attacked in the name of a pessimism which could not assert belief in the face of the immensities of time and space in which personal ideas of purpose seemed but transitory appearances. Belief in God was also attacked in the name of an optimism which asserted human responsibility for alleviating evil and building the kingdom of man - a responsibility which would be ultimately denied by any belief in a higher power. It was in the name of this optimism that men held belief in God to be morally wrong. It is, of course, true that the negative and creative aspects of the modern spirit have often seemed in contradiction to each other, especially when ill-combined in the lives of unthoughtful individuals. For instance, T.H. Huxley's combination of theoretical Darwinism with the practical life of an eager-beaver educational reformer leaves him an obvious prey to elementary criticism. Nevertheless, these negative and positive aspects of the modern spirit come from the same root - man's consciousness of his own freedom. Historically this freedom expressed itself first as the refusal to accept anything which was not its own and may be seen in the long tradition of criticism among European intellectuals. The old theological tradition was attacked as authority's imposition of illusion upon the freedom of the mind. But this negative freedom through which men struggled to free themselves intellectually from the old theological acceptance was not something complete in itself. Freedom could not find its completeness in the ability to criticize and to reject, but had to seek its fulfilment in the ability to create and to possess. Therefore freedom became practical. It came to be thought of as the power to make the world its own. It came to be thought of as that through which men could realize joy in the world, and could seek an acceptance in which all elements of transcendence or mystery were overcome. Freedom ceased to be thought of as the theoretical activity in terms of which the old acceptance was criticised and came to be thought of as that activity by which a new and true acceptance could be made concretely possible. It is this dominance of the practical spirit of freedom among modern men which leads to that profound indifference to the idea of God. The

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question of God's existence is simply beside the point. To people to whom freedom means the ability to change the world, it is a matter of indifference. In such an atmosphere religion is only unpopular if its exponents stand politically against some fulfilment in worldly life (for instance in sexual matters) or popular if it seems to offer a pleasant rounding out of worldly life - 'Somebody up there likes me.' And this indifference extends not only to the preachers but to the arguments of the sceptics against faith. The intellectual of the tradition of the Enlightenment who desired passionately to free himself and others from theological illusion is as much beside the point as the saint who saw life as the journey of the mind into God. Indeed, the triumph of the positive and practical aspect of freedom as against the negative and theoretical aspect can be seen in the fact that the European humanist hope found in Marx its greatest prophet and greatest instrument for expansion around the world. We in English-speaking countries are too often blind to that fact since among us nowadays Marxism is so often met with the detached ridicule of the academic, the pulpit rhetoric of the successful preacher, and moral abuse from political and business leaders. Neither must an easy answer to the complex question of its relation to the evils of the Soviet Empire be used as an excuse for refusing to judge its power. For in Marx's critique of all religion and theology the criticism of the old is most clearly unified with an affirmation of the new. The unity of the criticism and the new vision is not a speculative unity which leaves the object unchanged. Marxism claims to be historical prophecy which is itself the instrument for the overcoming of the evils which stand in the way of its own vision - evils which Marx so passionately and concretely describes. Here, indeed, the theoretical thought which asserts that the evils of the world mean that God is not, passes through the mediating practical stage that the world needs changing, to the positive affirmation that the world can be changed so that the human spirit will be able to live in it in acceptance. Marx's basic criticism of theology is, therefore, not negative, but the claim that theology is itself the negative. The deification of spirit is always based on the assumption that spirit cannot be actualised in the world. Marx's attack is not only against the popular reconciliation of religion, but also against the rational reconciliation which the philosophers have claimed is the aim and object of their study. Against the

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philosophers Marx hurls Feuerbach's compassionate slogan 'Suffering is before thought.' He claims that the philosophers of the past have lived in a contradiction. They exalted as the highest activity of man that contemplation in which the absolute dawned to consciousness and in which the division between reason and desire and reason and sense was overcome. But the very possibility of their freedom to pursue that activity was based on the repressive organization of society which provided their basic necessities. The conditions of the world were such that the majority of men had to live in alienation under the social and personal principle of domination, so that others could overcome the higher alienation of their spirits in the union with the absolute. But the reconciliation of the philosophers in the absolute was no reconciliation at all, for it left unchanged outside itself the unreconciled evil in the lives of others - an evil indeed upon which the very existence of the philosopher himself depended. Marx claims that philosophers so living always refuse to take the objective conditions of society seriously and generally end up by asserting the hoary old lie that physical evil doesn't really matter and that men are truly free, if they only knew it, under the most oppressive conditions of poverty and enslavement. The exaltation by certain idealist philosophers of the contemplative vision as the highest activity was but a covert way of turning men's desires from changing the status quo and with it the unique privileges of the philosophers. To read F.H. Bradley's essay 'My Station and Its Duties' is indeed to see the force of this criticism. From the comfortable privilege of nineteenth century Oxford Bradley uses the authority of philosophy to persuade people to accept their lot in life.3 According to Marx even Hegel was not free from this charge. Marx recognised that Hegel had struggled to eliminate transcendence as a source of mystification and was the first to make history central to philosophy and to understand the domination of nature by man and man by man within that history. Nevertheless, Hegel's reconciliation in thought was one in which evil was not overcome in the concrete, and one in which no clear means of its future overcoming could be expounded by the thinker. Indeed, to Marx, the overcoming of evil in Hegel's dialectic being without end could mean nothing but that he rested in a mystical theodicy. His achievement of acceptance without transcendence is only possible by a de facto ethical positivism and that makes his reconciliation quite unreal. Because of the practical contra-

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diction which underlies all contemplation, uninterested in the changing of its object, Marx substitutes for philosophy revolutionary prophecy, which sees itself not as the reconciliation nor apart from it, but as a willed means to its actual coming to be. Marx would claim that in his prophecy Hegel's phrase 'Truth is the movement of its own becoming' is at last realised. 'The philosophers up to now have been concerned with understanding the world, we are concerned with changing it.'4 It is essentially as the prophet of the coming of immanent and universal joy in the world that Marx has been such an influence. He has mediated the European humanist hope for the industrial age as has no other thinker. To say this is not to assert the truth of Marxism nor to refuse to look at the contradictions in his thought, either as philosopher, prophet, or social scientist, nor indeed to wonder at the conflict in him between these roles. It is simply to state an historical fact. The appeal of Marxist thought is the way that this humanist hope combines universality with practical immediacy. The hope is for all men and not something in the dim future to be brought in mysteriously by a deus ex machina. The steps towards it are laid down in terms of what is now in the world. He claims at one and the same time to take what is true from the old religious hope and make it serve a scientific sociology, while he takes science from its detachment and makes it a means of redemption, an overcoming of evil. Marx's humanism has had more power for the modern mind than any other, because of the way in which religion is taken up into social science and science is turned into a religious force. The truth of religion for Marx was the yearning of the human spirit to overcome its own alienation and take its proper place in the world. He claims that at last his thought has fully freed that yearning from the idea of transcendence which frustrated it. From Hegel he takes over the conception that Christianity was the mediating stage that led from the old mysticisms of transcendence to the recognition of the immanence of the spirit.a In this sense, it was the absolute religion. The a In this connection, it is worth insisting that the superiority of Marx's humanism to the philosophies of the French Enlightenment and British empiricism depends more than anything else on his profound understanding of Biblical religion. This understanding, of course, he owed not only to his own Judaic and Christian background, but even more to Hegel. Hegel had placed the attempt to understand historical religion at

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supreme insight of Christianity was the Trinity - that God was no longer other, but had become man. Here the old transcendentalism is passed beyond and the overcoming of evil is seen as taking place in the here and now. In Biblical thought God acts in history, and therefore history and worldly existence are for the first time taken seriously within theology. But for Marx Christianity had never fully realised the consequences of its own dogma of the Incarnation. Indeed, in a world of scarcity Christianity was torn apart by the fact that while it espoused this dogma theoretically, it had to deny it in practice. At its best Christianity could hold the idea of the God-man only as an ideal; at its worst it flagrantly contradicted its own belief in the interest of domination. Indeed, the presence of the Christian idea of redemption among the masses had often meant a flowering of ecstatic Utopian movements. But without any systematic understanding of themselves such movements always succumbed to the principle of domination as expressed in the ruling classes and their official churches. It is Marx's claim that he has taken what is true in Christianity and liberated it from its contradictions. He has taken the doctrine of God become man in a universal sense, so that the religious yearning for the overcoming of alienation has in his thought a concrete and practical significance. But the appeal of Marx's system is not only in the taking over of the

the centre of his work. Both Hegel and Marx were aware that the chief influence which divided classical from modern thought is the Christian faith. Christianity is for both of them the absolute religion and though both of them seek to transcend religion (Hegel in the name of philosophic reconciliation, Marx in the name of revolutionary prophecy) they knew well that its truths must be taken up in that transcending. From Hume to Whitehead, so many modern thinkers have seen their task as liberating man from historical religion and therefore have either explicitly or tacitly affirmed that Biblical religion has been a disastrous superstition. Therefore they never came to grips with spirit as history and freedom, the idea of which had come into western thought from Biblical religion. In this connection it is worth remarking that even Hegel's explicit disciples in England have continually trivialised his thought because they never seemed to believe in his concern with the truths of crucifixion and resurrection. This misinterpretation was not only due to the eupeptic spirit of an imperial age, and a classical education which underestimated the Bible. At a more obvious level it is explainable by the fact that Hegel's early writings were not published till 1907. In these writings Hegel is taken up with Christianity and they reveal the agonies from which sprang his later philosophy of reconciliation. See P. Asveld, La pensee religieuse du jeune Hegel (Louvain 1953) and J. Hyppolite, Introduction a la philosophie de I'histoire de Hegel (Paris 1948).

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religious hope for a worldly purpose, but also in giving the most representative activity of the modern spirit - natural science - a truly religious setting. Science becomes the central means of bringing in that hope - that is, the means of redemption. Though, indeed, in Marxism the final acts of the redemption of history must be by men towards each other, the sine qua non of these later acts is the power of spirit over nature in modern science. Marx's recognition of the place of science as central to the humanist hope has more than anything else led the multitude so often to see their truth in him and has led so many scientists to see in his thought the meaning of their activity. Even today in the western world, when many scientists do not wish or do not think it wise to espouse a systematic Marxism, their real religion remains very much like it. By insisting that history is the central category of modern thought Marx shows how an end has come to the old idea of an independent nature without human significance. As God has become man, so man has become the creator of nature and makes it the servant of his freedom. Marx claims that dialectical materialism alone can show the proper ethical context of scientific activity. The fact that modern science is concerned with learning about the external world by a method in which observation is central has often led, particularly in England, to the idea that empiricism is the philosophy of a scientific age. But the theoretical assertion of the primacy of experience in empiricism went ill with the practical achievement of modern science, the domination of nature by man.b It could give no satisfactory account of science as essentially ethical - the means by which men were freed from the bondage of pain and work. Marx's debt to Hebraic thought through the dialectic made b This inadequacy of empiricism was but part of its inability to give a philosophic account of the life of action, because of its insistence on man as objective. The result has been that the empiricists who have tried to expound any moral principles have found it difficult, and their ethical standards always give the impression of being detached from their philosophy proper, an import into their thought from nonphilosophical sources. J.S. Mill appeals to the Victorian conscience, Lord Russell generalises the standards of an emancipated Cambridge, the linguistic analysts assume the decencies of the intellectually privileged English. Where men are inactive, empiricism can be more consistent. So it continues to hold the minds of those who teach in the more protected universities where the demands of action are not great, and where men can judge the puzzles of their colleagues' researches to be the chief problems of philosophy.

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him see clearly that science was an historical activity - indeed the negation of nature by freedom. Thus, though empiricism was useful in understanding certain questions arising from scientific method, it could never express properly the implications of science for history or the ethical significance of the scientific life. On the other hand the traditional rationalisms have never made much appeal to the scientists, except to those taken up with mathematical theory. Such rationalisms seemed to fail to take the external seriously (whether rightly or wrongly is not here at issue), not only as the immediate condition of scientific knowledge, but also as the nexus of man's spiritual alienation in work and sex, about which something could and should be done. Marx claims that in dialectical materialism the old empiricist-rationalist dilemma is overcome. When he calls his ethics scientific he does not naively mean that it is deduced from our knowledge of nature, for he knows morality to be historical, and that men are deceived when they think they can be spectators towards an objective history which remains unchanged by their knowledge of it. It is scientific in the sense that science itself, in a proper social context, becomes the means to a moral humanity. Marx asserts a dialectical relation between nature and spirit in which spirit arising from nature wins dominion over nature and in so doing frees itself. There is a marked conflict here between the influence of Hegelian philosophy and Darwinian biology, a conflict which he does not seem to have realised, and which increasingly confuses his later theory after the publication of The Origin of Species. But this failure is not what concerns us at the moment. The criticism of Marxism must largely be left to later chapters. What must be evident is the appeal of such a position to thoughtful scientists, for it seems to reconcile within itself those two sides of modern science which have been so difficult to see together. The assumption of geological and biological studies that man is a product of nature seems therein unified with the idea of science as the victory of spirit over nature, promising new freedom for spirit in the world. It is in seeming to combine these two ideas that Marx has often mediated the humanist hope to scientists. Thus Marx's appeal is not to the scientist as an ethical man apart from his function, but primarily in his function itself. The moral appeal, however, goes beyond that function: for it would seem that within Marxism the scientist is required to lay his work on the univer-

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salist altar of the liberation of all. Here again there seems contradiction. Is the scientist qua scientist necessarily a liberator of mankind, or only if he deliberately chooses to serve the proletariat? This uncertainty has produced that ambiguity to scientists by Marxist leaders all round the world. Were scientists to be hailed as great men for their work itself or should public praise of them depend on the scientist seeing his work properly within the dialectic? This difficulty arises, of course, from the conflict within the dialectic between its claim to be a science of history and its desire to incite men to the ethically good. Inasmuch as the dialectic is the science of history certain scientific activity will serve the coming to be of the new world, however reactionary the politics of its discoverer. But for the dialectic to give political leadership to men in concrete cases the right direction of the wills and intellects of individual scientists becomes a matter of moment. Such a question was not so pressing in Marx's time, when any technological advance seemed good and when Marxists were not faced with the awful responsibilities of power. Nevertheless, leaving aside this uncertainty in the prophecy, what must be insisted upon is the attraction for scientists in the assertion that here in the proletariat science found a concrete and universal hope freed from all mystical undertones. In the conditions of the modern world such a hope must be a pressing requirement for scientists of sensitivity and thought. Without some such hope they are met with two unsatisfactory alternatives. The first is the belief in turning back from the scientific age. Such an idea must be absurd for those with the knowledge of the curse of pain and work, and is indeed beyond this a denial of the dignity of man in knowing. The second alternative is to accept that the scientific age must necessarily be the absolute tyranny described so often in recent years. The difficulty is, as Marx saw with clarity, that scientific activity entails the domination of nature by man. And this domination had come to be in a world ruled by the principle of domination of one man by another. It is but a truism to state that intelligent scientists are terrified by technology as the instrument of tyranny and therefore desire to see how science can be freed from this spirit. The Marxist dialectic claims to show that, though science is itself domination and arisen in a society founded thereon, it becomes the means of overcoming that domination. Thus the Marxist dialectic claims to be the means whereby scientists can see their work within a universalist hope of freedom.

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Much has been written of the strange weak-mindedness of scientists in the west for espousing Marxism and often even turning traitor. It may indeed have been weak-minded to have identified the Marxist hope with the progress of the Soviet Empire. But to find strange or weak-minded this acceptance of Marxism is to fail to understand the desire of scientists to see their work within a systematic ethical framework, and the power of Marxism, compared to other ethical frameworks thinkable by scientists dominated by the modern idea of the immanent. The appeal of Marxism is indeed most clearly seen in its concrete universalism; that is, in its insistence on the actual salvation of society as a whole. So often humanist liberalism has been vitiated by individualism which disregarded the dependence of the individual on the community, and so detached liberty from equality. But freedom could not find its fulfilment in such individualism. How could anyone find true freedom in a world where others had not found it? What true theodicy can there be which does not hold out the hope of a universal salvation? The power of Marxism as the modern theodicy lay in the fact that it foretold that the overcoming of evil would be a concrete overcoming in the world for all men. It was in this realization that Marx most deeply understood the positive content of freedom as against the merely negative idea of it expressed in the Enlightenment through its exponents, the bourgeoisie. He saw that the realization of freedom could not rest short of a democracy which was not only formal but actual. The distinction and, indeed, opposition drawn between liberty and equality by conservatives vitiated the universalism implicit in freedom. Marx gives content to the necessary universality of freedom in the idea of the proletariat. It is indeed around this conception that the misinterpretation of Marx has been greatest: misrepresentation which Marxists of both east and west have encouraged for political advantage, and which non-Marxists have encouraged for obvious reasons. Indeed, Marx himself obscured the value of this conception by tying it to the false doctrine of increasing misery, and to his over-simplified accounts of revolution, and of the relation of economic to political power. But even if his conception of the proletariat be judged full of contradictions, its full ethical power must still be seen. The proletariat is not to Marx one class among many, one against the others. It is that class which will destroy the very conception of class. It

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is thus the church of love, truly universal. With its reign there will be an end of history as domination, and the coming to be of the new history of freedom. In an industrial society, with its new relation to nature and its consequent impersonal concentrations of power, the mass of mankind moves towards a condition of alienation. They find themselves cut off from responsibility and creativity at the centre of their lives. Yet at the same time, this new society (historical rather than natural) is bringing into being the consciousness in man of his freedom to make history, and is eliminating those natural props (the old religion, etc.) which held man from the consciousness of that freedom. Man finds himself alienated from his freedom in the world, just as he has become conscious of the universal idea of freedom. Those who come to this recognition are not only the proletariat, but the proletariat conscious of itself, and are therefore its leaders. They are the instruments of universal freedom because they are in a condition where they can only liberate themselves from alienation by liberating society itself. Free men having achieved their own dominance over nature, find themselves alienated by the idea of class dominance which has survived from the age of scarcity. Because the proletariat is the victim of that dominance, it is its historic role to destroy it, and in destroying it to destroy class itself. It is not easy to see what truth there is in this conception of the proletariat as the instrument of universal freedom.c Certainly, in the light of modern history, it must be freed from many of the connotations Marx gives. Also, if it is to have any ethical significance, we must be able to see how it can be freed from the idea of 'the party beyond ethics,' in the name of which some of the greatest horrors of the twentieth century have been perpetrated. Nevertheless, the point to be made here is the sheer appeal of this conception as the means by which men hoped that universal freedom could be realised. It has seemed the way that their immediate ethical decisions (particularly political) could be c For instance, it is often claimed that North American society is the living refutation of this conception because an ethical state capitalist has been able to produce a prosperous society of liberty and equality. Certainly in some sense this cannot be denied. But are not the clerks and secretaries, the factory workers and salesmen, the professors and ad-men of the American suburbs proletarians in the sense that they have no creative responsibility for the direction of society through their work? For a further discussion of this, see Chapter 2.

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made significant as the servant of the worldly hopes. At a less explicit level, the way that the alienation of the proletariat was made the means to universal freedom also allowed humanism to take into itself the ideas of the cross and resurrection. The idea of the overcoming of absolute dereliction as the way to life, which had haunted Europe because of its Christian origins, here united with a social significance. Thus it is as the most explicit and immediate humanist hope that the thought of Marx has held the modern world. To say this is not to assert it to be true or false or that it is the hope in which I put my trust. For instance, to speak of Marx's criticism of Hegel in no sense implies that I think Marx's philosophy is comparable in truth with Hegel's. To speak of the brilliance of Marx's criticism of traditional Christian theology is not to deny that faith as our true standpoint. In the foregoing no attempt has been made to describe Marx's thought in detail or to discuss the manifold criticisms that arise therefrom. What has been insisted on is threefold: first, that the humanist hope remains the popular faith of an industrial age and that Marx is its chief mediator; secondly, that this is not surprising as, both as a critic of the old theology and as a prophet of humanism, Marx is a thinker of the first order; thirdly, that he has illuminated the question of acceptance and evil for the believer in God by greatly expanding the limits within which the mystery of reconciliation must be raised. Since Marx's day the most significant addition to the content of humanist Utopianism has come from the work of Freud. It is but a truism to insist that work and sexuality are the chief worldly activities. Where Marx gave concrete content to optimism by fastening on the universal fact of work and the means of freeing it from alienation, Freud grasped the centrality of sex and worked for its liberation. Marx has indeed often been criticised because the outline of the humanist society is so dim compared with his account of the cataclysms on the way thither. Freud's science, metaphysics, and prophecy, by coming to grips with sexuality as the source of worldly joy, fills out that emptiness and therefore speaks of a world in which men will live in liberated eroticism. To use the words metaphysician or Utopian prophet about Freud may seem nonsense. Did he not continually claim in his writings and show in his practice that he was a scientist, fully aware of the scientific method and hostile to any other method? How can he then be called a

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metaphysician? Are not his later writings filled with pessimistic conclusions about the coming tragedies of civilisation which make it absurd to speak of him as a prophet of hope? Is not his famous answer to the Leninist sufficient to prevent the word Utopian being used about him?5 In most of Freud's work it is clear that he limited himself to the nonfinalist conceptions of science. He was aware that his ideas were hypotheses or models which he changed readily in the light of observation and practice. Nevertheless, at two points in his work he passed beyond being a scientist. In the first place, his self-analysis of the 1890s, upon which his work depends, cannot be interpreted as scientific. To see this, it is only necessary to remember that since Freud's day all professional analysts must themselves be analyzed by somebody else. The very term 'self-analysis' is one of ridicule to the orthodox. Yet for analysis to be possible someone had to break the historic chain of repression and free himself by knowing the causes of universal sexual alienation. It is in this sense that Freud's self-analysis is no scientific act, but one of redemption - a buying back in mortal struggle of himself and the setting up of the apostolic succession. Ernest Jones, in his able life of Freud, writes of this achievement in language which is directly taken from that which has been traditionally associated with Golgotha.6 Another Freudian, Edward Glover, writes that there have been two crucial moments in history - the first repression buried deep in primitive times, and Freud's overcoming of that repression in his self-analysis.d Secondly, Freud passes beyond the role of scientist in his last writings, where he conceives existence as dominated by the two forces of life and death instincts. Eros and Thanatos are clearly metaphysical conceptions. Even if Freud can be judged as a metaphysician, is it possible to call him a Utopian? His writings on civilisation are so filled with the idea d See E. Glover: Freud or Jung (New York 1950). Clearly also, Freud's self-analysis must be compared with that tremendous act whereby Marx claims that he has participated in historical necessity so that he can chart the overcoming of alienation in the world. It is but a minor point that Marx's role is more that of Mohammed the prophet, while Freud's is that of Christ the redeemer. It is not surprising that both these men should have come from that great apocalyptic people, the Jews. Both lived in that difficult and strained atmosphere which was the lot of people of Jewish origin in the officially Christian society.7

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of its inevitable tragedy. Civilisation is a product of the ego and superego, which have arisen as the id was forced to come to terms with reality - that is, to live by the reality principle rather than by the pleasure principle. Freud works out this tragic history, not only in terms of the life of the individual, but of the race as a whole. Sexuality is the basic manifestation of the life instinct, Eros. Civilisation is produced by sublimated Eros. But sublimated Eros is desexualized Eros. Thus, though civilisation is built by Eros, constant desexualization is necessary as civilisation broadens its sway. Thus Eros is weakened and the death instinct is loosed, with all its terrible potentialities for destruction. In fact, civilisation moves to its destruction as it moves to its fulfilment. Here at a subtler level is the kind of pessimism one finds in Spengler. In the light of Freud's tragic interpretation, how can he be called a prophet of the humanist Utopia? Marxist thinkers have, however, claimed that Freud's mature metaphysics, if seen within a fuller philosophic perspective can be shown to belong to worldly optimism. Freud's metapsychology fails theoretically because it is coloured by a simple nineteenth century naturalism. He did not understand that history must be studied differently from nature. History is dialectical. He sees the relationship of man to nature biologically rather than historically. Scarcity is therefore seen as an ever present condition, imposing the need for dominance in any possible society. He does not understand man's relation to nature as an historical process, in which the domination of nature by man overcomes the very conditions which it arose to meet. He cannot conceive a society in which scarcity has been overcome, and in which man can turn his full attention to liberating his instincts from repression by the very methods which Freud had himself discovered.e By seeing Freud within the dialectic, the Utopians claim that pessimism is not necessary to his thought or his technique. They find implicit in his thought the vision of a society in which nature has been redeemed from domination, a vision given content by his recognition that it is sexuality which gives the world its joy. The perennial objection against Utopians has always been that true joy lies in striving and

e This position is most brilliantly put in H. Marcuse: Eros and Civilisation (London 1956). In what follows, my debt to that book will be obvious.8

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choice, in the presence of tasks to be done and evils to be overcome. A realised human society would be limited and dull. This criticism is a reminder of the old secularist idea of the dullness of the Kingdom of Heaven. Freud, it is claimed, has given the answer. An unrepressed polymorphous sexuality freed from domination (and from its very symbol, genito-petality) would give joy in the world.9 The recognition that the alienation of joy from the world has been the alienation of man from his instincts is Freud's central contribution to the vision of the Kingdom of man. Thus the hope of mankind for a world in which desire and necessity are one is claimed to find its fulfilment in Freud's erotic antinomianism and his techniques for its achievement. The ecstatic hope for a free society which has run through the history of mankind, as some illicit dream doomed to frustration by the forces of domination now arises as a concrete possibility before us. 'How're they going to keep him down on the farm, now that he's seen Paree?'10 So in taking Freud's thought up into the wider context of the Marxist dialectic, we are given the vision of a society in which human beings have passed beyond domination and who thus can spend their time liberating themselves from the dilemmas of their personal existence. It is a world in which flesh and freedom are not at war, so that at last the Incarnation is a realised universal fact. The life of work and art and sexuality have become one, and Eros realises a libidinal civilisation. In such a society it is claimed man can conquer time and death. Reconciled at last in the universal union of freedom and happiness, he can choose to go down to the grave when he will. As Professor Marcuse has written: across his blissful world will fall one shadow - the memory of those who in the past died in alienation. The Kingdom of man will thus be darkened, but even this darkness will be alleviated by the knowledge that that evil was not in vain. Here the idea of worldly salvation reaches its apotheosis. To the Christian believer and to the rationalist it reaches its reductio ad absurdam. It is the very denial of the infinite. To the empiricist it is the merest wish fulfilment. Nevertheless, it raises clearly the value of worldly life. It forces us to the question why, if it is God's world, we need to reform it. Can any idea of God be reconciled with man's need and power to change the world? Are we caught in a dilemma between an acceptance which trivialises evil and reformism which denies the infinity of the spirit? Or denying this humanist hope, must we also deny the idea of

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God, and say that we accept when we can and reform when we can, without hope of ultimate ends?

CHAPTER 2 - AN ACCOUNT OF AMERICAN CIVILISATION The modern spirit is nowhere so explicit as in North America. As has so often been observed, our society has no history before the age of progress. The modern faith - in the domination of nature, in historymaking, in optimism about the possibilities of worldly life - has formed our institutions and patterns of life more completely than in any other society. Therefore, before turning directly to the relation between the modern spirit and the question of acceptance, I wish to say something about the coming to be of this spirit in our midst. Hegel made plain beyond question that philosophy must come to grips with the meaning of historical events. As he wrote: 'Philosophy is its own epoch seized by thought.'11 Whatever may be said about the relations of theory and practice, there is nothing more barren than those ontologies which exist in splendid isolation from what has come to be in history. To start in this way is not to claim that other societies would not be illuminating in this connection. It is, however, to assert that no other civilisation so unequivocally embodies the modern spirit, and that to live in it raises certain questions in great clarity. So many European intellectuals fail signally to understand North America, and as contemplative self-consciousness is not widespread amongst us we are often prone to accept European interpretations of ourselves. Often Europeans interpret our society as a cruder edition of their own, undoubtedly more prosperous, but still dependent on European ideas, though debased through lack of its traditional culture and without the moral power of the European socialist movement. Thus sometimes within the same indictment, North America is accused both of being reactionary and of being unleavened by the ancient culture. This indictment is more understandable from the conservatives (generally Catholic), who frankly scorn the modern spirit, than from the liberals who theoretically claim to live by it and yet who despise this, its practical embodiment. It is more understandable that those who follow the cults of Moscow and Peking should consider that America is reactionary. It is, of course, true that under the instruction of Marxism these

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areas are taking a remarkable leap into the modern world. But their leap into a relative modernity does not deny that North American society is a more realised modernity. Indeed, the Europeans who judge North American society as uncultured or reactionary or a mixture of both, are applying the standards either of their own secularism, often a mere technological socialism, or of Catholicism, with its innate division between the secular and sacred orders. Both are inclined to see North Americans as materialist people who had the luck to move to an uncharted continent of great resources, and who exploited that continent just at a time when European science had found a new theoretical groundwork, and was ready to become practical and dominate nature. This is true as far as it goes. Who could be so foolish as to doubt the influence of our pioneering tradition, of the riches of our resources, or of our debt to European science and liberalism? But to interpret our society solely in these secular terms is to miss the subtlety of the spirit which moved through the conditions. What must never be forgotten is that the worldly faith which holds our society in being is not the same as the secularism of Europe, because it has in large measure arisen out of the ashes of a multiform Protestantism - particularly Puritanism. A predominantly Calvinist Protestantism was never the determining force in any major European country, and Puritanism was not long dominant even in England. Moreover, the Puritans of North America were not revolting against an old and entrenched order, but were themselves responsible for making a society. Because they had undertaken this task to escape religious rather than economic persecution, they brought to it an intensely thought and felt theology. Their societies were established before the break with England and before the movement west; they were the first to be industrialised. The religious tradition of those who opened the continent beyond the seaboard was largely sectarian Protestant. Whatever the vast influx of Jewish and Catholic immigrants, and certain established Catholic societies such as French Canada have meant, theirs has not been the definitive tradition. It is only necessary to see the degree to which Jewish and Catholic institutions have had to come to terms with Protestant secularism, to gauge the strength of that force. Thus, at the end of the explicitly Protestant era, much of its spirit lives on as a Phoenix in our society. To understand, therefore, what freedom has come to mean in North

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America, it is necessary to look at what Protestantism was in its origins and what it came to be in its development.f The Protestant return to biblicism involved a renewed emphasis on the life of freedom in the world. For whatever else Hebraic faith may be, it is a worldly faith - a belief that God the creator acts in history and that history is a series of meaningful events in which human beings are called to realize righteousness in the world. In contrast to the Greek exaltation of reason as a contemplative act, of history as an image of nature and of God as uninterested in the particularity of the world, the Hebrews saw God as the molder of history and existence as a call to decision. The brilliant medieval attempts to synthesise these traditions were none of them free from contradictions. In the practical sphere, for instance, the growing desire of the Church to influence the affairs of the world for righteousness, more and more evident from the last half of the eleventh century, was foreign to mystical monasticism. The insufficiency of the medieval synthesis can be seen theoretically in its distinction between revealed and natural theology, which leaves history as the sphere for faith and nature as the sphere of formal reason. It f Obviously in what follows I shall be forced to stress Protestantism at the expense of other vastly important influences in a way which may seem partisan. Nevertheless, the influence of Protestantism has too often been neglected, or even more often interpreted outside any knowledge of its theology. Also I wish particularly to avoid using the word 'Protestant' in the formal way it is so often used by European theologians, who limit it to certain theological formulations, particularly those of Calvin and Luther, and in these days perhaps Kierkegaard and Barth. For instance, the presentday school of reformed theologians speak as if they were the guardians of true Protestantism and that only in so far as North Americans have held to that outline of truth and have admitted that authority, can they be truly called Protestants. This is, of course, an arrogant and ridiculous claim based on a highly formalist view of reason and of faith. North American Protestants have brought out certain implications of their faith which could not be reconciled with the original European theory, but this is no reason to deny that they are still Protestants. When Max Weber takes Benjamin Franklin as the apotheosis of a certain practical aspect of the Protestant spirit, in my opinion he speaks far more truly than the theologians who on doctrinal grounds would put Franklin outside the fold. One would have to go far in North America these days to meet anybody outside the theological schools who takes the original Protestant theology seriously. Even the nineteenth century business men or farmer, who held the stamp of Calvinism in his will, after the disappearance of the doctrine, is an almost extinct type. Certainly the so-called revival of religion and church going in contemporary America is even in its fundamentalist form a very different phenomenon, however much certain ecclesiastics would hope otherwise. But the spirit of a society cannot be judged simply in terms of what is explicitly and generally formulated.12

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can be seen practically in the distinction drawn between the religious and secular life. Such basic tensions as these could not but ultimately become conscious, and lead to travail for those who sought a more unified light. Thus, though Protestantism in its initial formulations may seem simply the breaking of unity and, indeed, is this negatively, the Reformation is more than that. It is a moment of crisis when the old synthesis is seen in its contradictions, and man having smashed the natural images, insists on himself as freedom in history. The Reformation is negative in the sense that it smashes the old without seeing systematically the consequences of what has been done; it is positive in the sense that it asserts, however incompletely, the principle of freedom as regulative to any future theory or practice. Thus the return to biblicism may seem directly anti-philosophical, and has sometimes been so. But this need not be. It can be the recognition in the light of the transcendent God of the Bible that philosophy must move beyond a formal conception of reason and its consequent naturalist idolatries. Luther's rejection of Aristotelianism has been interpreted by Catholics as simply destructive and has often been the excuse among Protestants for the silliest contempt for philosophy. Nevertheless, by its very negation of the old and its affirmation of subjectivity in the light of faith, it helped to clear the way for the new German philosophy, which in the thought of Hegel claims to overcome the division into natural and revealed theology, and by distinguishing history from nature, to be able to think history and freedom philosophically. So Calvinism, with its practical sense of freedom, may be interpreted as breaking down the old medieval society in the name of capitalism, but positively it was a basis for egalitarian democracy in which the division between the religious and non-religious life is overcome. The account of freedom in Calvinism lacked the mystical yearning present in Lutheranism. Calvin's doctrines of the Deus Absconditus and of election, combined with the status of the laity, produced that concentration on the practical life which Max Weber has so brilliantly called 'worldly asceticism.'g Though predestinarianism and concentration g Despite all that been written on this question in the last fifty years, Weber's book still remains the locus classicus on the subject. R.H. Tawney's work is altogether less penetrating and, indeed, in many passages misleading. His own theology seems no more than the popular Anglo-Catholicism of Bishop Gore. From such a position he could

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on the Fall might seem theoretically to inhibit the sense of practical freedom, they led in fact to an assertion of it. Cut off from the contemplation of God because of His transcendence, the believers turned to action. Their wonderful grasp of the Bible filled their minds with that imagery of will by which the world was pictured as the sphere of God's creative action. At its best, this produced the superb courage and sacrifices which the people of God saw as necessary to the doing of His will. At its worst, it could produce that uncompromising rectitude which forced others to what it considered right, and later to that complacency which could identify prosperity as a mark of election. The trouble with the doctrine of predestination is that it is bad for the prosperous. Indeed, the return to Biblical categories has much to do with the relation between Protestantism and modern natural science - a relation vouched for in the fact that the first scientific societies have been predominantly Protestant: England, Germany, the United States.h Catholic philosophers often insist that their philosophy is the one which takes rational activity seriously over its whole range and therefore is the synthesis in which can be understood the proper scope and method of natural science. What they do not seem to see is that, in its coming to be, the new science had to break radically with the Greek view of nature, with its doctrine of essence, its formalist account of reason, and its finalist way of conceiving nature. This view of reason and nature was implicit in Aristotelian theology, with its doctrine of God as thought thinking itself. To repeat, in the medieval theology the Aristotelian and Hebraic views of God were held in a precarious synthesis dependent on an untenable relation between faith and reason. Within that synthesis, natural science was interpreted within Aristotelianism unaffected by the biblicist faith in a creator god. It must be insisted that the great spiritual fact of western history between the classical and the modern was the influence of Hebraic thought through Christianity. In

not hope to see more in Calvinism than an aberration from the true wholeness of the faith. For all the failures of Weber's historicism, he endured the discipline of theological study before writing on this deeply theological question. It is a pity, however, that the Englishman should have written the less profound book, for it is exactly the English-speaking peoples who most need to think clearly of the greatness and failure of the Calvinist spirit.13 h In what follows my debt is obvious to Mr M.B. Foster's articles in Mind.14

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Protestantism these Hebraic categories were asserted in unambiguous terms. The doctrine of creation was a way of expressing the radical contingency of the world as a product of God's will. In this sense it was related to the dominant place of observation and experiment within the new science. A contingent world had to be known in its immediacy by observation and experiment. Thus the Protestant rejection of Aristotelian natural theology was related to the rejection of Aristotelian science. Also, the worldly asceticism of the Calvinists, with their concentration on the practical as against the contemplative, was obviously closely related to the new science, with its role of changing the world. Thus in a Protestant world science was seen as essentially practical, in distinction to the idea of knowledge for its own sake. To insist on this is not to relate reformed religion and science too closely. It is simply to insist that they both rejected medieval Aristotelianism, and both desired (though expressing it differently) to reach forward to a unified view of the relationship of freedom to the temporal. Indeed, this relationship between Protestantism and science must be seen in the wider and difficult setting of that between Protestantism and European humanism. It has often been insisted that these two forces have been inimical. Such diverse groups as modern Catholics, secular literati, and the simpler Marxists have all decried Protestant asceticism as preventing appreciation of the world. Simplified accounts of the Protestant view of sex and art and social relations are used as proofs of this very simple thesis to a very complex problem proofs in which at one and the same time Luther is berated as a lecher and a hater of the natural. The Passion according to St Matthew and Para-

dise Lost are forgotten, and English-speaking reformism quite swallowed up in the picture of the tyrannical capitalist who exploits the masses with complete hypocrisy. This leads to the reactionary view that the forms of freedom which have come to be in our society are essentially perversions. Despite all that may be justly said by the Marxists against the capitalist imperialisms of the Protestant world, political and social democracy are at least as essential to freedom as economic democracy, and do not seem to be in quite so simple a relation of dependence upon the latter as the Marxists would suppose. It is an indubitable fact that political and social democracy have flowered in societies where Protestantism has been dominant. The continental aspect of this relationship has been consummately

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described in Hegel's History of Philosophy, where the idea of spiritual freedom in reformed theology is seen in relation to the idea of worldly freedom in the Enlightenment, and where the proper synthesis of mystical and worldly freedom is shown to lie in the doctrines of absolute idealism. Marx (with that deeper sense of debt to the tradition than his disciples have shown) insists, despite his enmity to Protestantism as the ideology of the bourgeois, that the Reformation's overcoming of the distinction between the lay and clerical orders was a sine qua non to the overcoming of the distinction between the state and citizen, necessary to the democratic world which he believed would be realised materially as well as formally in Communism. In England, where Protestantism took a more practical bent, it has always had a close connection with liberalism, which has had a profound effect on the history of reform and democratisation. This practical rapport always seems strange to both the European secularist and orthodox theologian; to the former the history of reform is seen as compromised, while to the latter the spirituality of these societies is denied and their practicality seen as essentially irreligious. Yet it is impossible to conceive Bentham and J.S. Mill arising in a purely secular culture, however much they rejected theology, and the chief cause of their immediate influence was the response they received from the Protestant masses.15 Predecessors of theirs, as for instance, Priestley, were ministers.16 Successors such as Huxley and Spencer, who theoretically seem even farther from Protestantism, have the unmistakable note of its morality.17 Morrison's remark about the Labour Party owing more to Methodism than to Marx is but a truism.18 Despite the fact that reformism in England tended increasingly to free itself from any theological framework, and although the idea of a creator God may not be necessary to the creation of a righteous world, it must be admitted that the relation between theology and reform was, in fact, of profound influence in bringing in the political freedoms we associate with England. In nineteenth century British imperialism there is seen at a stranger level the union of Protestantism and modern history-making. That son of the parsonage, Cecil Rhodes, is the unique example of the blending of Protestant practicality with a romantic evolutionary view of history, in the name of imperial expansion. To Rhodes, God had a plan for the world. That plan is the evolution of mankind. But such a plan requires

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practical leaders who in making history are doing God's will. The British race are destined to be those leaders. Here Protestant practicality shapes and is shaped by the new liberal immanentism. The melange of Darwinism and Christianity, romantic racism and Ruskinian justice, must not prevent one seeing how much secularised English Protestantism is summed up in Rhodes.19 In a sentimental way Kipling sang the praises of the lower echelons of this technocratic and Protestant imperialism.20 In its dying moments it was to have its most debased representative in Beaverbrook.21 In North America, of course, the influence of an unambiguous Protestantism was more powerful than anywhere else. On the one hand that influence was not lessened by the survival of institutions and customs from the feudal order, as it was in Europe. On the other, in a less established and therefore less thoughtful society Protestantism was not so early influenced by the theories of the new immanentisms. It would be absurd to attempt to describe here the long history of Protestant influence in North America or its complex interdependence with the spirit of democratic liberalism and science. Great subtlety and detail would be required to show the movement of that interdependence. Nor is it easy to follow the history whereby the restlessness of Puritanism for the triumph of God's purposes lost its transcendent source and came to take the practical spirit as a self-justifying expression of human freedom. The wonder in Puritan quietism could not withstand this rage for the practical; nor could its profound sense of evil and ruin. Worldly asceticism, in its meeting with modern liberalism and with the exigencies and possibilities of the pioneering and scientific revolutions, produced the view of freedom as the desire and capacity to change the world. It is the sheer force of this vision which has made North America the most realised and egalitarian society. Within its achievements and ambiguities we live. The question of the immigrants and the educational tradition illustrates the development of this spirit. Those who came to this continent were seldom persons who had been on the inside of the culture of Europe. However nobly spirit was incarnate in that civilisation, its failure lay deeply in the fact that large sections of the population were excluded from its riches. And, understandably enough, it was largely from these segments that the immigrants came, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, the lower middle

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class from the United Kingdom, for whom Toronto was an Eldorado in the early years of this century, brought with them many noble ideas, but they had been excluded from the particular educated liberalism which had dominated the English ruling classes. The Irish and Italian peasants who were starved out of their countries brought to the United States a very primitive mode of Catholicism. Such generalisations must, of course, be modified for each individual. A man such as Carl Schurz brought with him the pure flame of 1848.22 Nearly all the Jews came with a fairly explicit theological tradition. The influx of German scholars after 1933 often brought the highest philosophic traditions of their academic world. The generalisation may perhaps be attempted; the more an immigrant came for simply economic motives the less he had partaken in the riches of European culture; the more he came to escape religious or political persecution the deeper were the European traditions he brought with him. What may be said, however, is that most immigrants desired to sweep away any forms that put limits on the mobile society. In the field of education, for instance, the decisive victory of the technical over older studies allowed the Open-Sesame of success to be dependent on purely technical skill. The subtler educational forms, the study of literature, philosophy, and theology, had made success a more complex business in the old society. It was in terms of these that most of the immigrants had once been excluded. Inevitably, therefore, the immigrant as much as he could encouraged an egalitarian technologism. What is important in this connection is the degree to which the theological tradition of Calvinism encouraged the same sort of educational theory. To repeat, the Deus Absconditus of the Calvinists, by whose inscrutable will man was elected to salvation or damnation, encouraged that activity which was to prove to the believer his own grace. With such a theology, the old education, which was intended as a means to the contemplative vision of God, was largely beside the point, as the possibility of salvation could not be thus related to the educational process. Thus the educational theory arising from Calvinism concentrated on teaching a Biblical theology as a general regulative standard for life, and outside this increasingly stressed the utilitarian. The growing power of the Methodist tradition carried this process even farther by making faith a question of emotional inspiration and therefore even eliminating the discipline of a rigorous Biblical

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theology. Because of this theory the break between official Protestantism and the universities it founded has not been a sad surrender to the spirit of the age, but something done on principle. As the theology of the Protestants disappeared the theological college became an even vaguer and more incongruous appendage to a booming utilitarian institution. The continuing power of philosophical and theological studies in Germany is due to the mystical tradition of Lutheranism, largely absent from Calvinism. Thus the Protestants and the newer immigrants both worked for the purely technological in education. The open society of equality and practicality is characterised by the rule of the doer, the ability to use every new technique, the dominance of the ideology of progress. Our view of freedom can be seen in the exaltation of the organiser - whether he be business man, engineering scientist, doctor or pragmatic ruler such as Roosevelt or Eisenhower. The scientist of a generation ago, himself one generation from the Protestant or Jewish home, incarnated this faith in its purest form. Scientific knowledge was the only true knowledge because it was effective. Many natural scientists retain the faith that other studies are but a coating of culture while theirs is basic because it solves the problems of pain and work. Even a cultured man such as Robert Oppenheimer does not go far beyond this when he outlines his philosophy.23 Before the exigencies of imperialism and the mass society some scientists will now admit that pragmatic social studies may also be useful. It was the mixture of science and Biblical reformism, which in more optimistic days led so many scientists (often the more sensitive) to place their faith in the Marxist dream. A young Protestant or Jewish scientist, being unable to think his old tradition and his science together, yet still held by the ethical intensity of the old, could find in a vague Marxism a faith which seemed to reconcile these elements, without requiring that careful historical and philosophical study so difficult for the busy scientific mind. Today in a subtler age and when the importance of the scientist is fully recognised, this faith is often channelled by the conservative into American patriotism and by the liberal into a more international edition of the same. Scientific practicality found its exemplar in modern medicine. Science was directly harnessed by the doer who changed the world in the most obviously righteous of causes. To this day our society will grant anything for this end. For generations scientific medicine has been the

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chief recipient of charity from those who saw in it the obvious and understandable good cause. Whatever else democratic politicians can be against, they are always safe to back medicine. The rule over mental disorder which the medical profession has taken and which has given mass psychiatry a greater power in our society than in any other, was an inevitable extension of the practical spirit. When there is mental disease there must be some clinical cure for it. The psychiatrist treats the world of the spirit in just that way, and indeed he often gets something done. A generation ago, when the medical profession was still widely touched by the old Protestant morality and yet had reached a scientific optimism about the removal of pain, the doctors were indeed the very finest flower of the new world. Though the generations of being a prosperous priesthood has brought its inevitable degeneracy, even today they remain in their temples the very symbols of that spirit, to be regarded with numinous awe by the masses. To help others at twentyfive thousand dollars a year is the apotheosis and paradox of the American dream. Our faith is nowhere better illustrated than in the vast power and prestige given to those who organize economic expansion. The hostility from abroad to the North American capitalist seems unfair, envious, and certainly incomprehensible, and not only to the business men themselves. To many Europeans and Asiatics, the exaltation of economic enterprise, tied to the profit motive, seems but the loosing of the law of the jungle and of man's worst instincts. The relating of that spirit to an onward and upward moralism, from the Rockefellers down, seems but to coat the iniquity with hypocrisy. Though we may admit selfishness in all human activity, this is surely an incomplete picture. Despite the past and present iniquities of capitalism, despite its endemic greed and power seeking, it is impossible to understand its achievements and continuing power unless one sees that in and through the self-interest there moved the idea that economic enterprise was a truly moral activity and served the reformist tradition of freedom. The Alger legend of a generation ago,24 the outpouring of energy into organisation at home and abroad, the atmosphere of obligatory uplift at all but the highest levels, cannot be interpreted solely as a mask for exploitation. Its moral force lay in the vision of freedom as economic mastery and expansion. In this sense the general good could best be achieved by loosing those individuals to power who, by that

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definition, seemed the truly creative. Indeed, the very willingness to sacrifice the economically incompetent, which was characteristic of American capitalism, was justified as necessary to the encouragement of that energy which in the long run would serve the good of all. Whatever differences there may have been about method or about degree of sacrifice, there has been little difference about all-out economic expansion or the exaltation of individual initiative. Even the glassiest financial man, whose activism has narrowed to the point of calculation and whose leadership seems nothing but a frozen individual dominance, can believe that he is the instrument of progress. His control of society at many levels, economic and otherwise, is justified because he is central to that highest social good - the expanding economy. From its debacle in the great depression, capitalism was taught its stake in mass consumption, so that today conservative governments in the U.S.A. and Canada are committed to government supervision of economic life, and a general standard of welfare is evidence of how much more the spirit of our capitalism was committed to practical efficiency and progress than merely to that limited account of self-interest which is found in Marx. The Protestant self-made man, who was the lynch-pin of the early industrialism, has of course been replaced by an increasingly technical and slick set of managers in business and government. But this earlier type saw success as economic power and organization, and from this the later and diverging patterns of social prestige have emerged. Even today, when the achievement of mass consumption would seem to have liberated many from the need for such pursuits, the desire of people to show themselves busy at some piece of organization remains. If that piece of organization is well publicised so much the better. As we realize the world of mass consumption, the continuing power of this activism means that the gospel of enterprise does not generally give way to any simple hedonism, but to the pursuit of prestige. To keep the society of organised obsolescence at a high pitch the organisers and technicians must share their power more and more with those who manipulate other people rather than nature - that is, the psychologists and salesmen, the entertainers, and the public relations men. Inevitably among this new elite the faith in changing the world is increasingly harnessed to atomic ego power. This individualism is, however, now limited by a new factor - the continental peril, and the necessity of

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North America exerting its influence throughout the globe (and perhaps even beyond it). Thus the stratified society of technical and organisational elites in which the old Protestant ethic has disappeared, except as an activist drive, is forced to produce a new morality amongst its leaders - subordination to the principle of American power. This new principle is hardly a personal morality in the traditional sense, but another example of those 'higher' moralities so necessary in ages of imperialism. Here the claim of North American society to be the home of progressive freedom meets the belief of the cultured European that it is the very denial of freedom, in that it leads people to a simple submission before the objective and so to the destruction of man as self-consciousness. On the one hand we look at the world of corrupt advertising and the manipulation of standardised consumption, of other-directed men and the social conformism of the suburbs, of the frustrations of depersonalised work and leisure, of the corruption of the artist and the lover, of technological education carried on outside any ends beyond it, of concentrated industrial, military, and political elites, increasingly dehumanised and unthoughtful. On the other hand, we see the world of equality and consumption, of limited education open to everybody, of the thirty-hour week, of the mobile society and the end of natural classes, of the freeing of women by household appliances, of mass medicine and of culture mediated to the many. There is the threat that this freedom, as progress, when it loses all sense of the transcendent purpose of righteousness from which it sprang, will become a sheer urge to power and love of consumption. The ensuing materialist tyranny will be unalleviated by the traditional natural institutions, because it will have destroyed them, so that the general run of the people will lose their freedom in their integration to the ant heap. Pleasure will be pursued by the submissive for the alleviation of boredom rather than for the fulfilment of joy, and egocentric elites will use their freedom to pursue success as domination over their fellows at home and abroad. Against this, there is the hope that man is moving beyond the limits of the old natural society in which he was held in restraint by an imposed order, religiously and politically, sexually and technologically. Now a society is at last possible in which this practical freedom, having realised its ends, transcends itself in a realization of the spirit beyond dominance. The new era of freedom which has been heralded .

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theoretically in Europe for the last centuries finds its first incarnation in our society. In the face of this conflicting testimony, let it be admitted that even the most sensitive Europeans fail to see the profoundly moral concern which underlies the American world view. So clear a philosopher and so imaginative an artist as Madame de Beauvoir says of North America that it is the society of the objective.1 Also it may be granted that the European intellectual can easily forget that technology need not mean an exaltation of the objective, but rather a desire to master the objective in the name of freedom, that it is an affirmation of the subject against the object. Nevertheless, the judgment of the Europeans must raise questions for us. Is it true that our practical spirit, as it achieves its immediate ends, must produce a society in which the human spirit cannot flourish? The achievements of North America must first be set down. Foremost is the fact that social equality has been more deeply realised in our society than in any other. The European gentleman is apt to see our tradition of social equality as due to the fact that we have no sense beyond the quantitative, and that it is a mask under which money differences are exalted above all others. Certainly among some people of established wealth there has been the attempt to revive hierarchical ideas through their dollar power, and sometimes with some small success. The European socialist is apt to consider American capitalism as the very denial of equality - the exaltation of the economically aggressive at the expense of others. Certainly it is true that in the expanding economy, equality has been considered by the ruthless as the chance to make money and to exercise its power. Nevertheless, our knowledge of equality has far deeper roots than any simple fixation with the quantitative or the desire to clear the way for economic assertiveness. It springs from the Puritan recognition that individuals in their subjective freedom are all open to the absolute, and that therefore any natural inequality is a fact of less importance. In a right political order, therefore, the principle of equality must be first. i See S. de Beauvoir: America Day by Day. It is interesting that Santayana, with all his antipathy to the Protestant spirit (and, indeed, to the Hebraic tradition in general) should have seen farther. In his famous letter to Pearsall Smith he writes of the dominant materialism of North America, but recognises that it is moral.25

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The very different idea which penetrates classical philosophy, and through it tinges Christian theory in the Middle Ages, is of man's infinite value as he partakes of objective freedom (that is, as he becomes a philosopher). As most men have not had the talent or circumstances for that, the assertion of inequality was necessary to right political practice. Our remembrance of the Christian source of equality has been clouded in a pragmatic age. The fashion in an age of unphilosophical social science is to judge ideas such as this as mere superstructure, painted on the basic mindless reality. Yet the equality of wills before the absolute was the principle which the pioneering, immigrant, and industrial societies took and made their own. Even the abuses against the negroes have been consistently weakened before the recognition of equality among the majority. The great achievement of our practical sense has been to recognize that this principle must be actualised in leisure and consumption, as much as in political, religious, and educational institutions. Control of nature was recognised, not as something peripheral to spiritual freedom, but necessary to its becoming. Those who see technology as unimportant think of equality as simply formal; those who think of equality as solely dependent on technology have the vision of the ant heap. Because both of these errors have been resisted, the open society has arisen. It has been obvious since Socrates that the philosophic life requires leisure and education. In an age of scarcity, if that philosophic vision was to be preserved, a hierarchical structure was necessary. The objective vision of the few depended on the sacrifice of the many. This was more easily accepted in societies where there was no clear recognition of subjective freedom. But in Christianity that idea was brought unambiguously to consciousness. Officially, Christian societies could deny neither objective nor subjective freedom. In an age of scarcity the solution often was to relegate subjective freedom to a solitary quietist splendour in which the masses were told that their freedom was unaffected by poverty and oppression, and that faith rather than knowledge was sufficient. It is, of course, true that some people are free in the worst circumstances and that faith is the gift of God. To assert this, however, is no excuse for saying that people should be content with faith and not desire knowledge, or that the establishment of good worldly conditions for all is not important. To say otherwise is to assert

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the continuing necessity of suffering and oppression. To say that in the name of Christ makes it no better. The economy of consumption, by achieving a world where leisure and education are the rights of all, makes possible the society in which objective freedom can be pursued outside a hierarchical structure. Equality and wisdom need not be at odds. The scientific society leads to a deeper consciousness of freedom, not only in the achievements of consumption, but by destroying the traditional forms of the older societies. To illustrate this at the practical level: modern techniques of birth control and abortion mean that the mass of people find their sexual decisions less limited by natural necessity: if one can safely and easily kill a foetus, those concerned are more open to the absolute question, what they consider human existence to be. At the theoretical level there is the same expansion of the limits of freedom. The work of natural and social scientists, ranging over such diverse fields as biology and the study of sacred documents, has destroyed the images of a finite teleology in a way that can be understood by the many with technical education. Of course, this has not changed the problem of faith (the unity between subjective and objective freedom), which must always remain the same. It has, however, broadened the limits within which the mystery of faith presents itself to the majority. It is in this sense that the modern half-education of the technicians can be seen as a blessing. Despite all the new demons which arise from that education and which often replace the old natural theology with another set of finite images, at least it questions the old dispensation wherein the mass of people had to content themselves with a finite religion. The scientific society of equality is obviously not confined to North America. European Christianity was its source. Through the force of Marx's thought it has gone out into Asia and the same sort of societies seem to be arising there. But it is here that its outlines are most clearly realised. In comparison with recent Asiatic Marxism, America's long tradition of modernity has incarnated equality and liberty within its scientific achievements. Even in the age of its greatest cruelty it never indulged in the same disregard of the spirit present in modern communist societies, and which will mar their future for years to come. Today it is long past that stage and there can be no doubt that for the ordinary person it combines openness and kindness as no other.

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Yet where the achievements and hopes of the modern spirit are most exemplified in North America, so also are its evils and the fears those evils portend for the future. It is not surprising that when European novelists wish to describe the modern nightmare they turn again and again to this continent. Descriptions of the way in which technological organization chokes the very freedom it is intended to serve have been made so often that there is no need to pursue this in detail here. Freedom as the history-making which has saved men from so much pain and work and ignorance gradually loses all sense of limit and direction and so builds an inhuman world. Progress as domination becomes little more than an unthinking drive into the future. Thanks to the business and governmental Leviathan, 'more in America have more.' Acceptance of the standards of that Leviathan is the condition of partaking in its benefits. For most people there is little question of acceptance. We are without an alternative before its glittering surface. Indeed, with our society threatened by foreign elites who have taken history-making in a more drastic sense, the pace quickens and the powerful are perforce driven to discard what thoughts of limit they may ever have had. Just as the spirit of practical progress expressed itself most nobly in certain natural scientists, so now is its moment of hubris. The dream image of the maniacal master mind which haunts in a kind of attraction and repulsion the comic strips and science fiction is the wildly unthought recognition of this phenomenon in the minds of the ordinary people - a recognition justified in an age which has witnessed experiments on live conscious human beings against their will. Here, of course, very careful distinctions must be made, because the disappearance of the human ends of science from the minds of men always differs in degree. Clearly the American or Russian scientist experimenting with atomic weapons may be carefully moral in that he has decided that the future of mankind demands that his society be a leader in such weapons. One cannot judge the morality of individual cases. Nevertheless, one suspects in many scientists the inability to grasp anything beyond mastery of the objective and to pursue it outside any context but itself, and at whatever the cost. To this spirit the word demonism may be properly applied, for the idea of the progress of science becomes a Moloch to which anything can be sacrificed. How far can one justify experiments on human beings or on animals to test

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the limits of endurance? The scale in such matters is indefinite and the place of each case must be judged in its uniqueness, but the creating of a two-headed dog in Russia seems an example of curiosity become demonic. At what point does scientific progress become inverted as its means deny the ends it is supposed to be serving? What was believed in the past to make science and technology progressive was their service in liberating the spirit from ignorance and pain and work. To experiment on the pain threshold of another person against his will may free the scientist in question from ignorance (as has been known since de Sade) and it may also help the race in the future. On what grounds can it then be said to be unjustified? For a generation any talk of limits to scientific experiment have been met by the serried ranks of the organised scientific lobby with cries of medievalist and reactionary. The argument by the scientist is put on the ground of the right of man to know. In this high-sounding defence they are joined by the mass who have gained such benefits from techniques, by the business community who realise that the expanding economy can only be kept going by technology, and by military and governmental leaders who are faced with the ghastly exigencies of continental survival. It is, however, only a truism that the question of the limits to man's dominance of nature is now so urgent that it need not be raised in the name of a retreat into a pre-scientific past, but in the name of the human in the present and the future. Public-minded scientists are themselves becoming less the hot gospellers of salvation by science and turning instead to its responsibilities, since the very possibility of the race's survival is in question. The negative aspect of our excessive practicality can be seen in the inhibiting of those activities, such as day-dreaming, sexuality, art, prayer, and philosophy, which are outside the practical and which in the traditional theology were therefore linked together under the exalted term 'leisure.' It is but a truism to repeat that in our past leisure was sacrificed to the doctrine of work and the control of nature. The artist, lover, philosopher, and mystic have been most definitely outsiders. But even now, when vast numbers of people have been freed from practical claims, it is significant to what degree the worship of dominance continues and leisure finds difficultly in coming into its own. It would be wrong to underestimate the degree to which we are transcending the practical, for signs of such transcending (both licit and

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illicit) are everywhere. Nevertheless, it would be a foolish man who denied that we are still dominated by men who think everything can be organised. The inhibition of sexuality may seem to be denied by what has been said about the Protestant character of our secularism, and even more by the open worship of sexuality amongst us. Was it not one of the chief marks of the Reformation to assert that sexuality need not be excluded from the highest life and so to lift it up to its proper spiritual status? In modern North America the incessant teen-age play, the worship of youth, the gods and goddesses of an erotic popular entertainment, the comparatively new sexual licence sanctioned among large numbers of the white collar community, the taking over of the language of an empirical and almost pan-sexual psychology as the general pseudo-educated vocabulary - are not these the marks of a proper and even exaggerated recognition of sexuality in our midst? Indeed, the practical spirit has prepared a society where the mass of the people have in greater measure the proper time and circumstances for the cultivation of sexuality. Our prosperity should allow the breaking loose from that partial inhibition of the instincts which was necessary to the proper mastery of the world. Yet much of our sexuality (often the most licentious) seems still to be wedded in a frustrating way to the spirit of dominance. The absurdity, seen among our organisers, of putting success in work before marriage is an example of this. The notions of prestige, manipulation, and narcissism in teen-age play obviously frustrate the erotic from its true end.J The inhibiting of sexuality by the needs of domination may be just as strong, though superficially hidden, in an age of licence as in an age of more obvious sublimation. Obviously sexuality cannot widely flourish when the relation to nature is one of dominance, or even less when this has degenerated to the pursuit of prestige. As has been said by Christians, the tragedy of the seducer is not his sexuality but his inability to love expressed in his desire to conquer. Realised sexuality must be the acceptance of the j An example of the present stage of sexuality, in which a supposed licence merely masks the denial of sexuality, I encountered at a meeting of medical students. I was asked seriously the question: 'Is regular sexual intercourse necessary to maximum studying efficiency?' Kinsey's categories of climax and outlet here have their reductio ad absurdam.26

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other person in joy - an acceptance in which the simple distinctions between mind and body and between self and other are overcome. It is a waiting upon the other person which achieves a unity of nature and spirit. Therefore it must assume for its own completion that the domination of nature is not the final goal of freedom, and that spirit and nature are not only ideally one but can be one in actuality.k In this sense sexuality has always been the highest art and chief means of reconciliation for the mass of mankind. It is indeed only in such a view that the perennial dilemmas of sexuality, such as whether the proper end of marriage is the joy of the partners or the procreation of children, can in any sense be overcome. Of course, sexuality, as the symbol and content of the ecstatic, has challenged more and more the primacy of the practical in our society, where the needs of material life have been so widely achieved. At the moment these challenges seem often only the expression of a despiritualised attempt to return to nature. The privileged go to Europe or Palm Beach to indulge a sheer taste for the undifferentiated orgasm, or hold myths about the potency of primitive peoples. The ecstatic elements in the life of the young often find their gratification in the antics of entertainers, pushed for commercial ends by public relations. Such tragedies are inevitable when the ecstatic seeks its gratification in a commercial and practical society. But the dualism implicit in the domination of nature by freedom cannot be overcome by these privileged or popular attempts to lose the mind in the immediacy of nature. A proper sexual reconciliation must seek a unity which does not exclude freedom. The position of art also illustrates this dilemma. Puritanism had an authentic suspicion of images, as the bonds of the spirit. As this became secularised it degenerated into a suspicion of art, as reflected in the prosperous ugliness of churches and homes in the nineteenth century. So many of our small towns give the impression, even after generations, that their inhabitants have no sense of continuity, but see them as encampments on the pilgrimage to economic mastery. This k It is of interest in this connection that the French existentialists, with their doctrine of the antagonism of freedom to all that is other to it, always proclaim a doctrine in which sexual love is seen as alienated. This is manifest in Sartre and in Simone de Beauvoir.

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suspicion has been almost entirely overcome in the educated liberal mythology and is even ceasing to exist on the fringes. Half a century ago, in the age of the great collections, the lust to possess European culture foreshadowed this overcoming. Today the diffused prosperity and leisure, the techniques of television, gramophone, and publishing, popular education to an advanced age, allows a widespread appreciation of art, and a growing recognition that the practice of art is an acceptable social function. Thirty years ago artists in all genres consciously sought forms which would free them from the weight of the European tradition. Now that that reaction has itself been transcended an art for the new democratic society begins to appear. The Lever Brothers building is an exceptional sign that business, at the height of its power, can pass beyond the immediate and recognize the place of beauty as a necessary social form.27 However undisciplined and naive some of the efforts of schools and galleries for democratic artistic education may be, the fact that the big state controlled systems should now include such education is a mark of its acceptance among the many. However pretentious and laughable the efforts of some universities in this direction, the fact that these institutions (always eschewing the unpopular) should do such work is evidence that the prosperous classes want art for their children. Indeed, the optimists see in these phenomena the hope that a new Augustan age of democratic dimensions is arising in North America. In the age of plenty, art will not be confined to the few, but will become one of the chief means whereby all can come to worldly reconciliation. But the difficulties in the way of art in a society where the popular spirit is practical cannot be disregarded. These difficulties far transcend the material. That contemplating of the world as grief and evil in the novels of Henry James is but an example of how our highest art remains outside the main stream of our culture.1 Art still seems a strange and unmanly extra. So many artists cynically or unknowingly accept that vision of themselves and enter the world of manipulation to prove their success, or remaining outside the 1 There is, in no language, any more scathing indictment of the optimistic spirit than James' essay on Emerson. Its high sense of comedy does not hide this, any more than the tenderness of his letters to his brother William hides his contempt for pragmatism.28

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popular, become esoteric, strident, or of an attenuated anguish. Among the general population aesthetic appreciation is regarded as a pleasure added to other activities and to a necessary standard of prosperity. So viewed it tends to become a turfing of the grave, which is no transcendence of our practical moralism, but a descent below it. Art, like sex, can only reach its fulfilment within the spirit of acceptance and joy. Though including domination within it as technique, its ideal vision must always be beyond domination, and nature contemplated for its own sake. The difficulty of such an acceptance in an age of freedom has been brilliantly posed by Hegel. He seems to assert that spirit can no longer rest in any finite images of its own infinity, with the result that art can no longer have the place it had in the past.29 The truth of this cannot be discussed here outside the dialectic of nature and spirit. What can be said, however, is that if the practice and appreciation of art is going to give joy in the democratic society, the very practical spirit which has made possible the emergence of that society will have to be consciously transcended. Also, this transcending will be but an illusion if art is thought of as a return to the natural from which the infinity of spirit is excluded. It is not surprising that the pursuit of philosophic truth should have seemed unimportant. To repeat, the Protestant doctrine of faith did not necessarily lead to the denial of philosophy, as is shown in the history of Germany. Nevertheless, the Calvinist Deus Absconditus perforce excluded the mystical element in religion which is a propaedeutic to the philosophical quest. Such doctrine could not but exclude the amor intellectus Dei. The practicality and the egalitarianism united to scorn the privileged access to God which seemed implicit in the philosophic tradition. Theology was the strict organization of revelation as explanation for the believer and for the definition of faith against the unbeliever and other communions. As the tradition of Biblical theology lost its force, particularly through the influence of Methodism, the surviving theology became little more than a patching together of ethical and emotional data. This anti-philosophical tradition found natural alliance with the egalitarianism of democracy, and with the claim of natural science to be the archetype of all knowledge. What after all has the sensible man to do with theorising, which even seems to claim to exalt him above his fellows? His job is to get hold of a solid moral certainty and use it.

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Protestantism has paid a terrible price for encouraging the belief that there is a division between Biblical and secular truth, and for discouraging the contemplative life. North American intellectuals are more deeply cut off from the mystical tradition than were those in any civilisation previous to the USSR. Thinkers who had suffered from an arrogant and ill-thought biblicism were determined to resist its pretensions. In the name of freedom, they cut philosophy off from Biblical thought and from the control of ecclesiastics. Despite the benefits of this, they forgot that the chief watershed which divides classical from modern thought is the entrance of Biblical categories into our civilisation. The resulting denial of the ideal unity between philosophy and theology has led at its worst to obscurantism in the churches, and to a secular philosophy which is often content to be no more than an errand boy to the natural and social sciences. One result of our anti-mystical tradition is that the present spate of mysticism arises in reaction against the restraining existential categories of the Bible, and finds its inspiration in the foreign and the esoteric. As one might expect, the philosophical movement which has had the widest significance has been pragmatism. Dewey returns again and again to the repressive nature of official Protestantism and the need to free people in a scientific age from the transcendent and ironic elements in that tradition.30 Nevertheless, the whole tone of his thought is unthinkable outside a secularised Biblical moralism. His attacks on Greek philosophy and Plato in particular have the same ring as the reformer's attacks on natural theology. His continual berating of the eternal essences as aristocratic and unscientific could hardly have failed to be popular. To preach that the intellect is an instrument is to beat a dead horse. Whereas Hegel described philosophy as being its epoch seized by thought, pragmatism makes it a tame mirror of the emerging spirit of the age. A practical people could not but resist the claim of the traditional philosophy that the soul does not have its final standpoint in action. It must be emphasised, however, that the very spirit which inhibited philosophy has created the conditions for its widespread pursuit. Beyond the crude 'What good does it do?' two valid lines of attack on philosophy remain. To repeat, the first is the assertion that the contemplative life must depend on the labour of others and that love denies a

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vision so gained. Secondly, philosophy was said to exalt an esoteric knowledge which would necessarily deny equality.m With the proper organization and limitation of work, the philosopher need not pursue his loneliness on the sweat of others, nor need philosophy be the activity of the few. Must the vision of the age of wisdom be dispelled by the evidence of its antithesis? The foregoing is not written for the purpose of predicting good or evil. Consciousness has ends beyond that. It is written in the attempt to show the standpoint from which I wish to discuss the philosophy of history. To repeat, the rebellion against the idea of God was carried on in the name of man's responsibility for evil. The idea of God could not stand before the moral criticism of what was. It was to be eliminated from our minds as putting limits to human responsibility. In its place was put the idea of man as the creator of history. In North America this spirit of history making has reached its apogee and built its most advanced society. Yet in the very moment of its power, this spirit is plainly faced by the idea of limit. It is no cheap desire to stop progress or curtail knowledge which today forces us to ask what limits there are to history making. The question must be in any intelligent mind whether man's domination of nature can lead to the end of human life on the planet, not alone perhaps in a cataclysm of bombs, but also by the slow perversion of the processes of life. Here, of course, the question of limit is not in a directly moral setting, because we are concerned with 'natural' consequences. The 'common sense' philosophers can take the wonder and mystery from this strange revolt of nature by reducing the question to the hypothetical: 'If people think race survival desirable, they would be wise to act in certain ascertainable ways.' So the mind can be freed from the question of categorical limit. But before what has been done in all countries under the banner of progress, the question of limit arises unambiguously when we ask whether there is anything that should never be done to another person. If we cannot ever know the degradation of a person to have reached a point where m This attractive egalitarian strain remains in some of the linguistic analysts, with a claim that their philosophy is a technique which gives no wisdom beyond common sense.

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it is categorically wrong, surely we are implying that some people do not finally count? And if certain human beings are so judged, what is implied thereby about the whole? Before the fury of the history makers men still deny that there are categorial limits, but how can they deny that the alternative is pointlessness? The idea of limit is unavoidably the idea of God. It implies that the history-making spirit has come upon that which it has no right to manipulate. In that recognition we face that we are not the measure. The idea of God, having been discarded as impossible and immoral, returns in the knowledge that without God anything is permissible, and the abyss of horror opened before us.31 The truth of man's unambiguous right to change the world here meets the truth that there are limits to that changing. But how are we to see these truths together? Freedom, as being one's own, here meets the vision that one is not one's own.32 The problem of history making and its limits arises, however, beyond the public questions such as the end of the race or the limits of ruthlessness. It arises in the intimate question of personal acceptance and joy. Freedom, as the spirit of conquest, has built a world where conquest is no longer necessary. Do we find, then, that the very end for which men strove to conquer nature - namely, so that they could accept the world - is inhibited by the spirit which has created it? Can human beings, having known nature as an object to be dominated, find their peace in natural existence and the myth of the eternal return? If not, in what sense can we make the world our home? What reconciliation can we achieve which includes the world of work and art and sex? Is the only reconciliation the knowledge that this infinite restless creativity is its own purpose, and God no more than the eternal fire of this becoming? Must we believe that evil is necessary to good? Or is there a joy which has passed beyond this dilemma? CHAPTER 3 - [UNTITLED] That history is consciously and voluntarily made by human beings is the belief which above all others has characterised the liberal mind and this is what is meant by calling modern man 'historical.' It distinguishes us from the peoples of primitive and ancient societies with

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their ahistorical way of regarding human existence." Through religious ritual, primitive men were able to see natural events as partaking in supernatural archetypes, so that the contingency of time was overcome. Events were, therefore, not historical, because they were not viewed as unique and irreversible. It also distinguishes modern man from Christian believers. For although Christianity has from its very origins recognised the gulf between historical existence and nature in a way that the peoples of the ancient world did not, it was committed nevertheless to the mystery that human freedom is real and yet that God's Will is final. It has been my purpose in the last chapter to show that man as the maker of history is more completely realised in North America than in any other society. Among our elites the making of events has become the purpose of existence. Unlimited creativity is seen not as serving some purpose beyond itself, but is itself its own purpose. For example, discoveries in electronics may give profits to engineers and/or organisers and may make others safer and more comfortable, but the prodigious zest for such discoveries does not finally find its justification outside itself - in the private profit and comfort or in its extension to others - but simply as that which is in itself worth doing. Such dynamism is its own joy. And for this history making, there is first this continent and beyond this continent the world, and beyond the world space, and so on. For the more passive, it is left to admire the history making elite, to live in the comfort and pleasure they give us, and to hope to produce children who in their time will be makers and not made. Of course, this generalisation must immediately be qualified. Subtle conglomerations of belief from many eras continue to exist even in a society such as ours which has so broken with any past before the age of progress. In each one of us beliefs from ancient times and from the Christian era continue to exert their influence both consciously and unconsciously, conflicting with one another and with our membership in the modern world. It would be absurd, for instance, to imply that the Biblical belief in the Will of God (whether Christian or Judaic) does not hold some minds both consciously and forcefully, and survives as a n For an account of the ahistorical beliefs of primitive man see M. Eliade: The Myth of the Eternal Return (Routledge 1955) and his Images et Symboles (Gallimard 1952).33

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defused remnant among the minds of most. The range here is, of course, very great between those who are really gripped by that faith and those for whom it is a peripheral habit. In recent popular Protestantism, for instance, it seems clear that the idea of the Will of God has been turned more and more into an effective confederate to successful history making. The appeals to God, currently so popular in official pronouncements of policy, fail to be impressive because they appear so obviously foreign to the Pelagian spirit of the policy makers. The revival of the doctrine of natural right in conservative academic circles as a limit to history making cannot but seem alien to the general spirit of the society, despite its appeals to our own eighteenth century precedents. Even the Constitution of the United States, which is an instrument for overcoming history, is increasingly interpreted in terms of history making. The Roman Catholic tradition has cushioned its devout adherents against the terror of history by its union of Biblical elements with primitive ahistorical mysteries. And as I have said, the response among teenagers to ecstatic naturalism is in great measure an

unthoughtattempttoovercomethepressureofhistoricalexistence which everywhere assails them.0 Sexual joy is, after all, the very sym-

bolofthetimeless.Eventwenty-fiveyearsagoBingCrosbywassing-

ing: T don't want to make history, I just want to make love.' And even the most dedicated history maker must sometimes retire to the shade of the illicit, as the late Senator McCarthy's career so clearly exposed.34 Nevertheless, with all these qualifications, the generalisation may be made that in so far as human beings are capable of believing that they make history and therefore of living in the historical absolutely, the elites of North America have achieved this state. Conservative apologists for the 'West' often maintain that the history making spirit is more unambiguously manifest in the 'Communist' world than in our own. According to them, Marxism deifies history and man's ability to change it, and this can be seen in the terrible ruthlessness of the communist leaders, ready to use any means to achieve what they will. Marxism, of all philosophies, is the sheerest o The Chinese and Russian authorities have expressed the serious view they take of the decadent influence of popular American music, 'rock and roll,' for instance. To authorities who wish to force their people quickly to an historical temper, this influence must seem corrupting.

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concentration on historical existence. Only the foolish could deny the fact of the ruthlessness, or that despite many other causes, it has some relation to the Marxist account of history. Nevertheless, Marxism is not completely an historical faith and does not assert unambiguously that human beings voluntarily make history. I do not intend to discuss here the subtle question of how far the different leaders of the Soviet Union, at differing levels of responsibility, are held by Marxism, or to what extent other traditions are operative, nor whether the exigencies of their position drive them to act outside Marxism or to cease to believe it. Who knows, for instance, whether the new executives have indeed ever had the training to take Marxism as a serious philosophy. Certainly anybody who has had dealings with the communist parties of the diaspora will know how much their fascination with day to day affairs pushes any deep consciousness of theory from the leaders' minds. If this is the case among these men of negligible responsibility, how much more likely is it to be so among those in charge of its imperialism? Despite this empirical question, however, it is clear that Marxist doctrine places limits on the belief that history is consciously and voluntarily made by man. It is but a truism to point out that dialectical materialism asserts that historical events have a necessary structure. That is, we may will to serve the unfolding of the dialectic or not, but its unfolding will nevertheless occur. If by the words 'the conscious and voluntary making of history' we mean that what happens depends on choices by man, and we mean by choices that they could have acted otherwise, then this is clearly denied by dialectical materialism. Also, according to Marxism, historical events move to an appointed end - that great day when all will be well. It is indeed in terms of that great day that the exigencies of history are justified in the minds of the believers. But that eschaton is appointed. It is a certain end which no human choices can prevent. The Marxist faith imposes a limit on history making, not only in the theoretical sense that history is necessary both in its becoming and its end, but also in the more practical sense that the faith ideally demands that all actions be judged in their relation to that great day. And that great day, despite all attempts to show the contrary, remains in Marxism a mystery not directly shown to be related to the historical process. It is quite clear that the attempt to justify historical events in terms of this eschaton is the attempt to show that man's absolute situation is not historical exist-

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ence, just as has been attempted elsewhere by the positing of other ahistorical mysteries. Indeed, in claiming that Marxism is the true philosophy of history, the Marxist shows that he is not the absolutely historical man. For the assertion of any philosophy of history is the assertion that men can know the meaning of history as a whole - that in some sense they can transcend historical existence. A philosophy of history cannot but exalt theory above history making. Either the Marxist says his theory is true and so puts something beyond history making, or else gradually forgets Marxism as he debases it into a propaganda to justify his opportunist history making. Neither the doctrine that theory and practice are one, nor the authority of the party, can free the Marxist from this dilemma, in so far as he cares about philosophy. In so far as Marxists take Marxism as the truth, limits are put on their partaking in history making. As opposed to the Marxist, the faith of historical man is constituted by three propositions that form an interdependent unity. They are: (a) human beings are historical existences and have no destiny beyond history, (b) human beings consciously and voluntarily make history, (c) no philosophy of history is possible. These propositions are interdependent in that the more anyone believes one of them, the more he is led to believe the others. In this sense they sustain each other. The combination of these propositions shows why it is difficult to define the historical spirit. For the historical spirit includes within it the assumption that philosophical definition is not of final importance. As men live by this spirit they will engross themselves in the making of events and not try to understand why they believe history making is important. Indeed, the more men are articulate about ideology the less we must consider them authentically held by the history making spirit. As has so often been noted recently, the rulers of North America are not much concerned with understanding the meaning of their power but with exercising it.p If ideological rhetoric is necessary for some detail of their history making, ideologies of all sorts can be hired to do the ad hoc job. The only effective rhetoric in North America must always be a basic democratic liberalism. But clearly such rhetoric becomes more and more an obeisance to the past, external to the elite p Nowhere better described than in C.W. Mills: The Power Elite (Oxford 1956).35

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who use it. The making of the event becomes more and more its own purpose and justification - the guarantor of success and prestige both to oneself and others. As the elite are given over to such beliefs, philosophic activity will seem to them a waste of time, even if some philosophers are themselves taken up with justifying the history makers. It is only in the lower echelons of public responsibility - among the publicists, the politicians, and the professors - that men are concerned with justifying their conduct by an ideology. A care about ideological presentation is after all some mark of liberalism. Philosophy has some influence when it is patronised by the cultured man of affairs as a pleasant coating. But even at this secondary level of power we will not expect a man seriously fighting for responsibility in a corporation, a government, or a party to use ideology as any more than a means to his right to make history. It is indeed very difficult to see how far the history making spirit can be incarnate in any man. For taken absolutely it is the categorical denial of Providence. If, as in my case, one affirms the Providence of God, then the question is how far Providence achieves its purposes through its denial by human beings. I do not know the answer to this question. I do not know how far the history making spirit may entirely grip any human being. What is clear, however, is that in so far as it is incarnate it will not be concerned with self-understanding. Nevertheless, however much a serious living by the historical spirit would seem to exclude any attempt to justify that spirit, such justifications have been attempted and are illuminating. These justifications range from the popular cliches of modern common sense to carefully thought positions which employ a systematic vocabulary. They are illuminating for my purpose because in this book I desire to show the substantial truth in the historical spirit and also why that truth is only partial and therefore must be transcended. It is my purpose to say that in North American society this spirit has most completely come to be and in so coming to be exposes both its great accomplishments and the necessity of its transcending. But to see how it can be transcended, it is necessary to see it first in the force of its persuasion.36 It is not surprising that the clearest justifications of historical man should come from Europe. For Europe still maintains ways of thought and institutions which are not yet completely moulded by that age of progress. Many European thinkers still hold (even when they deny it)

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that clear thought has value beyond its uses for manipulation. The past lives on in the respect for intellectual pursuits and the prestige of the order of clerks. It lives on even in those whose explicit philosophy denies the ultimate presuppositions of that respect. European universities still assume that philosophy is personally and socially important to a degree which quite transcends their actual definition of it. They assume the continuation of a civilisation in which the philosophically articulate will maintain their prestige. Just as the European statesman still overestimates his influence in the world, although the ground of that influence was destroyed by the Europeans in their own wars, so the intellectuals of Paris or Oxford still believe that philosophical clarity will be judged important, even though the basis of such a judgment has been undermined by their own criticism. They cannot imagine a world where criticism of the pretensions of thought has really moulded social institutions. Despite this naivete, however, we can still learn from their clarity. English empiricism and French existentialism can teach us much about what it is to believe that historical existence is all, that we can have no metaphysic of history, and that what matters is the decent making of the world. It would, of course, be foolish to try to describe the whole range of modern empiricism or existentialism in any easy simplicity or short compass. Both these traditions have produced a subtle kaleidoscope towards which there can be no ease of intellectual relation.37 I, therefore, intend to single out one empiricist and one existentialist and in describing their thought hope to illustrate what they mean by historical existence. To turn first to empiricism: The English empiricists have not been much interested in discussing openly the philosophy of history. They have concentrated on questions of scientific truth and its relation to logic and philosophic method, on criticisms of the traditional metaphysics and its religious and ethical implications, on defining the new ethics of reform. In so far as they thought about the philosophy of history they were either agnostic or vaguely progressive or a mixture of both. Above all, they were dominated by the assumption that worldly happiness was what mattered. In the nineteenth century progressivism was liable to be influenced by the models of the new biology. Of course, the degree to which critical and sensitive men could be optimists was related to the fact that England was a prosperous and impe-

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rialist nation. Far from being at the mercy of the vicissitudes of history, its educated people were making the history of others. In such an atmosphere of confidence men did not have to occupy themselves with the meaning of the historical process. If, for instance, we are amazed that Hume's clear description of the evil of the world and his criticism of teleology allow him to rest in a moderate optimism, we must remember how much the enlightened were sustained by the privileges of the civilisation they assumed. To trot over to Paris and be welcomed as a lion is a good palliative for agony. If it seems strange that so decent and sensitive a man as John Stuart Mill should have rested in his particular vision, we must remember how much reform there was to be done and how much the educated English assumed their power to do it.q Also, of course, the philosophy of history seemed itself a product of modern thought and therefore it was not always evident how alien it was to empiricism, and how close to traditional metaphysics. Recently, however, English empiricists - such men as Professors Namier, Berlin, and Popper - have applied the empiricist critique directly against the philosophy of history, and have shown it to be as much metaphysical as the older teleologies.38 In the twentieth century the English middle classes have been more open to the terror of history and therefore less prone to accept its meaning as given. Also that very terror has often appeared to them as caused by ideologues, who attempted to destroy the moderate and liberal world in the name of one philosophy of history or another. The hatred of Germany in the political field, for instance, has not been without influence in causing the empiricists to criticise the philosophy of history, which after all was a German creation/ The empiricists have therefore turned their q The greatest of the last generation of empiricists, Lord Russell, still combines his recognition of evil and absence of teleology with a high degree of personal and social optimism. He recently said: 'The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible - you must feel it deeply and not brush it aside. You must feel it right in here - (hitting his breast) - and then you can start being happy again.' See Sunday Times, London, May 19th, 1957. Even the English Hegelians took their master's teaching in the same eupeptic way, purging him of his concern with the evils of history - indeed, of his concern with history itself - and so adapting him for the age of late imperialism. r It is interesting that the three professors mentioned have all had close connections with the continent of Europe. They have seen European bourgeois civilisation broken up and the ruthless part played by the ideologues. They compare this with the survival of liberal civilisation in England, they admire the way that practical humanism

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attention to the problem of history and to justifying empiricism against any metaphysicising in this field. Of these writings far the most important is Professor Berlin's 'Historical Inevitability.' In it an able man not only criticises any metaphysicising about the meaning of historical events but also in and through this criticism exposes what he thinks historical existence to be and why we must see nothing beyond it. It is therefore my purpose now to describe what Professor Berlin says in that book. Berlin criticises those thinkers who have claimed to be able to make true statements about the overall meaning of history - that is, the philosophers or metaphysicians of history. He criticises 'all past thinkers for whom history is "more" than past events, namely a theodicy."5 Berlin maintains that all such philosophies have been one of two sorts: (a) the teleological account of history and (b) the appearance and reality view of history. He characterises the first in the following way: The teleological outlook ... is the belief that men, and all living creatures and perhaps inanimate things as well, not merely are as they are, but have functions and pursue purposes. These purposes are either imposed upon them by a creator who has made every person and thing to serve each a specific goal; or else these purposes are not, indeed, imposed from the outside but are, as it were, internal to their possessors, so that every entity has a 'nature' and pursues a specific goal which is 'natural' to it, and the measure of its perfection consists in the degree to which it fulfils it.1

has kept that country free from the menace of ideologues. Of course, Professor Namier's empiricism has been limited to defining the method of the working historian - a method which has impressed itself on a generation of English scholars. Professors Berlin and Popper have gone much farther. They have defended empiricism as part of the good life and the free society. See K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies and I. Berlin, Historical Inevitability.

s Op. cit. p. 10. In Historical Inevitability Berlin is concerned to criticise other doctrines as well as the philosophy of history; for instance, any claim to know the meaning of history scientifically. As a true empiricist, he is as much concerned with freeing man from the tyrannous doctrines of social science as from those of metaphysics. I am not, however, concerned with that aspect of his thought. It is clear to me that as human beings cannot comprehend themselves as objects, if it be possible to have knowledge of the meaning of history, it will not be 'scientific' knowledge. t Op. cit. p. 13.

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The second he characterises in the following words: There is a second, no less time-honoured view, according to which it is not goals, less or more dimly discerned, which explains and justifies whatever happens but a timeless, permanent, transcendent reality, 'above' or 'outside' or 'beyond/ which is as it is for ever, in perfect, inevitable, self-explaining harmony. Each element of it is necessitated to be what it is by its relation to the other elements and to the whole." The difference between these two positions is, however, unimportant for our present purposes, as Berlin's criticisms are the same for both. These criticisms are fourfold: (i) There is no possible method of verifying the propositions in any philosophy of history. They are not, therefore, either true or false, (ii) Their use, however, inclines to impair the judgment of those who believe them - particularly the moral judgment - by tending to influence the believer towards thinking that evil has really been good, (iii) Those who believe these statements to be true are inclined towards ruthlessness, which becomes a wide public menace when the believer has political responsibility, (iv) Such statements imply the denial that human beings are morally responsible and such a denial turns existence into a meaningless charade. These four criticisms are clearly woven together in Berlin's brilliantly baroque rhetoric. The first criticism is that any such metaphysical statements about history are anti-empirical. That is, there is no method of verifying such statements. For instance, if one makes the assertion that 'all historical events serve the divine purpose' (to take a common metaphysical assumption) and if it is intended to be a true proposition about events, it must not only be shown to be consistent with all events, but also that what has happened would have been different in some specific way if this were not so. As Berlin puts it: 'if there were a question of evidence for it, there could in principle be evidence against it.'v But obviously this cannot be so, for the very assertion implies that there could not be such evidence. In other language, if such assertions make any claim to truth (and obviously we who make them claim they do), then on the u Op. cit. p. 17. v Op. cit. p. 15.

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empiricist account of truth such assertions must make some specifiable difference, and this specifiable difference is just what cannot be shown. Here indeed the criticism of belief by the empiricist can be referred back to the ordinary common sense suspicion of religion; what difference does it make? And here indeed the theoretical gulf which yawns between the unbeliever and the believer can be expressed most clearly. For when asked to show what specifiable difference the assertions of his belief makes, he must reply: 'a total difference/ that is, a difference potentially present in each moment of time, past and present. But, says the empiricist, a total difference is in fact no difference at all. Difference to be a difference must be here as against there, but not everywhere. Such propositions have no truth value because the difference which is to verify the assertion is just a repetition of the assertion. To the faithful the difference is everywhere; to the empiricist nowhere. The statements of the philosophy of history are not true according to the empiricist criterion of truth. This, however, is not to say that such statements are meaningless to the modern empiricist. To him the business of philosophy is the analysis of the meaning of language in its use, and there are many ways of using language besides the uttering of true statements. To Berlin, human beings make use of these metaphysical statements about history because of their desire for an overall scheme which will bring everything into unity and in terms of which they feel certainty in a difficult world. To Berlin such desires - call them metaphysical impulses, religious cravings, aesthetic feelings - are weaknesses of the human character. They are weaknesses because they prevent men from recognising the true human condition, which is the responsibility to shape events in the midst of uncertainty. They are illusions which men create to buffer themselves against their condition of freedom in a world where there are no easy answers. As an empiricist Berlin does not attempt to give any ultimate explanation of why particular men have such weaknesses. That they do is a fact. Presumably it is the work of the psychotherapist and not the philosopher to explain the existence of these illusions as he helps individual men to rid themselves of them. The philosopher, however, can show that the propositions which arise from such weaknesses have very harmful results. With these results we return to Berlin's criticisms (ii), (iii), and (iv), as I have described them above. Before expounding what is entailed in these three results, it is illu-

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minating to consider what another empiricist, Professor Braithwaite, says about the meaning of these propositions in their use.39 For here we come upon a sharp division among empiricists about the use of language. Where Berlin would say that the use of these propositions has pernicious effects, Professor Braithwaite believes that they have a valuable use.w He maintains that religious statements are used to assert the intention to adhere to a particular policy of action. And as he uses them himself, he implies that this use is valuable. He says, for instance, that the Christian assertion that God is love is a declaration of commitment to a agapeistic way of life, and that the intention of a person to follow such a way of life 'is not only the criterion for the sincerity of his belief in the assertions of Christianity; it is the criterion of the meaningfulness of his assertions.'x This disagreement between Professors Berlin and Braithwaite is worth noting, not only as the contrast illuminates the concept of use, but also because it illustrates the fundamental dilemma of any empiricist in defining this concept in an acceptable public way. To return then to what Berlin says of the pernicious effects of philosophies of history, his first criticism is that they prevent those who believe them from seeing the facts as they have been.y A priori schemes corrupt the historical judgment from its proper empiricism. This leads to a blurring of the evident facts of cruelty, pain, and oppression. Gradually good actions are not simply judged as good actions and wicked ones as wicked, but both must be interpreted as leading to some good. w See R.B. Braithwaite, An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief (O.U.P. 1955).

Professor Braithwaite writes here of religious propositions, not of those of the philosophy of history. But as he writes about Christianity, which has always included statements about the meaning of history, this comparison with Berlin is germane. x Op. cit. p. 15. Though it is not my intention to discuss this position, three comments relate it to what I say elsewhere in the book: (i) this sophisticated position of Professor Braithwaite is close to the popular democratic Protestantism of North America which identifies the heart of religion with practice, (ii) this position maintains the insistence of the empiricist that propositions about what ought to be and those about what is are of a different logical order, (iii) it has roots in the long tradition of Christian agnosticism and voluntarism. y The complete disjunction between philosophy and history has never been better expressed than by Burckhardt: The philosophy of history is a centaur, a contradiction in terms, for history co-ordinates, and hence is unphilosophical, while philosophy subordinates, and hence is unhistorical.' See Reflections on History, p. 15 (Allen & Unwin).

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Thus evil is gradually turned into good. Napoleon becomes a world historical figure whose actions become the march of God in the world and the crushing of innocent flowers becomes necessary to that march. Stalin's actions can be interpreted as the necessary response of the Russians to the challenge of western technological imperialism. Or again it is asserted that at this point in western culture, the only effective politician can be the empire builder, interested in size. This perverts the honest study of history. Facts are legion and the attempt to see them within such a scheme will lead (probably unconsciously) to the corruption of the historian's integrity. And as historians get vested interests in their schemes, the more prone they become to such dishonesty. Events are less and less described in their uniqueness, openness to new evidence diminishes, and historical facts illustrate the laws which the particular historian wishes to prove. For the professor to fall away from empiricism is not of great public consequence. His disregard of the innocent flowers may be a mark of his complacency; his vision of the conqueror as a moral force may be a mark of his incipient sadism. But generally his theories only corrupt himself, and any of his students who take him seriously. But theories and methods are often not confined to a small academic circle. And when this failure to judge facts as they are and this enslavement to a priori theories becomes influential among the practical men of affairs, it is a public nuisance and indeed a grave danger. A man of affairs so influenced may begin by not being able to judge facts as they are and so make foolish social decisions. Even worse, he may cease to know clearly what can be changed by social organisation and what cannot. At the worst he may end by seeing himself as the instrument of the divine purpose (it makes little odds if he calls it the party or the church or the race). Those who do not accept his view of 'the course of history' must be made ineffective or forced to see the light. This may involve wiping opposition off the face of the earth so that its continuing existence is not a living reminder of the failure of the theory. The history of the twentieth century may make the national socialists or communists the prime example of those who have let their conduct fall under the sway of a metaphysics of history, but people in the West should not forget our own Albigensian crusades and inquisitions, our own witch burnings, our own Guernicas and Nagasakis.40 This denial of empiricism has justified the higher morality in less explicit

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ways among politicians and civil servants in democratic countries.41 In short, the denial of empiricism becomes, in Professor Popper's words, the justification of Utopian social engineering which uses ruthlessness to force the world into the pattern which theory demands. It is the very denial of democratic piece-meal social engineering. Churchill's remark that the Bolsheviks were a bunch of bloody-minded professors expresses the practical Englishman's determination that the philosophers should not be kings. The fundamental argument of the practical empiricist against any philosophy of history is that it explicitly or implicitly denies that men are responsible for what they do. To deny responsibility is to turn history into a puppet show. This criticism may on the surface seem unfair, for are not metaphysical views of history insisting rather on human freedom, as against those naturalistic doctrines which see history determined by the struggle for survival or the interrelation of particles, etc.? Do not the philosophies of history insist on the primacy of spirit, against the mechanical determinations drawn from the false analogies of the natural and social sciences? Do not the philosophers say that history shows forth the unfolding of freedom in the world? Berlin, however, denies that such freedom is more than a mask, hiding the absolute denial of freedom. To understand what Berlin means by this, it is necessary to describe what the metaphysical tradition has meant by freedom2. In the classical metaphysics the word freedom means the ability to live by practical principles and not simply to be at the disposal of varying passions. Our ability to think is, therefore, not simply an instrument which helps us to get what we want. Our thought provides us with the idea of a highest good and makes us desire that good wherein not only this or that desire will be satisfied but in which that very unity which is ourselves will find its completeness. Freedom is, therefore, the gift of truth. It is the recognition, affirmation, and acceptance of the sovereign authority of universal rational law. Human beings are free in so far as they live in these universal self-authenticating principles. A man is free when he recognises that his true self is universal reason and puts aside the passing illusions of egocentricity. In the language of metaphysics

z I think the force of Berlin's argument is obscured by not making this sufficiently clear.

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freedom is the acceptance of rational necessity; in the language of religion it is the acceptance of the grace of God. The practical empiricist says that this is but a phoney freedom for it excludes from the definition of freedom the idea of personal responsibility. Responsibility implies that we are capable of making open choices, that at this or that moment in our lives we could have acted differently than in fact we did. Freedom is not here simply the gift of truth. It is an ability to make open choices, possessed by all men irrespective of their knowledge of what is true. In this sense the wicked are as free as the good. But it is just this existence of open choice which must be lacking from any metaphysical account of freedom. For in such accounts I do what I do in so far as I have been determined by some higher rational law, my true self, the universal, call it what you will. But of no moment of my life would it be possible to say that I could have acted differently. I have no freedom over against what I know. The metaphysical account of freedom is then in fact a superior sort of determination. I am free in so far as I am an instrument of reason, of the universal, the world spirit, the Holy Spirit, or what have you. But as it excludes the possibility that I could have acted differently, it denies responsibility and as such is not true freedom. As Berlin himself writes: Certainly it (the metaphysical view of human life) is to commit oneself to the view that the notion of individual responsibility is 'in the end' an illusion. No effort however ingenious, to reinterpret that much tormented expression will, within a teleological system, restore its normal meaning to the notion of free choice. The puppets may be conscious and identify themselves happily with the inevitable process in which they play their parts; but it remains inevitable, and they remain marionettes.aa

To insist on personal responsibility against the philosophers of history is, of course, not to believe that such responsibility can be proved. To prove it would be to show its necessity in some system, to make it subservient to some universal principle. But this is what denies its authenticity as characterising unique individuals. If we are not to trivialise morality we must think it, and yet we cannot prove it. In that aa Op. cit. p. 16.

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sense it is an absolute datum. Philosophical arguments can only be used to illuminate what we mean by asserting it. We can say that common sense always assumes that we are responsible and only sophisticated philosophers try and explain it away. We can say that without such an idea the administration of positive justice is deprived of its dignity. We can say it is assumed in the idea of political democracy. Most important, we can say that to give up the idea of responsibility is to trivialise our life as individuals for the sake of metaphysical satisfaction. In so doing we become puppets of some cosmic good before which all choice, decision, guilt, rebellion, and despair are reduced to illusions. This is too great a price for metaphysical certainty. But having said all this, we still have to accept responsibility as an ultimate beyond which we cannot think. Here indeed a practical empiricist such as Berlin finds himself in difficulties. For if the fact that we are responsible cannot be proved metaphysically, neither can it be verified within empiricist criteria. Indeed, most modern empiricists have said that the question of free will is meaningless. The problem is dissolved once one has seen that the distinction between free and unfree acts only arises from a linguistic confusion. Because he is both a practical man of affairs and a philosophical empiricist, Berlin often seems to waver about his faith in human responsibility. As an empiricist he has no way of verifying this lynch pin on which his political theory turns; as a man of affairs he recognises that without it practical life loses its seriousness. At one point in his essay he seems to accept a narrow theoretical empiricism when he says that in the future, educated societies may be able to do without the concept of responsibility, even though this is not feasible in our present state.bb But over and over he returns to the assertion that responsibility is an ultimate fact and that philosophers who try to deny it take all point from life. As he writes: The feeling of those who have recognised free will as a genuine issue, and have not been deceived by the latest efforts to interpret it away, turns out, as so often in the case of major problems which have plagued thoughtful men in every generation, to be sound against philosophers armed with some all conquering, simple method of sweeping troublebb Op. cit. pp. 33-4.

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some questions out of sight. Dr Johnson, as in other matters affecting common sense notions, here too seems to have had the last word.cc In his assertion of responsibility, we are at the heart of Berlin's attack on any philosophy of history. To be a man is to be an historical being and to be an historical being is to be responsible. There is no way of transcending that responsibility. Metaphysics is the attempt to escape this our inevitable position. In metaphysics we turn away from the uncertainty of creating the purposeful in a world which does not help us, to a supra-historical realm of certainty, peace, and absolute purpose. It is thus a vain turning away from our inescapable situation. It is pernicious because only the recognition of uncertainty and the absence of absolute purpose teaches us to be responsible. Certainty and the belief in absolute purpose can only lead us to irresponsibility - whether it be the ruthlessness of the Utopian social engineer or the aloofness of the philosophic quietist. We must make history because there is no theodicy; there is no theodicy because we must make history. As Berlin has put it: The attempt, therefore, to shuffle off responsibility, which at an empirical level seems to rest upon this or that historical individual or society or set of opinions held or propagated by them, on to some metaphysical machinery which, because it is impersonal, excludes the very idea of moral responsibility, must always be invalid; and the desire to do so may, as often as not, be written down to the wish to escape from an untidy, cruel, and above all seemingly purposeless world, into a realm where all is harmonious, clear, intelligible, mounting towards some perfect culmination which satisfies the demands of 'reason/ or an aesthetic feeling, or a metaphysical impulse or religious craving; where nothing above all, can be the object of criticism or condemnation or despair.dd

cc Op. cit. p. 27. By the phrase 'the latest efforts' Berlin here means the modern empiricists. In the narrower sense of empiricist Berlin is, of course, less consistent here than those who dissolve the problem of free will, as responsibility cannot be empirically verified. He is, however, truer to the broader tradition of empiricism in putting practical considerations above theoretical consistency. Philosophical empiricism is surely subsidiary to the tradition of the English liberal gentleman and the concept of responsibility central to that tradition. dd Op. cit. p. 71.

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A quotation such as this makes clear why I have chosen Berlin to illustrate the empiricist's criticism of the philosophy of history. For behind those criticisms there lies a positive vision of existence humane liberalism at its most explicit. In him empiricism is not only an academic technique (used mainly in the quarrels of the schools) but is the modern justification of that humane liberalism which has reached its apotheosis in the educated and responsible classes of England. It is the liberalism which in this century has claimed to be the mainstay and preserver of civilisation and which through the administrators and academics of England has spread its careful and urbane influence into many corners of the world. It has been the most powerful tradition among the best educated of the English speaking peoples. As this tradition found its home in Oxford and Cambridge, it is not surprising that it should be given its explicit justification by the professor of politics at Oxford. It is a liberalism which has consciously rid itself of the sloppy superstructure of theory which so often vitiated the clear thinking and public responsibility of earlier liberals. Before the exigencies of the twentieth century it has put aside its illusions. In recognising that its ultimate standpoint is that human beings belong to themselves and therefore shape the world, it has thrown off such grandiose notions as any easy progress. Before public threats to liberal civilisation, it has freed itself from any facile view of political power, seeing clearly that if civilisation is to be maintained it will be maintained by the liberal, and that this requires a frank recognition of the acceptance of political power. It can no longer be a philosophy of the outsider and the nonconformist. It has given up relying on help from any belief in the remnants of natural teleology which so often buttressed the courage of its disciples in the nineteenth century. In short, it has freed itself of illusions without losing its sense of responsibility; it has toughened itself without losing its sense of the humane. What matters to this liberalism is the cultivation of humane values in personal life and the maintenance and extension of their possibility in the public sphere. And what Berlin asserts is that this can only be achieved if there are no illusions that this humaneness depends on anything but human choice. In the face of nature which seems indifferent to human values, we must recognise that we make the meaning, and that the values of sensitivity and decency require cultivation. In the face of history we must recog-

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nise that political civilisation is always threatened by the arrogant, the ignorant, and the ruthless, and that therefore it can only be maintained by our careful responsibility. To exalt our private values into metaphysical principles is egocentric and worse. It removes them from that sphere of risk which gives human life its dignity and our values their authentic force. To say that the course of history is not in our hands but in God's makes a mockery of all our strivings. Indeed, to such liberalism, the Providence of God is an arrogant and impertinent assertion. The assertion of teleology is the foolishness of the optimist who does not know the difficulties of private and public life. After all, it was not God, but human courage and foresight which in this century has maintained the civilisation of decency in the face of its terrible enemies. In our personal life it is not God but ourself who tells us to stand up and play the man. The liberal may admit that religious belief is perhaps the best that many simple men can achieve. It gives mythological setting to the public virtue of justice and the private virtues of kindness and unselfishness. The wise liberal ruler may even encourage such illusions, if they seem to be providing support for the open society and if their destruction will produce a tiresome nihilism. But even among the simple, religious enthusiasm may rock the boat of a balanced society by fanaticism. Here the wise liberal ruler may have to break down the religious faith of the simple by the techniques of modern education and psychiatry.66 But there is no excuse for those with responsibility to be held by religious or metaphysical ideas. For the good of themselves and society they must be freed from the illusion that God or nature or history gives cosmic support to the values they cherish. They should recognise that men are on their own and that it depends on human beings how far the decent society is realised. Indeed, the wise democracy will eschew the leadership of the man with metaphysical certainty. For such belief on the part of the strongwilled is but the mark that he wants to give divine sanction to his own egocentricity. He is therefore a man to be watched. Above all, the democratic society should be continually reminded that with the belief in ee See as an example of this how the liberal politicians and civil servants in Canada used these instruments of persuasion to force the Doukhobours in British Columbia to conform to the mores of mass democracy.

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humane liberalism during the last centuries there has come a general interest and care about the ordinary wants of ordinary men. For the first time it was counted of prime importance that the mass of men should fulfil its everyday desires. This could never have been so when theological or metaphysical belief has governed policy. How could this not be so? In the personal sphere, if the intellectual love of God is what matters, then ordinary life becomes more and more neglected. In the public sphere, society's first consideration is not these ordinary wants but the promotion of the vision of God. In liberalism there is obviously an important place for the pursuit of art and science, not only as public but as private goods. But what is the place for the practice of philosophy? The view of philosophy as the rational vision of God is, of course, nonsense. Its very ultimate of theory must be that that vision is not possible for men. What then becomes of philosophy? It becomes an educational means whereby the young who have the ability to hold power are led to liberate themselves from the illusions of metaphysical certainty. Metaphysical or religious certainty is a vice or weakness to which all men are somewhat prone. It therefore becomes a social goal that those who are being picked for responsibility should be inoculated against metaphysics by a careful philosophical training. Metaphysics is simply taught to prevent men getting hold of bad or easy metaphysics. It will be necessary to teach men the tradition. This is not, however, done as in Catholic societies to give faith its basis of rational certainty, but rather to immunise against certainty. So will the powerful be taught both that decency depends on their efforts, and that any too clear-cut vision of it should be publicly eschewed. In short, liberalism is above all the affirmation that 'we are our own.' To put it negatively, we are not creatures, existence is not a gift, we do not belong to some being greater than ourselves. To put it positively, we create our own meaning, we make the world for good or ill. And it is in this freedom itself, with no appeal to any higher principle, that individuals have their value. And this freedom is an ultimate beyond which we cannot go. It is ultimate in the sense that if we do not believe it our existences are pointless. It is ultimate in the sense that it cannot be taken up into any higher synthesis without contradicting itself. Throughout its history, English liberalism has prized above all its

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moderation. It has been moderate in its pleasant sensualism, in its political practice, and in its trust of definition - even its definition of itself. But since it has been challenged in our century by rival practices and faiths, it has been driven to clearer definition of itself. It has more and more defined itself as 'being one's own/ as committed to responsibility in all its joys and sorrows. But this self-clarification has divided empiricism against itself. For the pursuit of enjoyment for its own sake and the sense of the natural world as the source of enjoyment are threatened the more we define ourselves as freedom to make the world. This is not only true in the obvious Freudian sense that responsibility and sensualism are at odds; but in the more fundamental sense that self-conscious freedom is the ability to transcend all our enjoyments, so that we can never entirely lose ourselves in them. To be one's own is the very denial of that giving of oneself to the natural situation which is the source of enjoyment. It is the denial of that acceptance which finds joy in the world.ff If liberalism is defined as freedom and freedom is only possible in a world which cannot be understood teleologically, then the cultivation of enjoyment for its own sake must be made peripheral if it is not to destroy the primacy of freedom. Empiricism, as it refuses to dissolve freedom in linguistic criticism, expresses itself more and more in existentialist language. The last pages of Berlin's 'Historical Inevitability' have an increasingly existentialist ring. In those pages empiricism is praised merely as a proper method in study and action, while commitment to historical existence as responsibility is made ultimate as in Sartre. I believe therefore that when the arguments against the philosophy of history are based on an appeal to human responsibility, they find a clearer expression in French existentialism than in English empiricism. Therefore in my attempt to describe historical man's account of himself, I must pass to the greatest of the existentialists - Sartre.42 Forward-looking publicists in Russia and the United States often denigrate Sartre's existentialism as the decadence of an inbred civilisation, bemoaning its loss of world dominance. It is ridiculed as a coterie ff The word 'surrender' would be here appropriate. Yet I hesitate to use it, because it is likely to be taken in a limited sexual context. 'Surrender' might also seem to be limited to feminine sexuality, which again would be a misinterpretation. The word can also be applied to men's surrender to love.

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philosophy with no universal significance. Such talk is the nonsense of those too busy to think. In Sartre historical man finds an unequivocal account of his condition, and that condition is not something reserved for the decadent few. As the world moves towards the truly industrial and historical society, more and more human beings find themselves in that very situation. And this will happen whether or not they have ever heard the word existentialist, and even though the trappings of their tradition are very different from those of a successful Parisian intellectual. For man's situation, according to Sartre, is to be absolutely free in a pointless world. This is historical existence and there is no other lot for man.gg In describing why I think Sartre's thought is the ultimate picture of historical man, it is well to remember that many of the thinkers of the nineteenth century only reached the proposition that this world is all by denying that men were free. They therefore found themselves exposed to the criticism of the metaphysicians that truth which denied human freedom was self-contradictory. Sartre starts from the proposition that man is his freedom. But this does not invalidate humanism or mean that we can transcend our existence in space and time and take flight to the eternal. For it is just this freedom, this self-consciousness, which pins us to the world and makes it obvious that we have no lot beyond the historical. Thus Sartre challenges the metaphysician at a far more deadly level than do the naturalisms of the nineteenth century. He takes the human spirit - the very starting point from which all religious hopes have sprung - and says that it is just this spirit which proves conclusively that all such hopes are vain and dangerous illusions. Our starting point must be then what Sartre means by human freegg It might be maintained that Heidegger has described in greater detail than Sartre why man cannot transcend time and history and that therefore it would be better to choose him as the archetypal existentialist. I do not think so for two reasons. First, Sartre as a philosopher has been more unequivocal than Heidegger about the consequences of not being able to transcend historical existence. Indeed, Heidegger has expressly disassociated himself from Sartre at this point. Secondly, Sartre has given himself over to the consequences of his thought while Heidegger has played the German role of the academic pundit. This may have been simply because of the difference between German and French conditions and traditions. Nevertheless, it has resulted in Sartre seeing the political consequences of existentialism in a way Heidegger does not. And it is just these political consequences of existentialism which take us to the heart of what it is to be an historical man.

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dom. He starts from the recognition that self-consciousness is of an entirely different order of being from the objects present to selfconsciousness. Self-consciousness is 'being for myself.'1* The object of consciousness is 'being in itself.' It is absolutely self-identical (i.e. all we can say of it philosophically is that it is). But 'being for myself is the denial of self-identity. To be a subject is to be self-conscious and to be self-conscious is to be present to oneself as separated from oneself. For as soon as one is conscious of oneself, one has turned the self into an object for the self. But there is always the T as subject, for whom the T is object. That is, self-consciousness is division. And this division is an abyss which I can never overcome. I can never come upon myself as subject. For as soon as I try to know myself, I turn myself into an object, and my subjectivity which tries to know escapes my knowing. I may be conscious of myself, and conscious of myself being conscious of myself, but I can never grasp the subject which grasps. I can never overcome the predicament that, although unable to escape my subjectivity, I can

neverknowit.Bythisabyssofself-division,thisnothingness,human

themselvestobethisrestlessandterribledivisionwhichisfreedom.

beings are exiled from ever being at one with themselves. They find

And indeed, I constitute myself as subject by separating myself from objects, from 'being in itself.' I am not this cup, this table, this cigarette, or even this woman. I am myself as I am nothing in the world. I am self-conscious in so far as I have exiled myself by that act of negation whereby I constitute myself against otherness. In that act I negate myself in so far as I am object for myself. As subject I can transcend any particular contingent situation, my given place in society, my Oedipus complex, my role as exploiter or exploited, my sexual normality or abnormality." As project for the future, I can always transcend hh This translation of Sartre's pour soi seems more appropriate than the literal 'for itself.' The third person pronoun is less flexible in French than in English, ii Sartre has illustrated what he means by his accounts of torture. He has illustrated it perhaps most clearly in his long analysis of the life and writings of Jean Genet, his most systematic work on ethical matters. See Saint Genet - Comedien et Martyr (see reference). He describes how Genet as an adolescent orphan was thrown into a school of correction and became an acquiescent homosexual object. This would seem to be a classic case of psychological necessity - with Genet the victim. But no, says Sartre, Genet affirms his freedom in his perversity. By it he constitutes himself as his own in a world which has branded him an alien object. He is free because his sexual conquest by fellow criminals is not a means to sexual fulfilment, but to dominance over those who would use him. In affirming himself thus against the bourgeois world which has pinned him down as an outcast, he is his own. He is the complete liberal.

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anything which I am objectively now. Thus I am what I am not, and I am not what I am. I can always transcend myself as object and can transcend the objects around me by manipulating them through knowing their qualities. My freedom is absolute because there is nothing either from without or within which I must accept and through accepting put limits on my freedom. There is no given moral law, no theory of nature or of history, no psychological or sociological explanation to which I must submit. I am always responsible for making myself, whatever the circumstances. There is no reason for my choices outside my choicesJJ But though freedom is the possibility of transcending any contingent situation, it is a transcendence which is always afflicted by the very contingency it transcends. We find that although we can manipulate objects by knowing their qualities, there is no reason why any object exists. 'Being in itself ('the other' for human beings) is absurd. Existence is before, or apart, or perhaps beneath essence. Teleology is then an illusion. We cannot know why anything exists. Otherness just is. When we say that an object has this or that purpose we are just relating its qualities to our own purposes. But as well as having qualities, it exists; and there is no reason for its existence; it is absurd.1* I can indeed use the world as a field of pleasure. But even in its most intense pleasure - sexual love - the other person remains an absurd object for me.11 jj Sartre has said that he is the only modern philosopher who can validly use the world absolute, because for him freedom is truly absolute. It is, indeed, here that the traditional Marxists have always considered his philosophy an expression of bourgeois individualism, even though Sartre has claimed that he is himself a Marxist. To the traditional Marxist, Sartre is just returning to the old Lutheranism and its philosophical counterpart in idealism, which maintains that man is free even while being exploited, tortured, and oppressed. See H. Marcuse, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (see reference). kk No description can catch the sheer genius of Sartre's account of his discovery of the absurdity of the world (or to use pedantic language, his discovery of radical contingency). See particularly his novel La Nausee. 11 In the leading French existentialists, sexual love is always described as disappointing. See the work of Sartre, Camus, and S. de Beauvoir. There is no possibility of overcoming in it the division between freedom and the absurdity of the world. I can never be unified with the other person. As Marx has said, man is for man an object, and this is never more true than in the existentialist account of love. For the existentialists, freedom requires that the objective world be absurd, and as fulfilled sexual love would be the overcoming of that absurdity, it would seem that for them freedom eliminates the possibility of realised love.

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Thus I live as freedom in an absurd world. And in the dependence of my freedom upon that world, I know my own existence to be absurd. From the knowledge that my freedom is both absolute and absurd arises the terrible anguish which is the very sense of existing. I know I am condemned to be free. But also in the absurdity and absoluteness of my freedom, I know that my choices are real choices. They are not the spurious choice which is but a hidden determination by some natural or moral law. I am authentically free. This then is historical existence: to be authentically free amidst an absurdity which includes my freedom. It is indeed only because human beings are self-conscious that there is historical time. 'Being in itself is self-identical and therefore not in time. It is, of course, true that as a matter of convenience we can speak of time as if it were objective. But it is only as self-conscious beings constitute themselves by acts of freedom (that is, by relating themselves to the future as project) that there is historical time. And so we see that the recognition of selfconsciousness in an absurd world is the recognition that we are committed to historical existence, and the recognition that we cannot transcend our situation as historical existents. We seek to overcome this situation. We seek to overcome that division within ourselves and to achieve self-identity. We fail to find our peace and certainty in the world. We seek to become self-conscious beings who are also self-identical. That is, we attempt to make ourselves divine. This is the source of all metaphysical and religious striving. It is the source of all those philosophies of history which believe that existence can be understood. But it is a search doomed to failure, because it requires the idea of a being which is at one and the same time 'for himself and 'in himself (that is, the Hegelian idea of God). It requires the idea of absolute self-conscious self-identity. Such a requirement is, however, self-contradictory. For self-consciousness is by definition the denial of self-identity. For those who think clearly, therefore, the idea of God is a contradiction and atheism a necessary consequence. The attempts of human beings to overcome their absurd freedom are then hopeless efforts to escape their inevitable situation. 'Mankind is a useless passion.'43 We cannot escape authentic choice in an absurd world. Even suicide is such a choice. There is no way of escaping the responsibilities of historical existence. Both freedom and evil must be faced as irreducible. Only as we

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recognise that our responsibility is absolute do we see that evil is absolute; only as we see that evil is absolute do we recognise the absoluteness of our responsibility. Sartre again and again insists that every honest man must believe the doctrine of radical evil. That is, evil cannot be subsumed under any metaphysical principle. It cannot be explained away or made well. As he has himself so brilliantly put it: We have been taught to take (the notion of evil) seriously. It is neither our fault nor our merit if we lived in a time when torture was a daily fact. Chateaubriand, Oradour, the Rue des Saussaies, Tulle, Dachau, and Auschwitz have all demonstrated to us that Evil is not an appearance, that knowing its cause does not dispel it, that it is not opposed to Good as a confused idea is to a clear one, that it is not the effects of passions which might be cured, of a fear which might be overcome, of a passing aberration which might be excused, of an ignorance which might be enlightened, that it can in no way be diverted, brought back, reduced and incorporated into idealistic humanism, like that shade of which Leibnitz has written that it is necessary for the glare of daylight. Satan, Maritain once said, is pure. Pure, that is, without mixture and without remission. We have learned to know this horrible, this irreducible purity. It blazes forth in the close and almost sexual rapport between the executioner and his victim. For torture is first of all a matter of debasement. Whatever the sufferings which have been endured, it is the victim who decides, as a last resort, what the moment is when they are unbearable and when he must talk. The supreme irony of torture is that the sufferer, if he breaks down and talks, applies his will as a man to denying that he is a man, makes himself the accomplice of his executioners and, by his own movement, precipitates himself into abjection. The executioner is aware of this; he watches for this weakness, not only because he will obtain the information he desires, but because it will prove to him once again that he is right in using torture and that man is an animal who must be led with a whip. Thus, he attempts to destroy the humanity in his fellow-creature. Also, as a consequence, in himself; he knows that the groaning, sweating, filthy creature who begs for mercy and abandons himself in a swooning consent with the moanings of an amorous woman, and who yields everything and is even so carried away that he improves upon his betrayals because the consciousness that he has done evil is like a stone around his neck dragging him still

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farther down, exists also in his own image and that he - the executioner - is bearing down upon himself as much as upon his victim. If he wishes, on his own account, to escape this total degradation, he has no other recourse than to affirm his blind faith in an iron order which like a corset confines our repulsive weaknesses - in short, to commit man's destiny to the hands of inhuman powers. A moment comes when torturer and tortured are in accord, the former because he has, in a single victim, symbolically gratified his hatred of all mankind, the latter because he can bear his failing only by pushing it to the limit, and because the only way he can endure his self-hatred is by hating all other men along with himself. Later, perhaps, the executioner will be hanged. Perhaps the victim, if he recovers, will be redeemed. But what will blot out this Mass in which two freedoms have communed in the destruction of the human? We knew that, to a certain extent, it was being celebrated everywhere in Paris while we were eating, sleeping, and making love. We heard whole blocks screaming and we understood that Evil, fruit of a free and sovereign will, is, like Good, absolute. Perhaps a day will come when a happy age, looking back at the past, will see in this suffering and shame one of the paths which led to peace. But we were not on the side of history already made. We were, as I said situated in such a way that every lived minute seemed to us like something irreducible. Therefore, in spite of ourselves, we came to this conclusion, which will seem shocking to lofty souls: Evil cannot be redeemed.44 Evil cannot be redeemed. This is what makes us refuse any metaphysical or theological meaning to history. For any such affirmation denies radical evil. It always ends (however much we may try to master the fact) by saying that evil is not really evil, but a kind of hidden good. 'All is best though we oft doubt' etc.45 And by such affirmations we are given an out. It doesn't really matter that we were too selfish, too lazy, or too scared to prevent a particular outrage happening. After all, God will make it well.11"11 But Sartre returns to the outrages that mm It is interesting to note that here Sartre takes exactly the opposite position to Professor Braithwaite's assertion that the propositions of Christianity affirm the intention to pursue an agapeistic way of life. To Sartre such propositions are the very mask of bad faith, the way we hide our responsibility from ourselves. It might be said that Sartre presents Christians with their own doctrine of love and says that for its sake all belief in God must be given up.

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have happened and are happening at each moment. And outrage is that which cannot be reconciled, which cannot be taken up into any vision of the eternal good. And if there is anything which cannot be taken up into the vision of the eternal, then there is no such vision. In the absoluteness of evil, the deceit of religious or metaphysical acceptance is laid bare. Only in the recognition that evil cannot be redeemed do we face directly that we freely and consciously must make history. No God, no nature, no doctrine of progress can free us from our responsibility for what happens. In Camus' novel The Plague a doctor and a priest watch a child die in prolonged and hideous agony. The doctor turns away contemptuous of any belief in providence, for such a belief must cover happenings such as this. But this is no reason for passive despair, for an aesthetic pessimism. For however absurd the world, he knows he is free to stop some of the evil. This is the cry of Dostoevsky's Ivan, who turns in his entrance ticket to any harmony that requires the torture of a child. There is no harmony, but still we are responsible. Evil cannot be redeemed. Sartre is not only arguing against the Christians, who believe it has already been redeemed in Jesus Christ; nor is he only disagreeing with Hegel's metaphysic of eternal redemption; nor is he simply criticising the Marxists who say that present evil will be justified by what will yet be; he is saying categorically that it is irreducible. He does not say that there will not be a happier world. He is not such a fool as to think that the quantum of evil is constant and therefore be able to relax in the sadness of an aesthetic pessimism. But still the happier age will not cancel out the evil, any more than Christ's triumph can reconcile the man who had better not have been born. It is evil and responsibility which never lets Sartre shirk the ultimacy of politics and which has made him a Marxist. To eliminate evil requires action and action is always political. He derides the illusion that there is such a thing as private life, that there is a distinction between private and social action.Tm Therefore from our subjectivity we nn The primacy of politics is not something Sartre has simply written about. Even although he has clearly seen the unimportance of France in world politics in our generation, he has not hesitated to lay down his genius as an artist and philosopher on the altar of political organisation. It is this commitment to politics which gives Sartre his indifference as to how people judge his motives. If evil and responsibility are absolute, what matters is what happens because of our actions.

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must commit ourselves to the objectivity of politics, to the necessary means of overcoming the obvious evils of our situation. Marxism is the only philosophy within which serious commitment to politics is made. It alone has made the objective analysis of the historical situation, has recognised what must be done, and taken seriously the only social means whereby it can be done. It recognises that in our age what matters is the liberation of the mass of men from poverty, and that can only be done by harnessing the aspirations of the proletariat to a ruthless organisation dedicated to this end. The tactical mistakes, the ignorant dogmatism, the Stalinist tyranny, the unnecessary cruelty of the Marxist parties are tragic, but not decisive. Equally the virtues of capitalist democracy are not decisive. What is decisive is that Marxism has the truest analysis of the evils of our time, and the most serious commitment to their overcoming, and that in the power of the Marxist parties there is the greatest hope that the quantum of evil will be lessened in this period. The empirical basis of Sartre's argument here seems to me absurd. For instance, the judgment that the power of the Marxist parties is most likely to lessen the quantum of evil seems nonsense when applied to most of the world. Sartre's honesty about facts is distorted by old-fashioned European prejudices. It is not my purpose, however, to criticise Sartre's judgment, but to illustrate how clearly he sees that freedom in a purposeless world involves commitment to total politics. Religious belief must always deny the ultimacy of politics, according to Sartre. For even if religious people give place to the active life, they must finally rest in a mysticism which cares about their own state of being and the being of other people. They are concerned therefore with their own clean hands, and in treating others as ends. They therefore turn away from action in which everyone cannot be treated as ends. In so doing they turn away from the mass evils of the world and the only possible means of overcoming these evils. As Sartre has said, to be a father who treats his own children as ends is inevitably to leave other children to die of starvation or be oppressed. The religious person is inclined to turn away from the realities of power, in which we must imprison and go to war and sacrifice some to others. In refusing this dilemma in the name of some metaphysical vision, the religious forego their responsibility and so condemn people to live in squalor

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and tyranny. For then the absolute is not political. Evil is not finally their responsibility.00 Indeed, Sartre's claim that existentialism is the true humanism must be treated with the greatest seriousness. For in it history is man's to make. There is no given meaning which it concerns us to accept. Only in making its meaning can we really count our lives as important. They are important as we know that they are all we have and everything depends on them. The illusion that we do not make the meaning - the idea of Providence - is then the enemy of the human, the very enemy of freedom. It demands that acceptance which asserts that we are not our own. It is therefore the antithesis of humanism. Humanists must therefore purge their intellects and imaginations of all remnants of the teleological vision. They must replace it with the vision of the world without God.

Notes 1 Geoffrey Reginald Gilchrist Mure (1893-1979) wrote An Introduction to Hegel (1940), A Study of Hegel's Logic (1950), Retreat from Truth (1958), and The Philosophy of Hegel (1965). Michael Beresford Foster (1903-59) wrote The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel (1935), A Mistake of Plato's in the Republic (1937), Masters of Political

Thought (1941), and Mystery and Philosophy (1957). Foster was important to Grant and he records a visit he had with Foster during his year in England. He also returned often to the Foster essays on creation and politics. See Cameron Wybrow, ed., Creation, Nature, and Political Order in the Philosophy of Michael Foster (1903-1959): The Classic Mind Articles and Others with Modern Critical Essays (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press 1992). Sir Thomas Malcolm Knox (1900-80) was translator and editor of Hegel's

oo It is worth noting that Gabriel Marcel, who has most severely criticised Sartre from within the Catholic Church and from within his own philosophy of existence, heads the second part of his Metaphysical Journal with the following quotation from E.M. Forster's Howard's End: 'It is private life which holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision.' In his books Marcel inveighs against the modern world of total politics and techniques and against the absence of the knowledge of being therein. But he always becomes vague when he gets down to discussing how evils of poverty and inequality may be overcome.46

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Philosophy of Right and other works. He also wrote Action (1968), A Layman's Quest (1969), and A Heretic's Religion (1976). 2 Grant to Dr A.E. Kerr, 26 April 1955 (Dalhousie University Archives, George Grant Philosophy, MS 1-168). 3 Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924) along with Bernard Bosanquet and T.H. Green belonged to a group of liberal Hegelians centred at Balliol College, Oxford, who tended in varying degrees toward a Burkean conservative politics (though both Green and Bosanquet were members of the Liberal Party). Bradley taught philosophy at Oxford. 4 Thesis XI of the Theses on Feuerbach.' Tucker has the following translation: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.' The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton 1978), 145. 5 Ernest Jones reports: 'Freud surprised me by saying he had recently had an interview with an ardent Communist and had been half converted to Bolshevism, as it was then called. He had been informed that the advent of Bolshevism would result in some years of misery and chaos, and that these would be followed by universal peace, prosperity, and happiness. Freud added: "I told him I believed the first half."' Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. Volume 3, The Last Phase 1919-1939 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 17. Alfred Ernest Jones (1879-1958), British psychoanalyst, was a close associate of Freud and the founder (1919) and president (1919-^iO) of the British Psychoanalytic Society. 6 In chapter 14 of Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, vol. 1, called 'Self-Analysis/ Jones says of Freud's achievement: 'Once done it is done for ever' (351). 7 Edward Glover (1888-1972). His work includes, in addition to Freud or Jung (1950), The Dangers of Being Human (1936), On the Early Development of Mind (1956), and Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (1956). 8 Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), German philosopher, was Heidegger's assistant (1928-32), member of the Frankfurt School after 1932, taught mostly in America, and was popular with student activists in the 1960s. His work, in addition to Eros and Civilization (1951), includes Reason and Revolution (1941), One Dimensional Man (1964), and Counter-Revolution and Revolt (1972). 9 Grant is probably referring to Marcuse and perhaps Wilhelm Reich. Later the advocacy of liberation through polymorphous sexuality was taken up by Norman Oliver Brown (1913- ). See, for example, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959), and Love's Body (1966). 10 From an American song by Walter Donaldson about troops returning from France after the First World War.

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11 For Hegel's discussion of philosophy belonging to its own epoch see T.M. Knox and A.V. Miller, eds, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philos-

ophy: G.W.F. Hegel, trans. Knox and Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985), chapt. II, sect. B, part (c), 'A Philosophy Belongs to Its Own Time/ 49ff. 'The individual is a son of his people, of his world. He may give himself airs as he likes but he does not transcend his time since he belongs to the one universal spirit which is his substance and essence; how could he escape from this? It is this same universal spirit which is grasped by philosophy in thought; philosophy is this spirit's thought of itself and so is its specific and substantive content' (49-50). 12 Grant is of course referring to Max Weber's influential book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, brought to English readers in the translation by Talcott Parsons. Max Weber (1864-1920), German sociologist and philosopher, taught in Berlin, Freiburg, Heidelberg, and Munich. 13 Charles Gore (1853-1932), Anglo-Catholic bishop and theologian, delivered the Bampton Lectures (1891), entitled The Incarnation of the Son of God, in which he argued primarily for the divinity of Christ. He had earlier edited and published a controversial collection of essays called Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (1889). Gore argued that bib-

lical inspiration had to be kept in context with the rest of the Holy Spirit's work in the Church. Gore later was Bishop of Worcester (1901), Birmingham (1904), and Oxford (1911-19). 14 See note 1 for Foster's articles in Mind. 15 Jeremy Bentham (see note 11 in 'Plato and Popper,' 91) was leader of the Philosophical Radicals, which included James Mill (1773-1836) and his son John Stuart Mill (1806-73). 16 Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), English chemist, philosopher, and dissenting Presbyterian minister wrote Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777) and Socrates and jesus Compared (1803). 17 Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95). See note 6 in 'Jean-Paul Sartre.' 136. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), social philosopher later called a 'social Darwinist/ attempted to apply the theory of evolution (interpreted as the survival of the fittest individuals) to all branches of knowledge. 18 Herbert Stanley Morrison, Baron Morrison of Lambeth (created a life peer in 1959) (1888-1965) helped to found the London Labour Party and became its secretary in 1915. He was in Winston Churchill's cabinet and then was a powerful figure in the postwar social revolution. He wrote How London Is Governed (1949) and Government and Parliament (1954). 19 Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902), South African statesman, was born in Bishop's Stortford, where his father was vicar. John Ruskin (1819-1900), English art critic and social thinker, gave his

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own account of 'Ruskinian justice' in his short work Unto This Last (1885). 20 Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), English poet, short-story writer, and novelist, was known among his generation at the turn of the century as the 'Poet of Empire.' His early poems were collected as Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892). His short-story collections, mostly about warfare and empire, include Life's Handicap (1891), Many Inventions (1893), Traffics and Discoveries (1904), and A Diversity of Creatures (1917). 21 William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook (1879-1964), Canadianborn British newspaper magnate and politician. 22 Carl Schurz (1829-1906), German-born American statesman and journalist. He joined the revolutionary movement of 1849 and in America from 1852 he was a politician, lecturer, major general in the Civil War, journalist, senator (1869-75), and secretary of the interior (1877-81). 23 Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), just before he died, wrote: 'Science isn't everything, but science is very beautful.' In 1963 he sent to The Christian Century (a magazine) a list of the books that most shaped his vocational attitude: Les Fleurs du Mai by Charles Baudelaire, The Bhagavad-Gita, Collected Works by Bernhard Riemann, Theaetetus by Plato, L'education sentimentale by Gustave Flaubert, The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri, The Three Centuries by Bhartihari, The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot, The notebooks of Michael Farraday, and Hamlet by William Shakespeare. See Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster 1995), 578. 24 Horatio Alger - see note 1 in 'Canadian Universities and Protestant Churches' (32). 25 Simone De Beauvoir (1908-86), French novelist and influential feminist, was the lifelong associate of Jean-Paul Sartre and contributed to the 'existentialist' movement of the middle of the twentieth century. See America Day by Day, trans. Patrick Dudlay [pseud.] (London: G. Duckworth 1952). A new version has appeared, translated by Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press 1999). De Beauvoir's work also includes Le deuxieme sexe (1949) and Les mandarins (1954). For Santayana's letter to Logan Pearsall Smith of 2 December 1921, see The Letters of George Santayana, ed. Daniel Cory (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1955), 192-5. 'Imagine a race perfectly adapted to elevated railroads and aeroplanes and submarines, with a regular percentage of a neutral sex to serve as "school-marms," and not the least dissatisfaction with the extremes of weather, the pains of childbirth or toothache (all pains being eliminated) or English as she is spoke by three hundred million Americans! I submit that such a race would be as well worth having and as precious in

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its own eyes (and any other criterion is irrelevant) as ever were the Chinese or the Egyptians or the Jews. And possibly on that basis of perfected material life, a new art and philosophy would grow unawares, not similar to what we call by those names, but having the same relation to the life beneath which art and philosophy amongst us ought to have had, but never have had actually. You see I am content to let the past bury its dead' (194). George Santayana (1863-1952), American-European philosopher, taught at Harvard with William James and then lived and worked in Rome. His work includes Life of Reason (5 vols, 1905-6). Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946), Anglo-American essayist, belonged to a family of Philadelphia Quakers living in England. He work includes Trivia (1917) and Little Essays: Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana (1920). 26 Alfred Charles Kinsey - see note 9 in 'The Uses of Freedom - A Word and Our World' (203). 27 Lever House, completed in 1952, is located in New York City at 390 Park Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets. The Lever Brothers company wanted an office building that would convey an image of sparkling cleanliness and modernity. The 24-storey tower is covered in a glass skin that conceals its internal structure. It set the standard for postwar office building in the United States. 28 Grant loved the novels of Henry James (1843-1916), especially The Wings of The Dove and The Aspern Papers. James wrote about Emerson in chapter 4 of his study on Hawthorne, called 'Brook Farm and Concord.' See Henry James, Hawthorne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1956), 67-8. 29 T.M. Knox, ed., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art by G.W.F. Hegel, vol 1, trans. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975), chap. I11, sect. 3, part (c), 'The End of the Romantic Form of Art,' 602-11. 30 John Dewey - see note 12 in 'Pursuit of an Illusion' (47-8). See especially A Common Faith (1934). 31 Grant often referred to the famous words the devil speaks in Ivan Karamazov's dream. See note 3 in 'Jean-Paul Sartre' (135). 32 The introduction to volume 1 of the Collected Works (xxiii) has an account of Grant's attachment to the language of 'being and not being one's own.' He claimed he learned it from a Scottish cleric, George MacDonald, who said: 'The first principle of hell is "I am my own.'" See C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: Collins 1959), 201. MacDonald's statement is in 'Kingship' in the second series of the Unspoken Sermons, George MacDonald: Creation in Christ, ed. Rolland Hein (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw 1976), 140. 33 Mircea Eliade (1907-86), Romanian historian and philosopher of religion, taught at Chicago (1957-85). The Myth of the Eternal Return (also known as Cosmos and History; New York: Pantheon 1954) was a book of enormous

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importance for Grant during his years at Dalhousie and also the early years at McMaster because it found a principle for separating eastern and western thought. 34 Joseph Raymond McCarthy - see note 6 in 'Adult Education in the Expanding Economy' (109). 35 Charles Wright Mills (1916-62), American sociologist, taught at Columbia (1946-62) and was critical of mainstream American sociology for evading social responsibility. He influenced New Left activists in the 1960s. His work, in addition to The Power Elite (1956), includes White Collar (1951), The Sociological Imagination (1959), and The Marxists (1962). 36 Compare this statement of purpose with the concluding chapter of Philosophy in the Mass Age (379ff.). 37 For the source of this favourite phrase of Grant's, see Henry James's preface to The Aspern Papers (London: Macmillan 1922), v-vi: 'It was in Florence years ago; which is precisely, of the whole matter, what I like most to remember. The air of the old-time Italy invests it, a mixture on the faintest invitation I rejoice again to inhale - and this in spite of the mere cold renewal, ever, of the infirm side of that felicity, the sense, in the whole element, of things too numerous, too deep, too obscure, too strange, or even simply too beautiful, for any ease of intellectual relation.' 38 Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier (1888-1960), British historian, after a career in diplomacy and journalism, taught modern history at Manchester (1931-52). Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-98) taught political philosophy and the history of ideas at Oxford. (See the first part of this chapter for Grant on Berlin.) Sir Karl Popper taught at the London School of Economics 1945-69. (See 'Plato and Popper' [75ff.] for Grant on Popper.) 39 Richard Bevan Braithwaite (1900-90), philosopher of science at Cambridge after 1924. In addition to An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief (1955) his work includes Scientific Explanation (1946) and Theory of Games as a Tool for the Moral Philosopher (1955). 40 The Albigensians were a group of ascetic, anti-clerical, Manichaean Christians during the period from the 11th to the 13th centuries. They were eradicated by the orthodox authorities. They took their name from the town of Albi in south-west France. Guernica is a Basque town in north Spain on the Bay of Biscay. German planes bombed it in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, an event recalled in a famous painting by Picasso. Nagasaki is a city in western Japan. On 9 August 1945 it was the target for the second atomic bomb of the Second World War that killed and wounded 75,000 people and destroyed over one-third of the city.

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41 Grant may be alluding to 'higher immorality/ a phrase used by C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite(1956),a book he had just read. 42 Grant came to a different, negative assessment of Sartre in later years. See the retraction he insisted should be published with his CBC piece 'JeanPaul Sartre' (123ff.). 43 'Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion.' Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenotnenological Ontology, trans.

Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press 1956), 784. 44 Sartre, What Is Literature, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library 1949), 211-13. See 'Jean-Paul Sartre' in this volume (130-1), where Grant quotes this same passage. 45 John Milton, Samson Agonistes, lines 1745-8: All is best tho we oft doubt What th' unsearchable dispose Of Highest Wisdom brings about, And ever best found in the close. 46 Gabriel Marcel (see note 2 in 'Jean-Paul Sartre,' 134-5) argued the modern broken world can be taken ontologically as well as psychologically, whereas Grant believed it was no longer possible in the context of the modern world to assert the primacy of being over thought. Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), English novelist and critic, was educated at Cambridge during the era of G. Lowes Dickinson, G.E. Moore, and G.M. Trevelyan.

Philosophy

This short entry on philosophy in Canada appeared in the 1958 edition and later editions of Encyclopaedia Canadiana.

The teaching of philosophy in English-speaking Canada has no long history and has generally been practised by men from the British Isles. Whatever has been happening in the English and particularly the Scottish universities has been the chief influence in Canadian teaching and writing. The varying problems and systems held by English and Scottish minds at different periods have been those presented to Canadian students as the issues of philosophy. But the Protestant pioneering society that was passing in two generations into the mass society of technology did not generally take the philosophic life with high seriousness. Other more immediate tasks have taken first place in the national life. Organized philosophical teaching in English-speaking Canada dates from the 1850s. Up to that time philosophy was occasionally taught by theologians as an appendix to their theological teaching. In 1850, J. Beaven was appointed professor of metaphysics and ethics in the newly formed University of Toronto.1 In 1862, J.C. Murray was appointed to the chair of mental and moral philosophy at Queen's University.2 These early philosophers seem to have worked within the tradition of the Scottish philosophy of common sense. In 1870 Murray published his Outline of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, an account of the leading metaphysician of that school. This was the first strictly philosophical book written by a man working in Canada. The keen moral preoccupation and empirical starting point of the philosophy of common sense made it easy to bring it into relation with the Protestant theology that was dominant at the time.

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During the second half of the 19th century the dominance of the empirical tradition in Britain was challenged by objective idealism, a school that owed its roots above all to the discovery by certain Englishmen of the genius of Hegel. This change in British philosophy had its effect in Canada. In 1872 John Watson, a well-trained exponent of objective idealism, came to teach at Queen's. For the next two generations Watson was the leading philosopher in Canada and the influence of idealism became paramount. In such books as Kant and His English Critics (1881) and The Philosophy of Kant Explained (1908) Watson

showed himself to be a leading authority on Kant, interpreting that philosopher as a partial expositor of the truth found in its full perfection in Hegel. Like other idealists, Watson gave his teaching a profoundly ethical direction and thought much of the relation between philosophy and theology. At a centre of Presbyterianism he worked hard to bring the traditional Calvinism under the categories of liberal idealism. This effort can be seen in his Gifford Lectures, The Interpretation of Religious Experience. Watson was a thinker of European reputation and he brought to the young country the light of that reputation.3 The idealist tradition was, in fact, strong in philosophical departments right across Canada. It flourished particularly at Dalhousie University under such men as J.G. Schurman and J. Seth.4 Here, too, H.L. Stewart from 1913 to 1949 brought this tradition into the contemporary world, relating it with vigour to his interest in public affairs.5 It was also kept alive over a long period by the influence of J. MacDonald at the University of Alberta and R.C, Lodge at the University of Manitoba.6 It is possible, however, to question how far the idealist tradition in philosophy has influenced Canadian life in any significant way that transcends the direct personal influence of its teachers. Around the turn of the century a change in emphasis occurred in Canadian philosophy. In England the long reign of idealism was being questioned by a renewal of empiricism, owing its impetus particularly to the new discoveries in natural science and symbolic logic. Also, after the Civil War, philosophy became more and more a force in American universities, particularly at Harvard. A greater number of Canadians began to pursue their advanced studies in the US. The pragmatism of James, and later of Dewey, began to have an influence on Canadian life, though never to the degree that it did in the US.7 In Canada the development and rapid expansion in the teaching of experimental and theoretical science presented the philosopher with new problems from

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his colleagues and students. In this period the problem that appeared most pressing was not so much the reconciliation of philosophy with theology but the reconciliation of scientific facts and hypotheses with philosophic truth. This change in dominant interest meant that the ethical preoccupation of the idealists gave way to a concentration on epistemology, particularly problems arising from the natural and social sciences. The most prominent figure in the period after the turn of the century was G.S. Brett.8 During his long connection with the University of Toronto from 1908 till his death in 1944 (from 1921 as head of the department), Brett's teaching and writing exercised a great influence on Canadian academic life. His chief writings were concerned with a philosophical and historical account of psychology, but his mind also ranged masterfully in showing the interdependence of philosophy, science, and art in the living culture of mankind. In a broad and not easily categorized way, Brett was a philosopher of Western civilization, illuminating many passages in its long history by his acute intelligence. Brett built up at Toronto a large and varied department of philosophy, so that today Toronto is the centre of English philosophic teaching in Canada, particularly at the doctorate level. The emphasis in the department, under Brett and his successor, F.H. Anderson, has been on the scholarly activity of intellectual history.9 All the varying traditions of classical and European philosophy are investigated, expounded, and analysed. A series of able works on the philosophers of the great tradition has come from the members of this department. Such a tradition of sound scholarship leads students and teachers to a catholic view of the world, which scorns immature system-building and prevents men from closing their eyes to what they do not care to understand. It has prevented Canadian philosophy from being dominated by the linguistic emphasis that characterizes contemporary English and American thought. Its main danger of inadequacy, perhaps, is that academic philosophers may be led to confine themselves to history and to living in silence before the urgent present of society. Philosophy has played a role of great importance in French Canada, a society whose forms have been chiefly shaped by the Roman Catholic Church. The control of education in Quebec by that institution has meant that the spiritual end of education has not been forgotten, and its universities have not become mere purveyors of a technology

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tinged with culture. The Church has always maintained its ancient trust in the activities of speculative reason for certain carefully chosen of its members and has held in close unity the study of philosophy and theology. Particularly since Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris it has been the duty of the universities and colleges of French Canada to school the best of their society in the method, doctrine, and principles of St Thomas Aquinas.10 This has not meant that other philosophers are neglected but that they are judged against the truth, as found for Roman Catholics in the system of St Thomas, with its synthesis of natural and revealed truth. Today, Laval University in Quebec City has become a renewed centre of scholastic philosophy under the leadership of Dean C. de Koninck.11 A notable contribution of Laval has been the establishment of the bilingual journal Laval theologique et philosophique. At the University of Montreal the Faculty of Philosophy under the Rev. Dean L.M. Regis now includes an Institute of Medieval Studies.12 The practice of scholastic philosophy has also achieved solid status in the Roman Catholic community outside French Canada. It would probably be true to say that philosophy in Canada has played a more formative role in the Roman Catholic community than in others; there the contemplative life has been encouraged as necessary for the community and noble in itself. References. Irving, J.A., and others, Philosophy in Canada: A Symposium,

University of Toronto Press, 1952; Phelan, G.B., The Teaching of Philosophy in Non-Catholic Universities in Canada.' Revue Dominicaine, 1933; Koninck, C. de, 'La philosophie au Canada de langue franchise/ Royal Commission Studies, Ottawa, 1951. George P. Grant

Notes 1 James Beaven (1801-75), Anglican clergyman and philosophy professor, arrived at King's College, Toronto, in 1843 before it was secularized and became the non-denominational University of Toronto in 1850. He published the first philosophical work written in English Canada, Elements of Natural Theology (1850).

304 Philosophy - Encyclopaedia Canadiana 2 John Clark Murray (1836-1917), after teaching philosophy at Queen's for ten years (1862-72), accepted a position at McGill, where he remained until retirement in 1903. In addition to Outline of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, his work includes A Handbook of Psychology (1885), A Handbook of Christian Ethics (1891), An Introduction to Ethics (1891), and Introduction to Psychology (1904). 3 John Watson - see note 2 in 'Philosophy' (20). 4 Jacob Gould Schurman (1854-1942), Canadian and American Idealist, taught at Acadia (1880), Dalhousie (1882), and Cornell (1885). His works include Kantian Ethics and The Ethics of Evolution (1881) and The Ethical Import of Darwin (1887). James Seth collaborated with Schurman in producing the journal Philosophical Review. 5 Herbert Leslie Stewart (1882-1953) was known for his radio broadcasts on public affairs on the national CBC. His writings include Questions of the Day in Philosophy and Psychology (1912), A Century of Anglo-Catholicism (1929), and Modernism Past and Present (1932). He founded the Dalhousie Review in 1921. Grant succeeded him as head of philosophy at Dalhousie. 6 John Macdonald graduated from Edinburgh in 1911 and arrived at the University of Alberta in 1921. He published Mind, School, and Civilization: The Expanding Community (1944) on the philosophy of education. Rupert Clendon Lodge (1886-1961), eclectic pluralist British Canadian scholar, taught at the University of Manitoba (1920-47). He wrote on ethics, business, and education. 7 William James - see note 2 in 'Philosophy and Adult Education' (73). John Dewey - see note 12 in 'Pursuit of an Illusion' (47-8). 8 George Sidney Brett - see note 3 in 'Philosophy' (20-1). 9 Fulton Anderson - see the discussion of Grant's encounters with Professor Anderson, along with note 11, in 'Introduction to Volume 2:1951-1960' (xxii-xxvii, xxxv). 10 Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) promulgated Aeterni Patris, 'On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy,' on 4 August 1879. 11 Charles De Koninck (1892-1965), was a Belgian Canadian Aristotelian philosopher who arrived at Laval in 1934 and was dean of the Faculte de Philosophie 1939-56. His work includes Le cosmos (1936) and De la primaute du bien commun contre les personalistes: Le principe de Vordre nouveau (1943). 12 Father Louis-Marie Regis (1903-88) was a prolific Catholic philosopher known in English circles as well as French who taught at Ottawa as well as Montreal. His works include St Thomas and Epistemology (1946) and Epislemology (1959).

The Humanities in Soviet Higher Education

This radio typescript, headed 'Post-news Talk,' was found with Grant's papers. The text indicates it was broadcast in 1958, one year after the launching of Sputnik.1 It does not appear in the CBC's records, but it was probably prepared for a national audience on the program Commentary, broadcast after the six o'clock news.

The University of Toronto Quarterly devotes the whole of its present number to an account of the 'The Humanities in Soviet Higher Education.' The issue is made up of accounts by Soviet academics of the study and teaching of all the great humane subjects in their society. A list of the studies discussed is worth hearing because it shows the broad treatment of the matter: foreign languages; Russian language and literature; history; archaeology; the philosophical sciences; political economy; music; theatrical arts; art and an account of scholarly publishing in all these fields. The reasons why this issue of the Quarterly was given over to this discussion is very well expressed by the editor himself. As he writes: When the Russians launched their first Sputnik a year ago they dramatically called the attention of the West to their educational system. Many of us had previously turned a blind or at the least a sceptical eye to the remarkable changes which a few experts told us were transforming Russian education but at once we started to clamour that we, too, must immediately copy what seemed to be the secret of the Russians' success, the mass production of technologists. As the furore caused by the Sputnik began to die down we were able to hear the warnings given by people who might reasonably be expected

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to know the facts, that the Russians' achievements in science were not due to a more or less mechanical reproduction of technologists, but to the thoroughness of the whole educational system, which was devoted to the preparing of highly trained minds in all the true disciplines ... [We therefore] decided to find out from Russians, engaged themselves in teaching or administrating the humanities in institutions of higher learning, something about their aims and methods, in the hope that such information would correct the dangerous impression that the whole weight of the system was directed to sustaining technology and would contribute something to a greater understanding of the modern Russian, the product of that system.2 Here are a few inadequate comments on this number and the very important questions it deals with. The first thing to do is to congratulate the University of Toronto and the editor of its quarterly on having got this important job done and having got the right people to do it the Soviet academics themselves. There are or should be in North America a large number of responsible people very much concerned with knowing about education in the Soviet Union both so that they can judge Soviet society fairly and also to compare it with our own educational processes. But the question always is to get information without becoming an expert, and to get information which is more than the extravagant rhetoric, pro or even more, contra, which has plagued writing about the Soviet Union particularly in the years of the cold war. This number, brought out under the impeccable auspices of a great university, is just the kind of information so many of us have needed. It starts neither with the premise of fear and hate or the premise of worship, but that of inquiry. Before Sputnik and even more after it, I have heard the wildest analogies drawn between Soviet and Canadian education and often by people in positions of serious responsibility for our educational system. The worst thing about these analogies was that they often depended on misrepresenting what was happening in the Soviet Union. If this issue is read it should limit this kind of nonsense; and that cannot but be good. Secondly, to state a rather obvious truism: it is indubitable from these articles that what is going on in humane education in the Soviet Union is serious and important study. This is not to say that it is easy to

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know what is going on even from an account such as this - so different are we in tradition and ideology - but we can certainly tell enough to know that it is a carefully defined and carefully administered undertaking. Of course any educated person should have known this without evidence. Soviet Marxism is a well thought out humanist faith which obviously takes education seriously. But what should be known can easily become blurred by misrepresentation. These articles make it clear by evidence; here is a serious programme in consistency with the ends of Soviet humanism. It is serious both in depth of content and rigour. The students are, for instance, indubitably made to submit themselves to the rigour proper to these disciplines. The word 'humanities' is used so often in popular North American rhetoric as if it meant little more than the implanting of a vague and external culture: to read a little poetry and to know a few popular myths about the history of the world. The intense rigour and work necessary to a proper literary, historical, or philosophical education is often quite discounted. It is clear that it is not forgotten in the official work done in the Soviet Union. The curricula, in all the subjects discussed here, make obvious that those who take degrees have submitted themselves to the rigour implicit in these subjects. Indeed it is also obvious from these articles that in a collective culture such as Russia, it is continually brought home to the educated man that the fruits of culture must be mediated throughout the whole society, but this does not mean that the media-

tors should themselves be sloppily educated.

As far as the studies themselves go, my impression is that the three most obvious places where they are ahead of us are music, the theatrical arts, and archaeology. In music, they simply leave us at the post. To me the great hiatus in their studies is the small interest taken in classical civilization. It seems to me the answer to this is clear. Those few of us who consider the study of the Greeks of such importance do so because in their greatest geniuses the pure desire to know is so wonderfully present. But of course central to Marxism is the attack on the pure desire to know as reactionary and uncharitable. Indeed in my opinion Marx made the subtlest of all attacks on the idea of theory isolated from practice. Because of this, studies in the Soviet Union are explicitly and on philosophical grounds directed to a practical end. One advantage of this over our education is that whereas with us the

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pure desire to know is given lip service but ridiculed in practice, with them it is denied with explicit honesty. Philosophy, for instance, is defined in this number of the Quarterly quite outside such a concept as the pure desire to know. This leads me to my last comment about these articles; a comment about the method under which they were brought together. In the foreword the editor writes: 'It was decided that the information to be sought should be ... as free from ideological bias as the circumstances could allow.' This seems to me to have been a mistake. How can one write about the aims and the methods of education outside ideological bias? Indeed the very phrase 'ideological bias' is itself part of particular ideology - the liberal empiricist ideology. It implies that the western world has an ideology and the Russians have an ideology and that if we just, as honest men, put these aside for the moment we will come upon the true facts of what is really happening in education. But to repeat, this is itself an ideological assumption of our bourgeois world and, as Marx himself so brilliantly explained, the central weakness of liberalism. Surely in education above all there are no facts outside ideology; ideology and facts are here in their closest unity. To assume anything else is to put the Marxists out of court from the beginning; it is to admit a necessary relation between free enterprise and the freedom of the spirit. Of course the Soviet writers did not stay within what was asked of them - how could they? That they do not is particularly clear in the articles on history, political economy, and the philosophical sciences. But perhaps why these articles give such a flat impression - the impression that one is not getting at the living process as it takes place in Russia - is that out of good manners they tried to stay within it and the resulting tension produced an unconvincing account of what they are doing. Perhaps I am wrong here - perhaps this empiricist starting point was the best, in the sense that although the division between ideology and facts leaves any educational system ultimately incomprehensible, this was still the best way that Canadian readers could be got to make anything of the Soviet system. Perhaps also the University of

Toronto Quarterly intends to pass beyond the empirical in a later discussion of these questions. Certainly I must end by emphasizing what a fine beginning this is and how much we are in debt to the editor for all

thecarefultroublehehastakentodoanimportantjobwell.

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Notes 1 The launching of Sputnik, the first satellite, into orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 inaugurated the Space Age and is generally credited with spurring the dormant USA space program into action and starting a North American movement to strengthen scientific and technological education. 2 The University of Toronto Quarterly 28/1 (1958), entitled 'The Humanities in Soviet Higher Education/ was edited by Professor Douglas Grant.

Philosophy in the Mass Age

Philosophy in the Mass Age is Grant's first book. It was published by Copp Clark, Toronto (1959), and Hill and Wang, New York (1960). The chapters had been delivered as a series of nine talks on CBC Radio for the series University of the Air, and were edited for the book version. See the introduction to this volume for a discussion of the significance of this work published at the end of Grant's decade at Dalhousie. A second edition was published without the original preface and 'with a new Introduction' by Copp Clark in 1966. Finally, a third edition appeared in 1995, edited by William Christian. It contains passages from the original broadcasts that had been taken out of earlier editions along with Grant's final broadcast in which he responded to some of his listeners. The editors have chosen the second edition as copy-text since it was the last version approved by Grant himself, but we are including the original preface along with the new introduction and also including the final broadcast in an appendix. Chapter 5 on Marxism also appears in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 229-37.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface to the First Edition 1 Philosophy in the Mass Society 2 The Mythic and Modern Consciousness 3 Natural Law 4 History as Progress 5 Marxism 6 The Limits of Progress

Philosophy in the Mass Age 311 7 American Morality 8 Law, Freedom, and Progress Appendix 1 Dr Grant Answers Questions Raised in Letters from Listeners Appendix 2 Introduction to the 1966 edition PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION BY GEORGE GRANT The following essays were originally spoken as an introduction to moral philosophy for a general radio audience. They must therefore be read in that light. Their introductory character means that they are in no sense a systematic treatise on moral philosophy. This must be stated explicitly because of the belief widely prevalent in North America that moral issues do not require much reflection (let alone systematic reflection) and that therefore the good life is in no way dependent upon sustained philosophical thought. Moral truth is considered to be a few loosely defined platitudes that any man of common sense can grasp easily without the discipline of reflection. The result is that moral philosophy has come to be identified with vague uplift. I would not wish that the popular form of these essays should do anything to encourage such nonsense. They are simply an introduction, intended to encourage further study. The essays are also limited by their historical approach. I have tried to describe briefly some of the more important aspects of tradition that go to make up modern thinking on this subject. The danger of approaching moral philosophy via history is that some readers may believe that a relativism is thereby implied; that because different people at different times have made differing moral judgments, there are no true judgments that can be made in this field. No such implication can properly be drawn from what follows. I believe there is such a study as moral judgments. I have used an historical approach despite its dangers because any by-passing of history inclines to even greater dangers. Any non-historical approach may tend towards an easy dogmatism. If one were to introduce moral philosophy by analysing its concepts outside any historical perspective, one would be apt to make certain assumptions that might not be clear either to oneself or one's

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readers. For instance, most contemporary English writers on ethics analyse ethical concepts with great clarity and precision, but within the assumptions of the educated liberalism they hold dear. These liberal assumptions may be true but are not immediately self-evident. Many educated men have denied them and given careful reasons for that denial. To start from history may free us from this kind of dogmatism, be it liberal or of some other form. It can help us to know that certain truths we hope to be self-evident may be only the passing assumptions of a particular race or class. It is indeed true that philosophy stands or falls by its claim to transcend history, but that transcending can only be authentic when it has passed through the forge of historical discipline. It is for this reason that I have introduced moral philosophy historically and socially. Lastly, and most important, it will be clear that I have assumed from the first sentence of these essays that there is such a study as moral philosophy, and that by reflection we can come to make true judgments as to how we ought to act. It will seem strange to those who know something of modern philosophy that at no point do I discuss this assumption, although it is generally denied throughout the sophisticated philosophical circles of the English-speaking world. For instance, the very distinction between the words 'ethics' and 'morals/ which is widely accepted in those circles, implies the denial of the assumption that I make throughout these essays. Within this distinction, 'morals' is the word applied to the whole sphere of actions that men call right and wrong. 'Ethics' is the analysis of the language of morals. The assumption is made that philosophers qua philosophers are concerned with ethics not with morals. The philosopher is concerned with using language systematically in this area of life; he is not concerned with knowing what it is to act rightly. This last activity (if it exists at all) is not the vocation of the philosopher, but of the priest or prophet. This position is not only popular among modern philosophers but is one of the most important assumptions of our educated middle-class world. In what follows I do not make this assumption. I would assert that philosophic reflection can lead us to make true judgments about right action. Contemplation can teach us the knowledge of God's law. But in what follows I make no effort to argue directly this view of the relation between reflection and action, to justify the existence of moral philoso-

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phy. To do so would require a technical and systematic exposition that could only be addressed to persons already thoroughly conversant with the philosophic tradition. It would be out of place as an introduction to moral philosophy to a general audience; it is wrong to spend the whole time proving that there is such a study. It has always seemed to me a source of amusement as well as regret that at our leading English-speaking universities, the professors of moral philosophy spend their time proving that there is really no such subject for them to profess. As married people will understand, anything true in what follows comes from my wife. G.P. Grant, Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 1959

CHAPTER 1: PHILOSOPHY IN THE MASS SOCIETY Whereas animals live by instinct and therefore do what they do directly, we can decide between alternatives, and this choice is possible because we can reflect on how we are going to act. We can formulate general rules or principles that serve as guides among the innumerable possibilities open to us and that give some degree of consistency to our lives as a whole. Thus men who make the pursuit of wealth the chief activity of their lives have, at least to some degree, formulated the principle that all their actions will be as much as possible subordinated to that end. But also we know that how we do live is not always how we ought to live. It therefore becomes of supreme importance that we think deeply as to what are the right principles by which we should direct our lives. Through the ages the thinking about such principles has been called 'moral philosophy.' Morality is the whole sphere of actions to which we can apply the categories right and wrong. Moral philosophy is the attempt by reflection to make true judgments as to whether actions are right or wrong. The making of such judgments requires knowledge of the principles of right, and knowledge to apply those principles to our particular situation. The process of thinking through our lives in this way is of course something that each person can only do for himself. As Luther once said, 'A man must do his own believing as he must do his own dying.'

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There is, however, value in discourse on the subject, particularly in considering what men have thought about these matters through the ages. Our minds are not separate, and we move towards the truth only as we are willing to learn from the full weight of what the thought of the past and the present have to tell us. Humanity has been called an inherited deposit, and we only become fully human as we make that deposit our own. The historical situation of the West, and of Canadians in particular, calls for the frankest and most critical look at the principles of right in which we put our trust. The world situation has been described so often: the existence of two rival power blocks both with instruments of total destruction, and the living in an age when we have launched on the conquest of space aided by our new technological mastery. In political and pulpit rhetoric, we hear repeated over and over that our conquest of nature has taken us to the point where we can destroy the human race. This is, indeed, an obvious cliche, but still true. Not only this world picture makes our situation new, but also the very texture of our North American society.a On this continent the modern mass age has arrived as to no other people in the world. North America is the only society that has no history of its own before the age of progress, and we have built here the society that incarnates more than any other the values and principles of the age of progress. Inevitably, other cultures are moving in the same direction. In 1957 it became obvious to the world how fast the Soviet Union was moving towards the scientific society.1 There, a people, scientifically backward forty years ago, have so concentrated their efforts, under the direction of a great philosophic faith, Marxism, that they have caught up with and in certain fields surpassed our society with its much deeper rational and scientific traditions. So far, however, modern scientific civilization has been most extensively realized in North America. Ours is the world of mass production and its techniques, of standardized consumption and standardized education, of wholesale entertainment and almost wholesale medicine. We are formed by this new environment at all the moments of our work and leisure - that is, in our total lives. a In speaking of North American society, I do not wish to imply that there is no difference between Canada and the United States. I am a firm believer in the idea of British North America. But, for the present purposes, there is no need to make that distinction.

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This world finds its chief creative centre in the Great Lakes region of North America, and spreads out from there as the dominant pattern of culture which shapes the rest of the continent. The Canadian heart of it is that vast metropolis that expands along the shores of Lake Ontario, with the old city of Toronto as its heart. It is the society of the continental chain stores and the automobile empires - the agents of which spread their culture through the rest of Canada. I, for instance, live in a little peninsula on the fringes of Canada, which two generations ago had a rather simple but intelligible agricultural, commercial, and military culture of its own. Even in the ten short years I have lived in Halifax, I have watched with amazement the speed with which the corporation empires have taken over this old culture and made it their own. This culture of monolithic capitalism creates the very fabric of all our lives. Two characteristics above all distinguish this culture from others that have existed. First, it is scientific; it concentrates on the domination of man over nature through knowledge and its application. This dominance of man over nature means that we can satisfy more human needs with less work than ever before in history. This characteristic of our society is generally recognized. What is less often recognized is that this society, like all others, is more than simply an expression of the relationship of man to nature; it also exemplifies a particular relationship of man to man, namely, some men's dominance over other men. All our institutions express the way in which one lot of men dedicated to certain ends impose their dominance over other men. Our society is above all the expression of the dominance that the large-scale capitalist exerts over all other persons. And what makes our modern society something new in history is the new ways that these concentrated economic, political, and military elites have of imposing social dominance over the individual. The paradox indeed is this: so great is the power that society can exert against the individual that it even subjects to dominance those very elites who seem to rule. Thus at this stage of industrial civilization, rule becomes ever more impersonal, something outside the grip of any individual. We can say, then, that ours is the society of late state capitalism. This new society and its intimate shaping of our lives presents to us in a particularly pressing way the need for moral philosophy. I do not mean by this anything so childish as that we can think simply about

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what in this culture we should accept and what reject. Individuals are not in a position where they can accept and reject their culture in this simple way and shape history by such choices alone. We cannot choose to be independent of the forces that make our mass culture far too profound simply to be thought away. The belief that the forms of society can be easily changed by our choices is a relic of the faith in liberalism, and as limited as most of that liberal faith. Philosophical faith is something rather different. Its hope is more indirect. As we live in these conditions of mass culture, we come to recognize them as profoundly new and this newness forces us to try to understand what they mean. We ask what it is that man has created in this new society. And as we try to see what we are, there arises an ultimate question about human nature and destiny. And such questions are what philosophy is. What I mean by philosophy arising out of such a situation is that so totally new is our situation in history, that we are driven to try and redefine the meaning of human history itself - the meaning of our own lives and of all lives in general. The fixed points of meaning have so disappeared that we must seek to redefine what our fixed points of meaning are. From this reassessment the shaping of our society will ultimately proceed. The most remarkable of modern philosophers, Hegel, expressed this by saying, 'The owl of Minerva only takes its flight at twilight.'2 What he means is that human beings only pursue philosophy, a rigorous and consistent attempt to think the meaning of existence, when an old system of meaning is coming to the end of its day. He does not imply in the remark any ultimate pessimism, for pessimism is by definition always vain. He does not imply that philosophy only arises when it is too late. Too late for what? What he means is that we take thought about the meaning of our lives when an old system of meaning has disappeared with an old society, and when we recognize that the new society that is coming to be raises new questions that cannot be understood within the old system. It is certain that in Canada our old systems of meaning, which suited the world of a pioneering, agricultural society with small commercial centres, have disappeared with the world they suited. And the more that people live in the new mass society, the more they are aware that the old systems of meaning no longer hold them, and the less they are able to see any relation between the old faiths and the practical

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business of living. For instance, the firm old Protestantism with its clear appeal to the Bible as the source of meaning, honestly and directly held the large part of English-speaking Canada a hundred years ago. It no longer does so. The mass of people no longer find in it that unambiguous meaning within which they can live their lives. This is truer than it was a generation ago; it is truer this year than it was last year. How many of the old-type, firm, and unequivocal Protestants can be found, outside certain rural areas and apart from the older generation? Of the Roman Catholic tradition I know much less, nor do I know how much certainty its members find in its ancient wisdom. It has always been a minority tradition in North American society, outside French-speaking Canada. And I, for one, am certain that a people who have passed through Protestantism can never go back to a traditional Catholicism.17 I am not here concerned with the truth or falsity of Christianity nor with the question of what loyalty men should grant to established religious organizations. To say that a particular system of meaning that arose from a particular form of Christianity no longer holds men's minds is not to identify Christianity with that particular form and therefore to brand it as inadequate. What Jesus Christ did is not ultimately dependent on its interpretations. What I am saying is simply that we cannot rest in old systems of meaning. Always in human history at periods of great change, when in that change the most sensitive feel the most deeply insecure, there has been the tendency to seek an answer to that insecurity by turning to the certainties of the past. Therapies that turn back the wheel of history are proposed as remedies for that insecurity. Such reactionary experiments are always vain. In a period when meaning has become obscure, or to use other language, when God seems absent, the search must be for a new authentic meaning that includes within itself the new conditions that make that search necessary. It must be a philosophical and theological search. Yet, as soon as we have admitted the need for that search, we must admit that our very society exerts a terrible pressure to hold us from that search. Every instrument of mass culture is a pressure alienating b Such a statement is, of course, dependent on the supposition that the Roman Catholic Church will never take into itself the truth of freedom which Protestantism knows.

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the individual from himself as a free being. In late capitalism the individual finds more and more that responsibility for his own life lies not with himself but with the whole system. Work is after all a necessity for civilization and work is always organized in an economic apparatus. And our economic apparatus is increasingly rationalized: work is more and more divided into specialized functions. In this situation the individual becomes (whether on the assembly line, in the office, or in the department store) an object to be administered by scientific efficiency experts. The human being is made to feel that he can best get along if he adjusts his attitudes to suit the collective institutions that dominate his life. Most of us know the power of these collective institutions and what they do to a person who will not conform to their demands. This is not only true of our work but of our leisure. Modern culture, through the movies, newspapers, and television, through commercialized recreation and popular advertising, forces the individual into the service of the capitalist system around him. As has been said so often, in the popular television programs the American entertainment industry reproduces the hackneyed scenes of family life as the source of amusement. The American family (though made more prosperous than the ordinary family so that the acquisitive desire will be aroused) is described and exalted in its life, which is so perfectly adjusted to the world of life insurance, teenage dating, and the supermarket. This, of course, glorifies our society as it is. Here is the way all decent Americans live and here is the way all mankind should live. And this exaltation helps to entrap us in the very reality described, helps us to accept our world and its system. Entertainment is used to keep people happy by identifying life as it is with life as it ought to be. Art is used to enfold us in the acceptance of what we are, not as the instrument of a truth beyond us. In the same way, religion is no longer an appeal to the transcendent and the infinite potentiality of the spirit. It is valued as something that holds society together and helps to adjust the individual to accept the organization as it is. The fact that a reliable member of society is seen as a church-goer becomes a motive for church attendance. Advertisements are put out: Take your children to church and make them good citizens.' The ideal minister is the active democratic organizer who keeps the church running as a home of social cohesion and 'positive thinking.'3 Thus even the church is brought to serve the interests of the

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apparatus persuading the individual into conformity with its ends. All this, of course, makes it difficult for the individual in our society to see any point to that rational reassessment of life that I have called moral philosophy. The very system exerts pressure at every point against such an assessment. What must be stressed in this connection is that reason itself is thought of simply as an instrument. It is to be used for the control of nature and the adjustment of the masses to what is required of them by the commercial society. This instrumentalist view of reason is itself one of the chief influences in making our society what it is; but, equally, our society increasingly forces on its members this view of reason. It is impossible to say which comes first, this idea of reason or the mass society. They are interdependent. Thought that does not serve the interests of the economic apparatus or some established group in society is sneered at as 'academic' The old idea that 'the truth shall make you free/ that is, the view of reason as the way in which we discover the meaning of our lives and make that meaning our own, has almost entirely disappeared. In place of it we have substituted the idea of reason as a subjective tool, helping us in production, in the guidance of the masses, and in the maintenance of our power against rival empires. People educate themselves to get dominance over nature and over other men. Thus, scientific reason is what we mean by reason. This is why in the human field, reason comes ever more to be thought of as social science, particularly psychology in its practical sense. We study practical psychology in order to learn how other people's minds work so that we can control them, and this study of psychology comes less and less to serve its proper end, which is individual therapy. This view of reason has found its most popular formulation in North America, in the philosophy known as pragmatism, famous in the writings of William James and John Dewey.4 This is not surprising, for it is in North America that control over nature and social adjustment has reached its most explicit development. Later on I wish to speak of pragmatism in detail as an important modern philosophy. At the moment I simply wish to emphasize that this philosophy, with its view of reason as an instrument, mirrors the actual life of our continent, in which individual freedom is subordinate to conformity. Such an account of reason goes so deep into the modern consciousness that any other account is very difficult for a modern man to understand at all. Therefore, only by constant and relentless reflection

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on this modern idea can we hope to liberate ourselves from the naive acceptance of it. Yet obviously the philosophic enterprise is only possible insofar as we have liberated ourselves from this view of reason. Yet, as soon as one has considered the obstacles that society puts in the way of philosophic thought, one must assert the opposite, and express optimism about the possibility of philosophy in our society. Whatever else the industrial civilization may have done, it has eliminated the excuse of scarcity. Always before in history, the mass of men had to give most of their energy to sheer, hard work because of the fact of scarcity. The conquest of nature by man through technology means human energy is liberated to attain objectives beyond those practically necessary. As this becomes ever more realized, vast numbers of men are able to devote their time to the free play of their individual faculties. The constraints once justified by the fact of scarcity can no longer in North America be justified on those grounds. Always before in history, if some few men were to be able to pursue the life of philosophy, it depended on the labour of others, who because of that labour, were themselves removed from the possibility of the philosophic life. The ideal of human freedom the philosophers held up was always denied by their dependence upon the work of others. Such a contradiction becomes increasingly unnecessary. Reason, considered as domination over nature, has freed man from his enslavement to nature so that it is open to him to pursue the life of reason as more than simply domination. The world of mass production and consumption and the idea of social equality makes this possible. Whatever we may say against our society, we must never forget that. Indeed, just as our industrial civilization creates the conditions of repression, it also creates the natural conditions of universal liberation: not only in the economic sense that people who are free from the necessity of hard work have the leisure to pursue ends beyond the practical, but also in the sense that an industrial society breaks down the old natural forms of human existence in which people traditionally found the meaning for their lives. In such a situation many persons are driven by the absence of these traditional forms to seek a meaning that will be their own. Anybody who sees much of the young people of our big cities will know what I mean. They are freed from the pressing demands of scarcity at the same time as they are freed from the old framework of

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tradition. And this produces in them a state of high self-consciousness; they are immensely open to both good and evil. This does not mean simply that the end of scarcity makes possible a high level of selfconsciousness to nearly all classes in society. A more subtle process is implied. However much the repressive elements of late industrial society may lie on us like chains, this very society is a fruit of the civilization of Europe: the civilization of rational theology, of the Reformation, and of the Enlightenment, a civilization that brought men a knowledge of themselves as free as had no other in the past. And these young people, whether they know it or not, hold in their very being the remnants of that tradition, the knowledge of themselves in their freedom, even if much else from that tradition has never been theirs. Thus knowing themselves as free, they know their freedom as standing against the pressures of the society that bind them in an impersonal grip. In such a society the best of them are open to the philosophic life with an intensity worthy of the greatest periods of human thought. How this happens is concretely expressed in the novels of J.D. Salinger. In the New Yorker of May 1956, Salinger had a story called 'Zooey,' which describes just such people.5 One finds them among the youth wherever one goes in North America. God reigns and the salt cannot lose its savour. What is sad about these young people is that our educational institutions cannot be ready to meet their needs. Our educational institutions at all levels are still largely formed by what is most banal in our society. They have lost what was best in the old European education. They are spiritually formed by the narrow practicality of techniques; they are immediately governed by ill-educated capitalists of narrow interest. But this very failure of our educational institutions is part of that alienation that will drive the best of our students to philosophy and theology. And these young people are the evidence that in our society profound philosophical thought is arising. They herald what may yet be, surprisingly, the dawn of the age of reason in North America.

CHAPTER 2: THE MYTHIC AND MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS How we act depends on what we consider life to be about, what we think is going on in human history in general, and in our own lives in

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particular. We do what we ultimately think is worth doing because of our vision of human existence. There is of course a great difference among people in the degree to which their vision is thought out explicitly, and the extent to which it merely lies in the root of their personality dominating their lives half-consciously. Emerson said, 'What you do speaks so loud, I can't hear what you say/ meaning that in our actions we expose the central core of ourselves and that central core is our vision. 'By their fruits you shall know them.'6 It is immensely difficult to become aware of our own world picture, both because it is so deeply assumed as to be almost our very self, and also because at this point the dependence of the individual upon the structures of society is at its most powerful. Individual beliefs as to the nature and destiny of man make, and are made by, the forms of society. The proposition that the individual makes society is as much a halftruth as its converse. It requires, therefore, vigorous acts of intellect and will if the individual is to stand apart and judge what truth there is in his own vision and in the visions of his society. To make a true judgment about a world view is to pass beyond it. And, as the world picture is almost identical with the self, the act of philosophy is not only a continual negation of the self, a continual self-transcendence; it is often, also, a negation of what is most dear to one's own society. An aid in understanding our assumptions is to compare them with those that men have held in other cultures. I therefore will compare modern man's conception of his existence with the vision of the traditional religious cultures. There is a radical gulf between these two visions, and as we define that gulf, we come to understand what modern man does assume, and how these assumptions have not always been necessary. In describing the difference, I must be allowed to use specific and even technical terms, the meaning of which will only be clarified gradually. The most characteristic belief of modern man is that history is consciously and voluntarily made by human beings. This is what I mean by saying that modern man is 'historical' man. He believes that the chief purpose of life is the making of history. This assumption appears so evident that it seems simply a truism. Yet it sharply distinguishes us from the peoples of ancient cultures. They did not believe that human beings make history and therefore did not see themselves as 'historical' men shaping unique events. They saw human life in a quite different

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way. They saw events as the pale shadows of divine realities, the temporal as the mere image of the eternal. Therefore, they did not see themselves as making events but as living out divinely established patterns.0 To give these generalizations any content, it is necessary to state what is meant by ancient man and ancient cultures. The main distinction is between modern scientific culture and all societies that existed before the age of progress, both primitive societies and the ancient civilizations of Europe, Asia, and America. But this second class obviously includes immense differences. There is clearly a qualitative distinction between the mythic consciousness of early peasant societies and the high ancient civilizations. Another distinction must be made between the ancient civilizations and western European civilization before the age of progress. Though in medieval Europe there is much that seems similar to the old cultures, modern scholarship has amply demonstrated that the foundations of modern scientific culture were already emerging in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so that there was clearly a new element in Europe, absent in the ancient cultures. Yet, as soon as one has distinguished primitive consciousness from the ancient civilizations, it must be remembered that the latter arose from the former, and the old ways continued to exist in the new. In the fine flowering of Greek civilization in the fifth century BC, with all its efforts to transcend the mythic consciousness, one is aware that it is from the primitive culture that this civilization came. It is also necessary to emphasize within these ancient cultures the difference between those whose beliefs were explicit and those who with less self-consciousness continued in their archaic mentality. As in our society, what people believed was not always formulated in clear, theoretical language. It can only be deduced from their behaviour, which is itself a symbol through which we can come to understand what they believed about existence. But we can also see the ancient beliefs, rational and illuminated, in the great philosophers of the c For what follows about archaic man, I must express my profound dependence on the work of Mircea Eliade. See especially his The Myth of the Eternal Return (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd. 1955); Traite d'histoire des religions (Paris 1953); and Images et Symboles (Paris: Gallimard 1952). Professor Eliade seems to me unique among modern scholars of religion not only in his grasp of the facts, but also in his philosophical and theological wisdom.7

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ancient East and West. In the same way, if we look for the fundamental beliefs of modern culture, we can either look for them in the symbols and myths and rites of our age, in the moon-rocket launching sites, in the general appeals to progress, or in the religious rites with which the big three automobile companies annually unveil on television the sacred new models. Or we can see our culture when it is most explicit to itself in its philosophers such as Marx or Sartre, or at a slightly less explicit level in such thinkers as Freud or Bertrand Russell. As far as we can see, to primitive men all important activities were sacred, that is, they were made holy by religious association. The world of work, of farming and fishing and hunting, the world of leisure, of games and art and sexuality, were, for these people, rituals. A human act had meaning insofar as it was thought of as repeating or participating in some divine act that had been performed by a god in the golden age of the past, and which was given to men in myth. Thus, for instance, the act of sacrifice exactly reproduces that original act of sacrifice performed in the golden age by some god, and the particular act is meaningful to the individual because it repeats the initial archetypal sacrifice. By archetype is meant the original divine model of which all human acts are copies or imitations. Thus events are filled with the sacred and have their meaning in being so filled. Any actions that could not be given this kind of religious significance were considered profane. For events to be profane, to be unique and individual instead of repetitive and universal, was for them almost to be unreal, for it was the religious element that conferred reality. This is why when we look at primitive men, we can often see them merely as silly and superstitious. Leaving aside for the moment the right of modern man to make such judgments, we can see that these criticisms are generally made because we have no conception of events as hierophanies, that is, of events as the appearance of the sacred, or as theophanies, that is, as the appearance of the divine. And however silly the interpretation of the sacred may be in particular cases, especially in the more primitive cultures, we must recognize that it was through this vision of the world as a place for the appearance of the sacred that ancient men found meaning in their lives. The way, the truth, and the life had been laid down by the divinities in mo tempore. Human action was the recreation of the sacred in the world. It is this that at its highest gives us the sense of rhythm

andharmonythatwefeelinthelivesoftheancientGreeks.

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At a high level of sophistication, this mythic consciousness can be seen in the great Greek plays. A few years ago the Stratford Festival in Ontario produced one of the greatest of these plays, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. What made that production finally unsatisfactory to me was that it failed to catch this spirit of the ancient world. The producer did not seem to understand that Oedipus is living out in his suffering an archetypal pattern and that the particular events and actions of the play are only symbols of that mythic pattern. This failure was perhaps inevitable as the play was produced by modern men and women who judge the meaning of human life quite differently. I ought to say in passing that this example is itself ambiguous, and shows the difficulty of making clear generalizations on this subject. The Greek dramatists may not have held explicit theories as to the archetypal nature of their subject matter. We, on the other hand, have, thanks to Freud, the clearest theoretical recognition of the Oedipus legend as an archetype. This, however, in no way invalidates my central point. In most ancient cultures the prime act of the creation of the world was reproduced every year in the religious ritual of the community. A carry over of this ancient spirit into the modern world is the way that in traditional Christian communions the liturgy follows through and repeats each year the birth, passion, death, and resurrection of Our Lord. Every day the sacrifice of Calvary is reenacted in the mass. And among ancient people, the reproduction of the original, creative divine act was seen as the way they could recreate the eternal in their midst and so overcome the meaninglessness of existence. In this way human beings in endlessly repeated imitative acts brought back the divine into the world. For the ancient man, justice is only the living out in time of a transcendent eternal model of justice. Law, which is the foundation of all communities, is seen first and foremost as that supreme law which preexists both written laws and the state itself. The application of law is not only undertaken for its own sake, nor only for its usefulness to society, but because it mirrors the eternal law. Thus the ancient religious cultures, as their premises became clear and explicit, saw the basis of their moral codes in the doctrine of natural law. In all civilizations up to the last few centuries, it has been in the doctrine of natural law that men came to know what was right and wrong in their actions. An act was right insofar as it was in conformity to the natural law, and wrong insofar as it was not.

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But I must return to the fact of how alien this view of the world is to modern men. In this ancient vision, man gains his reality solely through repetition of and participation in a divine reality. To us who count our personal uniqueness as so important this emphasis must seem very strange. It means that this type of man sees his own life as meaningful only insofar as he ceases to be himself and imitates and repeats the eternal archetypal gestures of the divine, such as the creation of the world and the bringing forth of life. This must seem paradoxical to us. How can a man find meaning simply by not seeing his actions as his own? It can be said that this ancient world view has its most luminous justification in the philosophy of Plato, in which time is considered as the moving image of an unmoving eternity and in which the passing events of life only have meaning as they lead men to the unchanging reality of God. In Plato's account of the last hours of Socrates' life, the supreme calm of the philosopher before his approaching death comes from his knowledge that death will be the completion of his liberation from the shadows and imaginings of the world to the reality beyond change. The prisoner leaps to lose his chains.' In Plato's Phaedo, the image of the prisoner in chains is exquisitely used to unite the two aspects of the dialogue, as an account of Socrates' death and as Plato's theory of eternity.8 Socrates is the very image of salvation to the classical world. 'Philosophy is the practice of dying.' This view of reality has been the basis of the mystical tradition that has flowered in both East and West. In mysticism, men have sought to find their true selves by being united with that which is beyond change. They have believed that they could find themselves by losing themselves in the divine.d When we read Plato's Republic, we can see in the full light of day what the ancient cultures at their highest conceived morality to be. Here the doctrine of natural law is worked out in detail as the very foundation of moral activity. Yet as soon as one has said that Plato gives the fullest justification of the ancient cultures, it must also be stated that his philosophy quite d From the foregoing I do not mean in any way to imply that mysticism is an activity appropriate only to archaic cultures. Mysticism, as an explicit doctrine and practice, has in such moderns as St John of the Cross and Jacob Boehme obviously passed beyond the limits of the archaic.

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transcends the mythic consciousness that was basic to those cultures. Here again Hegel's aphorism about the owl of Minerva is apposite. At the height of Greek civilization, its most remarkable philosopher illuminates the assumptions of that civilization and in doing so passes quite beyond these assumptions. In the Republic the morality and religion of the archaic world as found in Homer and Hesiod is made wonderfully explicit, but it is also most stringently criticized and in that criticism transcended. In Plato's doctrine of the soul and of knowledge, human beings come to know themselves as free, and therefore as finally outside religious myths and images. From the ancient religions of Greece, philosophy takes its origin, but through the rational consciousness, which is philosophy, men find that there is no possibility of resting in the mythic. To say therefore that in Plato we find the noblest justification of mythic religion is true only if we also insist that in his thought its inadequacy is first clearly expressed. When we look at the people of ancient cultures, we surely must often ask ourselves how they bore the terrible vicissitudes of their lives, the enslavements, the famines, and the wars. In the catastrophes of the twentieth century, the outraged and the sensitive have also asked themselves what meaning, if any, the historical process may have. But the calamities of ancient history were in many ways more terrible than ours. Men were more helpless before pain. Yet, when one studies the ancient world, one is conscious of the tremendous meaning men found through all the terror, a meaning that was more than a mere survival value, more than a mere grim courage to bear the worst. What enabled them to achieve this sense of meaning was their assumption that historical time was not really important. They saw it simply as a vehicle through which necessity and the good played out their relation over and over again. Among the less sophisticated, the whole social apparatus of religious ritual and the images and symbols that were closely tied to their everyday world taught them to find the sacred in a vast variety of circumstances. Among the educated the belief that through philosophic knowledge the individual could partake of the divine during his life and eventually move by purification beyond the cycle of time gave purpose in the midst of uncertainty. At this point it can be seen what is meant by calling modern man historical and by contrasting him with ancient peoples. In ancient cultures, men simply refused history. They overcame historical time by

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giving it no significance. For modern, historical man, time is a series of unique and irreversible events. Therefore, what happens in history is of supreme consequence. As it is of such consequence, it is of ultimate importance that we shape those events as they should be shaped. We have taken our fate into our own hands and are determined to make the world as we want it. Man and not God is the maker of history. Unique and irreversible events must be shaped by creative acts of human will. This modern view is evident in the talk we hear these days about the hydrogen bomb and the other weapons of horror. It is said that man now has it in his power to end human history. Therefore it is said that the decisions of leading statesmen are of vast importance, because upon these decisions what happens in human history depends. Human history is considered the be-all and the end-all. But ancient man simply could not have believed this. Time ran its course through an infinite series of cycles. No event is new or unique. It has happened, happens, and will happen again. We can see this at its clearest in the speculations about time of both Greek and Indian philosophers. The most famous example of this belief in the ancient world was the popular idea that Socrates has lived and died, and will live and die an infinite number of times. Events did not happen once and for all. Suffering was therefore never final. The cycles periodically regenerated themselves. Thus, perhaps an ancient man would not be able even to admit the idea with which we are faced - that we can end human history. He could believe that one cycle had reached a low point in its degeneration, but he was certain that it would be regenerated in the endless cycles of time that mirror the eternal present. To repeat, North Americans have no history before the age of progress, and therefore the denial of progress and of history appears especially foreign to us. The idea that we make history and that this is what is important is so completely taken for granted that we hardly think of it, let alone question it. The dominance of this spirit is seen in the activities that are considered most important in North America: those of the engineers, the businessmen, and the administrators. These are the people who are really doing something, because they are changing the world. We see it negatively in the activities that are not considered important: those of the artists, the lovers, the thinkers, and the people of prayer, for these are all activities that do not change the

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world. We see this spirit in the terrible sadness about old age in this continent. The old person is coming to an end of being part of history; he has probably come to an end of his ability to shape history. Old people are no longer good administrative, economic, or sexual instruments. Therefore, old age is more and more seen as an unalleviated disaster, not only by those people who are outside it but by those people who are old themselves. We sometimes treat old people kindly, but we patronize them. We do not see age as that time when the eternal can be most realized, and we therefore pity the aged as coming to the end of historic existence. This historical spirit is of course not absolute in our society. Subtle conglomerations of belief from previous eras still continue to exist, even though we have so strongly broken with our past. In each one of us, beliefs from ancient times and from the Christian era continue to exert their influence both consciously and unconsciously, conflicting with one another and with membership in the modern world. As individuals, we can take seriously activities that are beyond history making. Twenty-five years ago the most popular crooner of the day, Bing Crosby, was singing 'I don't wantta make history, I just wantta make love.' Nevertheless, despite such a qualification, the generalization may be made that insofar as human beings are capable of believing they make history and therefore of living in the historical absolutely, the elites of North America have achieved this state. It is only necessary to see how rocked our society was when the Russians got that piece of metal up into the sky before we did. They had beaten us at our own game and the game we consider important. So from our business and military leaders the cry goes up that we must intensify our history-making activities, we must be tougher history makers. It is of supreme importance that we beat the Russians to the moon. What has happened, of course, is that throughout the East the traditional religious societies, which had existed for much longer than those in the West, have crumbled, and Easterners have taken over the history-making spirit for themselves. They had to do this if they were not to be perpetually enslaved by Western men. And as the guide in their transformation into modern, historical men they have a great and carefully thought philosophy - Marxism. Marxism is, after all, a Western philosophy, coming from that remarkable people, the Germans, and dedicated to the idea of man the creator of history. This new spirit

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under the banner of Marxism conquers the traditional societies of Asia. And thus the historical spirit passes from being merely Western to being world-wide. Perhaps the very apotheosis of this spirit will come when man, united on this planet, sees his central purpose as pressing out farther and farther into an imperialism over space. When one listens to a man such as von Braun, the famous rocket scientist, talking with such joy about the infinite possibilities now open to us, one really sees what is meant by the modern spirit.9 The infinite is not the ancient eternalbeyond-time, but the limitless possibilities of men for action in space and time. Now that Western man has made his civilization worldwide, he turns outward to be the maker of worlds beyond. Historical man has been compared with ahistorical man, whose ideas are largely alien to us; the idea of time as cycles endlessly repeated has been compared with the idea of time as a set of unique and irreversible events. The writer believes that this comparison is useful, because only as we become capable of thinking outside modern assumptions are we able to see at all what our assumptions are. In the same way, the study of the Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle is wonderfully illuminating. As we try to think with them their vision of human nature and destiny, we come to see our own. In the eighteenth century it was common to speak of the quarrel between the ancients and moderns, as a way of understanding these different assumptions. This is why the dying out of careful philosophical study in Canada is one factor helping to produce our dead-level, conformist society. When people have not thought about ideas quite different from their own, they tend simply to live within the principles of their civilization, not even conscious that they are living within those limits. I have not compared modern historical man with the ancient religious cultures in order to take sides; to imply, for instance, that the ancient cultures were better than our own. It is only necessary to think what modern men have done to make life pleasant, to cut down the curses of pain and work (and they are curses) to see how great the achievements of the modern world have been. The old, traditional societies governed by landlords and clerics required most men to spend the day at back-breaking physical work and to be a prey to disease and scarcity. To see both the truth and inadequacy of such a conception as man

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the maker of history requires careful thought; I will only begin to assess the question at the end of these essays, and then only tentatively. What must first be done is (1) to see in detail how the religious civilizations formulated their beliefs philosophically into a clearly thought ethical system, i.e., the doctrine of natural law, and (2) to see the force of that doctrine. Only after we have seen its power, can we see why men gave it up and started to believe in the modern, historical morality.

CHAPTER 3: NATURAL LAW The theory of natural law is the assertion that there is an order in the universe, and that right action for us human beings consists in attuning ourselves to that order. It is the most influential theory of morality in the history of the human race. We meet it in some form wherever we go among the pre-scientific civilizations: in Greece, in Rome, in India, in China, and among the European peoples up to the last two hundred years. It is still the cornerstone of the ethical theory of the Roman Catholic Church. In the present desegregation issue in the United States, it is appealed to by constitutional lawyers, in this instance, the suggestion being that men by their very nature have certain inalienable rights, irrespective of the colour of their skin.10 Indeed, only in the last two hundred years has it ceased to be the generally assumed theory from which moral judgment proceeds. It is popular to speak of a crisis in our standards and values. This sense of crisis arises above all from the fact that the doctrine of natural law no longer holds the minds of most modern men, and no alternative theory has its universal power. Not only are most people unaware of what natural law means, but when they learn of it, it seems somehow strange and alien to their modern perspective. As I explained in the last chapter, the doctrine of natural law arose among men of the ancient cultures as they passed beyond their mythic beginnings and began to think of the world as an ordered universe which their minds could understand. They began to think about this order, not only as it appeared in the planets, but also as it was exemplified in human action. In the Western world (which is our chief concern) it arose among the Greeks, who were the first to practise systematic

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science and philosophy. These studies presupposed that it was the nature of mind to seek that order that is manifest in the universe. The Greek formulation of natural law was taken over by the Romans as the theoretical basis of their great empire of law. The doctrine was later immensely illuminated by Christian revelation, as also on the other hand the Christian Church was illuminated by it. It passed over into European civilization through the Christian Church. The doctrine was the following: There is an order in the universe that human reason can discover and according to which the human will must act so that it can attune itself to the universal harmony. Human beings in choosing their purposes must recognize that if these purposes are to be right, they must be those that are proper to the place mankind holds within the framework of universal law. We do not make this law, but are made to live within it. In this doctrine certain assumptions are made, first, about the universe in general and, secondly, about human beings in particular. The assumption about the universe is that it is a cosmos and not a chaos. That is, it conforms to law; and to conform to law is to be held in being by reason. The great Roman lawyer Cicero puts this extremely well in his book De Legibus. 'What is more true/ he writes, 'than that no man should be so stupidly arrogant as to suppose that reason and mind are to be found in himself and not to suppose that they are to be found in heaven and earth, or to suppose that those things that are scarcely to be comprehended by the highest reason are not themselves set in motion by reason ... Since all things that have reason stand above those that are devoid of reason and since it is blasphemy to say that anything stands above the universe as a whole, we must admit that reason is inherent in the universe.'11 In Cicero's statement the assumptions of natural law become clear. By law is meant not something simply human, which we make. It is that which at every point makes the universe what it is. It is that reason which is common to God and to men. The universe is a great system of beings, all moved by law and ultimately governed by the divine mind. It is a hierarchy in which all beings have their place, from the stones that obey the laws of the physical world, up through the plants and animals to man, and beyond man to the angels, and finally to God, who is reason itself. The noun 'nature' and its adjective 'natural' are other words for the order of the universe. And the nature of any particular

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thing is that which it is when it realizes its immanent meaning, that is, when it takes its proper place in the whole. To take an example popular in the ancient world: the laws of a beehive may be dictated by the instinct of the bees and the laws of a human state by legislation, but when the beehive or the state are what they ought to be, both types of law are an expression of reason and intelligence. They are reflections of that divine intelligence which is the ultimate arbiter of all. This view of the universe as a great chain of being bound together by mind must be understood, if we are to see the moral principles of natural law that arise from it. Aristotle once said that the belief that there was a moral law depended ultimately on how we interpreted the movements of the stars. What he meant by this is that if we come to deny that the planets in their motion can be known as finally caused, we will eventually, if we are consistent, deny that there is any purpose or law governing human life. If we deny that, we are denying that there is such a thing as human morality. In other words, the doctrine of natural law depends unequivocally on the existence of metaphysical knowledge. Metaphysics is the study of reality as a whole. It asserts that we can make true judgments about reality. To speak of the 'nature of man/ 'the order of the universe,' 'final causality/ or 'God/ is to speak metaphysically. Obviously, when Aristotle asserts that there is a final cause of the motion of the planets he is not giving a scientific explanation in the modern sense of that phrase. Yet only if we can affirm that there is metaphysical knowledge of this kind can we speak of natural law and deduce the principles of right action from that conception. In this sense a natural-law morality stands or falls with metaphysical knowledge. The truth of this can be seen in history from the fact that the denial by modern philosophers that there is metaphysical knowledge has gone hand in hand with the criticism of the natural-law account of morality. Secondly, this doctrine makes certain assumptions about human beings and the way they should live. It assumes that there is a human nature and that this human nature is ultimately the same in all men. It does not depend on whether we are tall or short, black or white. This universal human nature is to be a rational creature. Our place in the hierarchy is to be distinguished from animals as being rational and from God as being creatures. With regard to human action, we have the power to determine for ourselves, through intelligence, the ends

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that are proper to us. This is not to deny that for the ancients reason was immanent in a stone or in an animal - both of which were thought of as expressions of the law. Man, however, has a rational soul, as distinct from an animal soul. The ends that we pursue are not given us directly in the way they are given an animal through instinct. We must discover our proper ends through reflection. The believers in natural law saw clearly that our ability to reason about ends is not something given to us immediately. We are governed by laws that we only partly understand. Reason is at first only present in us potentially and not actually. It needs to be developed, and developed by education. Education is seen as the process by which a person comes to think clearly about the proper purposes of human life. (How different this is from our modern technical education that is simply concerned with teaching people how to get on, never with teaching them where they are getting on to.) In the old theory of education, when a man began to see what was the ultimate purpose of human life, he was said to be wise - to have the virtue of wisdom. Wisdom was then the purpose of education. It was the condition that men reached through reason, as they came to know what were the purposes in human life truly worthy of a rational soul. To live according to nature was then the supreme good for a man, as it was for any being in the universe. But, of course, our nature being higher than that of an animal demands of us a higher way of life than that which is good for an animal. The good life for man includes within it the perfection of his rational nature. Man is to be perfected and brought to his highest possibility through the union of his reason with the divine reason. Thus, the logical completion of natural law is to pass beyond a simply practical life to a life of mysticism. Practice passes into adoration. It is easy to see how this doctrine of natural law produced the fundamentals of our legal system. The law that is administered in the courts originates and derives its sanction from the eternal law of justice that is at once the law of God and of nature. Worldly laws, the laws of the land, depend on that supreme law that pre-exists both written laws and the state itself. As late as two hundred years ago, this was almost universally believed by practising lawyers. The great English jurist Blackstone put it with clarity: 'This law of nature being coeval with mankind and dictated by God Himself is of course superior in obliga-

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tion to any other. It is binding over the whole globe in all countries at all times. No human laws are of any validity if contrary to this and such of them as are valid derive their force and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original.'12 The distinction between natural law and positive law was then clear. Positive laws are the laws that men enact, but they are only true laws insofar as they are in conformity with a law that is more than man-made. Cicero uses a very good simile to explain this: Suppose you go to a doctor, and he, looking very wise, writes in his unintelligible jargon what you are to drink and you take this paper to the drugstore and the druggist makes up the prescription and you drink it and find out it was poison. Was it a prescription that the doctor gave you? Yes, in a sense it was. A dose written down by a doctor to be made up by a druggist is a prescription. Yet the whole meaning and purpose of a prescription is that it should be for the advantage and healing of the patient. This is true of laws also. A law is only a law when it is a just law, mirroring the divine law of justice. Both conservatives and radicals have appealed to this doctrine. The radical has said that existing law was not in conformity with divine law and therefore should be changed. Conservatives have said that some proposed change was turning away from the divine law and therefore wrong. But in the past both conservatives and radicals generally believed in this divine law from which they derived their judgments. Thus, for instance, the idea of a fair trial as necessary to a just system of law became part of the way we do things because it was believed that all individuals have certain rights. Those rights belong to them by the very nature of things and cannot be taken away by the whim of others, by the officials of government or by dictators, or for the convenience of democracies. Not only in the laws of the state but also in the personal moral decisions of life was the doctrine of natural law operative. The right way to live could be deduced from that unchanging law that is the reason and will of God. Moral conduct was therefore not considered a matter of convenience, but the attempt to actualize the eternal law in one's own life. The question of abortion will serve as an illustration. More and more modern states now allow abortion in certain circumstances. This is because abortion is believed to be something that you choose to do or not to do, at your own convenience. This has not yet come officially

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into Canada because the old tradition about this matter still lives on. But I think it is true that more and more people believe that abortion is a permissible act and practise it when the need arises. The traditional believer in natural law would say that abortion is a wrong act, and that the wrongness of the act is not affected by whether it suits our convenience or not. It is a law of nature, which we did not make and which we cannot alter, that we should not extinguish what is at least potentially a human soul. This is why you come across in Greek plays or in Shakespeare the idea that being a dictator or committing incest is an unnatural act. These acts are looked upon with horror because they are 13 contrary to what is demanded from us as human beings. The Germans have a word for this that turns up in that matchless work of art, Mozart's Magic Flute. A dictator is called an Unmensch, a non-human. Dictatorship is not only wrong because it affects the convenience of other people, but also because it affects the dictator himself: to be a dictator is to fail in fulfilling one's manhood. It does not belong to the order of being a man to rule other men at one's own whim. It is plain what a clear and powerful doctrine of morality natural law was. It gave to those who held it a sure and certain sense of direction. First and foremost, the doctrine was clear that moral standards are not relative but absolute. Right action was not considered a matter of our convenience. The objective moral law does not depend on what we think. As sophisticated a practising lawyer as Cicero said: 'Only a madman could maintain that the distinction between honourable and dishonourable, between virtue and vice is only a matter of opinion.'14 Such a quotation illustrates how far many people in the modern world have departed from the doctrine of natural law. So often one hears modern people who have some education say that right and wrong are just matters of convenience or of opinion and that therefore there are no absolute moral standards. How influential this is in our society can be seen from the fact that the late Chief Justice Vinson of the United States Supreme Court could state this in a legal judgment as if it were so obvious that it did not need arguing. And those who take this view often think they have proven it when they point to the fact that people have believed different actions to be right at different times and places. Indeed, the belief that there are absolute standards of conduct is often supposed to be a very unsophisticated belief held only by

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simple people who do not know what the score is. After one has attended university or the cocktail parties of the prosperous, one will give it up. In Canadian history, how many people have come to university from well-defined moral backgrounds and been taught that a man, wise in natural or social science, is educated when he is a sceptic about moral questions. This used to happen more often than it does now because most people are now brought up in a world where this moral relativity has become the tradition. Indeed we are told from our earliest youth by the psychiatrists and their publicists that belief in absolute standards is positively unhealthy and will at the least lead us to difficulty in adjusting ourselves to society and at the worst will lead us to the mental hospital. The second implication of the doctrine of natural law is that reason leads us to know what is right. The good man is the reasonable man. The believer in natural law took for granted that reason could be practical. The vast range of particular desires did not appear to him simply as a chaos, because reason could present to him that idea of a highest rational good in terms of which all his desires could be brought into an intelligible and ordered system of life. The idea of the highest good was that in which not only particular desires would be satisfied but that in which the total self would find its completion, its happiness. The doctrine distinguished between happiness and pleasure. This highest good was the purpose for which life was lived and all our particular purposes should be subordinated to it. But this highest good could only be known through reflection. Therefore, the life of reason was the most important thing for the individual and for society. It was this indeed that led people to take the life of philosophy so seriously in the ancient world. If reason could be the ultimate governor of life, if the good life was the rational life, then philosophy became very important. To repeat, it was believed that a man's reason is at first only potential, and needs to be developed. The very word philosophy meant that. It was a combination of the Greek word 'philo,' meaning love, and the word 'sophia/ meaning wisdom. 'Philosophia' - the love of wisdom. Philosophy was the attempt to incarnate wisdom in our very lives. This is what Plato is saying in his Republic, and what Aristotle is saying in his Ethics. How different is the importance granted to the life of reason in our Canadian institutions. Reason is generally thought of as an instrument.

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Practical reason is a means that can help us to achieve what our passions lead us to desire. But it is these desires and not reason that are considered as ultimately determinative of action. This is why reason to a North American is generally thought of as scientific reason. For scientific reason is concerned with the external and its control from human purposes. It is not concerned with what human purposes are good. This again can be so clearly seen in our educational system. Education is concerned with teaching young people techniques by which they can do things in the world. There is almost no concern in our educational system with seeing that our young people think deeply about the purposes for which these techniques should be used. Just look at the training of our engineers and scientists. Although we call the Russians materialists, we must remember that they give their young people more time in their curriculum to look at such questions than we permit our students. The question 'for what purpose?' we leave to the ministers and even more to psychiatry, the new ministry. We believe that such questions are fundamentally answered if we cultivate in

youngpeoplecertainemotionalattitudes.Reasonablediscussionof

moral purposes has therefore almost entirely disappeared from our

schools and universities. It must be emphasized that the doctrine of reason as a subjective tool of our convenience is held not only by the mass of people but by the most influential philosophers of our day. As famous a philosopher as Bertrand Russell repeats over and over again that thought is not the arbiter of human action, that it has no ultimate voice in telling us what is worth doing. And of course no philosopher has had such influence over the semi-educated of the English-speaking world in the last generation.15 When the doctrine of natural law is compared with modern theories about morality, one issue stands out as a central point of divergence. It is this point of divergence that I want to emphasize more than anything else in these essays. To put this issue simply: are we truly and finally responsible for shaping what happens in the world, or do we live in an order for which we are not ultimately responsible, so that the purpose of our lives is to discover and serve that order? There are philosophers (Hegel, for instance) who have claimed to include the truth of both these sides in their philosophies and thus to have reconciled this divergence. Whether or not they have succeeded is not our con-

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cern here. What matters first is to see how divergent are these ways of looking at the world and what different moralities they must lead to. In natural law theory, it is clear that man is not finally responsible for what happens in the world. He chooses to conform or not to conform to an order that he himself does not make. But as the individual only has reality within the system, if he chooses not to conform then the order simply breaks him and brings his efforts to naught. To go against the natural law is both for society and the individual to descend into chaos and nothingness. This means that finally the individual has no choice but to accept the God-given order. The theorists of natural law use the words 'choice' and 'freedom' in a much more limited sense than that of the popular usage of the liberal West. Freedom does not mean the ability to make an unambiguous choice between open possibilities. We become free only insofar as we base our relevant actions on the law; we lose our freedom as we disregard that law. Thus in traditional Christian theory the highest stage of the good life is to be beyond choice. To be free is to be a slave. As St Augustine puts it: 'To be able not to sin is a great liberty; not to be able to sin is the greatest.' What is ultimately important to a man then is to know that he is not his own, that he is a creature who did not make himself. A modern exponent of natural law, George MacDonald, put the doctrine very clearly when he wrote: 'The first principle of hell is "I am my own.'"e How different is the humanist view of life. Man makes the world, and there is no overall system that determines what he makes. To act is to choose what kind of a world we want to make. In our acts we show what things we regard as valuable. We create value, we do not participate in a value already given. We make what order there is; we are not made by it. In this sense we are our own; we are independent. We are not bound by any dependence on anything more powerful than ourselves. We are authentically free because what happens in the world depends on us, not on some providence beyond our control. The fate of man is in his own hands. We and not God are the creators of history. To put the issue in this simple way: 'Are we our own or are we not our own?' is not to imply that any kind of intelligible answer can be e It is worth noting that George MacDonald was the author of those lovely children's books, The Princess and the Goblins, Curdie and the Princess, and The Back of the North Wind.16

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discovered simply or quickly. To begin to answer such a question would first require a careful analysis of such words as 'freedom/ law/ 'adoration/ 'the making of history/ and many others. This issue takes us to the heart of the relations between metaphysics and ethics and between religion and morality. It is with such systematic analysis and synthesis that moral philosophy is concerned. What is first necessary is to say something historical about why modern Europeans came to criticize and to reject the doctrine of natural law. Even a preliminary account of such criticism goes to the roots of the history of the Western world in the last centuries.

CHAPTER 4: HISTORY AS PROGRESS It has been the destiny of the western European peoples to be the first to destroy their old religious society and to replace it with modern scientific culture, something radically different from anything that existed in the past. To repeat, the fundamental difference between our modern society and the old is not only, or even primarily, the external difference shown by our mastery over nature through science and technology, but a profound difference in man's very view of himself. We no longer consider ourselves as part of a natural order and as subordinate to a divine law. We see ourselves rather as the makers of history, the makers of our own laws. We are authentically free since nothing beyond us limits what we should do. If we are to understand ourselves, we must try to understand how this change came about, what was going on in the minds of those who criticized the old religious societies out of existence and who brought into being the new scientific society of historic man. In essays such as these the whole complex of causes that goes to make up so profound a change can only be discussed in a very general and therefore unsatisfactory way. The causes touch on the very centre of human consciousness, and the change is accomplished in the struggle and agony of many lives over many centuries. Every aspect of human life is involved in it - politics, economics, art, science, morality, and religion. The historical task is to search for the unity between what has happened in all these seemingly disparate fields: to see how the theologians affect the politicians and how the inventors affect the theologians

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and how the artists affect the scientists and so on. In what follows, no such proper historical description will be possible and it will be necessary to write very generally about an intricate historical problem. To make the main point about the doctrine of progress clear I must rest in simple assertions without attempting to justify them. The danger of so skipping around the centuries is to give the impression that history is not a rigorous and subtle study. What also makes such generalizing unconvincing is that the change here described happened often without the men who were responsible for it being fully aware of the assumptions on which they acted. It is a necessary principle of any proper philosophy of history that the conscious intention of human actions is often different from the meaning of those acts as events in the historical process, considered philosophically. It is this that Hegel is describing in his doctrine of the 'cunning of reason.'17 For example, Luther's intention in acting the way he did at Worms obviously did not consciously include the significance that that event was to have in the history of the race. But to accept the difference between intended action and the meaning of event is to have insisted that historical explanation only completes itself within philosophy. It is to write as a philosopher of history, not simply as an empirical historian. The most important cause of this change to man seen as the maker of history seems to me without doubt to be Christianity. Of all the points I am going to make in these essays, this is the most difficult to understand. What I am saying is that Christianity has been chiefly responsible for the destruction of the old religious cultures and the coming to be of our modern, secular culture. This must appear paradoxical, because we in Canada identify Christianity with religion. We identify the old world with Christianity. It therefore seems contradictory to say that Christianity has been the chief cause of the destruction of the traditional religious cultures. In support of this thesis, I want to start from one historical fact, which seems inexplicable on any other hypothesis. The modern spirit first came to be in European culture and not in the civilizations of the East. To look for the reason is to look for the radical difference between China or India and Europe. The central difference is that European civilization was, in its emergence, penetrated by Christianity. Furthermore, it can be asked what is the most important difference between the old classical world of Greece and Rome and the European society

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of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, out of which the modern spirit was to arise. It was that the classical spirit had taken into itself Biblical religion/ It therefore becomes essential to understand what was distinctive about this religion. By Biblical religion is meant the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament and its culmination in the Incarnation of God, Jesus Christ. That religion was unique in its absolute historicity. It was the Jews who discovered the very idea of history. More than anything else, what has made Western culture so dynamic is its impregnation with the JudaeoChristian idea that history is the divinely ordained process of man's salvation. This is an idea utterly foreign to any other civilization until Marxism took it to the East. It is impossible to describe in detail the fascinating story of how the Hebrew prophets came to interpret events as directly ordered by the will of Jehovah. The God of the Jewish prophets is no longer an archaic deity who creates archetypal gestures, but a personality who ceaselessly intervenes in history and who reveals his will through particular events. The events of the world take on meaning not only as images of eternal patterns but as concrete expressions of the divine will. They therefore become valuable in themselves. What is more important, the idea of a God of will, who acts in history, brings with it the idea of a final end or purpose towards which his acts are directed, to which history itself is directed. This final end is seen as the redemption of the Jewish people through the Messiah. The events of the world come to be thought of as necessary to the final salvation of the chosen people. When the Messiah comes, the world will be saved once and for all. Thus the events of time are seen as oriented towards the future. Where for archaic civilizations 'that great day' was in the past, it becomes for the Jews something in the future. The purpose of God unfolds in the world and will culminate in his final purpose, that of redemption. In Hebraic religion there is a new conception of God's relation to the world, a new conception of time and of the meaning of human action in time. Time no longer repeats itself endlessly as the moving image of f On this complex and little discussed subject, Michael B. Foster has written two illuminating articles: The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science/ Mind (October 1934), and 'Christian Theology and the Modern Science of Nature,' Mind (October 1935-January 1936).

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an unmoving eternity. It becomes, rather, the vehicle of God's will. It is not infinite, but has been created by God and is moving to a glorious purpose at its end. Not a timeless eternity but the future will regenerate time, a future in which the redemptive purposes of God will be achieved. The Jews are not interested in the immortality of the individual but in the salvation of the people. The events of the world come to be thought of as unique and irreversible because they are the manifestation of a personal will. Thus there arises from Judaic religion the idea of history, the idea that the events of human society have a meaning in their totality, as directed towards an end. We in the West so take for granted this view of history (or something derived from it) that we often forget where it came from. We think it is the way that human beings inevitably conceive the temporal process. But this view is not something that has been believed by men in all civilizations. Insofar as we believe it, we owe it above all to Hebraic religion. This view of time as history was brought out from the narrow confines of the Jewish people into the main stream of Western civilization by Christianity. This is what the doctrine of the Trinity is: it incorporates into the timeless God of the Greeks the God of project and of suffering; that is, the God of love. The sense of the unique importance of historical events was made absolute by the Incarnation. Our redemption has been achieved once and for all in His passion and death. This was not going to be repeated an infinite number of times. It was a unique and irreversible event. 'His sweat was as it were great drops of blood, falling down to the ground' (Luke 22: 44). The divine Person had acted in an historic human existence. He had been lifted up and he would return again at the end of time with the salvation of the Kingdom of God. The idea that history is the sphere for the overcoming of evil and the hope of that overcoming has never been far from the centre of thought among those people who adopted Christianity. Throughout European history the repressed have returned again and again to this hope. It is the very foundation of the revolutionary tradition. It is the ultimate reason why Western man has taken worldly life and its arrangements so seriously. This is the truth of materialism. To God all things are possible. The material and spiritual evils of the world will yet be redeemed.

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Such ideas become explicit only very slowly, at first only in the minds of the greatest thinkers and then throughout society as a whole. Among the Jewish people this vision of God as the God of history is at first confined to the prophets. The main body of the people reject this conception and are continually returning to the baser religions of their neighbours, and are only being called back to the worship of the living God, Jehovah, by the admonitions of the prophets in times of tragedy. From the beginnings of Christianity, and even to this day, Christian communities have taken into themselves elements of the anti-historical, pre-Christian religion of nature. It is indeed a fascinating study to watch the historical religion of Christianity mingling with the ancient religion of natural law in the first centuries of the Christian era. In this connection, St Augustine, the African bishop of the fifth century, is the most significant figure. In his wonderful book De Civitate Dei, the profoundest attempt is made to unify the religion of redemption with the philosophy of Plato. Augustine's attempt to hold these two disparate views of God and the world together may ultimately be inadequate, but it was of immense consequence for the future, as being, in outline, the spiritual basis for the wonderful civilization of medieval Europe. And at the height of that civilization, in the thirteenth century, St Thomas Aquinas synthesized the theology of natural law (with its atemporal standpoint) with the Christian conception of the God of history. His remarkable synthesis holds these two conceptions together with two theologies: a natural realm of the human reason and a revealed realm of God's mighty acts in history. This tension between the Hebraic and the Greek in Christian thought expressed itself in the practical life of the Church - in the tension between, on the one hand, the idea that the supernatural life is essentially mystical and monastic and, on the other hand, the growing desire of churchmen to influence worldly affairs for righteousness. This new, worldly spirit appears moderately within the Church in the Investiture Controversy of the eleventh century; it appears outside of the control of the organization in the ecstatic hopes of Joachim of Floris and the Franciscan spirituals and in the Utopian outbreaks that increasingly characterized the German world in the late Middle Ages.18 This is no place to discuss what is true and what inadequate in the Thomist synthesis of Greek philosophy and Judaic prophecy. Suffice it to say that, in fact, the medieval synthesis was unable to hold the

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minds of western Europeans after the fifteenth century. And in the four hundred years since the breakdown of that balance, there has gradually arisen our world-wide scientific civilization. To use an inadequate analogy from biology: this new civilization is a unique mutation in the history of the race. It may appear that the spirit of the modern world is the very antithesis of the religious, rooted as it is in the idea of progress rather than the idea of law, and emphasizing man's trust in his own ability to make the world rather than his trust in God. But what must be insisted is that the very spirit of progress takes its form and depends for its origin on the Judaeo-Christian idea of history. The influences shaping the modern spirit have been too diverse and subtle for any ease of intellectual relation or facile categorizing. Nevertheless, in its moral connotation there is nothing more important to its understanding than to recognize how the Christian idea of history as the divinely ordained process of salvation, culminating in the Kingdom of God, passes over into the idea of history as progress, culminating in the Kingdom of Man; how Christianity's orienting of time to a future made by the will of God becomes the futuristic spirit of progress in which events are shaped by the will of man. Only in such terms can the doctrine of progress be seen in its Utopian power and an answer be given to the inevitable question as to why the modern spirit first arose in Europe and not in the civilizations of the East. The mediating term between history as providence and history as progress is the idea of freedom. (Call it, if you will, subjectivity.) Conscious of themselves as free, men came to believe that history could be shaped to their own ends. This consciousness of freedom appears first in the modern world in the religious freedom of the life and thought of the Reformation. As against the medieval theology of nature and supernature, in terms of which men could so marvellously take their place in an ordered cosmos, Luther insists that no man should find his proper rest in any natural images. Indeed, the Reformation may seem simply negative in that it attacks all the finite images of thought and ritual without thinking systematically of the consequences of what it has done. It protests against the idols that stand between man and God and in this sense the term Protestant is apposite. But it is more than simply protest, because it asserts that the principle of freedom must be regulative of any future theory of practice. It is more than negative in

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that the idea of freedom is the affirmation that the human spirit cannot be limited by any determinations. Indeed it asserts this freedom only within the religious sphere, but once it has been so asserted it cannot be confined to that sphere. In the next centuries the idea of man as free is taken into all aspects of life, into the spheres of politics, of art, and of science. For instance, Marx was to say that the overcoming of the difference between the citizen and the state, which he believed necessary to a realized democracy, was but an extension of the Reformers' overcoming of the difference between the lay and clerical orders. This extension of freedom into all spheres is justified theoretically in the eighteenth century, known therefore as the Age of Enlightenment. At the end of that century, these ideas are acted out in all their practical significance in the French Revolution. The idea of freedom has often been expressed negatively - as in the long tradition of criticism by the middle-class European intellectuals. This criticism was man's refusal to accept any beliefs that were not his own. The old philosophical and theological tradition was attacked as clerical imposition of illusion of the freedom of the mind. The old religion was accused of having prevented man from exercising his freedom, by holding over him the idea of God - that is, of a master to whom he must be subservient. These witty criticisms of the idea of God have appeared in Europe from the eighteenth century to our own day; from Voltaire's Candide to Freud's The Future of an Illusion.

Voltaire's essay on the earthquake at Cadiz is mainly negative. It is concerned with ridiculing belief in the providential ordering of the world. How can there be a providential ordering of events when evil such as this occurs? The natural evil of an earthquake cannot be blamed on man, as can the moral evil of sin. Its cause is elsewhere. The works of God are condemned in the name of morality, so that the idea of God is killed in man's heart. Belief in God is attacked in the name of a pessimism that cannot reconcile the evil of the world with a divine purpose. But above all, what must be made clear in this connection is that the attack on the belief in providence took place in a civilization dominated by Christian ideas about time, which held that evil would be overcome in the future. Therefore, as belief in God was driven from men's minds, it was not replaced (as it was in the classical world) by a rather sad humanism (the attempt to live life as pleasantly as one could

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in a meaningless world); rather, it was replaced by an optimistic humanism, by belief in progress. Time is still oriented to the future, but it is a future that will be dominated by man's activity. The idea of human freedom merges with Judaeo-Christian hope and produces the idea of progress. This means an entirely new kind of humanism. For a humanism arising in a Christian setting was bound to be quite different from one which had arisen from the archaic religious cultures. It was a humanism of project and reform. It was a humanism that put science and technology at its centre, as the means of redemption. Thus, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the idea of progress crushes the idea of providence. And in this crushing, belief in God is not now attacked on the pessimistic grounds of the evil that is present in nature and history, but on the optimistic grounds that assert human responsibility for building the Kingdom of Man - which total independence of man would be ultimately denied by any belief in a controlling power beyond the human spirit. In the name of human responsibility for alleviating evil and making the world, men came to think that belief in God was morally wrong. For belief in God was the enemy of our desire to change the world. Who was responsible for evil - God or man? The criticism of belief in God is here not negative, but rather the assertion that the claims of theology are themselves negative, because they turn men away from changing the world. The believers in progress claimed that the theologians, by deifying the spirit, put it outside the world, and in so doing assumed that the spirit cannot be actualized in the world. Bakunin, the great revolutionary, put this idea of rebellion brilliantly when he said: 'If God existed, we would have to kill him.'19 He meant that anything - including the idea of God - that stands in the way of man's absolute freedom to make history as he chooses must be destroyed. Men no longer believed that they lived under a natural law that they did not make and that they had been created to obey. They came to see themselves as the makers of their own laws and values. Jeremy Bentham, the famous English reformer of the nineteenth century, ridiculed the idea of a divine law behind our human laws, because it placed events outside human control. There is no other law but that which man makes. By his conscious and voluntary acts he shapes the world, shaping it even more towards the goals of his own choice. It is this belief that in the last centuries has dominated the elites of Western

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nations, so that today we live in a society that is the very incarnation of that spirit.

CHAPTER 5: MARXISM In the thought of Karl Marx the meaning of the change described in the last chapter is brilliantly illuminated. Through his thought more than anyone else's, the Western spirit of progress has gone out into the countries of Asia and has become the dynamic religion of the East. Study of this thought is, therefore, pressed upon us in the West. Yet just as this understanding of Marxism is most important to us, it has become most difficult, because in the last decades there has been a campaign of vilification against Marx and of suspicion of those who study his thought in any systematic manner. He has been attacked as the prophet of the worst abuses of the Soviet empire; as the subverter of the achievements of capitalism; as the enemy of godliness and morality. Although this campaign has draped itself in the flags of patriotism and of religion, it is not surprising that it has been inspired largely by those whose basic interest was the maintenance of our present property relations. The contradictory nature of this attack stems from the mixture of fear and contempt with which it has been motivated. Why should the blackeners of Marx try to prevent systematic studying of his writings, if they consider these such a jumble of nonsense? What is especially strange in the behaviour of those who attack Marx in this wild way is that they have generally asserted their faith in God. Do they not believe then that this faith includes the belief that the truth will make men free and that therefore only in careful study can the chaff be divided from the wheat? The contempt for Marx has not been confined to the irresponsible rich and their demagogues. It is heard from responsible business men and government officials and from their servants in the universities. This educated contempt is more dangerous to Western interests because it takes the form not of abuse but of patronizing aloofness. These people claim that the important thing is Russian and Chinese imperialism, not the spread of Marxism. To those who pride themselves on their realism, Marxism need not be taken more seriously than any other faith. They assert that what matters is power and not ideas.

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This position naturally appeals to the civil servants of Washington, London, and Ottawa who like to be considered too sophisticated in the ways of the world to take theory seriously, and believe that history is ultimately shaped by the ad hoc decisions that make up their lives. This supposed realism is, however, one-sided and short-sighted. If the word power is to mean anything, the social and ideological structure of that power must be analysed and understood. It is the pettiest view of human history to believe that the intellectuals of Asia are moved by a philosophy that is simply a tissue of wild imaginings. We must understand Marx as well as the power of Russia and of anti-colonialism if we are to understand the continued victories of communism in Asia. We must understand, indeed, how much Marxism has contributed to the present political and technological power of Russian society. It must be insisted however that Marx is worth studying not only because of his influence in the history of Asia, but also because of what he is in himself: a social theorist of the first rank, who reveals to us the diverse currents that make up the progressivist river. Indeed it must be recognized that Marxism is a much profounder river than the limited canals of theory dug by the officials of the Communist party in the East or West. As has been the inevitable fate of great prophets, his disciples have consistently neglected and misinterpreted those aspects of his thought that did not serve their purposes. This process started even with his intimate friend Engels, who is inclined to interpret Marx as a disciple of Darwin. The narrowing was carried even further by such men of action as Lenin and Stalin. Marx must be studied not so much as a political-economic propagandist than as a theorist who brought together the varying streams of the humanist hope and in whose synthesis, therefore, the value of the doctrine of progress is most clearly exposed to us.g g The difficulty of studying Marx in his own writings must be emphasized. His master work, Capital, consciously imitates the structure of Hegel's Logic, with its scheme of being, essence, and idea. Also, some of Marx's profoundest thought is to be found in his early writings which are not easily available in English. For instance, his philosophy of history begins to take shape in a magazine article protesting a German law which penalized the collection of firewood by the poor. The reader is therefore advised to approach the study of Marx through such modern commentaries as A. Cornu's K. Marx et F. Engels, vol. I (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1955), vol. II (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1958), and J. Hyppolite's Etudes sur Marx et Hegel (Paris: Riviere 1955).

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Marx is essentially a philosopher of history, that is, one who believes he knows the meaning of the historical process as a whole and derives his view of right action therefrom. In a certain sense the philosophy of history is the modern equivalent of what in olden days was known as theodicy, the vindication of the divine providence in view of the existence of evil. The search for meaning becomes necessary when we are faced with evil in all its negativity. In Marx's search the starting point is the indubitable fact of evil. Reality is not as it ought to be. Men are not able to live properly, because their lives are full of starvation, exploitation, greed, the domination of one man by another. Our present society is not such that it permits men to fulfil themselves. As Marx says: 'Men are for other men objects.' No thinker ever had a more passionate hatred of the evils men inflict on each other, nor a greater yearning that such evils should cease.20 It is perhaps not surprising that he should have been so aware of evil, living as he did in the early years of the industrial era, when new ways of work were instituted with little respect for those who did the work. What is more surprising is how few of his contemporary intellectuals rebelled against the crimes that were being committed against working men, women, and children. Marx proceeds from the present evil to criticism of the religious solution of that evil. He says that the religious solution is to maintain that all is really well, despite the evident evil. This solution has prevented men from dealing with the evils of the world. The idea that there is a God who is finally responsible holds men from taking their responsibility sufficiently seriously. If there is going to be pie in the sky when you die, then the evils of the world are not finally important. In this sense, religion is the opium of the people. Religion and its handmaiden, traditional philosophy, have said that reconciliation can be found in the here and now - if men will only seek God. In fact they say that evil is not what it seems and that despite it, all is well. But this is not the case: all is far from well. To pretend anything else is simply to disregard the sufferings of others. Therefore, the first function of thought must be the destruction of the idea of God in human consciousness. As Marx wrote: 'The philosophers up to now have been concerned with understanding the world; we are concerned with changing it.'21 What he means is that the philosophers have sought the meaning already present. They have sought God. He is not concerned with the

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meaning already present, he is concerned with the creation of meaning in the future by man. He is concerned with the practical overcoming of the suffering he sees all around him. Therefore, man must take his fate into his own hands and to do that he must overcome the idea of God. Marx's criticism of religion, however, is more profound than that of others who have said the same thing. For he recognizes that if man is to pass beyond belief in God, religion must not only be denied, but also its truth must be taken up into the humanist hope. The truth of religion for Marx was the yearning of the human spirit to overcome its evil - or, in his language, to overcome its own alienation. By 'alienation' he means that man's situation in society estranges him from the proper fulfilment of his freedom. He has never been able to live as he ought in society. Marx claims that he has freed this religious yearning for the overcoming of evil from any supernatural connotation, and shown how it will be fulfilled by man in history. In the previous chapter, the centre of biblical thought was defined as the idea of history being the divinely ordained process of man's salvation. Marx takes over this idea of history as the sphere for the overcoming of evil. Therefore Christianity is for him the absolute religion, in that as far as religion can go, Christianity takes it. The supreme insight in Christianity, according to Marx, is the doctrine of the Incarnation, which means that God is no longer 'other' to man, because he has become man. But, according to him, Christianity had never understood the consequences of its own doctrine of the Incarnation. In a world of scarcity it could only hold the idea of 'the God-man' as an ideal once achieved, but not to be made universally concrete. It is Marx's claim that he has taken what is true in Christianity and liberated it from this limitation. He has taken the doctrine of God become man, freed it from its other-worldly associations, and shown how it can be universally realized in the time process. In denying supernatural religion, he believes that he has taken its truth into his philosophy. Marx's philosophy of history is however not only the perfection of humanism, because it makes the religious hope serve a humanist purpose, but even more because he sees the most representative activity of the modern world, natural science, as the chief means of conquering evil. More than any other philosopher, he places the activity of the natural scientist in a setting of ethical redemption. Marx's recognition that natural science is central to the humanist hope has led many scientists

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to see the meaning of their activity in terms of Marxism. Even today in the Western world, when many scientists do not wish or do not think it wise to espouse a systematic Marxism, their real religion remains very much like it. To show this more fully, it is necessary first to describe what Marx thinks is going on in history. This can only be understood in terms of Marx's debt to German philosophy in general and to the philosopher Hegel in particular.11 When Marx is thinking about history, he is thinking in Hegelian terms. History is the sphere in which spirit is realizing itself in the world. It is realizing itself always in relation to nature. Here appears the distinction between spirit and nature. Nature is what it is and is not what it is not. A stone is a stone and not something else. But man is selfconscious, and self-consciousness is divided against itself. Man can always stand above himself and make himself what he is not. Every action is a project to the future, in which we negate what we are now. Therefore, man both is and is not what he is. Spirit, then, has a different logic from the logic of identity proper to nature. History is the coming to be of spirit in the world. Marx takes over this Hegelian way of thought, and limits it by finding the whole meaning of history in the relation of human freedom to nature. There is for him no nature without human significance; there is no significance to human freedom apart from the domination of nature.1 To Marx, therefore, the way that men have organized their economic relations is the key to history. In the economic organization that expresses our relation to nature, he sees h It is difficult for English-speaking peoples to admit the spiritual greatness of the Germans. In our last two wars we have been taught to despise their civilization. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the highest European achievements in music and philosophy have come from the Germans. Indeed the ambiguity of German history is that these people have been capable of the most appalling evil, but also of the highest reaches of the human spirit. In Western philosophy, for instance, two periods of thought stand out as the most brilliant: the fourth century BC in Greece, which we associate with Plato and Aristotle, and the late eighteenth century in Germany, whose masters were Kant and Hegel. There are no more remarkable books on human history than Hegel's Philosophy of History and his Phenomenology of Mind. Marx is the heir

to this tradition of German philosophical genius. I write about Marx in these essays because his thought is the most influential way that German philosophy has gone out into the world, but under his thought at every point lies the much profounder genius of Hegel. i I need hardly stress what a different view this is of man and nature, and their relationship, compared with the Greek view of natural law.

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the cause of human evil in the past; in the creation of a new relation he sees the overcoming of that evil. To state this in more detail: from the earliest days of history, men found themselves in a position of scarcity. There was just not enough food, shelter, and clothing for everybody to have an abundance. Because of this, a society of class dominance was necessary. A minority group in society gained control of the economic life, the means of production. And as they controlled the means upon which everybody depended for sustaining life, they controlled society as a whole, and set the pattern of its government, its art, its religion, its morality. In other words, in a world of scarcity, society was necessarily divided into classes. 'Class' in Marx is defined in a strictly economic sense, in relation to control or lack of control over the means of production. This division of society has meant class struggle between those who wanted to maintain their control over the source of wealth and their consequent position of privilege, and the majority, who were excluded from that control. But at the same time as one dominant class has been imposing its control over society through its control of the means of production, people have also been seeking greater power over nature through technology, and therefore introducing new forms of social wealth. This continually changing relation of men to nature has prevented any one class from long being able to impose its dominance over the means of production, and so over society as a whole. The new forms of wealth have produced new classes to challenge the power of the old rulers. For example, in medieval society the means of production was chiefly land, and therefore the ruling classes were the landlords. But as there came to be more and more commerce and simple manufacturing, the new middle class arose in the new towns. This class challenged the power of the landowners. The times of quick and radical change in history have been when a new class, produced by new economic conditions, has come to sufficient power to challenge the old ruling class, which in turn does all it can to retain its dying supremacy. Marx also believed that as man's control over nature becomes more complete, so the dominant classes who come to power progressively serve a more universal interest of man-kind. They serve the gradual emergence of freedom in the world. In the modern era it has been the historic role of the capitalists and their capitalist society to bring technology and economic organization to the point where, ideally, the

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conditions of scarcity might be once and for all overcome. The achievement of the capitalists has been to destroy the old natural world in which human freedom could not come to be. They have rationalized society. At the same time, however, as capitalist society has created the conditions of liberation, it has intensified the conditions of enslavement. The very form that the ownership of the means of production takes in capitalism sharpens the class struggle to its peak. For as capitalism solidifies, it moves, because of the profit motive, to the concentration of economic control into fewer and fewer hands. The mass of mankind is cut off from control over the conditions of its own work as it is cut off from any control over the means of production. The contradiction that capitalist society creates is that it has produced the possibility of overcoming scarcity - that is, the conditions for overcoming class dominance and inequality have arrived; yet at the same time it has chained the mass of men to uncreative labour, work for which they have no responsibility. It has taken to the extreme the division between the owners of the economic apparatus and servants of that apparatus. In such a situation where liberation is possible and where alienation is actual, there can be only one result. The mass of men will not allow themselves to be excluded from the liberation that technology has now opened for them. They will take the means of production out of private control and place them under social control. They will destroy capitalism and create socialism. In this new society the basic cause of evil will be overcome. Men will no longer be for each other objects of economic exploitation. Human beings will be able to give themselves over to the free play of their faculties, to the life of love and art and thought. The mass of people who are increasingly separated from control over their own work and over the economic apparatus as a whole, Marx calls the proletariat. Few conceptions in Marx generate so much confusion. People think that the proletariat means the hungry, the ragged, the destitute. As today in North America there are not many people who are destitute, the inference is drawn that Marx has been proven wrong about capitalism. Of course Marx hated the grinding poverty and the degrading division between physical and intellectual work that characterized the capitalism of his day. He said that industrial workers were turned into the living counterparts of a dead mechanism. But the idea of destitution is not necessary to the idea of the proletariat. The proletariat consists of those who have no creative

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responsibility for the society through their work, because they do not own the means of production with which they have to work. They are employees serving the private interests of their employers. For Marx, the proletariat is not one class amongst other classes, one class against other classes. It is the universal condition in which the vast majority of men find themselves in the age of the machine, when the machines and the machines that make machines serve private interests. The proletariat cannot liberate itself by producing another class society, but only by destroying the very existence of economic classes themselves. The mass of society is driven to recognize that in a machine age all work is social and rational and that therefore what must be created is an appropriate economic apparatus, not one given over to the irrational ends of private profit. Those people who first become conscious that this is the historical position of the age will become the leaders of that liberation, the proletariat conscious-of-itself. They are the Communist party, the party that will direct the bringing in of a classless society of equality. Thus, the sufferings of the proletariat are seen as the Christian sees the passion of Christ, necessary to the redemption of mankind. It is this idea (at some level of explicitness) that has enabled countless ordinary people to endure suffering - with such high fortitude - for the sake of the Communist cause. The suffering is seen as meaningful. It is not possible to assess here this remarkable vision of human history. There are many things to be said about it both as economic and philosophic doctrine. For instance, to assess it as an economic doctrine it would be necessary to discuss its dependence on the labour theory of value; to assess it as a philosophic doctrine, discussion of the causes of human evil would have to be introduced. Nor is it possible to describe the development of Marxist doctrine in the last century or the question of how far the Russian Revolution and the consequent regime of the Soviet Union can be said to be the socialist society of which Marx was talking. It is, for instance, arguable that it is with us in North America that the conditions that Marx prophesied are most clearly fulfilled, and therefore Marx is more the prophet of North America than of Russia. These are intricate questions to which no short answer can be given. What must be insisted on, however, is that Marx's philosophy has been the most powerful of modern humanisms, for two reasons above all. First, it was a humanism of universal salvation, and secondly, it seemed very concrete and practical about the means to that salvation.

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With regard to the first point: the Marxist hope is not for the isolated individual but for society as a whole. His humanism is not for a few rare, fine spirits in exceptional positions, but promises the good life for all. So often humanist liberalism has been made ridiculous by its individualism that disregarded the dependence of the individual on the community, and seemed little concerned with the way the mass of men lived. But how can the human spirit find any moral fulfilment in such individualism? There can be no perfected freedom in a world where others have not found it. What kind of a heaven can be enjoyed while others are in hell? The power of Marxism has lain in the fact that it foretold a concrete overcoming of evil in the world, which would be for society as a whole. Here Marx's dependence on the Judaeo-Christian idea of history is obvious. His humanism retains the idea of history as salvation, but rejects its theological framework. This makes it incomparably more powerful than those humanisms that are liberal and individualistic. The second reason for the power of Marxism is its claimed practicality. Instead of leaving the worldly hope up in the air, it describes concretely how it is to be brought about. It relates its achievement to the forces already around us in modern society. There is much that could be said about the superiority of Marxism over other doctrines of progress, on account of its direct application to the world as it is, but I will single out only one connection - the significance Marx gave to the natural scientists. The fact to be explained is why many scientists in this century have been followers of Marx or have been deeply influenced by him. Because governments must concern themselves with treason, this fact has been surrounded with a miasma of anxiety in the last years. But the first problem is to give a serious explanation of why it has been so. The answer is surely this: Marxism gave such a satisfactory account of science as essentially an ethical, indeed a redemptive activity, the means by which men were to be freed from the evils of pain and work. Recently there was a syndicated American cartoon in our local paper. It was a drawing of a Russian commissar for foreign aid speaking to a young student whom he wishes to send abroad on a technical mission. The commissar is saying: 'I don't care about your engineering degree, what do you know of Karl Marx?' Obviously this cartoon expresses the great need the Americans have these days to keep alive

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their sense of superiority over the Russians. What the cartoon says is this: we Americans are interested in helping underdeveloped countries quite honestly by giving them engineers; the Russians are not really interested in helping people through engineering but in dominating them through Marxism. This is to misrepresent entirely what Marxism is and the hope that men see in it. The philosophy of Marxism is regarded as the guide and control under which modern techniques can be brought to underdeveloped countries, and it claims that it alone can guarantee that these modern techniques will be the servant of the good of all and not of private profit. Marx's appeal was not to the scientist as an ethical man apart from his function, but primarily in his function itself. Scientists, like other men of intelligence, want to know what purpose their activity is serving. Marx gave them a systematic answer to this question. He showed (whether accurately or not) the role of the scientific function within an optimistic and worldly philosophy of history, which had a place for the universal interests of humanity. It may be said by way of digression that it was often a contradictory tendency in Marx that made his philosophy so powerful among certain scientists. Among modern scientists there have been two ways of looking at man that have been difficult to relate. On the one hand, assumptions from geological and biological studies have led certain scientists to judge man as but a product of nature. They have believed that history is but a part of nature. On the other hand, science as technology has been obviously the victory of human freedom over nature, which means that nature has been taken up into history. Many scientists have held both these views at the same time - as theoretical men they have often asserted that their science shows that man is but a product of nature; as practical men they have asserted that science is the domination of man over nature. It may be that some scientists have been adherents of Marx because his thought seemed to hold these positions together. His materialism seemed to make man simply a part of nature; his dialectic, to make man firmly the master of nature. Thus the Marxist could have the best of two worlds. But leaving aside this digression, what is important is that Marxism seemed to be tied to what was already in the world - the everyday world of technology and mass industry that surrounds us. He seemed to show men that through the present conditions of society the human-

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ist Utopia could be achieved and progress brought to its consummation. His Utopia did not therefore seem an airy ideal, but something concrete, a possibility to be actualized in terms of what already existed. This is what has made Marxism the most influential humanist religion the world has ever known. It is this that gives it its power over the East.

CHAPTER 6: THE LIMITS OF PROGRESS Marxism has been described as a powerful statement of the modern progressive spirit, filled with the hope of a worldly existence freed from evil and laying down the practical steps to the achievement of that hope. It has been insisted that this is why Marxism is now the dynamic religion of Asia, the chief directing force in making the progressive spirit more than European, indeed worldwide. Nevertheless, as soon as the guiding power of Marxism in Asia has been stressed, another fact of modern history must also be emphasized. Official Marxism has been defeated in the very civilization from which it originated. Orthodox communism has triumphed outside the social area in which Marxism was conceived and for which it was designed as a social theory. Marxism claims to be the authentic product of Western intellectual and industrial development. Yet it is precisely in the West that its hold over the makers of social policy has been limited. If we are to know the truth of the modern world, we must try to understand why this has been so. To draw an analogy from another period of religious history: Buddhism was a product of India yet it was defeated in India and won its chief power in Japan and Ceylon. The failure of orthodox communism to become the dominant faith in the West lies far deeper than in the practical arrogance and theoretical narrowness of the Party. It lies in Marxism itself, even when that faith is taken at its best - in its founder. Marxism has failed in the West primarily because it does not allow sufficient place to the freedom of the spirit) One is loath to say this to North Americans, because so often when Marxism is attacked as denying freedom, all that is meant by j What follows is not intended to pass as a systematic critique of Marxism, but as the making of one central point.

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freedom is the divine right of the businessman to rule society - a freedom that allows the greedy to exploit public resources for private gain. But despite the possibility of misinterpretation, I would still insist that Marxism does not truly understand the freedom of the spirit. And it is for this reason that the Western peoples, at their best, have rejected it. What is meant here may easily be confused by the varying uses of the word freedom. The word is often used to express the ability to get what we want when we want it. A rich man is free because when he wants caviar or pearls or to go to Florida, he is free to get what he wants. A dictator is free when he can get his own way with the state. This is a perfectly proper use of the word, but it is not what is meant by the freedom of the spirit. What is meant by that phrase is that man is more than simply an object in the world, he is a subject. The distinction between subject and object is obvious, yet it needs to be insisted on in a society such as ours where attention is generally focused on objects. Thinking about the world of objects is carried on by an '1/ or subject, which is not itself an object but which is implied in all those acts of thought. The more we think about the T the more mysterious this subjectivity will appear to us. On the one hand we can never escape it, it is implied in all we think and do and are. On the other hand, though we can never escape ourselves, we can never completely come upon ourselves. When we think about ourselves, we turn ourselves into an object thought about, but there is always the T who is doing the thinking about the T.' We can think about ourselves thinking about ourselves, and we can think about ourselves thinking about ourselves thinking about ourselves. But what we really are can never become an object for ourselves. As far as action is concerned, this subjectivity implies the power to stand above ourselves and judge what we are and what we should be. We are always a project to ourselves, in that in any given situation we can negate what we are in the name of what we ought to be. We cannot therefore be explained or explain ourselves adequately in objective terms. It is this ability to transcend any worldly situation that we call the freedom of the spirit. 'Freedom' so defined is not, then, simply the ability to get what we want when we want it, but also the ability to reflect about what we should want. To use the traditional language of moral philosophy, it also implies that we cannot find our completeness in any finite object of desire.

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To put it in another way: let us say that there had been achieved a socialist society in which economic exploitation of person by person had been overcome and in which there was no division between the freedom of the individual and the harmony of the whole. In such a situation a man could still ask what is the point of it all, what is the purpose of my existence. If all objective needs were satisfied, men would still not find themselves reconciled. This is in no sense to deny the value of achieving such goals or to discuss the relationship of their achievement to the achievement of our supernatural end. It is simply to say that the purpose of human life cannot adequately be defined in terms of objective goals. 'My Kingdom is not of this world.'22 It is this truth that is not satisfied in Marxism. In Marx's thought, the subject is finally subordinated to the object, so that it is asserted that we can find our completeness in space and time. The hope towards which Marxism directs human freedom is an objective hope. The reconciliation that Marxism offers man is a reconciliation in the world, not an absolute reconciliation in which the distinction between mind and world is overcome. This worldly hope is simply not adequate to our potentiality for the infinite. This failure to take true account of human freedom affects Marxism at every point, not just in the worldly Utopia that is offered man as the basis of reconciliation. To single out one point: it leads to superficiality about evil. Marxism asserts that men will live well when they are liberated from scarcity and its consequent society of class domination. Hegel saw the basic fallacy here, before Marx had expounded it. 'It is a false principle,' Hegel wrote, 'that the fetters which bind right and freedom can be broken without the emancipation of conscience - that there can be a Revolution without a Reformation.'23 Whatever levels of meaning this remark may have, one of them certainly is that necessary changes in the externals of society can only proceed in a community where many men already know themselves as free, and that this knowledge of freedom arises as a religious affirmation in the light of the infinite. The Marxist account of freedom as depending solely on the objective situation is far too simple, because the very bringing of the objective situation to the point where its liberation is possible depends on generations of men and women having known themselves as free. This being so, Marx's account of the fetters that bind right and freedom is quite inadequate.

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Indeed, the subordination of the mind to the world in Marxism and the consequent superficiality of its account of evil has been responsible for that unpreparedness among Marxists for the corruptions that have ravaged their own parties. Believing that scarcity and class dominance were the cause of evil, they were not ready for the demoniac outbreaks of power-seeking that have characterized the Communist worlds. Because of its superficial view of evil, there were no built-in safeguards, such as practices of spiritual purification, within the system. A phenomenon such as Stalin cannot be totally explained as a product of oriental despotism (as some Western empiricists would have it) but must also be considered as a product of Marxist theory. After all, similar phenomena have appeared in all the Communist parties of the world. In another connection, this same dialectic of corruption has worked itself out among Communists because of the Marxist naivety about ends justifying the means. This failure indicates why Marxism has been officially triumphant in the East but defeated in the West. The knowledge of each person as a free subject and as of unique importance in his freedom had not been part of the old religious cultures of the East. These cultures had never passed through a stage similar to what the Reformation and the Enlightenment had meant to Europe by way of the general consciousness of right and freedom.k To some extent Russia was touched by the Enlightenment, but only indirectly as compared with Germany, France, or England. Therefore, when the ancient societies of the East recognized both the possibilities and the threat from the progressive European culture and realized that they were going to have to take over that culture if they were not to be slaves of the Europeans, it is not surprising that they should take over the progressive spirit in a very objective form, which did not adequately include within itself the truth of freedom. And this is Marxism: a brilliant account of history that does not sufficiently recognize the truth of the spirit; a philosophy that although aware of the sins against human freedom, finally subordinates our freedom to the objective conditions of the world. Indeed, Marxism was made more suitable for Asia by the fact that revolutionary leaders such as Lenin changed Marx's thought into an k It must be repeated once again that words such as Enlightenment and Reformation are only inadequate shorthand.

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ever naiver and cruder scientific materialism. Darwinism had been influential in leading Engels to conceive the human spirit as dependent on the objective conditions of the world. In the thought of Lenin, the process was carried even further: the freedom of the subject was made entirely subordinate to the objective world in a way that would have been unthinkable to Marx, who saw subject and object in dialectical relationship. Certainly Lenin did not think he was misinterpreting Marx but in so doing he made Marxism a more effective instrument of immediate political power. The organization of the Bolshevik party, in power and out, has always shown a ruthless subordination of the individual. Therefore it is not surprising that the party should have adopted the naive materialism of Lenin rather than the philosophy of Marx. After all, the origin of Marx's criticism of the capitalist system was that this system reversed the true relation between subject and object. It subordinated the worker to the conditions of his work. Thus the origin of Marxism is an affirmation of human freedom, even though that freedom is not given proper theoretical place in Marxism. But such an affirmation of freedom has not been much in evidence in Communist states. The workers of the East have surely been subordinated to the conditions of their work.1 To justify this subordination, the leaders of Marxism in the East turned their doctrine into a kind of simple scientism, concentrating solely on the improvement of techniques. This can be seen in the progressive elimination from Eastern Marxism of its religious undertones. As I have said, the ultimate source of Marxist thought was the Judaeo-Christian idea of history as the divinely ordained process of man's salvation; therefore, Marx's doctrine of progress is filled with the ecstatic hopes of its origin. But the elimination of this ecstatic element from Marxism has been necessary so that it could become official doctrine in the East. Thus it has become increasingly a species of practical materialism that excludes more and more the true significance of man in his freedom. 1 I am not concerned with the Communist argument that this subordination was necessary if their regimes in Russia and China were to survive against the West and against internal enemies. What I am saying does not rest on the assertion or denial of this historical judgment. The truth of this could only be established by sifting an enormous amount of historical data.

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Nevertheless, it is the very practicality of this materialism that makes the Russians such a powerful social force at the moment. They can concentrate on definite objectives and find an immense and almost childish satisfaction in their accomplishment. And such a new thing is this practical and collectivized materialism in Asia that we can look forward to its leaders being intoxicated by such limited objectives for many generations. It is this that makes them so like Americans of the early twentieth century. Just look at Khrushchev - a tough and amusing organizer, of peasant origin, with a great zest for life, and having the most limited materialism as philosophy.24 What centuries of civilization separate him from a man such as Marx! Of course eventually the Russian society will produce a new spirit of freedom. Among the children of the elites, young existentialists must be growing up who know their freedom as the negation of the world. It was heartening to read that both Russian and Chinese officials had found it necessary to condemn rock 'n' roll as a decadent occupation. Whatever the limitations of rock 'n' roll, it is an attempt of the young to express themselves on a level beyond the practical. No wonder the Russians and Chinese who want their people to concentrate their energies on immediate and collective objectives should distrust such phenomena in their midst. Indeed the very studying of the writings of Marx himself, and of Russian writers such as Dostoevsky, is bound to create in Russia a sense of the individual as the expression of freedom. As it has been this submerging of freedom in the objective that has enabled Marxism to play such a role in the East, it was this same failing that has ultimately prevented Marxism from being a dominant intellectual force in the West. Our civilization, for all its faults, has given many of its members a sense of themselves as free, a sense that their ultimate destiny was more than of this world, and so they could not be satisfied with Marxism. The West had, after all, known the spiritual law of Catholicism and the freedom of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. However much this knowledge of the spirit may have faltered and betrayed itself under the new and frightening conditions of the mass age, it has been too powerful a tradition to surrender to such a limited hope as Marxism. Even when thinking of the worst sides of the Western world - the invention of mass war in Christian civilization, the greed and ruthlessness of imperialist capitalism, the vulgarity and

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hypocrisy of the commercial society in North America - still I do not hesitate to say that the conceptions of spiritual law and freedom have some hold in our midst and give our tradition something that Asiatic Marxism does not yet have. Even when this small boast is made, we must immediately hesitate. For obviously the progressive spirit is at least as dominant in North America as in Russia. We are obviously dedicated to one God above any other, the idea of progress and man's making of it. In any advertisement, any company report, any political speech, history making and progress cry out 'Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.' In some political speeches of recent years this spirit has reached a level of high comedy. It is also true of the lower levels of power such as labour leaders, university presidents, and ministers. In the last hundred years we have so served the idea of man the maker of progress that today we live in a society that is the very incarnation of that idea. The question thoughtful people must ask themselves is whether the progressive spirit is going to hold within itself any conception of spiritual law and freedom; or whether our history-making spirit will degenerate into a rudderless desire for domination on the part of our elites, and aimless pleasure seeking among the masses. Can the achievements of the age of progress be placed at the service of a human freedom that finds itself completed and not denied by a spiritual order? The rest of these essays will deal with this immensely difficult question. In this discussion the philosopher's relation to it must first be made plain. It is not the function of the philosopher to speak in detail about how the contradictions of the world will be overcome in the temporal process: for instance, to predict what is going to happen in North America. The function of the philosopher is rather to think how the various sides of truth that have made themselves explicit in history may be known in their unity. At the superficial level, at least, certain great ideas appear to be in contradiction. It is the philosopher's job to search for the unity behind the contradiction. I am not saying he will find any satisfactory unity; but insofar as he does, he illuminates the meaning of existence for others and thus plays a significant role in the overcoming of those contractions in the actuality. To proceed: the truth of natural law is that man lives within an order that he did not make and to which he must subordinate his actions; the truth of the history-making spirit is that man is free to build a society

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that eliminates the evils of the world. Both these assertions seem true. The difficulty is to understand how they both can be thought together. Yet the necessity of thinking them together is shown in the fact that when the conclusions of either are worked out in detail, they appear wholly unacceptable. On the one hand, does not the idea of a divine order encourage man to accept the conditions of the world rather than to improve them? Religious societies have surely accepted the fact of scarcity, have accepted that starvation is one of the vicissitudes men may be called upon to bear, have accepted that men must earn their living by the sweat of their brow. The contemplative meditating on the wonders of the divine order, isolated and protected from the floods and famines, illustrates this acceptance. It is rebellion against this that has moved men in the age of progress. Indeed, these days when the age of progress seems to have brought such chaos and confusion, there is a tendency among many of the most sensitive and intelligent to ridicule its doctrines. This has become a very fashionable occupation among intellectuals in Europe and the United States. Clever young. men are always saying that it is old-fashioned to believe in progress. This ridicule is understandable from the defeated and the empirically minded, but when it comes from Christian theologians it is a dreadful perversion of the gospel. It generally indicates a vested interest in the continuance of evil. They are saying that if man can eliminate evil, then there is no need for God. Therefore we must ridicule man's powers so as to protect God. Those who say this are themselves usually comfortable and protected from life's vicissitudes. Against this, the right of man to rebel against the conditions of the world and to improve them seems indubitable. But as soon as this is said, the necessity for limits to man's making of history must be stated with equal force. It is undeniable that the worst crimes of the twentieth century have been perpetrated in the name of progress and man's right to make history. And we must remind ourselves that North Americans have been among the perpetrators of these progressive crimes. Surely the twentieth century has presented us with one question above all: are there any limits to history-making? The question must be in any intelligent mind whether man's domination of nature can lead to the end of human life on the planet, if not in a cataclysm of bombs, perhaps by the slow

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perversion of the processes of life. Here, of course, the question of limit is not necessarily seen in a moral setting, because we may be concerned with simply natural consequences. The pragmatic modern man can take the wonder and mystery from this strange revolt of nature by reducing the matter to the hypothetical: 'If people think race survival desirable, they would be wise to act in certain ways.' So the mind can be freed from the idea of categorical limit, of acts we should never do under any circumstances. But the idea of categorical limit arises inescapably when we turn from the future of the race to our relations with individual persons. This is seen most clearly when we ask the questions, 'Is there anything that we should never under any circumstances do to another human being?' 'Is there a point in the degradation of a human being where we can say that so to degrade for whatever purpose is categorically wrong?' These questions have of course faced us in the work of the Nazis. The coercive experiments of researchers upon live, conscious human beings were undertaken by the doctors because they thought that their knowledge would be extended thereby. Do we think that such practices are categorically wrong? The same problem has faced us with the Communists in the purge trials where men were degraded till they were willing to confess to having done what in fact they had not done. And this example is a better one than the previous, for let us never forget that many of the Communists who so degraded their fellow men acted for the sake of that highest good, progress. It was permissible to torture this particular man because his confession would influence the masses to make easier the proper steps to progress. This question of limit is not confined to alien lands. More and more the elites of North America seem to deny that there is any limit to what you can do to make history. Let me illustrate: at a National Electronics Conference in 1956, an engineer was talking about what he called biocontrol. He used the following words not to describe an appalling nightmare but an interesting scientific possibility. 'The ultimate achievement of bio-control may be the control of man himself. The controlled subjects would never be permitted to think as individuals. A few months after birth a surgeon would equip each child with a socket mounted under the scalp and through electrodes reaching selected areas of the brain tissue, the child's sensory perceptions and muscular activity would be either modified or completely controlled

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by bio-electric signals radiating from state-controlled transmitters.'25 The words of this engineer are extreme. This generation may not have to surrender its children to the engineers to have sockets put in their heads. But the relevant question here is, Why not? For surely we can have no hesitation in saying that as we believe men are free, if they cannot understand the true reasons for not doing something, there is nothing to restrain them from doing it. Surely the last years have taught us not to rely too much on traditions or decent feelings, certainly not our own decent feelings. This question of limit surrounds us at all points, both important and unimportant, whatever our occupation. The scientists may be singled out as an example, because on the clarity of their vision so much of what happens will depend. If we could gain knowledge by experimenting on live, conscious human beings against their will, should we do it? Should we do it if the knowledge gained added to the happiness of the greatest number? Once the idea of limit is admitted in extreme cases, such as cruelty or torture, it cannot of course be confined simply to such cases. It must be recognized as operative throughout all our lives. The salesman or shopkeeper who objects to the ruthlessness of the Russians may be just the person who sees no limit to enslaving poor people by selling them things on the instalment plan at outrageous rates of interest, which the poor person may not even understand. The man who objects to the persecution of the Jews may make a fortune by the ownership of slum property. The very North American rulers who have most condemned the lack of restraint in the Russians have brought about the unrestrained control of the acquisitive over all aspects of our society. But the idea of limit is unavoidably the idea of God. If we say there is something that should never be done under any circumstances, we have said that something is absolutely wrong. We have said that the history-making spirit has come upon that which it has no right to manipulate. The standard we have come upon is a reality we must accept, not a value we create. God is that which we cannot manipulate. He is the limit of our right to change the world. In the recognition of limit, the idea of law in some form must once again become real for us. The idea of God, having been discarded as impossible and immoral, comes back in the twentieth century as men recognize that if there is no theoretical limit there is no practical limit, and any action is permissible.

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CHAPTER 7: AMERICAN MORALITY North American secularism has more complex roots than is often supposed. Europeans often interpret our society in a very simplified and biased manner, as if it were merely a debased edition of their own. Their indictment accuses us at one and the same time of being reactionary capitalists, and yet also of being unleavened by the ancient conservative culture. They interpret North Americans simply as materialists who had the luck to move to an uncharted continent of great resources just when European science was providing the skills to use those resources. They see us, therefore, with no moral ideas beyond the utilitarian. What they misunderstand is that the progressive secularism that holds our society is not identical with the secularism of Europe because it has in large measure arisen out of the ashes of a multiform Protestantism, particularly Puritanism. Such a predominantly Calvinist Protestantism was never long the determining force in any major European country, and Puritanism was not long dominant even in England. Whatever the influence of the vast immigration of Catholics and Jews, whatever the influence of established Catholic societies, theirs has not been the dominant tradition here. It is only necessary to understand the degree to which Jewish and Catholic institutions have had to come to terms with Protestant secularism to gauge the strength of that force. Thus at the end of the explicitly Protestant era, its spirit still implicitly forms us. To understand our modern moral language, it is necessary to see it therefore as the end product of a secularized Calvinism, or if you want it the other way, a secularism with Calvinist undertones. It has often been considered clever to ridicule Puritanism. But those who ridiculed it have generally confused an authentic Puritanism with a hypocritical nineteenth century religion, and have not bothered to study Calvinist theology.m Above all it must be emphasized that Calvinism was an immensely practical faith. This is what distinguishes it m As I can only discuss Calvinism and its Puritan offshoots very shortly, let me recommend two books as introductions to the subject, one by a German, the other by a Canadian. The first is Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, Ltd. 1930); the other, by Professor Woodhouse of Toronto, is Puritanism and Liberty (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1938).

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from Lutheranism, which was essentially mystical. Calvin's doctrine of the Hidden God by whose inscrutable Will men were elected to salvation or damnation meant that they believed themselves cut off from the contemplation of God, except as He revealed Himself in the Bible, and particularly in Jesus Christ. Though predestinarianism and emphasis on the Fall might seem to lead to a passive quietism, they in fact led to concentration on the practical life, because men cut off from contemplation sought in practicality the assurance that they were indeed the recipients of grace. This combined with the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers led to what Max Weber has brilliantly defined as 'worldly ascetism' - the saints living practical lives in the world.26 Their worldly ascetism made the Calvinists an immense force in shaping history, as democratic reformers and as capitalists. Paradoxically, the rage to be confident of their election was what gave the Puritans such a sense of their own authentic freedom. Whatever may be said about the Puritan tradition, it has produced people who have known themselves as possessors of practical freedom. Also the Calvinist doctrine of the Hidden God meant that they did not believe, as have the Catholics, that one could see God's footprints in the world, and that one could discover natural law. One could only contemplate God in Jesus Christ, and go out and act as best one could. It is this tradition of acting for the best in the world that has been of such influence in creating our modern North American practicality. When freed from all theological context, it becomes pragmatism. Because of these theological presuppositions, Calvinism was a determining force for egalitarianism. In Puritanism, more than in any other influence, lies the source of our greatest spiritual achievement in North America, social equality. It is not possible to describe here the battle over church government between Catholicism and Calvinism the battle between the principle of hierarchy and the principle of equality. But it is clear that when you believe that every person in the Church is capable of grasping essential truth through revelation, you have a firm religious incentive towards an egalitarian rather than a hierarchical society. I cannot here attempt to describe the long history of Protestant influence on North America or its complex interdependence with the spirit of democracy, pioneering, and science. The movement of that interdependence may be illustrated at one point only: how in educational

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theory the Puritans and the later immigrants have worked together to produce egalitarian technologism. This is an important example to understand because of the power of this tradition over all our educational institutions today. The immigrants who have poured into this continent in the last hundred years have had the very understandable interest of destroying any social forms that limited the open society. In the field of education, the decisive victory of the technical over the older studies has allowed the open sesame to success to consist of purely technical skill: engineering, commerce, etc. When success depends on the subtler educational forms (the study of history and art and philosophy), it is a much more complex business for the outsider to succeed. It was in terms of these subtler studies that most of the immigrants had once been excluded from the privileged classes of Europe. Inevitably therefore the ordinary immigrant did all that was in his power to break down in education everything but the technological. What is interesting is the degree to which Puritan theology encouraged this tendency. In the face of a theology of revelation, the old philosophical education, which was intended as a means to the contemplative vision of God, became largely beside the point. Salvation was one thing; the educational process was another. Thus they came more and more to be held apart. The educational process gradually came to be concerned only with the teaching of techniques, so that Christians could be effective in the world. What must be recognized is that the democratic and secular educational system we have today in all our schools and universities, far from being something to which Protestants have objected, is something they have largely built themselves. There is grief and a perverse pleasure to be derived from the irony of the fact that our present educational institutions have been created more by ministers than by any other group. This is not to say that the ministers have always been ambitious front men pandering to the spirit of the age. Often they did it on principle - the principle that ultimate truth had almost nothing to do with the educational process. This formative Protestant influence has been emphasized to show that our exaltation of the doer, the organizer, the busy man has far deeper moral roots than a sheer surrender to materialism, as so many Europeans believe. This exaltation is the basis of our North American assumption that it is the right of the businessman to rule; to control not

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only our economic apparatus, but all our institutions, our politics, our churches, our schools, our universities, our newspapers, our art, and our science. Despite all that can be said against the tyranny of business, it is impossible to understand its achievements and the acceptance of its continuing power by most people unless one realizes that in and through its self-interest there has moved the idea that economic enterprise was a truly moral activity and that it served the freedom of the human spirit. How many North Americans were raised on such repressive cliches as the following from Longfellow? The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight But they while their companions slept Were toiling upward in the night.n How many of our Canadian bankers (of Scottish descent) still believe in such doctrine? The Alger legend of a generation ago, the outpouring of energy at home and abroad, the atmosphere of obligatory uplift among all but the highest level of businessmen cannot be interpreted solely as the hypocritical mask of exploitation.28 Even the glassiest financial man, whose activism has narrowed to the point of calculation, is likely to believe his activity is an instrument of progress; that he is justified to himself and to others because he has the key to the highest social good - the dynamic, expanding society. The Protestant self-made man who was the linchpin of the early industrialism has, of course, been replaced by an increasingly technical and slick set of managers among whom the old Protestant ethic has disappeared. But what remains is the belief that the activist spirit is the highest form of human life imaginable. Under early Protestantism this activism is seen as serving the Will of God;° in the nineteenth century the Will of God and personal gain are grossly confused, as in such men as J.P. n The reader is reminded that the last line of the quatrain was not intended by Longfellow to have any Giovannian undertones.27 o This identification of Christianity with practicality by North American Protestants is well illustrated by a quotation from my grandfather. 'Work! Honest work for and with God in Christ! This is the Gospel that is preached unto us. No form, new or old, no pet doctrine or panacea, no institution or catechism can take the place of that.' G.M. Grant to the Synod of the Presbyterian Church in Nova Scotia, 1866.

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Morgan and Rockefeller;29 in the twentieth century personal power combined with social engineering become ends in themselves. But always the control of the world is seen as the essentially moral. This exaltation of activism can be seen in its negative side in the way it has inhibited those activities, such as daydreaming, sensuality, art, prayer, theoretical science, and philosophy, which do not directly change the world, and that therefore have been linked together, in contradistinction to the practical, under that exalted term, leisure. By leisure I do not mean inactivity, but those activities that are nonmanipulative, which have as their ends joy rather than power, adoration rather than control. Historically, the artist, the philosopher, the mystic have been outsiders in our Protestant civilization. During the excitement over Sputnik, it was suggested that the Americans were deeply depressed by the Russian success. I thought this was a wrong interpretation. Rather, there was a great sigh of relief from the American elites, for now there was an immediate practical objective of competition to be achieved, a new frontier to be conquered - outer space. It provided further excuse not to think about what will make life meaningful when the practical problems are settled, about what people will do when the factories are filled with mechanical robots. Then, of course, leisure will have to be accepted as the most important part of life. It is hard to catch the popular moral language in explicit form. Our very practicality has made us uninterested in systematic thought and therefore our common moral language is seldom systematized. The history-making elites of North America are not much concerned with the ideology of their power but with its exercise. Nevertheless we have a moral vocabulary that is fairly general. The remnants of a dying liberal Protestantism are combined with a potent influence from the natural sciences, and now even more from the language of the social sciences. It succeeds in exalting and uniting both capitalist enterprise and democratic equality. Of course, these influences have all shaped each other. For instance, the language of our psychology is penetrated throughout with an onward and upward optimism that it owes greatly to liberal Protestantism and which would have left a metaphysical old Jew like Freud very amused. Psychologists and YMCA secretaries now speak the same language. It is hard to know this language for what it is, because so many of its

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conceptions have been demoralized. The word 'motive' with its connotations of a free being becomes 'motivational drive' with the connotation of a robot. 'Beliefs' are now called 'attitudes,' with the implication that we have no control about what we ultimately think. Sin becomes maladjustment. The intellectual is said to intellectualize, as if thought was a front to make prejudice respectable. Conscience becomes superego, as if it were an appendage to our real selves, and so on and so on. What has happened is that psychology is thought to be a science in the narrow sense of that term. Therefore it increasingly interprets man as an object of the world. And as this psychological jargon enters our everyday speech it becomes in fact our moral language, although really it is denying that there is any such thing as morality. There is only morality if we are free. If we are beings for whom the vocabulary of attitudes, drives, and adjustment is adequate, then we are not free. The nearest we have come to a systematic presentation of the secularized Protestant moral language is in pragmatism - the philosophy of William James and John Dewey, which was so popular in the twenties and thirties of this century. Pragmatism has had such a pervasive influence in our schools because it expressed in philosophic form much that was implicit in our way of life. Both James and Dewey continually write about the repressive nature of traditional Protestantism and the need to free people in a scientific age from its transcendent and ironic elements. Pragmatism has therefore been interpreted as if it were a reaction against Protestantism. Indeed it is clear that Dewey and James thought it so. But this seems to me quite wrong. The whole basis of their humanism is unthinkable outside the practical Protestant ethic. Their attacks on Greek philosophy and Plato in particular have a ring completely reminiscent of the Reformers' attacks on natural theology. The Spanish-American philosopher Santayana made the very shrewd distinction between the humanisms that arise out of the Catholic tradition and those that arise in a Protestant climate.30 Pragmatism is the apotheosis of Protestant humanism. What is relevant here is the pragmatists' definition of truth. Our ideas are true when and insofar as they are effective in action. To quote William James: 'The true is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our acting.'31 Or again: Truth in our ideas means their power to work.' Or again:

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'An idea is true as long as it is profitable in our lives.' It will be clear how far this pragmatist account of truth expresses the history-making spirit. We not only make history and nature but truth itself. To quote James again: 'Pragmatic philosophy turns towards action and power.' Contemplation, far from being an end in itself, is a dangerous pastime. To believe in the absolute, James said, was to take a moral holiday.32 Pragmatism is much more completely a history-making philosophy than Marxism, for in Marx's philosophy man's power to make the world is limited by a final necessary outcome. In pragmatism man is entirely open to make the world as he chooses and there is no final certainty. Everything is dependent on how man uses his practical freedom. Again James' words: 'The world stands ready, malleable, waiting to receive the final touches at our hands. Like the Kingdom of Heaven it suffers human violence willingly. Man engenders truth upon it.' To digress for a moment, this sentence is an example of how our language uses Protestant metaphors with a secular meaning. The old Christian words 'final' and 'The Kingdom of Heaven' are here used in a context that utterly denies their origin. James is steeped in the old Protestant vocabulary and yet uses it to deny that there is a reality that cannot be manipulated. What must first be mentioned about this definition of truth is its attractiveness. How appealing it is to make truth the servant of life and of our actions. The freedom of man to make the world is unambiguously asserted. The definition appears democratic and egalitarian, with its care about life, and the life of ordinary people. What gives pragmatism its power is that it catches the modern insight that the ordinary comforts of ordinary people matter in the scheme of things. The day-to-day business of living is the purpose of everything and thought is its servant. Take its educational mottoes, for instance: 'Education for Living,' 'We Learn by Doing.' Education is not being imposed on people but must serve their ordinary needs. Or as the pragmatists used to say: T don't teach arithmetic, I teach children.' Arithmetic becomes the servant of man; reason an instrument for fuller living. Indeed why pragmatism has been so influential with so many decent people is that it seemed such an affirmation of human freedom. It seemed a philosophy by which practical, democratic people could create a world where the full life could be lived. The exaltation of life and action above truth seemed to liberate ordinary men.

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But at a deeper level, is the exaltation of life and action over truth and thought an adequate philosophic position? What does it imply in terms of spiritual law and freedom? In the last essay the possibility of law was presented in the form of the question: Is there anything that one man can do to another that is categorically wrong? Pragmatism, as the exaltation of life and action over thought, cannot give an affirmative answer to that question. If you say that the right is 'the expedient in the way of our behaving,' how can there be any room for the categorically wrong? May not the torture of children sometimes be expedient and therefore right? To say that an idea is true as long as it is profitable in our lives sounds harmless but it involves saying that the judicial condemnation of the innocent can be justified, because it is certainly often profitable in the lives of men and nations.p This criticism of pragmatism may be summarized in two propositions: (1) A philosophy that exalts action and life over thought cannot condemn any action as categorically wrong. (2) Any philosophy that cannot condemn certain actions as categorically wrong is in my opinion iniquitous (and I choose the adjective advisedly), whatever else it may say about anything. To make this condemnation of pragmatism, without arguing it carefully, must not obscure how difficult it is to think the categorically wrong. We see this difficulty when we try to apply the idea of the categorically wrong to concrete cases. Is there any type of action that we can know in principle as absolutely wrong? Are there not always some circumstances that could justify a particular case? To take the example of torture: if a man had hidden a hydrogen bomb in the city of Montreal to go off at a certain hour and the police had captured him, should they torture him to persuade him to speak? Should they torture his children as a means of persuasion? Should they torture for a hydrogen bomb and not a uranium bomb, for a uranium bomb and not for TNT? Men have always found it easier to condemn torture when they were out of power than when they were responsible. The French existentialists have condemned torture by their political opponents in Algeria; they have condoned its use by their communist friends in China. To give actuality to the idea of the categorically wrong, therefore, we p I have borrowed the example of the judicial condemnation of the innocent from Miss G.E.M. Anscombe's article in Philosophy 0anuary 1958).

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must be able to state some type of action that we can know in advance that we should never do, and be able to show why such actions are inexcusable. We do not have to wait for the particular circumstances of experience in order to condemn them as wrong. Only if we can do this can we say that the idea of law makes any difference. I have borrowed the example of the judicial condemnation of the innocent because, unlike most examples, I can think of no occasions when it could be right. It can and has been argued, of course, that the judicial condemnation of the innocent is justified if it serves a wider interest, as for instance the enlightening of the masses about a conspiracy against their society. This is why certain Americans in the last years may have done it.q The Communist world has constantly made this its practice. It may be suggested that this type of action is wrong because it leads the law into disrespect and there is no higher interest in society than a general respect for the law; but this argument will not hold water, because if the conspiracy is carefully guarded it may not bring the law into disrespect with more than one person. If the argument then passes to the notion that the idea of the law is an image of the absolute and should never be brought into disrespect in the heart of even one person, then it implies the moral law as absolute, and depends on a justification of the wider proposition. Thus to start from assuming such a type of action is not meant as an argument for the moral law, because it obviously depends on the more general affirmation. No such wider justification is attempted in these essays. Furthermore the philosophy that would constitute such a justification is not a task of which I would be capable.r What then is the value of the above condemnations of pragmatism? Its value depends on the fact that the language of pragmatism has often masqueraded as something it is not. It is therefore important to bring out its implications, namely, that it denies moral law despite all its high-sounding language. The argument has been reduced to a concrete case, in the hope that by taking theoretical assumptions to their q The evidence about the Hiss case is still full of uncertainties. It must be emphasized that in saying this I am not concerned with the arrogance, foolishness, or perversion of Hiss, but whether he was innocent of the crime of which he was convicted, and if so, whether those responsible for his conviction knew of his innocence.33 r The most brilliant modern attempts at such a justification are Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

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practical limit, those assumptions may appear unacceptable. Because human beings are agents as well as intelligences, theory and practice can never be independent of each other. Theoretical propositions may lead us to reassess our practice; but equally the immediacy of practice may lead us to reassess our theories. It is therefore a legitimate argument against a theory that it leads to what may be considered morally repugnant practice. Like all forms of argument, however, it can be misused. This argument has also been used to emphasize that men are morally responsible for what they publicly write about theory. A philosophy the principles of which can give no reason why men should not judicially condemn the innocent, indeed whose principles would seem to encourage the powerful to that condemnation, is as morally reprehensible as the actual carrying out of the deed. Recent centuries have time and again witnessed one generation laying down the theoretical basis for such iniquities and leaving it to the next generation to take the words seriously and live by them. As common sense takes practice seriously and theory cavalierly, it has been popular to condemn those who commit the iniquities, but not those who justified them. Why should this be? The language of pragmatism may seem uplifting in the mouths of James or Dewey. Obviously they and their early disciples were decent men taught by their Protestant humanism to loathe such actions as the condemnation of the innocent. Look at Dewey's actions over the Trotsky case or James's view of the Spanish-American war.34 Nevertheless, men are responsible for their theoretical writings. To write false theory may be more reprehensible than to organize a school badly, the bad organization of a school more harmful than the robbing of a bank. The same argument may be applied to one philosopher's justification of adultery, as compared with the simple commission of the deed. To say this is to imply nothing about the proper safeguards for freedom of opinion. As would be expected from its Puritan origins, pragmatism has a fuller account of freedom than of law. This can be seen in relation to Dewey's influence over public education. Dewey's thought has been influential in bringing about that change in our education whereby the individual has more freedom to express his individuality, and that is surely a good. But it is equally clear that Dewey's belief that the intellect is an instrument for living has directly led to a lowering of intellec-

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tual rigour in our education. We are brought back here to the definition of the true as the expedient in our way of thinking. The Deweyite might say that it is always expedient to be able to solve some mathematical problems: so that you can [exceed] the Russians, or because you can do more things if your mind has been trained mathematically. But why is it expedient to be able to do more things? I meet youngsters every day who can do everything they want and therefore see no purpose in a trained intellect or imagination. Indeed, there is a new type of student who is a product of the Deweyite influence on our schools. Such students have been taught by the modern world to have an unlimited sense of their own freedom but have learned in their education no intellectual interest or discipline to give content to that freedom. At the universities they are immensely aware and immensely bored. This is not meant as criticism, because their potentiality may be greater than that of those who are chugging away at success. So many professors from an entirely different era excuse themselves from coping with this boredom, by saying we have far too many poor students. They are not poor students. They are youngsters who have been taught to consider themselves free in a world where the intellect does not matter; where there is only life to be lived; there is nothing that it concerns us to know. To sum up, the pragmatists' conception of freedom ultimately fails because it does not understand the relation between freedom and thought, that is, between freedom and spiritual law. The democratic capitalist morality cannot of course be entirely summed up in pragmatism. Nevertheless, what has been said about pragmatism indicates the direction in which our general moral language is headed. It is a language that has almost no place for the idea of spiritual law, namely, that there is a right order to our way of doing and thinking. In many ways the Marxists have a greater sense of the world as a spiritual order than we do. On the other hand, we have an incomparably greater sense of the individual as the source of freedom. It is this that may yet save our democratic society from chaos. Those whose awareness of freedom becomes anguished in its alienation must seek reconciliation in an order that will not destroy their freedom but fulfil it. It cannot be known whether a sense of order will be created in sufficient people in our civilization to keep it alive, or whether the very sense of freedom will disappear first as people begin to take seriously the jargon of attitudes and adjustments.

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CHAPTER 8: LAW, FREEDOM, AND PROGRESS In these essays the central question of modern moral philosophy has been posed: How can we think a conception of law that does not deny the truth of our freedom or the truth of progress? This dilemma may be illustrated again because it is a dilemma of intensity and depth. The hurtling by man of objects into orbit, and indeed of himself into space is the very apotheosis of the modern spirit. Von Braun, the American rocket scientist, summed up this Faustian desire when he said, 'Man belongs to wherever he wants to go.' And already a generation ago the following words had been written on the tomb of a Russian scientist, 'Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever.' Such words are the very affirmation of the limitless and of man's freedom as the symbol of that limitlessness. In them, modern Prometheanism affirms itself. But as I read the statement from the Russian grave, the use of the word 'bound' raises in my imagination the picture of the slavering two-headed dog the Russians have created. Men may not long remain bound to the earth, but will they remain bound by anything in what they do? As I read von Braun's statement, there comes into my mind in contrast to it, that most ironic and terrible statement of the limited: what Jesus said to Peter after the Resurrection, to comfort him for his denial. 'When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when thou shalt be old ... another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.' By 'another' Jesus means at one level the Roman government who will have Peter crucified upside down, but also he means it will be God who will carry Peter whither he would not. Here limit is seen in all its ambiguity, for it is a law that carries evil within itself, a law that does not carry one wherever one wants to go, but whither one would not. This is the very negation of freedom and power, the acceptance of one's own death. And, what is most difficult, because this acceptance of death is in the mouth of Jesus Christ, it must be understood as an act of joy. The distance that divides the necessary from the good and that must be faced in any proper discussion of moral law is here most wonderfully expressed. In approaching this problem, let me also try to make clear the point from which I think about it. For most hours of the day, human existence seems to me a crazy chaos in which I can make out no meaning

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and no order, a world the unspeakable evils and tragedies of which seem to have no meaning. If anyone thinks the purpose of existence is evident let him contemplate what has happened in the twentieth century; let him contemplate what is happening at the very moment that these words are read. To quote a modern saint, Simone Weil: To manage to love God through and beyond the misery of others is very much more difficult than to love him through and beyond one's own suffering. When one loves him through and beyond one's own suffering, this suffering is thereby transfigured; becomes, depending upon the degree of purity of that love, either expiatory or redemptive. But love is unable to transfigure the misery of others (with the exception of those who are within the range of one's influence). What saint shall transfigure the misery of the slaves who died on the cross in Rome and in the Roman provinces throughout the course of so many centuries.35 To be reconciled in the face of this vision is a supernatural gift. To those who are not so reconciled, the sense of meaninglessness should not result in a beaten retirement, but in a rage for action. If this is what the world is, let us do everything in our power to create a world where children do not starve, where men are not unemployed or burnt up by napalm. Real pessimism must surely lead to the active life and the affirmation of human freedom. It is his understanding of this that makes J.P. Sartre the clearest of modern humanists.36 As soon as that sense of meaninglessness is expressed, however, I am forced to admit that I never doubt that some actions can be known to be categorically wrong. As has been repeated so often, the idea of the categorically wrong implies an order, a law, a meaning to existence. However chaotic, however crazy the world may seem, doubt is not my final standpoint, because there is that which I do not doubt. In speaking of morality, I speak ultimately from the side of the law. To do so is to affirm that the idea of God ultimately regulates moral philosophy; that the moral law is an unconditional authority of which we do not take the measure, but by which we ourselves are measured and defined; that the final judge of all moral codes is the test of the limitless, and that they can be measured first and foremost by the degree of their resistance to that test. The justification of moral law would involve showing that without such a conception, all our actions, our

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strivings, our decisions, our agonies must count as nothing and why they do not so count. Only a great artist could state this affirmation in the concrete; only a great philosopher could show how it can withstand any argument brought against it. As I am neither of these, it must remain in part a matter of faith for me. Yet as soon as this is said, it must be insisted that no one should remain satisfied with the unthought content of faith that remains in any such affirmation. In this sense the philosopher must find himself as much at variance intellectually with a religion that relies solely on faith, as with a nihilistic scepticism. Religious people may say of the foregoing, 'What's all the fuss about, of course there's a moral law, now let's get on with it. After all these words, is this what philosophy leads to? There is a moral law. We knew this all the time and did not need these arguments to affirm it. We knew it on faith.' It is on these grounds that a certain kind of Protestant church-goer is always attacking philosophy. In answer, it must be emphasized that a moral code, the authority for which is based solely on faith and that makes no attempt to define itself rigorously, is a dying code, a closed morality, a morality that does not care about its own communication. It is founded on a ghetto mentality. This indeed is what certain of our Protestant churches are more and more becoming - intellectual ghettoes. In Christian terms, a morality that does not care about its own communication is condemned at its heart, because it contradicts its own first principle, charity. It is its failure in charity, just as much as its intellectual sloth, that condemns fundamentalism, in all its guises. Indeed charity and thought are here one. Those who care about charity must care about communication, and to communicate requires systematic thought. A genuine moral language must try to be universal. This is but to return from where these essays started: the problem of a morality that can be thought stares Canadians in the face. The need for an absolute moral law is evident, just when the difficulties of thinking such a law are also most evident. It doesn't require much knowledge of Canadian society to know that the more influential people become, the less they are held by the old formulations of the moral law. It is one of the distinctive marks of North America that character and intellect are ever more in disunion. Those with character arising from faith in the traditional formulations of the law seem only to maintain that faith insofar as they are not touched by modern thought. Those

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who are touched by the modern world less and less maintain any sense of limit. Are the churches to say then that people are not to be educated - that the law they teach cannot withstand modern criticism? To see the problem in all its difficulty one need only ask oneself what reasons can be given in reply to a clever person who denies any categorical limits, to find that arguments turn quickly into appeals to faith. There is not space here to make the necessary distinctions for any discussion of the relation of faith to reason, but I am insisting on two points: (1) To base a moral language on an act of faith is to fail to recognize that moral language must be concerned with communication; (2) None of our traditional theologies seem to me able to provide an adequate account of what it is to think an absolute morality.s From this it follows that the systematic formulation of a categorical moral law is a prime necessity for Canadians. For those who can find an adequate formulation of the law in either the Catholic or Protestant theologies, this will not be a real question. Even less will it be a pressing question for those who have so entered the capitalist suburbia of the social engineers that they are happy in a relative, humanist morality. Because the primary task of moral theory is to do the philosophy for an adequate statement of law, I wish to end these essays by raising certain theoretical issues. Otherwise it would have been tempting to end on a practical note; to write of such intricate problems as work and leisure, the proper scope of freedom and law in sexuality, the right means for the overcoming of capitalism, etc. The years since 1945 have been a time of undirected doing in which thought about practical morality has been inhibited even in those institutions, such as the universities and churches, whose special function it is. Nevertheless I will end with theoretical questions, not in any hope of dishing out slogans to our dilemmas, but to indicate the difficulties in a statement of the law. Theory always seems so unspecific to those who do not realize its constitutive power. But to be a philosopher is to know its power. Only those

s In making such a statement, I must, of course, emphasize that the Roman Catholic Church is in a different position from that of any other ecclesiastical body, because of its systematic encouragement of philosophical study among its members. Within its fold, the corpus of tradition is being brought continually before the court of definition, in a way which allows the possibility of a dynamic restatement arising in its midst.

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will be interested in philosophy who realize that as we sow in theory so will we reap in action. The first consideration is how the moral law can be formulated in a way that does not override but fully recognizes the freedom of the spirit. The breakdown of the old systems of moral law were chiefly due to the failure of their formulations at this point. The demand of the law seemed external to the human will from which it was demanded. As men became conscious of themselves as free they believed their freedom to lie in the rejection of what was external to them. It was this recognition and rejection that is the common ground between the reformed theologians and the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Kant puts this in the fullest light of argument in his wonderful little book The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. He says there that if the

law is to be moral it must be a law that is freely obeyed. It is not a moral act to obey the law, except in freedom. Thereby good acts are distinguished from right acts and it is shown that morality is first and foremost concerned with right acts. This being so, the moral law depends upon our freedom. To use Kant's metaphor, in morality men self-legislate the law. Yet the question immediately arises how this spirit of independence proper to morality can be reconciled with the spirit of dependence proper to adoration. It is around the discussion of freedom and law, therefore, that what was put simply in an earlier essay about being one's own or not one's own can be properly thought. Practically, the clear recognition of this problem is of especial consequence in our society, where our long tradition of Protestantism has taught men to know themselves as free in a very direct way. Indeed there are still some people in our society who can accept the law as something given, rather than as something self-legislated. But such a morality of authority will have less and less significance in our society, particularly as the conditions of our lives are more and more rationalized in a scientific era. To rely on an external morality in such a period of history produces people who revolt from the conception of moral law itself. This was illustrated recently when incidents with drugs occurred among teenagers in Halifax. The reaction of many older people to this evidence was simply to advocate all kinds of external methods to keep the young within the limits of the traditional morality. It was significant that this appeal to external law came particularly from Protes-

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tants, who seem to have forgotten that the origin of Protestantism lay in an affirmation of the primacy of the Gospel over the law. This is but an illustration of how emptied Protestantism has been of its original magnificent affirmations. Of course some external precautions have to be taken. One obviously must try to prevent by police action criminals selling drugs to the young. But such external methods are only palliatives and have little to do with the far more important question of how young people are to become self-legislating. A law that incipient adults can accept must be a law that has meaning for them and springs from their own freedom. Therefore, the methods for producing that selfknowledge cannot be external but must go to the very roots of the educational process. Technological education plus pious pep talks are not enough. This is more than simply a question of educational means, because the right educational means can only arise among people who are thinking carefully about the proper theoretical relation between freedom and law. Yet the difficulty of the problem is also illustrated from the fact that in the practical world there is a continual danger in making the law dependent on our freedom. The abuse is to write as if the moral law must pander to every whim. This abuse is well illustrated by the articles about moral questions that appear in our mass circulation magazines - articles about the marriage bed, divorce, education, etc. These articles are written for middle-class consumption and therefore interpret the moral law to suit the convenience of suburbia and the supposed facts of popular psychology. They illustrate how easily the principle of the dependence of the law upon freedom can reduce the moral law to a tame confederate of the Lares and Penates of the country club.37 It was the application of this same principle in the immanentisms of the nineteenth century that gradually eliminated from them any idea of limit. These practical dangers lead obviously to the dilemmas of theory. Yet it must be insisted how complicated it is to achieve theoretical clarity at this point. To illustrate: the Kantian conception of freedom cannot be reconciled with the old conception of substance, on which the philosophies of natural law were based. It is this that Hegel is insisting on in his preface to The Phenomenology of Mind when he says that the ultimate meaning of the modern spirit is to think the absolute as subject, not as simple substance. But it is the ancient philosophy of substance that allowed men to use such a word as T

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arises how we can think any doctrine of personality if we cannot think of the soul as substance. Indeed the claim is made by the philosophers of the ancient persuasion that it is just this giving up of the doctrine of substance that has meant that modern philosophy can have no doctrine of limit and therefore can show no resistance to the test of the limitless. To illustrate the complexity again: does not the metaphor of a self-legislated moral law stem from and result in the doctrine of many mystics that man is necessary to God? Clearly such a doctrine cannot be reconciled with the traditional conception of creation. But does not the idea that we must be limited in our conduct depend on the doctrine that we are created? These metaphysical issues have been raised to show what deep waters surround the question of law and freedom; to show that a reformulation of the moral law cannot be made without the closest scholarship. Above all it is necessary to think about these problems in the light of the history of philosophy. And in that history what is most important is to grasp the differing imports of ancient and modern thought. One of the tragedies of the modern society is that those of the ancient persuasion have a rich and comprehensive knowledge of Greek philosophy and the Christian commentary thereon, while often lacking any close knowledge of the moderns; on the other hand, those who see the modern problems often have only scanty knowledge of the relevance of ancient philosophy. It must be insisted that the true relation of freedom to law can only be thought by those who have immersed themselves in the history of philosophy. A second theoretical issue is how the doctrine of law can be properly related to a doctrine of history that includes what is true about progress. It is necessary to bring into unity the idea of the unchangingness of God with the idea of God who works in history. The idea of a law eternally valid and to be accepted here and now must be related to the idea of God in whom all things are possible; that is, to the idea of God before whom all the present structures of the world are to be judged inadequate. To put the metaphysical problem in its moral and political setting: all progressive moralities are condemned as not being able to withstand the temptation of the limitless. There is no place in their theory for saying 'no' to certain types of action. Because there is no place for the categorical 'no,' they cannot understand the absoluteness of sin. It is this superficiality about sin that above all leads so

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many disciples of progress to indulge or acquiesce in appalling means. Yet the doctrine of limit can so easily be used to make sacrosanct the particular structures of the present - whether in economics, politics, or metaphysics - and by so doing to eliminate from our minds the hope and the determination that the evils of this world will yet be overcome. As against the unthought progressivism of modern society that seems to move towards the future with no sense of purpose, it is no wonder that conservatism has become popular among thinking people in the Western world. The truth of conservatism is the truth of order and limit, both in social and personal life. But obviously conservatism by itself will not do. For it can say nothing about the overcoming of evil, and at its worst implies that certain evils are a continuing necessity. Let us admit how terribly the powers of this world have used the phrase 'the poor we have always with us.' Against this the truth of radicalism is just the unlimited hope that evil is not necessary. This is why the great Utopian thinkers have developed when a religious, political, and economic structure is being deified. In our modern world the greatest of these Utopian prophets was Marx. As against the capitalist order that made absolute such concepts as the law of supply and demand, and particular property relations, that in fact meant acceptance of the evils that went with them, Marx held up a total denial of the world as it was in the name of the ecstatic hope that in history all things are possible, and evil never necessary. To put the problem directly in terms of our contemporary society: there can be no doubt that we all have need of a proper conservatism, an order that gives form to persons, to families, to education, to worship, to politics, and to the economic system. Yet to express conservatism in Canada means de facto to justify the continuing rule of the businessman and the right of the greedy to turn all activities into sources of personal gain. The conservative idea of law has often been in the mouths of the capitalists, but seldom in their actions. Their economic policy has been the denial of order and form. It has been carried out by exalting the impulse that is the very symbol of the unlimited and the disordered. As a ruling class they stand condemned for their denial of law. Thus it is almost impossible to express the truth of conservatism in our society without seeming to justify our present capitalism. To avoid this, a careful theory is needed in which the idea of limit includes within itself a doctrine of history as the sphere for the overcoming of evil.

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These dilemmas of moral and political theory are dependent on the metaphysical dilemmas that surround the doctrine of God. The doctrine of God must allow the cry 'Veni Creator Spiritus' as the affirmation that all the present structures of the world will yet be superseded; but it must also allow the imposition of structure on our selves and society in the here and now. On the one hand, such a reconciliation does not seem possible within the division between natural and revealed religion, which underlay the old metaphysics. On the other hand, it does not seem possible within modern immanentism, which tends to eliminate the idea of eternity from the idea of God, and which either degenerates into undefined liberal platitudes or reacts into a biblicism that denies philosophy. Even to approach this problem requires the analysis of a complex of metaphysical questions. Our doctrine of God will only become more adequate if a multitude of philosophers give their time to rethinking in the greatest detail such concepts as 'purpose,' 'revelation,' 'progress,' 'time,' 'history,' 'nature,' and above all, 'freedom' and 'evil.' From this complex of metaphysical questions about God, one stands out as being of particular significance and difficulty: the true conception of nature and its relation to history. As I have said, history has been understood by modern men as the imposition of their freedom upon nature. This has led to a view of nature as infinitely malleable. Nature has meaning only in relation to ourselves. The extremity of this view not only raises the question of the limits of our manipulation, but also the fact that within such a view there can be no natural joy for us. Art and love can only find their fulfilment in a vision of nature in opposition to our freedom. For instance, it is surely the spirit of domination that has frustrated a proper respect for sexuality on this continent, even if that frustration takes the outward form of a too great engrossment with it. Indeed we may say that the spirit knowing itself as free cannot rest in natural joy. Nevertheless it cannot deny natural joy without paying the terrible price of those fantastic revolts of a perverted nature that have so characterized the twentieth century. What doctrine of nature will be adequate to express that nature is a sphere for our timeless enjoyment and yet also a sphere that we must organize, that it has meaning apart from our ends and yet is also part of redemptive history? Obviously the Aristotelian conception of nature can no longer hold us, as we have passed beyond it in the science of the last centuries. A philosophic reconstruction of the concept of nature is necessary, but of consummate difficulty, because it must take into itself

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what the modern scientists have discovered. The hope that there will be such a reconstruction is strengthened when one sees the speculations of some few theoretical scientists, mainly in Europe. Take such a book as The History of Nature by the German physicist von Weizsacker.38 Von Weizsacker's view of nature quite transcends that of something to be dominated. He has after all lived through the twentieth century in Germany. Yet he does not exclude history from nature. He does not see nature as some timeless entity outside the historical process. He seems to be moving to a doctrine of nature that overcomes the distinction between practical and theoretical science, that overcomes the distinction between nature as the simply dominated and nature as the simply contemplated. The theoretical dissatisfaction of von Weiszacker is not often to be met with among scientists. Yet with such people does our hope lie. Insofar as artists come to take their art seriously and try to think and practise it within a fuller perspective; insofar as scientists think the meaning of their own work in relation to being as well as to history; insofar as practical men of all sorts and conditions think deeply about what they are doing; and insofar as metaphysicians, in fear and trembling are not content with inadequate unities, the contradictions of our present practice may yet be overcome. A morality that does not scorn joy and relates it to suffering may perhaps arise. Whether or how this will happen in our particular civilization cannot be determined. What can be determined however, within this present, is enough to enable us to at least try, with the very Word Himself, to take the cup and give thanks.

APPENDIX 1 DR GRANT ANSWERS QUESTIONS RAISED IN LETTERS FROM LISTENERS This was the final broadcast in the original University of the Air radio series, delivered 10 March 1958.

I would like to say thank you to all of the people who sent me letters, and particularly to those who included questions about philosophy, or wrote down why they disagreed with various things I'd said.

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Tonight I intend to say what I think about certain of the questions asked, particularly when the same kind of question was asked by various people. There are three types of letters, however, that I won't be able to answer. The first type is from those who posed their question basically as an accusation of bad faith. For instance, the kind of question that says 'Don't you really believe in an absolute moral law because you don't enjoy life or because you are a reactionary, etc?' One letter accused me of a particular form of activity that I had never heard of and that sent me hotfoot to my Krafft-Ebing.39 Now, I cannot answer these letters because they are not to do with philosophy, not because of any claim to good faith. One of the most deadly things about our society is the claim that we are all really wanting the best, when in fact we are all moved by most devious motives. I'm sure I am as filled with them as anybody. But still such questions aren't philosophy. I say this because these letters represent a tendency in modern thought - to interpret the truth or falsity of something in terms of psychological causes. For instance, there has been a recent book in England interpreting the philosophy of Berkeley as arising from the fact that Berkeley was fixated at the anal stage of his childhood development. Now this kind of talk is interesting and it is useful for all of us to think about it in connection with ourselves, but my objection to it is when it is used to bypass the question 'what is true and what is false?' in philosophy, and these psychological explanations are often used for just this purpose. The question that interests me about Bishop Berkeley is whether what he said about our perceptions is a true account of perceiving. And the training his parents gave him on the pot seems to be not of determining significance. The second type I cannot answer is the kind of question that is of such excellence and of such profundity that I could only discuss it in detail with the person who sent it. A listener in Victoria, for instance, has written down some brilliant and subtle questions about what we mean by causality. He is obviously a person who has thought deeply about philosophy for many more years than I and it would be impertinent on my part to answer in short space what I think of causality when applied to morality and history. I have received various letters of this sort dealing with very intricate metaphysical questions. I hope to be able to answer them directly by mail when I have clarified my mind on the issues concerned. These are all issues where very sharp distinctions must be made, and very careful vocabulary employed.

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The third type I cannot answer includes what I would call the really wild letters, and I don't mean the term 'wild' in any sense of the term of abuse. For anybody who gives himself to life at all must be full of wildness and craziness. The people the world calls sane are often those who have just closed themselves off from life. Do you remember what Dr Johnson said to his cautious friends about Kit Smart?40 But these letters are too individual to speak about in a public broadcast. I really go for these crazy letters - what I call Kerouac-Dean Moriarty letters.41 One thing that is interesting is how many of these letters come from Vancouver. What a relief they are to somebody who spends the winter in cautious old Halifax. Do you remember Hegel's wonderful metaphor about the process through which philosophical truth is established - the bacchanalian revel where not a soul is sober?42 Now to say something about those questions that have been asked most often. Many people asked what I meant by archetype. I think the question that was asked could best be put in this way: 'In what way, if at all, do we still partake of archetypes, as the men of the primitive culture?' My answer would be this: We still, of course, partake of archetypes in religious rituals. And in so far as we share in any ritual, however far removed from explicit religion, we do still experience to some small extent life in the archaic way. This undoubtedly becomes more and more rare in conditions of urban industrial life, where the pressure of the historic sense is so great. Of course, outside the Christian liturgy, the archetypes that give significance to our actions are not sacred in the sense of the supernatural as they were to archaic man, but only sacred in the sense that tradition can make them so. Insofar as any of us do still experience in the ancient way, it is mainly in relation to our sense of time. Of course we may be conscious of time in the two different ways at once: that is, both in the archaic and modern sense of time. We may live through such events as marriage, birth, death, and burial (that is the death and burial of those we love) as overwhelmingly new and unique in their personal context, yet at the same time be aware of them as ancient, archetypal, impersonal, heavy with the weight of the sacred. Whenever we look back to some pattern in the past, to a perfection already achieved, and never again to be reached but only imitated, then we are in some sense thinking as did archaic man. We do this in varying degrees, in many contexts, more or less trivial. When we cele-

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brate traditional feasts with secular rituals, as at Christmas, Easter, Halloween - even in our welcoming of the seasons, finding the first mayflower, etc. - actions that are significant not because they are new and ours, but because they are repetitive, ancient, universal. Even food may take on a sacred quality. The pie that mother used to bake was in some sense laid up in heaven, in contrast to every cake mix that is labelled new. The advertisers in the commercial world are, of course, aware of the power of the archetypes and use them. Still more often they use the historic sense of time. This toothpaste is unique because it alone has this new chemical in it. But Mother's Day, for instance, is a good example of commercial exploitation of one of our most archetypally sacred conceptions. I would say also that women, more usually, can continue to inhabit this archetypal world than men. And that is why when a society is breaking up women often maintain a greater health than men. Of course, what is also true is when women are broken they seem capable of even greater perversions than men. Another question a lot of people asked was why I asserted so categorically that I believed there was an overall meaning to history - why I believed history to be no arbitrary or exponential process. Various people wrote to say that, 'if you attempt to see meaning in history aren't you forcing all the manifold events of history into a strait-jacket, which only expresses one person's interpretation of the matter? Isn't it true that the more knowledge we have of historical facts the less we can see any pattern or point in them? Isn't Toynbee just the perfect example of a man who tries to force all the facts of history into particular patterns and he becomes dishonest in doing so?'43 Now in answering this question I would make a distinction here between the historian and the philosopher. I agree that when one is an historian who observes history and whose business it is to recount honestly and in the light of a careful examination of the evidence what has been going on in human existence, there is no need to state that there is an overall pattern as to what has been going on. That is, qua historian, the individual need find no meaning arising from the facts he studies. I think one can be a perfectly good scientific historian and see no meaning to history. But when a man becomes a philosopher he is in a different relation to these facts; for a philosopher is not only viewing the facts from the position of observer, he knows that he is a person who is seeking to

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understand the meaning of his own life. And I must point out that the most unimportant events of our own lives are as much historical events as the Battle of Waterloo or the Peace of Westphalia. Then the question is: Is there any meaning to the events of my life? And if one answers that affirmatively, one must move from the meaning of one's own life to the meaning of all lives. And one comes to recognize that if there is meaning to certain events there must be meaning to all events. And that is to say that there is meaning to history. But what I am saying is that one's answer to the question, 'Is there meaning in history?,' is not something that arises first from studying history, but something that arises from the study of philosophy, and that philosophy brings to history. And let us never forget that philosophy stands or falls by its ability to transcend history. Now it is at this level that I would criticize Toynbee. I do not criticize Toynbee because he says there is meaning to history, but because he says our knowledge of that meaning arises directly from the scientific study of history. Of course it doesn't. And this can be seen from the fact that perfectly honest scientific historians can differ about the question whether there is meaning in history. That is, when I made the statement that history is no arbitrary or accidental process I was not making an historical statement, but a philosophic one. It would be to pass beyond this to say what I think the meaning of history is, for instance, to discuss the question of what truth and what inadequacy there is in the idea of progress. To do that I would have to write down a detailed and careful philosophy of history. But where the people who asked this question seemed to me to have been quite right, is that throughout all my talks I have been assuming a philosophy of history, which is, in my opinion, true. I do not think it is possible to speak about the questions of moral philosophy outside the question of what is history. Another question. A lot of people asked me what I thought of the society of the Soviet Union in the light of what I had said about Marx as a great prophet. There seem to me two distinct questions involved here. First, what is good and what is bad in modern Soviet society? Second, how much Marxian prophecy is responsible for what is good and what is bad in the Soviet Union? These are distinct questions, and they are distinct questions, again, for two reasons. First, Marxism did not come into a vacuum in Russia. There was a long history in Russia

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before 1917. And much that is bad in Russia and much that is good may owe its roots to that history which is quite apart from Marxism. And secondly, Marxism was brought to Russia by people who interpreted Marx in a particular way. I think, of course, especially of Lenin. Therefore someone might say that some of the worst things in the Soviet Union arise from a perverted Marxism and not a true Marxism. Obviously, before we can judge what is good and bad in the Soviet Union, we must first study what is going on in that society. The study of what is going on in another civilization is, of course, a science of great subtlety. And we rely on the finding of sciences in such studies, or at least we should rely on them and not on propaganda, whether pro or contra. As in all spheres there will be good and bad scientists. And here indeed is a sphere in which dishonesty is well paid. And it will be the duty of any student of Soviet civilization to determine the influence of Marxism in that society. But what the philosopher can determine is the adequacy of Marxism as an account of human existence. Here I need only repeat what I have said earlier: Marxism has extremely brilliant insights into the course of modern civilization. Also, where existentialism is the most lucid of modern humanisms, Marxism seems to me the noblest. Yet for all this, it does not seem to me to give an adequate account of freedom or moral law. One caution I would, however, like to make. Nothing has done and will do more harm in the course of our own society than to keep our attention too fixed on Soviet society. It turns us away from correct judgment as to what should happen here. During the last decade, for instance, so much time was spent by educated men speaking of our first task being the maintenance of the free world against communist tyranny. At the same time, the Howes and the Taylors were subordinating all ends of our society to the interest of big business.44 As I have said, all our institutions, particularly those of the mind, were being shaped in the image of state capitalists, so that the language the diplomats used about free society sounded hollower and hollower. Our first social concern must be qualitative judgment about our own, and we can be distracted from these by any fixation with Russia. By far the most letters I have received have concerned the conception of law and the idea of the absolutely right and wrong. These took many forms: defences of pragmatism, assertions that an absolute

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morality was antique in a scientific age, statements that I pulled limits out of a hat without rational justification. There was, however, a consistent position that gives unity to many of these letters. I would therefore like to state that position and comment on it. The position I am going to describe is against what I have said about the idea of the absolutely wrong being necessary to thought. I singled out pragmatism for condemnation along these lines because of its influence in North America. But of course what I have said applies equally to any naturalistic philosophy - for instance, those ethical systems that find their prime inspiration in the truth of evolution, or any other scientific proof. Now the central criticism of what I have said has been the following - I hope I put it fairly. 'Isn't it in fact just those people who believe in moral absolutes who have practised the very ruthlessness to which you object? Aren't the worst cases of persecution in history associated with absolutist fanatics?' Several people writing mentioned the Inquisition in Spain, the purge trials in Russia, and implied that it was on absolutist grounds that the late Senator McCarthy perpetrated his worst iniquities. Therefore, isn't it true to say that scepticism is the foundation of tolerance and that only as we know that we can be certain of nothing do we come to take that proper respect for other people? That is, after all, the foundation of any true morality. Aren't the sceptics the people who are truly tolerant and moderate and aware of limits? Some people who argued this way went on to say that it does no harm to say that moral standards are relative or a matter of convenience. What does matter is that people who don't like torture, who don't like the judicial condemnation of the innocent, should influence society to produce in other people the same feeling. Now, I would like first to say what seems to me of substance in this position. First, I think scepticism is a necessary method for any educated man, and this includes scepticism about our own deepest opinions so that we don't get a vested interest in certain opinions and hold them as idols. It is this indeed that makes philosophy necessary in a civilized community; the critical and sceptical side of philosophy is necessary if we are to escape idolatry. St Augustine once spoke of philosophy as being ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, that is, 'out of the shadows and the

imaginings, into the truth.' And of course scepticism is necessary if we are not to confuse the shadows and the imaginings with the truth. But I

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don't think this scepticism should include doubting that there is truth that will make us free. Oliver Cromwell once said to some fanatics of his day, 'I beseech you by the bowels of Christ that you may consider the possibility that you are mistaken.' I think we should all be constantly considering the possibility that we are mistaken about this or that. 1 believe that this kind of consideration will make us more tolerant. Secondly, I would also agree as a fact that some of the most terrible crimes of history, against love and decency, have been committed by those who believe in absolutes and this is a fact of history it behooves us to remember. The persecutions that have been carried out in the name of Jesus seem more repugnant than those crimes that have been done in the name of greed or power - even if they have been justified before the court of social order. I would also like to bring out the point, which I did not make sufficiently clearly before, that I recognize that the issue of the categorically wrong only becomes difficult when we bring it down to concrete cases. Can you ever say about any type of action that you can know in advance that it can never be done under any circumstance? Aren't there always particular circumstances that justify certain types of action? For instance, let's say a man has hidden a hydrogen bomb somewhere in the city of Montreal to go off at a certain hour. The police capture him. Shouldn't they torture him to find out where the bomb is? The point that I am trying to make is that the idea of moral law is no good unless there are certain actions that can be known in advance as categorically wrong, and isn't this what we just cannot know. It was for this reason that I borrowed, and with great care, the example of the judicial condemnation of the innocent, because it seems to me a crystal-clear case of what I mean. This is something we can know in advance we should never do. This is something we do not have to wait for the particular circumstances of experience to decide whether it is right or wrong. What I have maintained is that this is something we can know is out of the question before the case arises. We have here a type of action that implies the law and about which we can speak universally. Now a student said to me about this type of action, 'Couldn't you justify it if by condemning a man who is innocent of a particular crime you brought home to society as a whole the danger of the communist

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conspiracy?' Now this is what the Americans in the last years have either done or come very close to doing. The evidence about the Hiss and Remington cases is not yet absolutely clear. And of course, the Russians have done it. Isn't it because Nixon seems to have come close to this kind of thing that one is terrified of him becoming President of the United States?45 However arrogant, however foolish, however twisted Hiss may have been, if you say that if he was innocent of the crime for which he was being tried he should not have been condemned, and if you say this is not just your feeling but is a principle, then you are saying what I am trying to say. Now as I have admitted, I cannot see yet with absolute clarity how this principle can be said to be true. But I find it absolutely impossible to think its denial. Do we ever come nearer to what convinces us than this? Now pragmatism by its very definition cannot say anything in advance about such questions. It in fact denies that we can ever say anything about moral law in advance and therefore denies the concept of moral law itself. Now I want to make absolutely clear that I am not judging pragmatism on its consequences in the world - to do so would be to fall into the pragmatic way of thinking. That is to substitute one pragmatism for another; pragmatists judge actions by their consequences. Of one thing I am sure, the defence of a moral law cannot rest itself on an appeal to consequences. In practice, what I am saying is that the judicial condemnation of the innocent is not said to be wrong because of its consequences. It is to be judged wrong irrespective of its consequences. This is what I meant by law. There must be a law by which we judge consequences and which is thought to be quite apart from experience. The finite is judged by the infinite and not vice versa. One thing that confuses this issue greatly is that the truth of this is confused with the truth of its relation to other questions of grave difficulty, questions that come from political philosophy, two in particular - first, the authority of particular institutions to state what the moral law is in particular cases, and second, the use of force by these institutions or through them by the state to make people conform to these particular cases. To speak clearly about either of these questions very careful distinctions will have to be made. It is with these kind of distinctions that the body of political theory is concerned. Let us face it, for an individual to live an educated moral life he must learn to make

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these careful distinctions. I would say, for instance, that people who have believed in absolutes and who have persecuted throughout history have failed at this point, not over the question of the ultimate truth of an absolutist moral theory. But they have failed to make the distinction between the absolute and the particular institutions of history. They have failed to make the proper distinction between love and freedom and law. It is on these grounds that we may fairly say that they were wrong - not on the grounds that they asserted a moral law. On the other hand, I suggest that the pragmatists are wrong in denying moral law because in so doing they are denying not only the interpretations of moral questions, but they are also denying the very idea of morality itself. They have therefore no right to masquerade as moral philosophers because they are denying that which they are philosophizing about. Now of course people can take the argument from here because what I have said is only a prolegomena to the question. The last question I would like to speak about was asked by many people. What they said was this: 'What you have spoken about concerns the history of thought, but how does all this academic stuff help me to decide moral problems here and now?' I would like to say first that I hardly see it as my function to stand up before a microphone and to exhort everybody to be moral, or even to discuss the pros and cons of bilking the income tax. Such persuasion of people to do good actions is the role of the preacher, and a very important role it is. But it is not the role of the philosopher. What I have tried to do in this introduction is to illuminate some of the assumptions and implications involved in our modern moral thinking and speaking, partly by seeing them within their historical context. This is one way by which our selfconsciousness may be gradually increased. Insofar as understanding increases our self-consciousness, it increases at the same time our freedom, and thereby our openness both to moral and to immoral actions. I've tried to emphasize that we live in the age of reason with all the terrible capacity for good and evil that that involves. In such an age, we more then ever need the rational freedom of self-knowledge with which to legislate our own laws and limits. Let me take but one example, chastity, and by chastity I do not in any sense mean a refusal of sexuality, but the giving of sexuality its proper place in a whole human existence. Until recently, the ordering of sexuality in our lives was enforced not only by principles but by fear of results, in other words by

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expediency. Soon science will have perfected devices for the avoidance of results. In so doing the problem will have moved more out of the realm of expediency into the realm of morality, pure and simple. The need to know what we are doing and why is too obvious to need much stressing. In such an age, philosophic thought presents itself to us in all its immediacy. How can we know the purpose and point of our existence? Of course, I do not mean thereby to say that philosophy is simply the servant of the practical. Moral philosophy is by definition concerned with the practical. But in solving practical problems it points beyond itself to the act of knowing, which is its own reward. It is better to arrive than to journey.

APPENDIX 2 INTRODUCTION TO THE 1966 EDITION This book was written seven years ago and since that time I have changed my mind about certain questions in moral philosophy. It is not surprising that this should happen. Moral philosophy attempts to answer the question, 'What constitutes the good life?/ and is therefore a science in which it is difficult to achieve clarity. Life would be an empty affair indeed, if we did not see this question in a deepening way as we mature. Ours is a period of history in which clarity about the problems of moral philosophy is particularly difficult. The chief reason for this difficulty is the dominance of technique over all aspects of our lives. I consider technique to be 'the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.'t In the last several centuries most human beings have come to believe with growing certainty that all human problems can be settled by technical skill. This belief has made technique their morality and today it can be truly said that the only living morality of our society is faith in technique. This fact is often hidden by the popular liberal platitude, 'We can use technology for good

t J. Ellul, The Technological Society (London: Jonathan Cape 1965), xxxiii.

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or evil according to the values we choose.' We should not, however, be deluded by this platitude into thinking that technique is any longer the servant of mankind. The pursuit of technological advance is what constitutes human excellence in our age and therefore it is our morality. Negatively, faith in technique only achieved this supreme status as its worshippers (often philosophers) ridiculed all the moral traditions of the past that doubted the dogma that human beings could solve all their problems by technique. In the situation where technique is victorious the individual finds himself in a new relation to tradition. The tradition that he inherits is at once more monolithic than any previous one and, at the same time, by its very nature is hostile to the moral teachings of the past. We live in a society where more men worship the same god than ever before, but the cult of that god can find no easily fixed forms. In North America the theology of technique goes by the name of liberalism. I mean by liberalism the belief that man's essence is his freedom. Our society functions effectively because liberalism is the doctrine that best expresses the needs of technology - far better than its chief public rival in the East. Society would not work so well if its dominant classes were not committed to that creed, and if the masses did not give it at least passive allegiance. Most individuals must live within the dominant morality of their age. They do not need moral philosophy; they need liberal sermons, and, if they become more sophisticated, the systematic exposition of progressive dogma. There is plenty of both abroad, for it is always easy to find flatterers of the spirit of the age. Men being what they are, however, there are some who cannot find an adequate moral philosophy in the self-authenticating worship of technique and the liberalism that rationalizes it. If a man still hungers for the bread of eternal life in the midst of the modern dynamism, he must seek to satisfy that hunger, even though he knows his talents are limited. Since the modern age has destroyed as living options all other traditions but itself, such people must turn back to the past in the hope of finding there what has been lost in the dynamic present. As the past has been demolished as a living continuity, men can no longer inherit it in their day-to-day lives; they must set themselves the task of being miners of the buried past. The serious entry into the human past is a prodigious event in the life of any individual. By 'serious' I mean an entry into the past not simply as an antiquarian interest (such as the

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false mandarinism that characterizes much university scholarship) but as a search for good that can be appropriated to the present. Such an entry is a prodigious event because the individual who makes it is faced with charting the subtle and diverse elements that compose the moral philosophy of the era. It is the difficulty of this charting that makes the writing of moral philosophy such a perilous task in our age. Philosophy in the Mass Age was an attempt to put down in popular form some observations about the moral traditions of the West. When I wrote it, my mind was deeply divided about the relation between those traditions and the religion of progress. Some glimmering of what it was to believe in an eternal order had been vouchsafed to me so that I was no longer totally held by the liberal faith. I believed in a moral order that men did not measure and define but by which we were measured and defined. At the practical level, I had seen many of the limitations of the technological society. Nevertheless, I was still held by the progressive dogma. It is hard indeed to overrate the importance of faith in progress through technology to those brought up in the main stream of North American life. It is the very ground of their being. The loss of this faith for a North American is equivalent to the loss of himself and the knowledge of how to live. The ferocious events of the twentieth century may batter the outposts of that faith, dim intuitions of the eternal order may put some of its consequences into question, but its central core is not easily surrendered. Its bastion is the trust in that science that issues in the conquest of nature, human and nonhuman. Every moment of our existence is so surrounded by the benefits of technology that to try to understand the limits to its conquests, and also its relation to human excellence, may seem the work of a neurotic seeking to escape from life into dreams. Philosophy in the Mass Age expresses clearly that uncertainty in my mind about the progressive faith. The basic presuppositions of that faith are still present in it, even when some of the dogma's formulations are shown to tend towards immoral practice. The book is therefore permeated with the faith that human history for all its pain and ambiguities is somehow to be seen as the progressive incarnation of reason. What had been lost in the immediacy of the North American technological drive would be regained, and regained at a higher level because of the leisure made possible by technology. It might seem that we were losing the idea that morality had any eternal reference, that

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we were entering a society where anything goes; it might be that contemplation of final cause was disappearing from the multiversities that served our system; it might be that art had lost all reference beyond the subjective and the entertaining. While all of this seemed to be true, it was balanced by the belief that all that was lost would soon be regained. When technology had reached a certain stage it would once again serve human purposes. Thus, our society would have within itself all that was good in the antique world and yet keep all the benefits of technology. At the theoretical level, I considered Hegel the greatest of all philosophers. He had partaken of all that was true and beautiful and good in the Greek world and was able to synthesize it with Christianity and with the freedom of the enlightenment and modern science. It cannot be insisted too often how hard it is for anyone who believes the Western Christian doctrine of providence to avoid reaching the conclusion that Hegel has understood the implications of that doctrine better than any other thinker. I therefore attempted to write down in nonprofessional language the substance of the vision that the age of reason was beginning to dawn and first in North America. Since that day my mind has changed. In the practical realm, I am much less optimistic about the effects that a society dominated by technology has on the individuals that comprise it. I no longer believe that technology is simply a matter of means, which men can use well or badly. As an end in itself, it inhibits the pursuit of other ends in the society it controls. Thus, its effect is debasing our conceptions of human excellence. So pervasive and deep-rooted is the faith that all human problems will be solved by unlimited technological development that it is a terrible moment for the individual when he crosses the Rubicon and puts that faith into question. To do so implies that unlimited technological development presents an undoubted threat to the possibility of human excellence. One can thereafter only approach modern society with fear and perhaps trembling and, above all, with caution. Related to this new view of technology is my reassessment of the truth of modern political philosophy. By modern philosophy I mean the thought that has emerged in western European civilization in the last four or five centuries. Modern philosophy is, more than any other source, responsible for the world we now inhabit. If we are forced to

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question the goodness of society, we are forced to question the ultimate presuppositions upon which its immediacies depend. Those presuppositions can be seen most clearly in that great line of Western philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau and from Hegel to Heidegger and Wittgenstein. But if we question these presuppositions, we are driven to look elsewhere for more adequate accounts. The obvious place for a Western man to look is to the Greek philosophers - that is, to the political writings of Plato and Aristotle. In studying these writings, I came to the conclusion that Hegel was not correct in his claim to have taken the truth of antique thought and synthesized it with the modern to produce a higher (and perhaps highest) truth; that on many of the most important political matters Plato's teaching is truer than Hegel's. Particularly, I have come to the conclusion that Plato's account of what constitutes human excellence and the possibility of its realization in the world is more valid than that of Hegel. I realize the inadequacy of such a brief description of my change of mind. To state quickly why one has changed one's mind is always difficult. Experience and reflection are too intricately bound 'for any ease of intellectual relation.' However, there is no difficulty in expressing my debt to two contemporary thinkers of clarity and, indeed, of genius. Concerning practical questions, I would mention the writings of Jacques Ellul, particularly his book The Technological Society. In that work, the structure of modern society is made plain as in nothing else I have read. Concerning the more difficult and more important theoretical questions, my debt is above all to the writings of Leo Strauss. Of Professor Strauss's books I will mention only two: What is Political Philosophy? and Thoughts on Machiavelli. As the greatest joy and that most difficult of attainment is any movement of the mind (however small) towards enlightenment, I count it a high blessing to have been acquainted with this man's thought. George Grant, Hamilton, 1966

Notes 1 Grant is referring to the launching of Sputnik. See note 1 in 'The Humanities in Soviet Higher Education' (309).

Philosophy in the Mass Age 403 2 T.M. Knox, Philosophy of Right by G.W.F. Hegel, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1958), 13. 3 The reference is to the main idea of Norman Vincent Peale - see note 12 in 'Two Theological Languages' (64). 4 William James - see note 2 in 'Philosophy and Adult Education' (73). John Dewey - see note 12 in 'Pursuit of an Illusion' (47-8). 5 Jerome David ('J.D.') Salinger (1919- ) is an American writer whose 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye, about sensitive, rebellious adolescent Holden Caulfield, won him critical acclaim and devoted admirers, especially among the post-Second World War generation of college students in the USA and Canada. Franny and Zooey (1961) brought together a number of New Yorker stories, one of which Grant mentions. 6 Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), American poet, essayist, Unitarian preacher, and noted lecturer. The editors were unable to find the source of Grant's quotation. 'Thus by their fruits ye shall know them,' Matthew 7:20. 7 Mircea Eliade - see note 33 in 'Acceptance and Rebellion' (297-8). 8 Phaedo 65, 67e. 'The prisoner leaps to lose his chains' is taken from 'Jesus shall reign where'er the sun,' by Rev. Isaac Watts (1719), hymn 388 in The Book of Common Praise (hymn book of the Anglican Church of Canada); hymn 164 in the new hymn book of the Anglican and United churches. 9 Wernher von Braun (1912-77), a pioneer of rocket research, was technical director, German Rocket Research Centre, 1937-45, and, after emigrating to the United States, director, George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, National Aereonautics and Space Administration (NASA), 1960-70. See W. von Braun, History of Rocketry and Space Travel (London: Nelson 1966). 10 In the 1954 judgment Brown vs. Board of Education ofTopeka the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all segregation in public schools was 'inherently unequal.' Dr Martin Luther King led blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, in a boycott of the municipal bus system, and in November of 1956, the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of buses. In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus of Alabama called in the National Guard to prevent integration in Little Rock; President Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the court order. 11 Marcus Tullius Cicero, De re publica; De legibus, trans. C.W. Keyes (Loeb Classical Library, London: William Heinemann Ltd 1928), VII, 16, p. 389. 12 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 1, 'Of the Rights of Persons' (1765). Sir William Blackstone (1723-80), English jurist. His Commentaries on the Laws of England (4 vols.) were produced from 1765 to 1769.

404 Philosophy in the Mass Age 13 Tamino asserts of Sarastro in Act 1, Finale, 'Er ist ein Unmensch, ein Tyrann.' 14 Cicero, De re publica; De legibus, XVII, 45, p. 347. 15 See Grant's critique of Russell in this volume, 'Pursuit of an Illusion: A Commentary on Bertrand Russell' (34). 16 George MacDonald (1824-1905), Scottish Congregational minister, abandoned his first vocation to become a successful writer of narrative poems, usually moral allegories, and novels of life in rural Scotland. His lasting reputation, however, rests upon the allegorical fairy stories for children that Grant mentions. He also published three volumes of sermons under the title Unspoken Sermons, series I (1867), II (1886), and III (1889). MacDonald's statement, slightly different than the version given by Grant, is in 'Kingship,' the Unspoken Sermons, 2nd series. See George MacDonald: Creation in Christ, ed. Rolland Hein (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw 1976), 140. Grant was struck by MacDonald's statement when he first read it in C.S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy. 17 Philosophy of History, G.W.F. Hegel, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover 1956), 32. 18 The Investiture Controversy was a dispute between church and state over the role played by lay princes in the installation of bishops and abbots. Lay investiture was condemned by Pope Nicholas II in 1059 and later by Pope Gregory VII in 1075, incurring the fierce but unsuccessful opposition of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. Joachim of Floris or Fiore (c.1135-1202), Italian mystic, theologian, biblical commentator, and philosopher of history, known for his mystical interpretation of history recognizing three ages of increasing spirituality culminating in the Age of the Spirit, a period of perfect liberty that was to emerge in the thirteenth century. The Spiritual Franciscans of the mid-thirteenth century accepted Joachim's prophesy of the third age. They were an extreme group within the Franciscan order who espoused the austerity and poverty prescribed by the original Rule of St Francis. 19 See Michael Bakunin, God and the State, preface by Carlo Cafiero and Elisee Reclus (New York: Mother Earth 1888). Bakunin had quoted Voltaire saying '"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." For, you understand, "the people must have a religion"' (17). He then 'reverses the phrase of Voltaire,' and says that 'if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him' (28). Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1814-76), Russian revolutionary, was the chief propagator of nineteenth-century anarchism, along with Proudhon. Bakunin championed the untutored spirit of revolt against political control,

Philosophy in the Mass Age 405 centralization, and subordination to authority, embodied in the Russian peasant. His quarrel with Marx split the European revolutionary movement. 20 See, for example, the discussion of the objectification of labour as estrangement or alienation in Marx's early essay 'Estranged Labour.' 21 Robert C. Tucker has the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach as 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.' R.C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton 1972), 145. 22 John 18:36 23 Philosophy of History, G.W.F. Hegel, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover 1956), 453. 24 Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894-1974), first secretary of the Communist party 1953-64 and premier of the USSR 1958-64. He espoused a policy of 'peaceful coexistence' during the cold war. 25 The Proceedings of the National Electronics Conference (later the Annual Review of Communications) are published yearly in Chicago by Professional Education International. 26 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen and Unwin 1930), chaps. 4 and 5. On Weber, see note 12 in 'Acceptance and Rebellion' (295). 27 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), popular American poet, taught modern languages at Harvard University and created a body of American legends in such narrative poems as 'Evangeline' (1847), 'The Story of Hiawatha' (1855), and 'Paul Revere's Ride' (1861). Grant's quotation is from Longfellow's 'The Ladder of St Augustine.' 28 Horatio Alger, Jr - see note 1 in 'Canadian Universities and Protestant Churches' (32). 29 John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), American banker and financier, was the owner of J.P. Morgan and Co. and also a renowned collector of art and rare books as well as the benefactor of churches, libraries, and hospitals. John Davison Rockefeller (1839-1937), American industrialist and philanthropist, organized Standard Oil and monopolized the oil business, then set up the Rockefeller Foundation, which benefited, among many other institutions, the University of Chicago. 30 Grant may have come upon the 'shrewd distinction' in a letter of Santayana's, but Santayana was responding to Bertrand Russell, who did make the distinction in a 1958 article called 'Catholic and Protestant Sceptics,' citing Santayana among others as a Catholic sceptic. Santayana wrote to Sir Desmond MacCarthy: 'Please tell Berty Russell, if you see him, that I was immensely amused at his diagnosis of "Catholic and Protestant Sceptics,"

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and in particular of myself. But I don't like his saying that I dislike the Founder of Christianity.' Daniel Cory, ed., The Letters of George Santayana (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1955), 237. Russell's article appeared in Life and Letters 1928,468-76 and was reprinted in Dial the following year. George Santayana - see note 25 in 'Acceptance and Rebellion' (297). 31 William James, Pragmatism: A New Way for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Ne w York: Longman's Green, and Co. 1914). This passage is found in the lecture 'Pragmatism's Conception of Truth' (197ff.). 32 James argued (in pragmatic terms) for the comforting truth of religious belief while criticizing its moral irresponsibility. Believers in the Absolute treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal and are able to drop the worry of our finite responsibility. 'In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way,feelingthat its issues are in better hands than ours, and are none of our business.' James, ibid., 74 (further references to 'moral holiday': 79,108). 33 Alger Hiss (1904-96), American state department official who was an advisor at Yalta, stood trial twice (1949,1950) for perjury in the matter of allegedly passing documents to Whittaker Chambers, an agent in 1938 of a communist spy ring. He was finally convicted and imprisoned for five years, but many at the time believed he was innocent. 34 See note 7 in 'The Uses of Freedom: A Word and Our World' (203). For an account of William James's view of the Spanish American War, see George Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1990), 132-51. Socialism, pacifism, and anti-imperialism led him to oppose the war, but 'James would eventually come to respect the instinctual allure of the warlike spirit while fashioning a method or therapeutic to blunt its sharpest dangers' (136). 35 Simone Weil, Notebooks 1,255. 36 Grant later changed his mind about Sartre. See the retraction published along with 'Jean-Paul Sartre' in this volume (133-4). 37 In the Roman religion, these gods of the household were regarded as protectors and symbols of fertility and prosperity. 38 Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker (1912-), German nuclear physicist, cosmologist, and philosopher of science, taught at Max Planck Institute and Marburg University and was concerned with the relation of modern science to the whole of human life. In addition to History of Nature (1949), his work includes Ethical and Political Problems of the Atomic Age (1958). 39 Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), German psychiatrist, did most of his work on forensic psychiatry and sexual pathology. 40 'My poor friend Smart [Christopher Smart, poet] shewed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or

Philosophy in the Mass Age 407 in any other unusual place. Now although, rationally speaking, it is greater madness not to pray at all, than to pray as Smart did, I am afraid there are so many who do not pray, that their understanding is not called in question ... I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else.' James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980), 281. 41 Jack Kerouac (1922-69), American novelist, portrayed his friend Neal Cassady as Dean Moriarty in his second novel, On the Road (1957), becoming a cult-hero as a principal figure along with Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder in 'the Beat Generation,' a label he originated and later repudiated. 42 John B. Baillie, G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie (London: Allen and Unwin 1931), 105. 43 Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975), philosopher of history, taught at the London School of Economics and wrote a 10-volume History of the World (1934-54). 44 Clarence Decatur Howe - see note 5 in 'Review of Henry Marshall Tory' (98). Edward Plunkett ('E.P.') Taylor (1901-89) was placed by Howe on the executive committee of the Department of Munitions and Supply in 1940. After the war he was president of the influential investment company Argus Corporation. 45 Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-94) gained his national reputation as counsel for the House Un-American Activities Committee during the hearings on Hiss (among others) before becoming vice-president under Eisenhower (1953-61). William Walter Remington (1917-54), career government official under Harry Truman, was charged in 1948 with being a communist and a Soviet spy. His murder in prison was covered up by the U.S. government. See Gary May, Un-American Activities: The Trials of William Remington (New York: Oxford University Press 1994).

Fyodor Dostoevsky

This talk was broadcast over the CBC Trans-Canada Radio Network on 5 November 1958 as part of the series 'Architects of Modern Thought.' It was later published in Architects of Modern Thought, Third and Fourth Series, Twelve Talks for CBC Radio (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1959), 71-83. Sheila Grant wrote the text with additions by Grant at the beginning and end. Grant relied on his wife to prepare this broadcast because of the pressure of other work. They had discussed Dostoevsky at length and had reached a common understanding of his writings.

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. As a young man he became involved in revolutionary activities against the Tsarist government and was sentenced to be shot. He was awaiting his turn before the firing squad, already blindfolded, when the arrival of his reprieve saved him. The next five years he spent as a convict in a penal settlement in Siberia, and amidst these horrors the New Testament was the only reading material allowed. He wrote many early novels but the first of his masterpieces, Crime and Punishment, appeared in 1866. After that appeared three works of the same order; The Idiot in 1868, The Possessed in 1871, and The Brothers Karamazov in 1879-80. This last work, the very pinnacle of his genius, he had pondered for years and finished just before his death at the age of sixty. His life alternated between Russia and western Europe in those years of the nineteenth century when bourgeois scientific civilisation was at its height, arrogant and proud, not only in the west but also in the empire it was extending over old cultures on its periphery such as Russia. The irony of its arrogance and pride lay in its unawareness that it had already planted the seeds of its

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own destruction. Dostoevsky's living out of these immense social conflicts was matched and mirrored by his personal agonies. He was an epileptic, a pathological gambler, a man driven by financial disaster. In this talk, I am considering Dostoevsky as an architect of modern thought and in that connection his importance is of two kinds, direct and indirect. Certain of his philosophic concepts have had direct influence on modern thinking. But first and foremost he is an artist, and art itself is only indirectly an architect of modern thought; because whereas thought is universal, art is particular and unique. It is indeed a medicine for the consciousness, as Collingwood called it, but not a statement of principles.1 And it is as an artist that Dostoevsky is supreme. I would not hesitate to call him the greatest of all novelists and this is not to forget Tolstoy or Henry James.2 His books are so full of what is vulgarly called a 'ferment of ideas' that his primary role is sometimes underemphasised. We are constantly told that in this or that character Dostoevsky is arguing out his theory of something or other, as if he were a philosopher writing a Platonic dialogue. He is not; his dialectic is of another order. He is great, not because he is stimulating and polemical, but because he opens our eyes to existence as it is and so renews our consciousness. He is indeed the novelist of human subjectivity, but in being so, he creates supremely objective works of art. The form of his writing may tempt the naive to underestimate his sheer artistry. It is true that he often wrote at great speed and under difficult conditions. The Idiot for instance, appeared as a serial and therefore Dostoevsky had to meet his monthly deadline, just as did Bach and Mozart. At first Dostoevsky's style may appear prolix, undisciplined, indirect to a fault, but only at first glance. His sophistication at this level is complete. The ambiguities and the deviousness are in the subject matter itself, and are no accident of an imperfect style. Indeed, one mark of the highest art is that style and subject matter cannot be separated, for they are a realised unity. One of the effects of Dostoevsky's way of telling his story, with all the reservations, the conjectural asides, the hints and undertones, is to establish an extraordinary relationship with the reader, quite unlike that of any other writer, though imitations have been numerous. (Perhaps Thomas Mann has come nearest.)3 This relationship is intended to make us uneasy, as when he is describing minutely the preposterous state of mind of some pretentious fool, not as though it were unfamil-

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iar, but with constant glances in our direction, as if to say, 'You know well enough what this feels like.' Another subtlety is his use, almost purely nominal, of the first person singular in narrative so that the emotional turbulence of the action is at a distance of one remove, with an ironical pretence of detachment. It is sometimes forgotten how immensely witty Dostoevsky can be. His wit is so subtly interwoven with elements of the highest seriousness that it is easily overlooked. Indeed this takes us to the very centre of his realism. His novels are profoundly life-like in that they do not separate life into compartments - into scenes solemn and humorous, religious and worldly, but all are carried on at once. It may be called contrapuntal. The subjects are stated successively, simultaneously, inversely, in every relation, as in a fugue. This is realism indeed, but is usually avoided in art because it leads to the grotesque and the incongruous, the sudden anticlimax and even descent into bathos. Examples can be taken from any of the novels but it is of the very essence of The Idiot, in which the epileptic Prince Mishkin moves with simple direct goodness among the posturings and intrigues of the other characters. The sublime, the cynical, the melodramatic are carried along together at the highest pitch. Hippolyte, a young self-conscious boy, is dying rapidly of tuberculosis. Having read a very lengthy but passionate last testament to a group of rather bored friends who are drinking champagne, he tries to shoot himself at dawn, but the gesture is foiled by the failure of the revolver to work. He later asks the Prince how he should die, and Mishkin replies: 'Pass us by and forgive us our happiness.' But Hippolyte cannot rise to this simplicity, and because he is overcome with confusion, runs for safety to the banal. 'Ha! ha! ha! I thought so. I thought I should hear something like that. Well you are, you really are - oh dear me. Eloquence, eloquence. Goodbye.' A far greater example of contrapuntal writing is found at the end of The Possessed, where Verkovensky's political conspiracy reaches its climax in the murder of Shatov and the suicide of Kirilov. These scenes are of surpassing genius, comparable in their art to some of the mad scenes in Lear (indeed I cannot think with whom to compare Dostoevsky at his greatest but with Shakespeare at his greatest). Obviously one can give no idea of such scenes by short quotations. Shatov has been murdered at the instigation of Verkovensky, and Kirilov who has often announced his intention of committing suicide for a mystical

Fyodor Dostoevsky 411 idea has consented to take the blame for the murder. There is a scene in which Kirilov finally brings himself to the point of fulfilling his promise by suicide, tottering between heroism and madness, while Verkovensky watches him in an agony of fear that he will talk himself out of his decision and spoil the conspiracy by deciding to live. And Kirilov understands Verkovensky's attitude entirely. As Dostoevsky moves to the grotesque climax of the suicide itself, the counterpoint reaches its perfection with every theme absolutely individual and completely developed and yet all in unity with each other. So far I have only mentioned the form of Dostoevsky's art. Its greatest achievement is of course the content, the colossal figures that people his books - the tortured Raskolnikov, the epileptic and saintly Mishkin, the charismatic superman Stavrogin, and that wonderful train of women in all their love of life and their perversity. Some of us do not know our own families as well as we know the Karamazovs. I could spend a whole talk on each one of them, for they are all unique and individual, complex and contradictory. Dostoevsky has been criticised for creating only extreme and morbid characters - if not fools and knaves, then madmen and mystics. It has been suggested that he failed to create a normal well adjusted person, because he could not do so; it has been surmised in extenuation that perhaps the Russians are really like this. I would say that he drew people in the way he did because that is the way people are, and we know them to be like that when the surface is uncovered. The 'normal man' is a non-existent abstraction. Critics have tried under the influence of the new psychology to probe Dostoevsky's own psyche. This has no doubt profited themselves, but has little critical value. It is small satisfaction to point the knowing finger at Dostoevsky, for he is so much more knowing himself. He was aware enough of the demon of which Ivan Karamazov speaks, 'the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain' that lies hidden 'in every man.' To be a Christian is to accuse oneself and Dostoevsky was a Christian. During the trial of his brother, Ivan comes out quite casually with the remark: 'Who doesn't desire his father's death?' Though Dostoevsky's self-awareness is so often underestimated by the clever, it has of course been impossible not to acclaim the brilliance of his psychological insight. One famous example may be taken - the infinite subtlety of the relationship between Ivan Karamazov, his repulsive

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half brother Smerdyakov, and Ivan's hallucination, the Devil. (Every theological tone and quantity must be included in the word hallucination.) What more vivid account of the relation between sadism and masochism than one short scene between Lise Hohlakov and Alyosha Karamazov? Even in his non-fictional work The Diary of a Writer there is for example the most amazing account of the relation between torturer and tortured - an account strongly resembling Sartre's modern description of the matter. Dostoevsky's main interest is man and his relation to good and evil. It is therefore true that he does not concern himself with the world of nature apart from man. This is deliberate, no failure of his art. He is a total modern in so far as he says there is no nature without human significance, that the world is submerged in the mental. This does not mean that his power of physical evocation is not great. Who can forget Kirilov's leaf or the stairs of the lodging house which Raskolnikov climbs to murder the old money lender, or the oil-cloth that covered Nastasia Philippovna's corpse? Now I must attempt to abstract Dostoevsky's thought from his novels, to see his doctrine of man. There is always a danger in abstracting an artist's ideas from their context, for almost any theory can be justified by suitable quotations. In great art the universal is dependent on the particular. Nevertheless, I must try. Dostoevsky's doctrine of man centres around the will. He believed man's will to be not only free but totally free, in other words, irrational. He did not believe the will to be directed towards the good as did Plato and Aristotle and the main Christian tradition. Therefore man's tendency towards evil was not seen merely as a weakness of the flesh or as a blindness of the intellect, but as authentic choosing of evil, even against one's own advantage, just to assert the will, which is one's very selfhood. The hero of that strange existentialist soliloquy, Letters from the Underworld, is concerned almost exclusively with this. Although this freedom is open, perhaps more open to evil than to good, it is infinitely precious to man, it is his existence. If any person or any system denies a man's freedom, that man must either revolt in outrage, or succumb ultimately to the sub-human level. Yet although a man's freedom is his very self, his salvation must come from elsewhere. Lived on the human level, a man's freedom will either be crushed, reducing him to a member of the ant heap (like nine-

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tenths of the population in Shigalov's Utopia) or it will run wild in a monstrosity of self-assertion and self-worship, leading infallibly to destruction. Only the grace of God can save man from destroying his humanity. Dostoevsky's works are a vast anti-Pelagian treatise.4 Although totally free, man cannot save himself; he must be redeemed. Raskolnikov has to wait for the prostitute and Siberia before repentance is granted to him; it is not until Mitya Karamazov is convicted for a murder which he has not done, that he can sing a hymn of joy to God; Shatov by watching his wife give birth to another man's child discovers the glory of God just before he is murdered; but Kirilov and Stavrogin are destroyed by their very attempt to be their own redeemers. In the western tradition, those who have asserted freedom have minimised our need of redemption; those insistent upon redemption have minimised our freedom. Dostoevsky asserts both our absolute freedom and our absolute need for redemption. Obviously this view of man was totally alien to the Russia and the Europe of the 1860's. Optimistic atheism, scientific and cultured humanism, psychology, social science, western idealist philosophy, and worldly Utopianism were flooding into Russia from Europe. To us it must seem an innocent and optimistic age. What Dostoevsky saw was the price to be paid for that innocence and even more the price to be paid for its loss. His vision denies the basic assumption of liberalism that men are naturally good, and denies that of the new sciences that man can be made good by being manipulated as an object. And he saw the ideas of liberalism (for all their outward and practical decency) as evil in their denial of man's need of God. This denial inevitably resulted in nihilism. Again and again in such phrases as 'the knaves trafficking in liberalism' he expresses his contempt for the shallowness of western progressive thought. The Possessed is of course the most famous expression of this contempt, dealing wholly with liberals and revolutionaries and showing where their differing kinds of atheism lead. Letters from the Underworld is a great snarl of outrage against liberalism, against the cult of 'the great and the beautiful' and the builders of worldly Utopias; because man is free, and knows himself free, and knows himself free to reject anything, even good, that seems to infringe on that freedom. (I must say here that it is not my business this evening to give my opinions but rather Dostoevsky's. This is to say: however penetrating Dostoevsky's

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attack on liberalism and the worldly hope may be, I do not consider it the whole truth of the matter.) So far my conclusions have been rather negative. Dostoevsky's influence has been said to be that of the supreme artist of existentialism and the critic of progressivist illusions. But his greatest influence has depended on something beyond both of these. It lies in his account of faith and of doubt. This remarkable dialectic must now be considered very briefly. How overwhelmingly Dostoevsky sees the case against God. His doubt could not be further from the hearty optimistic atheisms of the 19th century; it is more like modern doubt, the agonizing struggle of the believer to reconcile the necessary with the good. This, rather than simply 'the problem of evil' seems to me the root of Dostoevsky's grief, his particular anguish and division. It is in terms of this that Dostoevsky most profoundly heightens our consciousness. The dialectic starts from Dostoevsky's unwavering love and adoration of Jesus Christ. Always Christ is the good. But the terrible fear is that reality may after all be quite indifferent to the good, the good as we know it in Jesus Christ; that the cry of dereliction on the Cross was not answered. This doubt is expressed in so many forms and contexts, in letters as well as novels, that I think we are justified in taking it as Dostoevsky's own. The difficulty is put with incomparable brilliance by Ivan Karamazov in the chapter 'Pro and Contra.' (By the way this chapter seems to me to have made most subsequent existentialist writing about evil quite superfluous.) Ivan is sometimes described as a proud and irreligious atheist, but he is far more complex. He is consumed with desire for reconciliation, for divine universal harmony. He says, 'All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer.' Nevertheless, because of the ghastly suffering that has been inflicted on the innocent, he cannot bring himself to accept any possible future harmony. If the suffering of children go to swell the sum of suffering which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.5 It is not worth it, because those tears (of the tortured children) are not

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atoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? The mother may forgive the child's torturer for her own immeasurable suffering, but the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive. Here I would like to quote Simone Weil to illustrate the same impasse. She writes: To manage to love God through and beyond the misery of others is very much more difficult than to love him through and beyond one's own suffering. When one loves him through and beyond one's own suffering, this suffering is thereby transfigured; becomes, depending upon the degree of purity of that love, either expiatory or redemptive. But love is unable to transfigure the misery of others (with the exception of those who are within the range of one's influence). What saint shall transfigure the misery of the slaves who died on the cross in Rome and in the Roman provinces throughout the course of so many centuries.6 Ivan Karamazov is however no saint and he 'gives back his entrance ticket' to the future harmony. 'I would rather remain,' he says, 'with my unavenged suffering and my unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong.' And this because he refuses to embrace a unity that seems to him to deny love itself, by saying that suffering is unreal. Ivan has taken the suffering of children to make his case 'unanswerably clear.' But Dostoevsky sees the necessity which is divided from the good not only as personal diremption, but as cosmic, in that great indifferent brute force, nature itself. Especially when Christ is subjected to that force is this opposition most overwhelming. Kirilov in The Possessed says: 'If the laws of nature did not spare even Him, have not spared even their miracle, then all the planet is a lie and rests on a lie and on mockery.' Dostoevsky's wife has left us a description of how her husband once stood transfixed for twenty minutes in front of a painting by Holbein of the Descent from the Cross. In The Idiot Mishkin says of this very picture that it might almost make a believer lose his faith. Hippolyte in the same book describes the effect thus: When you look at this picture, you imagine nature as a huge beast dumb and implacable. Or rather - an enormous machine of modern construction which deaf and insensible, had stupidly caught, crushed and swallowed a great Being, a Being beyond all price, one that was worth the

416 Fyodor Dostoevsky whole of nature and all the laws that govern it, worth the whole earth, which had perhaps been created solely for the advent of that Being!7

Dostoevsky believed in the Resurrection, in God. But when faced with the sight of necessity swallowing up the good, he adheres with all the more passion to the good. It is not that he ultimately accepts that there is disunity between goodness and the nature of things, but he cannot think the unity and therefore the possible disunity is a terrible agony for him. As he wrote to Madame von Wisine: [I] believe that there is nothing finer, deeper, more lovable, more reasonable, braver and more perfect than Christ; and not only is there nothing, but there cannot be anything. More than that; if anyone told me that Christ is outside truth and if it had really been established that truth is outside Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ rather than the truth.8 Certainly Dostoevsky did not believe Christ was outside the truth but he is haunted by the possibility, which infinitely increases his power to speak to modern men of faith. We can go with him from there. Nevertheless, despite the anguish of his doubt, how overwhelmingly his faith irradiates all his writing. Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods With warm breast and with ah! bright wings.9 The subject matter, the characters, the conversation, all is concerned with the supernatural. What else finally matters? Kirilov speaks for all the characters when he says: 'God has tormented me all my life.' How Dostoevsky would have hated the modern therapeutic God. Sonia the prostitute reads to the unrepentant Raskolnikov the story of Lazarus raised from the dead by our Saviour. Surely such a scene is the very archetype of ham and of the phoney. Yet with consummate genius Dostoevsky raises it to the perfect account of adoration in all literature. There are also his wonderful accounts of religious ecstasy, quite different from Sonia's direct Christian faith. And, as Father de Lubac has pointed out, what is so remarkable about the accounts is that there is often something equivocal in the origins of these religious ecstasies.10 Mishkin is an epileptic and reduced finally to a state near idiocy. Kir-

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ilov, who has similar visions of unendurable glory, is a near-epileptic and ends in suicide. There is nothing pathological about Alyosha Karamazov and his ecstasy after the death of his beloved teacher Zossima is very touching. Yet he is certainly less alive to the reader than his two less regenerate brothers. Why is there this constant hesitation to strike the major chord of ultimate assertion? The reasons are, I think, the following. First, Dostoevsky knew that it could not be done. The supernatural is beyond the range of art. It can be suggested, evoked, hinted at, but never directly possessed and embodied. And the difficulty in art is paralleled by a difficulty in life. The psychological may masquerade as the spiritual, and the spiritual be mistaken for the psychological. Dostoevsky knew there is no direct transition from one realm to the other - they coexist. And so he makes his beautiful Mishkin an epileptic, while granting him the same moments of religious ecstasy as he himself experienced at the beginning of his epileptic fits. Did he not wonder at the equivocal source of his own insights? An unbeliever can therefore read Dostoevsky's novels and understand them in psychological terms; but if God exists, their meaning is totally different. Neither interpretation is forced on the reader. But whichever interpretation is taken, it must be remembered that Dostoevsky's faith was not based on his feelings of ecstasy, but on his objective apprehension of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Thus he treats ecstatic experience ambiguously, and the Gospel always directly. This seems to me the mark of his final sanity. The refusal to assume a preacher's dogmatism, however, does not only arise from the limitations of art, and from acknowledgment of the equivocal nature of religious excitement. Dostoevsky does not believe that faith can be 'proved.' To believe so would for him have denied an essential condition of faith itself. His certainty is in man as freedom and Jesus as Redeemer, but the relation between the two is always one of freedom. This is worked out explicitly in Dostoevsky's greatest statement of faith, Ivan's vision, 'The Grand Inquisitor.' Typically enough, it is in the form of an attack on Christ, yet as Ivan admits to Alyosha, it turns out to be a hymn in praise of Christ. The scene is sixteenth century Spain where the Grand Inquisitor is supervising the burning of heretics. Suddenly Christ appears, walking quietly through the streets and the Inquisitor, who rules in Christ's name, puts Him in prison and there pours out his indictment. It must of course be read in

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its entirety. The part which most concerns us in this context is where the Inquisitor reproaches Jesus for his cruelty to men in expecting too much of them. Instead of taking men's freedom from them, You made it greater than ever! - Instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest for ever, You chose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic; You chose what was utterly beyond the strength of men, acting as though You did not love them at all - You who came to give Your life for them! - There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels, for their own happiness - these forces are miracle, mystery and authority. You rejected all these, and have set the example for so doing. - Is the nature of men such that they can reject miracle, and at the greatest moments of their life, at the moments of their deepest, most agonizing spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the conscience? - You did not come down from the Cross when they shouted to You, mocking and reviling You, 'Come down from the Cross and we will believe that Thou art He.' You did not come down, for You craved faith given freely.11 It seems to me that 'The Grand Inquisitor' brings into at least a tentative unity most of the problems and agonies that tormented Dostoevsky. The terrible picture of Holbein can be seen in a triumphant setting. This is the Being of whom Alyosha spoke, who alone has the right to forgive everything, all and for all. But even with Ivan's eloquence, the reconciliation cannot be made explicit either for him or for us. Jesus speaks not a word to the Grand Inquisitor, but only kisses him. Here is the infinite weakness in which the second Person of the Trinity crosses the void of separation.

Notes 1 Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943), English philosopher of history and art, spent most of his life teaching at Oxford. The Grants are referring to his Principles of Art (1938). 2 Grant held the novels of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) and Henry James in high esteem. For James, see note 28 in Acceptance and Rebellion' (297).

Fyodor Dostoevsky 419 3 Thomas Mann (1875-1955), German novelist who fled Germany during the Nazi period and settled in the United States in 1938. His most famous works are Buddenbrooks (1901), Tonio Kroger (1903), Death in Venice (1912), The Magic Mountain (1924), and Dr Faustus (1947). 4 The Pelagian heresy was the doctrine of Romano-British theologian Pelagius (360-418) that humans are not subject to original sin and can fulfil the divine commands with their own free will and with the assistance of divine grace not being necessary. 5 The Brothers Karamazov, 'Rebellion,' section 4 of 'Pro and Contra/ trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Signet 1957), 224-6. 6 Simone Weil, Notebooks I, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1956), 255. 7 The Idiot, trans. Eva M. Martin (London: J.M. Dent and Sons 1935), 396. 8 The letter was written February 1854 to Natalya Dmitrievna Fonvizina (1805-69), wife of retired General Mikhail A. Fon-Vizin or Fonvizin (17871854), exiled to Siberia for his part in the Decembrist uprising of 1825. The Fonvizins settled in Tobolsk, where Natalya befriended the young Dostoevsky, also exiled, and gave him a Bible. Dostoevsky later portrayed Shatov in The Possessed as prepared to accept Christ even if it meant rejecting the truth, using his own words from this letter. See Fyodor Dostoevsky: Complete Letters, Volume 1,1832-1859, ed. and trans. David Lowe and Ronald Meyer (Ann Arbor: Ardis 1988), 193-6. The Grants' spelling of the name, 'von Wisine,' is a German form of 'Fonvizin,' sometimes spelled 'Fon-Visin' with the hyphen, indicating the name originally had been German. 9 From 'God's Grandeur' by Gerard Manley Hopkins. See Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press 1938), 70. 10 Henri de Lubac, SJ (1896-1991), French theologian, was later made a cardinal in 1983 by Pope John Paul II. He wrote The Drama of Atheist Humanism (1963), in which he argued that Dostoevsky's work showed that modern atheism must return to a humanism that emanates from Christ. 11 Karamazov, 'The Grand Inquisitor,' sect. 5 of 'Pro and Contra,' 236.

Christ, What a Planet!

These comments on the events of 1959 were broadcast as a ten-minute talk on CBC Radio in the series Our Special Speaker on 27 December 1959.

How is one to describe or assess all that went on in this crazy planet in 1959? History is like a fire in which individuals are consumed. Should one single out the experiment in human engineering among the Chinese communes? There, certainly, individuals are being consumed. The communists claim that this will bring liberation from want for a multitude of humans. But what of the ruthless engineering? Should one speak of atomic testing and the growing amount of strontium in the atmosphere? What intricate questions about God and nature and human freedom this brings to the mind. Or again the problems of world population and birth control, which Bishop Pike so forcibly threw into American politics the other day.1 For each member of the human race this has both the most intimately personal and the widest social relevance, at the same time. To speak for myself one of the saddest things in 1959 was how little the British thought about Africa when they voted. For like many other Canadians, I am one of the old fashioned who can't help thinking that if the British show a declining interest in political right and wrong, where are we?2 One can discuss all these things for hours with one's friends, but what fascinated me most in 1959 was watching the North American ruling classes being forced to recognise what was happening in the world. After all, how could this not be central for a Canadian - our destiny in the world is so much bound up with the kind of society this capitalist and managerial elite is bringing into being. More important,

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any sensible person knows that the society which is emerging in North America is what will eventually appear everywhere in the world. The moment when I really saw this face to face was when the television cameras ground out Mr Khrushchev in Hollywood - Mr Khrushchev with Shirley MacLaine and Spyros Skouras, the movie star and the movie magnate. Revelation is the word made flesh - the incarnate word - well this was revelation to me - the word about American civilization made incarnate on the TV.3 Like many people I get sick of the banalities of television - the vitamined bread, the scientific toothpaste, the tiresome westerns, and the interminable talk about the weather but I really thanked God for the invention which showed in detail the American elite performing before Khrushchev. What an unbelievable sight! As in the case of the unique revelation, one couldn't believe it had happened unless it had happened. The Germans have a wonderful long noun, Offenbarungsmachtigkeit, capacity to receive revelation. Well to receive this, one needed to remember all that had happened in the 1950s. The American ruling class had come out at the end of the war with decisive economic and political power and the possibility of producing a most remarkable society on this continent and of helping the rest of the world. Its tough totalitarian rival didn't compare to North America in material or spiritual resources. In the late forties the American leadership seemed to do something under Dean Acheson and General Marshall.4 But the 1950s have mainly been a record of the utter failure of the American ruling class. The 1950s have been the decade in which that pleasant and complacent man Eisenhower let the greedy wealthy be in complete charge of the domestic scene and let John Foster Dulles wave the cross and the hydrogen bomb in the international field. The absurdity of Dulles was not on his combining of the cross and the hydrogen bomb, it was even more the virtuous phrases about freedom and law coming from a man who was at the very centre of predatory capitalism. He was a great corporation lawyer who had spent his life serving Standard Oil. He really identified the free world with the interests of capitalism and therefore made the talk of a free world confronting the unfree seem so much rhetoric.5 And this failure of American leadership has meant that a ruthless and limited communist ideal has often seemed to the rest of the world a better alternative to the American with its exaltation of personal and corporate greed and personal publicity and prestige hunting.

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Of course in the early fifties all seemed well. At home in America there was enough prosperity for the leadership of the business world to go unchallenged. What was good for General Motors was good for the American people. Dulles was able to convince his people at home that the platitudes of moral superiority over the communists really represented the facts, so that the average American could believe that their society was a universal beacon - that not only did they outclass everybody else in technological brilliance but that they were an example of free government and a creative society. But then the lessons began to come in. The victories of the Russians in the exploration of space. Whether human beings are able to live on the moon is to me a matter of almost supreme indifference - but not so to the Americans who saw in Soviet science the symbol that they were being beaten at what they had always claimed capitalist technology did best. And of course always present was the thought that the power of the Soviet rockets would take not only men to the moon, but hydrogen bombs to Los Angeles. Then more recently the growing realisation that Soviet communism was in the same league in production as the West. Again of course it is true that production is no longer the chief economic problem of the North American world - as Professor Galbraith of Harvard has made wonderfully clear in his book The Affluent Society.6 But after all to the American capitalist leaders it was just production which had been exalted as the standard by which they won and to be challenged in this standard by the communists was a bitter blow. Finally after all the moral superiority about communism which had become part of the American way of life, they were reduced to realising that their very survival demanded a sensible compromise with the communists. This was the bitterest blow of all. And part of this survival meant they had to give up the old platitudes of their own righteousness over the wicked communist leaders and ask Mr Khrushchev to come as their guest to the United States. But then oh! how did they welcome him? It is because that welcome reached its vulgarest and stupidest in Los Angeles that this scene was a revelation. They did not treat Khrushchev as the head of a great state who bears immense responsibility for the future of the race - but as another celebrity who was pretty lucky to come where fame was really to be had. Shirley MacLaine waggled her little fanny at him as if to say: Look at us two great important celebrities on television. Skouras treated him as rival movie magnate and lectured him about what great

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things the American movie industry had done. When a chorus boy reached up and pulled off Shirley MacLaine's pants Khrushchev had the dignity to say 'My wife was grey with shame.' Indeed as one watched the two elites meeting one could not help saying to oneself: I may still prefer that I and my children be ruled by Eisenhower and General Motors and Hollywood, but goodness I would rather be married to Mrs Khrushchev than to any of the American women she was shown with. Just compare her intelligent and dignified face with the synthetic and ageless masks of Mrs Eisenhower, Mrs Rockefeller, Mrs Nixon, or Mrs Kennedy. Indeed Khrushchev's achievement was not only to say to the Americans I can beat you at production and technology, but also to say with telling force that the communist moral ideal is an incomparably nobler one than that of the American ruling class. And indeed the only time when telling moral points were made against Khrushchev was when he was confronted by Walter Reuther the head of the United Auto Workers.7 Reuther alone put up a true image of human freedom against the limited communal morality of this totalitarian boss. Yet of course it is with no joy that one speaks of the failure of the American ruling class in the 1950s. For despite all that has happened to make that decade so depressing for Canadians and Americans, I certainly still believe that if the new mass consumption age is to give scope for human freedom it will do so first and foremost in North America. Let us hope that in the 1960s we will move to that task. There are signs indeed that this is going to happen, that in this decade North Americans will no longer be satisfied with the kind of rule and the kind of purposes we have had in the last decade. Whether or not this will happen is of course beyond any prediction. And, as always, my last comment to any year must be what the old woman prayed as she struggled up the hill 'with her legs killin' her' to see her husband before he died. And let me be perfectly clear, she did not say it as blasphemy: 'Christ, What a Planet!'

Notes 1 James A. Pike (1913-69), Episcopalian bishop of California and former Dean of San Francisco Cathedral, had become a nationwide celebrity because of his successful weekly TV program, 'The Dean Pike Show.' In December 1959,

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as chairman of the Episcopal Clergyman's Advisory Committee to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, he issued a statement criticizing President Eisenhower's decision to deny aid for birth control to other countries. See New York Times, 3 December 1959, p. 20. 2 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan won the election on the basis of the slogan 'You've never had it so good.' Little attention was given to questions about decolonization in Africa. See David Thomson, England in the Twentieth Century (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books 1965), 280-5. 3 Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier (see note 24 in 'Philosophy in the Mass Age,' 405), visited and toured the United States in 1959 in pursuit of the policy of 'peaceful coexistence.' Actress Shirley MacLaine (1934-) performed dances for Khrushchev from the film Can-Can. He was reported to have said the film was immoral and that 'the face of mankind is prettier than its backside.' Spyros P. Skouras (1893-1977) was president of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1942-62. 4 Dean Gooderham Acheson (1893-1971), was one of the architects of American Foreign Policy after the Second World War as Undersecretary of State (1945-7) and Secretary of State (1949-53). He outlined the main points of the Marshall Plan (1947), and was responsible for the Truman Doctrine (1947), which pledged military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey. General George Catlett Marshall (1880-1959), U.S. army chief of staff (193945) and Secretary of State (1947-9) and Defence (1950-1), was creator of the Marshall Plan for recovery after the Second World War. 5 Dwight D. Eisenhower - see note 4 in 'The Paradox of Democratic Education' (181). John Foster Dulles (1888-1959), United States Secretary of State (1953-9), was the son of a Presbyterian minister and noted for his passionate hostility to Communism based in part on his religious faith. He made clear that the United States would react to Soviet aggression with 'massive nuclear retaliation.' 6 John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-), Canadian-born economist, taught at Harvard and Princeton, served in government positions in the Second World War and after, and returned to Harvard in 1949. In The Affluent Society (1958) he called for less emphasis on production and more attention to public services, 'investment in men' rather than in things. 7 Walter Philip Reuther (1907-70), leading U.S. labour leader active in national and international affairs, was president of the United Auto Workers union and of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. During the 1930s he worked for two years in a car plant in the Soviet Union. He was highly critical of the lack of freedom in communist society.

Three Talks and a Review

The following four unpublished texts found with Grant's papers could not be dated with any certainty.

THE BASIC PROBLEMS OF MANKIND? Grant addressed this talk to 'a sophisticated group' on a resolution about the application of the sciences to the problems of mankind. The date is uncertain, although according to Sheila Grant it may be from the 1954-5 period.

In discussing the resolution there are two questions which immediately arise. First, what are the basic problems of mankind? Second, what do we mean by the proper application of the methods of the physical and biological sciences? As a fair division of labour Professor Page is going to concentrate on what is meant by the proper application of the methods of the physical and biological sciences;1 while I am going to speak about what is meant by the phrase 'the basic problems of mankind.' Of course some overlapping is inevitable. Now the question, what are the basic problems of mankind, must obviously be answered before we can know how they are going to be resolved. It seems to me that if you say that the basic problems of mankind are food, shelter, comfort, health, and prolonged sexual potency, then indeed these problems can best be resolved as the resolution says. The proper application (and I do not intend at this point to discuss what is involved in that ambiguous phrase) of the methods of the physical and biological sciences already in this century has done much for the problem of shelter and food etc., though of course they have

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done much else besides. But is it not true that if one says that these problems are basic for mankind one is saying that men are clever apes whose purpose in this world is to insure their comfortable animal existence, and perhaps though not necessarily the same for others. Now it is just my purpose this evening to question the adequacy of this definition of human nature and destiny. I first must say that this view which I hold inadequate is not easily questioned these days, because it is the chief dogma of the twentieth century and dogmas are those beliefs that go so deep in the mind that man can hardly conceive the possibility of their being doubted. This dogma that man is a clever ape or a comfortable animal is, for instance, shared by both sides in the present cold war. It always seems to me extremely amusing that the Russians and the Americans should hurl imprecations at each other, for the dominating theology in each country is remarkably similar - namely salvation through technology. The dream of a production engineer in Detroit and his cohorts in his laboratory is after all not very different from the dream of the production expert in the politburo. The endless suburbs of comfortable, welladjusted, well organised middle class animals stretching from New York to Vancouver, which will exist if that dream is realised, will not be very different from the same life stretching from Stalingrad to Malenkovgrad. Moreover what General Eisenhower calls Malenkov's atheistic materialism is not very different from his own theistic materialism2 - in the latter God is just added on to production engineering and laboratory techniques as a kind of insurance policy. It is after all this dogma of the comfortable animal which largely sets the pattern of the university to which we belong. Indeed this dogma goes very deep and is therefore not easy to remove from the mind. I wish therefore to put forward another view of man and in so doing I hope it will be obvious that man's basic problem is not food and shelter etc., - that these are but means and the end for which they exist quite transcends them. And that it is an end which therefore cannot be reached through the proper application of the methods of the physical and biological sciences. Now in doing this I do not want to imply in any way that food and shelter etc. are not problems to man. To say that man does not live by bread alone is not to be so foolish as to say he doesn't live by bread. All I am saying is that the problem of bread is

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not final for man - that is, not basic. To become a man, that is, and authentic member of mankind, more than bread is necessary. Now as I am speaking before a sophisticated group I want to make immediately explicit a difficulty in my alternative definition of man. As against the definition of man as a clever ape who finds himself in comfort and security through techniques, I am going to put forward a view of man as a rational free being whose destiny is to find himself in the infinite. Now the difficulty is this. As soon as this is said - implied in it is the idea that man is not now capable of entirely knowing himself. Only an infinite being would be entirely aware of his own subjectivity. That is, I am saying that though I think I can show all other definitions of man to be inadequate, my own definition cannot be made entirely explicit in thought. Indeed the most cogent reason for rejecting the definition of man as a clever ape is just this fact - namely that man can always transcend himself in consciousness - that is can never entirely find his own true subjectivity. Now what do I mean by subjectivity? It is the very nature of those activities we call scientific that they study the world as object - physics - physical objects; biology - alive objects etc. But it is of course obvious that this decision to look at the world as object implies an active subject who has decided so to look. To use a technical philosophic phrase, all thought presupposes a subject-object distinction. When we think about ourselves we artificially turn ourselves into an object, but of course there is always a subject thinking about that object and so we can think about ourselves thinking about ourselves. But what we are as we are is always subjectivity and to find that subjectivity we must be continually transcending ourselves. Now there are some problems where for the sake of convenience we give ourselves over to the object and so can temporarily pay only small attention to our own subjectivity, for instance in measuring a table. But the basic problems of mankind arise at the moment when he is faced directly with his own subjectivity. Let me illustrate. Let us say we reached this world where the problem of food and shelter were settled and everybody had all they needed to live and have leisure (let me say in parenthesis that I cannot imagine this world, for are not our appetites insatiable, when we had one yacht wouldn't we want two; when we had one mistress wouldn't we want twenty; when we had power

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over a small community wouldn't we want it over a larger one?). But let us make the hypothesis that a Utopia had arrived as regards food and shelter - a man would still be able to ask the question is life worth living or is consciousness too great a blight to be sustained - that is, we would still be free to choose to live or die. And that is a question that cannot be answered objectively but only subjectively. Now somebody may say, no, in those circumstances one wouldn't be free to answer that question. You may simply import an idea from biology and say that the desire for life is inherent in all healthy animals. But I am just saying that such an importation from biology is not appropriate because man lives in the world of freedom and can transcend in his freedom all biological categories. It is more popular these days to import a hypothesis from empirical psychology and say that any normal man will want to live in such circumstances - but that again is not to give any rational grounds for living, it is just to import an arbitrary dogma of normality, which when presented with doubt, cannot stand. But let me take a simpler example of a question of subjectivity. On the road to this animal Utopia let us say one is a scientist and one knows that one could learn something helpful to the race by experimenting on live, conscious human beings against their desire (for example, Russian prisoners of war or members of a political opposition). How should one decide whether one was to do it or not? One might say as some scientists have said that after all I will sacrifice these human beings for the sake of the human beings in the future. Or one might say that these present human beings could not be used as means for this end, however good. But whatever line one took and not raising that question which would be correct, what is clear is that the principle for deciding such an issue could not be derived from the objective world. The question of good and bad ends is not a question for reason in its objective moment but for reason in its subjective moment. Or a third and even more obvious example. Let us take any question which has in general the form how should I live? - that is an ethical question. And by such a question I don't mean one which is concerned simply with a conflict of means (for example should I drink whiskey or rum?) but rather the question as it arises when one is contrarily disposed to the same object of desire; for example, I am at the moment

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contrarily disposed to the making of money. I want to, for the sake of my family's comfort and I do not want to, for the sake of having the time to study philosophy. At such a moment freedom arises for me, for I must seek some rational ground as to what is important, that is, for how I should commit myself and then I must commit myself. Obviously here results and effects in the objective world can have no central place, because the very question is just what kind of results and effects I want for myself and for the world. That is, the right principles I must seek to know cannot be derived from the world as object, but only from the world as subject. Now you may say such ethical decisions are not ultimate for mankind. But if you say that I don't know what you mean, because they are ultimate for me and I am a member of mankind. And such problems as this seem to arise at some time for all men. And how can the question how a man is going to make himself not be ultimate for him? Moreover it must not be forgotten in discussing this subject, that mankind is only a general class name for all its unique individual members. In biology concerned with what is universal in a species, one uses such a class name in a different sense than in the studies of man where the individual does not have the same relation to the species as in animals. After all, man as an individual is free not to desire the good of his race or of particular members of the race. To put in general what I have been trying to illustrate - the physical and biological sciences are concerned with the world as object, that is the world as nature - they are not concerned with the world as subject - that is the world as freedom. Nor are they concerned with what relation is between these two worlds. 'We catch our fish in a net and the size of the net will determine what fishes we catch.' The net of the physical and biological sciences is not made to catch the problems of freedom. When certain scientists say that all problems of human existence are objective problems - that is man can be understood entirely as a part of nature, they have forgotten that they are simply being dominated by one particular way of looking at the world. Those who so speak are like fishermen who have a net the holes of which are a yard wide and then when these fishermen only catch fishes more than a yard long, they proclaim as certain that there are no fishes in the sea less than a yard long. Just as fisherman is prior to his necessary net, so the world of subjectivity is prior to the world of objects. To affirm

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tonight's resolution is to deny this priority, indeed to deny human subjectivity itself.

ON EDUCATION Grant's work in Adult Education brought him often to Halifax and in contact with many teachers (see 'The Paradox of Democratic Education' [166]). He delivered this particular talk to the Teachers Institute in Bridgetown, Nova Scotia. No exact date is available, but it probably was delivered in 1953 or 1954.

The job of a philosopher is to define things. Therefore, in the privilege of speaking to you, I want to start by trying to define education. Now to define something is to say what it is for, what its purpose is within the scheme of the universe as a whole. When we define a chair we say it is a physical object to sit on with comfort and when we say a chair is a good chair what we mean is that it serves its purpose. So when I attempt to define education I must try and say what education is for, and in judging our Nova Scotian education (at all levels, school, university, church, and adult education) I must ask how well it lives up to the purpose it is intended to serve. How education has to do with human beings and therefore its purpose can only be defined in terms of what we think is the purpose of human life, why men exist on this strange planet. If you define man as a clever ape, then, of course, the purpose of education is to make men comfortable animals, adjusted to their society and living out their lives like ants or cows. If comfort, success, and social adjustment are the chief ends of man, then you teach him things to achieve those ends, and the emphasis in education will be on earning a good living and inventing instruments of war that will keep us stronger than anyone else. It is this view of education, indeed, that one objects to in the writings of John Dewey and his cohorts at Columbia,3 and of course we have many of this kind in normal schools, university departments of education, and government departments across Canada. It is not their particular ideas about education that one hates in the progressive educators, but the definition implicit in all they say, namely, that man is nothing more than a comfortable animal - to be socially adjusted and organized.

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How has this view of man arisen? It arises, of course, from the pragmatists' attitude to Knowledge. Under the Christian tradition, Knowledge had been considered the proper pursuit of rational beings, for in knowing anything human beings were moving towards God. Now the pragmatists declare that Knowledge is vain and empty unless it helps you manipulate the physical world. They declare that the true is what works. If something cannot be shown to work it is useless. 'Useful' is the key word. Knowledge is to be valued for its use - not for its trueness. Thus knowledge and education became a means; the practically useful becomes the end. The effects of this pernicious and irreligious doctrine on education in this continent must be evident to you all. We are teaching our youngsters that knowledge is not valuable in itself but only valuable as it brings useful things like money, comfort, success, power. Of course useful techniques are useful. None of us will deny that platitude. And what more do animals need than useful techniques? For having denied an essential rational and free nature and its proper object truth - what more can the pragmatists make of man than [that] he is an animal. When John Dewey and his cohorts among the professors of education and psychology attack our concern for truth, our pursuit of Knowledge for its own sake, they make inevitable the modern definition of man as a clever ape and they build an educational system appropriate for clever apes. My definition of man would go back behind these modern interpretations and say, as true Christianity has always said, that man is a free rational being whose destiny is to live in the light of God. And if you define man that way education becomes something quite different from merely adjusting people to being good animals - like a farmer organizing his cows. It becomes the meaning and purpose of life. All our activities - from our most primitive playing as children, through our first use of the intellect in mathematics and science, up through art and morality, to philosophy and religion - all these are but steps leading us to that great light of Truth. The job of education is then to cultivate in all people, at whatever stage they may be, that receptiveness to Truth. School, university, practical affairs, love between human beings, reading books or organizing a union, all our manifold human activities can then be seen as education - as the way finite mind makes its journey toward the infinite. The very word education comes from an allegory of that great Greek thinker, Plato. He describes human beings as

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living chained in a dark cave and their lives as the struggle to free themselves from those chains, to struggle up the steep ascent to the mouth of the cave and out into the sunlight which is the radiance of God. That is where the word education comes from. Educo - to lead out. And it seems to me that all of us are doing that with ourselves and with the youngsters we teach - leading ourselves out of the chains of ignorance into the freedom of knowledge. That is, obviously, what Jesus meant when he said, 'The truth shall make you free.'4 And anyone who humbly dares to say that he or she is a Christian can only take this view of education - the view that the end for which all education exists is the vision of God. Now such a definition of education as the leading of men from finite chains to the love of the infinite may seem pretty remote to your problems here, and you may say here is another of these fellows living in his ivory tower at the university and talking a lot of high sounding nonsense to us who have good practical problems to deal with. But I want this morning for a few moments to try and show why this definition is practical and why it is important to keep it before our minds. Ideals (that is definitions) are important because they tell us where we should be going and only a man who knows where he is going will know how to get there - what concrete steps are necessary to make the journey. In a society like ours where education is laughed at and derided and where those of us who are teachers find it so easy to forget the greatness of our work, it is absolutely essential, if we are to keep our sense of destiny, that we don't lose sight of our ideal. First and foremost, the definition of man as free and rational tells us that education is not a means to something else but an end in itself. I often hear businessmen saying (and businessman are apt these days to think they run the world) that the point of education is produce youngsters who will be efficient in business. I find at Dalhousie, and I am sure you find it in the schools, that a lot of youngsters think that education exists so that they will be able to earn more money. The teacher is a kind of servant to help youngsters get more prosperous. But, of course, the proper way of looking at it is that wealth only exists for the purpose of helping men to know what is important. Education is not a means for which wealth is the end. Rather, wealth was put into the world so that men can use it to illumine their souls. I do not mean by this that technical education is not important - of course it is important to teach people how to earn their living. But earning one's living is

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only a means so that one can live in the world and move one's mind to fuller and richer life. To put it crudely, we do not live to eat; we eat so that we can live and live more abundantly. And the trouble in Canada at the moment is that this truth is being forgotten. Education is concerned more and more with making people prosperous and forgetting that that is only a means. The true end of education is being forgotten among parents, among governments, among teachers, and worst of all, it is even being forgotten among the clergy. And, after all, if North America forgets this it will be no better than the Russians whom we are continually criticizing for being materialistic. For what is materialism but this - the worship of prosperity and success as an end. The Bible again puts it with absolute clarity when it says 'You cannot serve God and Mammon'5 and so much Canadian education at the moment, with its worship of the technical and commercial, is simply the service of Mammon. Our politicians also talk as if education was just a means and not an end in itself. They ask how education can serve democracy. But, after all, democracy is itself only a means. Democracy is not good in itself. It is after all only a political expedient, like cooking with gas rather than with electricity. It is only valuable as it leaves men freer than does any other form of government to cultivate the good life. Therefore, if democratic politicians are not furthering education they are not doing their primary job. When politicians say there is money in our society - for battleships and tanks and aeroplanes, for roads and for bridges, etc., but not for education - they have forgotten that all the battleships and tanks, all the roads and bridges, only exist so that they can help man to become educated. When we talk about defence, we should remember, that whether we have any thing worth defending depends on whether we have real and proper education. Let me be even more practical. Take the question of teachers' salaries. If what I say about education is true, and education in the broadest sense is the meaning and purpose of life, then how terrible it is to pay the people who lay the foundations of education less than any other trained profession. I had a man in my office the other day who has worked faithfully for this province as a teacher for twenty-five years and that man's son left grade nine and got a job selling plumbing equipment and earned a thousand dollars more a year than his father the first year after grade nine. I was offered a job the other day writing advertisements (the lowest form of animal life) and I would have

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started out at about double what I earn at Dalhousie. Now, obviously, teachers do not ask for wealth and more than their share. But every year I watch youngsters who would have been good teachers give up the idea of entering the profession because they know that in professions like law and medicine they will be able to earn five and ten times as much; that is, earn this in professions which are no more specialized than teaching at its best. And this is where my definition of education is important. I often argue with my friends in the Nova Scotia Teachers Union. They say teachers should be paid more, and I agree with them. But I don't think they look deep enough as to why they aren't paid more. Educationalists aren't paid more because whatever is said in pious platitudes at Rotary Clubs or by ministers of education, etc., people in our society don't think education is important, and as it isn't important, they say let's get the little which is necessary as cheaply as we can. This is where a definition such as I gave at the beginning really cuts ice. Unless one can convince society that education is really the end and purpose of life and that, therefore, the teachers of the young in the schools and universities are of tremendous importance for society, one will never convince society to pay teachers properly. And as long as one has progressive educators going around saying that education is only a matter of rearing healthy and socially minded animals, then, of course, teachers should not be paid any more than keepers at the zoo. And, of course, the financial treatment of teachers is not the worst. It is the general patronizing of the teaching profession which is so terrible. Teachers are often treated by the rich as if they were their servants. You, down here in the Valley, are probably more civilized than we are in Halifax, and certainly more civilized than my home town, Toronto but you probably have met as much as I have that patronizing of the teaching profession. The smile that comes over the lips of businessmen when they know one is a professor - as if to say 'You are a nice fellow but I know what life is really about because I know how to make money.' And when the teacher himself accepts this view of his function - that is, unconsciously believes that the teaching profession is a haven for those who aren't tough enough to pursue power or make money that is the real lie in the soul. I find it creeping like a nasty cancer into my soul all the time, when I am tired or depressed. But here again let me apply the importance of my definition. Those

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people in our profession, like John Dewey, who take the whole pragmatic view of education, and say what is important is not knowledge for its own sake but what is useful, are directly fostering this low view of our profession. Because if knowledge is but a means to wealth and power and comfort and success and not an end in itself, then indeed the teacher is not very important, and he cannot expect to be respected. When we notice that the old respect for ministers and teachers is dying in our society that is only a necessary consequence of a philosophy abroad which shows no respect for knowledge. I don't know if any of you have ever heard Dr C.E. Phillips of the Ontario College of Education speak. But I always find a contradiction in what he says.6 On the one hand, he continually cheapens education by his advocacy of the anti-intellectual position - his jokes about the uselessness of Latin, etc., but at the same time, he expects that teachers should be highly respected in society. But, of course, Dr Phillips cannot have his cake and eat it too. He cannot define education in a cheap pragmatic way and then expect that teachers will be considered important. (And I may point out in parenthesis that when the Nova Scotia government wants a report on education, it calls on Dr Phillips to make it.) I could go on at great length to show how one's definition of education affects all educational problems. The problem of curriculum, for instance, in which the progressive educators are substituting for the ancient and difficult studies a lot of easy new ones designed to help children conform comfortably to society but not to make them intellectually alive and morally independent. I hope all of you will have the time to read Miss Hilda Neatby's book So Little for the Mind, in which she shows the debasement of the modern curriculum with its antiintellectualist content.71 could also talk about education equally easily at the level of our North American universities, where millions are spent and everything is done to encourage technical training at the expense of a broad and liberal education. The result being that we are training thousands of good engineers, good doctors, good salesmen, and good accountants and neglecting the careful training of ministers and teachers, philosophers and artists out of which the spiritual capital in society will arise. But I have not time to go into these various ways in which a false philosophy of education corrupts education in many, many ways. What I have been trying to say to you this morning is this. If any of

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us in education are to do a good job we must know what education is for. We must know that education is not a means, but that which gives purpose and point to human life and which raises men above the beasts. And in the modern world that ancient spiritual view of education is slowly dying. The view of man as a mere animal is growing amongst us - just as we see its terrible result in Russia. ['But the same creeping ...' written here.] We in Nova Scotia are luckily less swept away by this dreadful lie than is the rest of North America. The full tide of the mass society is not yet on top of us to the same extent as it is in the US or in Central Canada. We still have the chance to see that we take over into the new world what is wisest and best from our ancient spiritual traditions and are not simply swept away by the new worship of techniques and self-expression and prosperity and power which exalt usefulness above truth, and convenience and worldly success above knowledge. But we haven't much time. Let us not forget that even here in Nova Scotia we are moving ever more quickly into the world of television and the comic book, and that the forces which would debase our education are all around us - even in government departments and private bodies whose avowed job is to help education. Therefore, if the old and true view of man as a free rational being is to be kept alive and incarnated in our educational system, it will take the concentrated loyalty and hard thinking of many, many people in our profession in all parts of the province. If there is not this loyalty and hard thought amongst us, we will just develop an education fit for clever apes and then soon we will have a society of clever apes - not of human beings. Do you remember what Shakespeare makes Isabella say in Measure for Measure [Act II, scene II] about how man forgets his own nature and destiny? But man, proud man Drest in a little brief authority Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence - Like an angry ape Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep.

What's an Arts Faculty for? 437 WHAT'S AN ARTS FACULTY FOR? Grant probably gave this talk to a university committee. No exact date is available, but it was possibly given in 1953 or 1954.

To speak of the purpose of education, it is necessary to speak first of the purpose of human existence. One must define that purpose as somehow tied up with the faculty which is uniquely man's, his self-consciousness. That is, the chief end of life is to seek the perfection of our self-consciousness, as reason, will, and imagination. If used in its richest sense, the word knowledge will express that perfection. Such a definition does not make education a means to some other end, such as wealth or power or comfort, but says that education is itself the purpose of our existence. Put negatively, education is to cast aside those prejudices which limit our freedom; put positively, it is to seek those principles by which our minds can know themselves and what is other than themselves. Such a definition should not be taken as individualistic, for the good life must (in some sense) be lived in community. Neither should it be taken as uninterested in the technical, for some control of the objective world is a condition of that freedom. Therefore, medicine, law, engineering etc. are all necessary means and this view of education must be interested in such means - though knowing them as means. In such an all-inclusive definition of education it is necessary to distinguish (A) what is the special function of the Arts Faculty and (B) within that function what are the limitations and opportunities of such a faculty in the particular circumstances at Dalhousie. A. The Arts Faculty in General What is the principle by which we can discriminate as to what should be done and what not done in an Arts Faculty? Before attempting to answer the question, one caveat is necessary. Arts Faculties in Canada are historical creations of much subtlety. They are products of such varying traditions as British humanism, Protestantism, and modern science, traditions which are a mixture of conflict and agreement one with another. The principle of such historical creations, when formulated, is unlikely to be clear cut in application.

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I would formulate the principle of the Arts Faculty in the following way: an Arts Faculty embraces those studies the chief concern of which is to create, through their practice, quality of self-consciousness, rather than having as chief concern the ability to manipulate the objective world. As soon as such a principle is laid down its obvious limitations must be stressed. On the one hand, nothing must be said which implies that studies outside the Arts Faculty are not concerned with this quality of self-consciousness. For example, it would be foolish to interpret natural science in a purely pragmatic way. For when studied in the proper spirit it creates such high virtue as honesty before the given and the recognition of necessity. On the other hand, it must be stressed that studies carried out in the Arts Faculty can be useful for the manipulationoftheobjectiveworld.Forinstance,mathematicsisasinequanonforcertainpracticaltasks,aseconomicsisforothers.Oneca for certain practical tasks,as economics is for other. One can n hardl hardly live in the world at even the most utilitarian level without some knowledge of history. Despite its limitations, however, this principle will serve as a basis for inclusion and exclusion. This may be illustrated by stating why mathematics lies inside the faculty. If we are ever to become rational, the ability to isolate concepts and to recognise the necessity in argument must be cultivated. Proper mathematical study can begin this cultivation and with the minimum appeal to practical ends beyond itself. The application of this principle to other subjects can only be mentioned briefly here. Classical and modern literature serve two main functions, (a) They touch the imagination and reason with the tradition of the beautiful, and (b) they lead to a discriminating mastery of language which is essential to the proper cultivation of reason. (In passing it must be noted that under [a] there is no reason to exclude music and the fine arts from the faculty.) Classical and modern history not only teach the scientific virtues and lay the background for all study about man, but also can raise those basic mysteries of human existence, the facing of which is the greatest cultivator of our minds. Philosophy is the attempt to deal with those mysteries by the systematic use of reason. A special word must be said about the new social sciences and their relation to the Arts Faculty. It is clear, for instance, that careful knowledge about international affairs or about what man can know

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of himself by the empirical method, develops that quality of selfconsciousness and its proper incarnation in society. In so far as the chief end of social sciences is that development, they lie within the Arts Faculty. But when their chief end becomes special projects and researches, the aim of which is to achieve something definite in the world and to provide young people with limited skills, more harm than good can result from trying to keep them within the Faculty. In the light of this principle what are the chief functions of the Arts Faculty? In my opinion they are three. 1.Teaching.Teachingexiststointroducetheablestyoungstersofthecommunitytothetraditionofreasonandimagination,sothatb Community to the tradition of reason and imagination,so that byy their thei partaking in it, those students may begin their minds' journey. In such teaching one principle above all will be regulative: good work will depend on the individual attention which students get from well educated minds. The careful distinctions which are the essence of arts studies require such attention. The question whether instruction in these studies should be carried on to the BA, MA or PhD level depends on the particular resources of the institution and its relation to others. 2. Scholarship and Thought. It is essential to make clear that 'research' in the Arts exists for different purposes from the work done in the natural sciences. In the Arts Faculty it can be divided into two classes, (a) scholarship and (b) thought. (This distinction between [a] and [b] must not be pushed to arbitrary limits.) (a) The purpose of scholarship is the restatement of the major elements in our tradition. If society is not to lose the best from its past, there must be men in every generation who have mastered the work of such people as Plotinus, Milton, and de Tocqueville. Not every university does the whole job, but each university must play its part. In this function of reliving the great tradition, Canada has too long relied on Europe. (b) Beyond scholarship, the Arts Faculty must provide a place for those who are able to enrich the tradition by creative thought. Thinkers may be rare, but no university is worth its salt that is not looking for them and willing to give them freedom when they appear. Place for such thinkers in universities is particularly important these days since

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the society is largely dedicated to busyness and provides few other places for the contemplative life. 3. Instruction in the Community. The Arts Faculty has an obligation to give instruction to those older members of the community who desire it. This is particularly important in a technological society where a greater percentage should have freedom for such study. Nevertheless this third function is subsidiary to the other two and therefore must not be carried out at their expense. We cannot have our cake and eat it. If the same university staff teaches extramurally, the quality of intramural teaching and study must decline. B. Particular Opportunities and Limitations at Dalhousie [Grant states here] I just did not have time to get this part done. SOME RECENT MOZART RECORDINGS The date of this short review and who commissioned it is uncertain, but Sheila Grant believes it may have been written in the early fifties.

The Requiem (K. 626) is the last work of Mozart. He died in the middle of writing it and it was completed by Siissmayer. Here Mozart has reached that point where his art has become completely cosmic, where joy and pain and resignation have been taken up and transcended in an adoration which cannot be grasped except as music. It can only be compared in art with moments in Tolstoy or Homer or Sophocles or with the closing scenes of King Lear. Yet it must be said that the Requiem is not the total manifestation of this moment as are the slow movement of the clarinet concerto, the last piano concerto (K. 595), or The Magic Flute. The Requiem is like The Winter's Tale, a play of supreme moments, but not completely realized. This is not only that Siissmayer wrote parts of it, but because Mozart's fully realized adoration is limited by the extraordinary legalism of the Requiem's verbal content. What would it have been if Mozart had at this point been commissioned to write the usual Mass? Yet there are moments in this work of such genius (e.g. the Lacrimosa) that nobody who has ears should go down

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to the grave without listening to it. These days when every Tom, Barth, and Albee can write of the death of God, it is well to remember that having written the eighth bar of the Lacrimosa, a god did die. For indeed he was Orpheus. This recording of the work (London OSA 1157) is extremely good. Istvan Kertesz conducts the Vienna Philharmonic and I prefer his interpretation to that of either Scherchen or Bruno Walter. To say that is a high compliment. The soloists and the orchestra are both good and the technical aspect of the recording A-l. Decca (DL710129) has produced a recording of the Serenade no. 9 (Posthorn, K. 320) performed by the Cincinnati Symphony under Max Rudolf. Mozart's serenades were written for public functions such as weddings and they have all the externality and immediate attractiveness necessary to such occasions. The gaiety and happiness of Mozart in this form is partially responsible for leading the foolish (who are always many) to think of Mozart simply as the composer of ease and joy, so that they entirely misinterpret him. It is as if one were to judge Shakespeare solely by Twelfth Night. Mozart in his external moment is well matched by the Cincinnati orchestra. American musical performance is well characterized by Isaac Stern's violin playing, technically brilliant, glittering, and lacking in subtlety or the ability to interpret the highest reaches of the spirit. This is why the Met can perform Wagner well, but never Mozart. The Cincinnati orchestra is a good example of this technical brilliance without subtlety. But in this case it does not matter because the Serenade (and the Symphony no. 28 which goes with it) are Mozart at his most external and charming. Mozart's early symphonies (Nos. 1-13, Westminster 1001) are well performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra of London under Erich Leinsdorf. These are symphonies written by Mozart up to the age of fifteen. When one contemplates that he was nine years old when he conducted the fifth of these, the imagination boggles. The children of our society rarely know how to write a grammatical sentence when they are nine. It is interesting that all these first thirteen symphonies are in the major key. Two hundred years after they were written one would not listen to these early symphonies because of their intrinsic merit. We listen to them as a fascinating preparation of what was to come. It is not blasphemous to use the analogy: one is interested in them as we are in the child Christ's arguing in the temple. What was yet to happen!

442 Three Talks and a Review Notes 1 Hilton Page (1905-89), professor of psychology and philosophy at King's College, also taught philosophy courses with Grant at Dalhousie. 2 Georgi Maksimilianovich Malenkov - see note 1 in 'Adult Education in the Expanding Economy' (108). 3 John Dewey - see note 12 in 'Pursuit of an Illusion' (47-8). 4 John 8:32. 5 Matthew 6:24; Luke 16:13. 6 Charles Edward Phillips - see note 5 in 'Adult Education in the Expanding Economy' (109). 7 Hilda Marion Neatby - see note 3 in 'Adult Education in the Expanding Economy' (108).

Lectures at Dalhousie - A Selection

Sheila Grant found a box in Grant's study containing over 100 lectures and parts of lectures he prepared for his classes and seminars during the 1950s. He wrote the lectures on legal-size foolscap and delivered them to students in Philosophy 1 (Introduction to Philosophy), Philosophy 3 (Ethics), Philosophy 7 (Plato), Philosophy 14 (Kant), and Philosophy 16 (Augustine). They vary in form and quality from careful and thorough to unfinished and fragmentary. We have selected a small sample to give readers a glimpse into Grant's classroom during the Dalhousie years. A complete list of the lectures and fragments that were not selected is included at the end of the section. The lectures chosen for publication are listed in tables of contents for each course. During Grant's years there, Dalhousie was a small university with approximately 1500 students. When Grant joined the philosophy department there was only one full-time appointment besides himself and, when he left, there were still only two positions besides the one he vacated. Although Grant was hired to teach philosophy, the president of the university, A.E. Kerr, encouraged him to emphasize religion and morality as important elements of the curriculum. Some of the lectures and fragments in this selection are included for their intrinsic interest or merit (this was especially true of the lectures on Kant and Augustine, probably prepared for smaller classes of Honours and MA students). Others are included for their possible historical and biographical interest because they illustrate Grant's curriculum and approach to teaching at the time. The philosophy classes were, in part, a 'workshop' where Grant worked on the lines of thought set forth more systematically in 'Acceptance and Rebellion' and Philosophy in The Mass Age. Together with his colleague James Doull, Grant became an intellec-

444 Lectures at Dalhousie tual leader to many Dalhousie students in the fifties. His philosophy classes were exciting and controversial. His presence in the classroom and his sense of drama brought philosophy to life for his students; he seemed to carry on a debate with other thinkers in the lectures and in the seminars. The written words of these lectures alone do not always convey the excitement of the exchange between teacher and students that students of those years experienced. Grant was particularly attentive to students, responding to their intellectual needs and also relating academic study to their lived experience. Some important themes of Grant's curriculum are not covered in the lectures that appear here. Students remember that David Hume, for example, loomed large as the leading figure in what Grant called the 'world-centred' approach to philosophy and ethics. The few fragmentary lectures on Hume do not, however, elaborate Grant's line of argument well. The lectures on Marx, Hegel, and Sartre also do not do justice to the level of importance Grant gave to these thinkers at the time, as is made clear in 'Acceptance and Rebellion' and Philosophy in the Mass Age. Finally, we found the fragments of the lectures for his introductory course (Philosophy 1) to be largely exegetical and not, in our judgment, adequate to convey a sense of the thoughtful engagement that characterized the course. In sum, readers should not think that our selection from Grant's lectures is exhaustive; it does not cover the complete curriculum or even sample all of its essential components.

A. PHILOSOPHY 1 - INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY We are not including any lectures from Philosophy 1, but we can perhaps give some idea of what Grant was trying to achieve in the course. He hoped to awaken students to philosophical questioning about religion, politics, and ethics through the examination of Plato's Republic, Kant's Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, A.E. Taylor's Does God Exist?, and, on occasion, Karl Jaspers's Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy. He considered logic and epistemology, at this early stage at least, to be inseparable from philosophic and religious questions. The question Grant wanted students to ask was, Which of the philosophic traditions offer the best guidance concerning how we should live

Introduction to Philosophy 445 our lives as thoughtful moral individuals, as citizens, and as participants in the expanding economy and mass society of North America? The philosophical search involved politics, religion, poetry, and music as well as business, science, and technology; he asked his students to think about ethical questions raised by the sexual revolution and the expanding economy. The modern secular world centred in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles was attracting students at the time, and some were also reading European philosophers and writers such as Sartre, Gide, and Camus, while still wrestling with the beliefs of their own families and churches in the context of Nova Scotia's politics and culture. Students from both the early and late fifties recall that it was possible to talk to Grant about religious doubts, about books they were reading, such as Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye or Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, and about the music of Bach, Mozart, and Richard Strauss. Grant became a mentor for many because he was willing to give time and attention to their questions. Combining Socratic questioning with an understanding of commitment and responsibility, he helped them examine their assumptions and face the life choices they had to make. A consideration of the Republic occupied most of the first term, with emphasis on the debate between Socratic philosophy and the sophistry of Thrasymachus and on the tenth book about the sun, the line, and the cave. Grant asked students to write their first philosophic essays on these topics. In a way that had perhaps become rather unusual in the 1950s Grant was a Platonist teaching Plato. He believed Plato's ideas were true even in the context of modern North America, though those ideas were difficult to understand from within modern assumptions. Grant therefore spent time trying to awaken his modern students to an awareness that they had such assumptions. In the second term Grant turned the class to Kant's moral law as expressed in his affirmation and formulation of the categorical imperative. He emphasized two questions in his lectures on Kant. First, what does it mean to be subject to duty as well as being free? Second, can we be at the same time moral (meaning that we are autonomous) and also religious (meaning that we seek to obey God)? The course ended with A.E. Taylor's book asking about God's existence, featuring a critical

446 Lectures at Dalhousie examination of Darwin's evolutionary theory. Students wrote essays on the Groundwork as well as on the Republic.

B. PHILOSOPHY 3 - ETHICS LECTURES Grant taught the Ethics course five times during the 1950s. Of the lectures and fragments well over half were written for that course. Grant divided the course into sections on theory and practice, as announced in an introductory lecture: Now how are we going to proceed? Basically this - the first term theoretical - fundamental questions - like, is happiness the end of life? - what is pleasure? - duty? - freedom? etc. Then after Christmas for January, February, March, practical questions - what is right conduct in war? economics? - marriage, divorce? - the state? etc. Then at the end return to some basic theoretical questions. For the first part of the course he sometimes used for his text book John

Coventry's Morals and Independence: An Introduction to Ethics (London: Burns and Oates 1949). (Grant also taught a course called 'Morals and Politics' - Philosophy 10 - with his friend, political scientist Professor James Aitchison. That course was cross-listed with Political Science from 1951 to 1954.)

Table of Contents 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Study of Ethics A Definition of Ethics Religion and Ethics/Freedom Excerpt from World-centred Ethics Excerpt from a Fragment on War

The Study of Ethics This lecture makes clear what 'ethics' meant to Grant, though it was delivered near the end of the course. We therefore placed it at the begin-

Ethics 447 ning of this section. The reference to the Russell article {Dalhousie Review,1952)probably locates the lecture in 1953.

I have said things to you myself - not giving sufficient integration so I thought today I would try to give you as fairly as I am able what I think the study of ethics is and why I think it is valuable. I am afraid of too much integration - people must be in the wilderness. Now for me the problems of ethics arise from the facts of our existence. They arise for us at moments in time. Yesterday I was downtown shopping in Woolworth's and Birks - the ruthlessness, the isolation, the shop girls doing dull jobs - the goods sold, the whole question of industrial society - my own place - what was for me - was there purpose and point. But above all the eternal question given in that place and at that time - could I look at all these faces and seeing them in their crudity etc. - could I believe that through all and in all there was purpose. Not only, I say, can I find for myself some purpose and point - for that may be simply a psychological question and when I find point and purpose that may be illusion. Or when I despair that may equally be illusion. But can I by some act so come to the point where objectively I can assert what is real - whatever that reality may be. I think philosophy arises for people at that point when at the same time one finds oneself in that radical confusion where one looks at everything that is presented to one - openly and urgently - and says I don't understand what it is; and yet at that very moment of confusion the affirmation is made that somehow through activity on one's own part one can perhaps come, if only one thinks and feels and wills with sufficient dedication, to know and understand - that is, that the veil of confusion will be lifted - that veil which lies between us and the world, and between us and ourselves and between us and reality. Now it seems to me that only at such moments does authentic philosophy arise and it arises particularly in the study of ethics. Because where at other points the veil does not torture us - at the point of action it must torture us. Not to know what nature is may awake our curiosity - but we can still get on with science - indeed we may just get on with our science as a diversion to make us forget about that veil - so in the same way with art. But when that veil means that we do not know how we should act then we are indeed plagued; and if the veil is so heavy that we are at the point where we perhaps are at the very

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edge of despair, when we do not know if anything at all has any point, then ethics itself disappears and then the need for philosophy is no longer a need for psychological peace - but it is the question on which the possibility of our existence hangs. Of course some people are held from this by a variety of things. And one thing one must not claim [is] that if one is in the position where philosophy is a need of our very existence, those who are, are in a better and nobler position than those who are not. Just in a different position. I do not say that I am in a better or nobler position than Hume. I just say I am in a different position. He does not need to philosophise; I do. Now of course there are endless things that may hold a man from philosophy - a strongly rooted religious dogma like some of the Roman Catholics of our city, or the tattered remnants of scientific and political pragmatism or humanism that hold so many today - in Asia, Marxism. It is but a truism to say that not all dogmas belong to the churches. The dogma of a selfish hedonism - of men whose chief aim is to make money etc. etc. And in all of us many activities will keep us from that real despair - will make us think we know when we do not. Relations with the opposite sex certainly are an activity (which in itself may be good) but which may be used by us to divert us from our real position. But I would point out in a very real way that the intellectual dogmas that held us in North America - have less honest [?] ability to hold us in my judgment. Roman Catholicism seems to me to rest on quite untenable assumptions. Scientific and political humanism that held European and American men seems to me quite untenable. The cloak of English decency and bourgeois honour, the tradition that holds Hume, is for us here just non-existent. We are indeed faced directly by the possibility of nihilism at every point in our lives - because the usual traditions that hold men back from facing the possibility of nihilism have disappeared, at least for me, and I am sure for some of us. I say this simply to point out that ethics arises at the point where one is a person without an alternative.1 Now people faced with that position often dislike being faced with what they call academic philosophy. They dislike having immediately to read the systematic thought of men such as Plato or Kant, but it is necessary. The anguish of spirit which arises from doubt calls upon us not to face the problems loosely - but with the greatest rigour, and we

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soon find that other men can teach us that rigour, because out of that anguish they have seen with greater clarity than we can immediately, the basic issues - that is, the issues in their barest form when they are at stake. When we speak of words like 'freedom' 'happiness' 'duty' 'reason' in ethics, we are not using these abstract words to escape from the concrete position we are at. These words are not abstractions, they are the points at which the life and death issues raise themselves in their greatest intensity and with the most ruthless clarity. Nobody has begun to understand Kant for instance if he thinks the formal exposition of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is for Kant a losing of the reality

of human existence in some vague abstractions. Rather their very formality and clarity so clearly arises from the very strength with which Kant thought out these existential battles in his soul. It is these battles that drove him to that care of expression. Those, like John Dewey, who ask us not to quibble over the meaning of words like freedom do so only because the life and death issues involved in that word are not real to them. They can get on with the job without attempting to solve them. Now what are some of the problems that seem to me to have arisen this year. Where better to start than with the one [for] which I asked you to read Kant and to write essays on Hume (though not with suc2 cess). Can reason be practical? Without seeming to peddle my own wares, I have written on that in writing about Bertrand Russell in the Dalhousie Review. I have talked there of the consequences of denying it. What is meant by that affirmation. A Definition of Ethics It is wise to start out with a definition of ethics - because it is a word loosely used - people say this is or is not ethical. He is an ethical man. This is bad usage - It is to confuse two words, ethics and morality. Morality is part of the phenomenon of human life. We live in a world where we act rightly or wrongly - foolishly or wisely etc. Morality is indeed the word used to describe the fact of these phenomena. Ethics is something else. It is the study of these phenomena. It is the study of human action in so far as it is concerned with the right and the wrong. Now at this point I could, at great length, go into the following points.

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(a) It is presupposed in ethics that there is the sphere of the right and its negative the wrong. That is, the conception 'right' falls outside ethics. That is, it is given in ethics and its deduction is presupposed - that is, within ethics we assume there is such a thing as right action -just as in physics we assume that there is a physical world. That is, the proof of the existence of the subject matter of physics lies outside physics in philosophy, so the proof of the existence of the subject matter of ethics lies outside ethics in more basic philosophy (namely what we will call metaphysics). I don't say this to mean that we will not discuss whether there is right and wrong. Of course we must - but rather to make clear (a) that in doing so we will have passed beyond ethics and (b) in saying that I hope I have shown in ethics we must immediately pass into philosophy in general. That is, ethics is the study of the rational elements of right action. Now in that statement there are obviously three ideas: (a) as I have spoken of them, right and wrong; (b) that there is such a thing as action; and (c), the most difficult, that we can study ethics and find out the rational. It is the third of these that I want to discuss for a moment, for in it the glory and misery of the human condition is most deeply expressed. Man can study himself. That is, man is consciousness of himself or herself. An animal is conscious but from what we gather he is not conscious of himself. But man is - he can stand over against himself - make himself an object for himself. Thus where man is an artist - he can also have a philosophy of art - that is, stand over against himself as artist and think what it is for himself to be an artist. So with science - philosophy of science So with religion - philosophy of religion So with morality. We stand off as it were and look at our own and others' standards of conduct (and when I say others I mean not only in the present but in all human history) and say what is the rational content in these forms of behaviour. Now I have said this is both the glory and the misery of man - this consciousness of himself. It is the glory because it means we are not slaves. It is the misery because we are divided against ourselves. We have

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lost the spontaneity of animals. This is why men turn from thought because it destroys the immediacy of everything - no longer does one, like an animal, respond to the immediate spontaneity of desire. If we are to re-grasp the spontaneity of desire it must be re-grasped at a higher level. Now I think one thing that must be clear from what I have said is that this leaves us always in a twofold situation in life - a position which is, as it were, the dragging apart of theory and practice. And which is particularly difficult in a course on ethics which is the theory of practice. (a) the right attitude for theory is a certain openness of mind. For instance, if you or I come into this class decided as to what is right practice and nothing is going to change our mind, then why come? (b) on the other hand action or practice in the world is in a certain sense the denial of openness. To act is to exclude alternatives - and there is no such thing as not acting - for not acting is really acting in a situation - Sitting on the fence (and this is good to remind the Nova Scotians) is as much an act as jumping off it. That is, while we study we are still committing ourselves - it is inescapable. That is, our dilemma always is to combine that right combination of openness and commitment that our lives require. Now how to proceed - How do we find a point of departure? We are all different human beings. For instance I am extremely interested in speaking about the modern world and its ethical systems - but they are in large measure a criticism and a passing beyond the old systems of the classical and medieval worlds - I don't know how much you know - that is what I would like to ask this morning. As I am not going to - this year - talk about the ancient world - but the modern world. How the course will proceed. Religion and Ethics/Freedom In this important lecture Grant explains that there is a need to balance the two sides of the debate about religion and ethics. Augustine is seen as the exemplar of the religious side and Kant of the ethical. In a second

452 Lectures at Dalhousie lecture fragment on freedom Grant asks whether a modern conception of freedom is possible within a religious or Platonic-Christian view of freedom seen as being grasped by a vision of God.

Now we have seen this problem in embryo since the beginning of this course. Put in a certain sense it may be the question of duty and happiness, but in another sense it may be that with which Kant struggles in the third chapter of the Grundlegung - how can the moral law be objective and yet we be free? Looked at historically we can say it is the argument between Augustine and Pelagius, grace and free will,3 or again Luther and Erasmus. In the modern world we may in a certain sense place Kant in the role of Pelagius and Hegel with Augustine. Looked at in the way I have been talking in the last lectures it is this. If the absolute has dawned - which tells us after all that all is well - because after all that is what the absolute is - the reigning of God - but if this is so, if God reigns, why do we have to do anything - after all, all is well. In other words if the world is God's why do we have to change it? - Do you see that what we may call the language of religion is the language that asserts all is well - while the language of morality asserts that all is not well - that the world needs changing. Mauriac's Ce qui etait perdu ['the lost one' or 'the one who was lost'] - explain.4 Now it seems to me one of the greatest questions for the philosopher, 'oughtness' and 'isness,' is how those languages are put together - so that in all truth one is not swallowed up in the other - either religion swallowed up in morality or morality swallowed up in religion. Now of course as I have said modern North America swallows up the absolute in the activist spirit. Do you see what I mean by not swallowing up morality in religion or religion in morality? (a) The people who swallow up morality in religion say something like the following. The deepest life of the soul belongs to the sphere of religion - Morality is concerned with our duties in the world - but our end is beyond the world. Therefore the categories of morality are temporary categories which must be passed beyond. Freedom, they would say, is freedom to recognize the absolute and become its slave - to be swallowed up in it. Freedom is to do the will of God (to put it in rather crude language) - that is, ultimately to have passed beyond the distinction between inclination and obligation. I have quoted to you enough

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Augustine's great dictum on this subject which entirely expresses the case of those who swallow up morality in religion. Evil not real.5 (b) Of those who swallow up religion in morality Kant is the very archetype - read von Hiigel (p.157).6 For why does he say this (on p.157) earlier, that is, the only contact with God is through morality - if we could know God then there would be no freedom - and without freedom there would be no true morality. Cutting off the branch. Marx, Sartre. Now I could speak at great length about the truth which is in both these positions (you have read one answer to this in Laird's last chapter),7 but I can't go into [it] in detail. What I want to say is this. (1) avoid confusion of the territory of ethics with the territory of religion, i.e. of the actual life of conduct with the mind life of the soul which inspires that conduct - which basically rests on one's apprehension of certain truths. That is, try to fix one's mind on the boundaries between these two clearly. This is hard enough, not easy. Then when that is done, try and see the relation between these two territories. (2) I would like to say something rather simple about my position. Without hesitation I take my stand on the side which says that the deepest life of the soul belongs to what I would call the sphere of religion - that is, the apprehension of the soul (in will, in thought, and in imagination) of the absolute - and that therefore I would say that the sphere of ethics - the language of ethics - is finally dependent on the language of religion. Nevertheless this dependence is of a rather strange variety. The sphere of ethics has in a certain sense independence of religion. Let me say what I mean by that by making a comparison. Religion and science. Now scientific activity must also be dependent on religion - yet it must be independent. The categories necessary to science and the free pursuit of observation must in no sense be tampered [with] directly by religion. That is, religion must stand over science rather like a loving parent stands over its child - and the dependence must be of this kind - so with ethics. If I may return to what I have said earlier about history - in the medieval period - the worlds of art, science, ethics, and political ethics were held in the strictest subservience to the sphere of religion - now the history of Europe since the 16th century has been the freeing of

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those spheres from the religious - (very obviously in art, in science, and in ethics). This was secular humanism. Now we have come to the point where that independence is seen as a false and empty thing. (I think this for instance is what makes an artist like Rouault so interesting.)8 Yet just because we have seen the ultimate dependence of ethics, of art, and of science on something beyond themselves - this should not mean that we should return to the same form of immediate dependence which typified the medieval world. I want to speak further of this question in a personal way on Monday. Freedom [A fragment of a lecture also on the problem religion poses for freedom and morality]

Here it is, however, that it seems to me that the problems of ethics get difficult, for, having asserted that it is in the moment of absolute decision that freedom is vouchsafed, we are affirming that this is possible because it is in the moment of absolute decision that the absolute most clearly dawns to consciousness. But, and this is the problem, if the absolute dawns to consciousness how are we free? That is, we have proved freedom by the absolute but doesn't this absolute just swallow up the freedom we have proved? Let me illustrate what I mean from the traditional ethics of all the supreme religions - the ethics that is most beautifully expressed by Plato. What is freedom? Ethics to Plato (as it is fundamentally for me) is that we can love that which is absolutely worthy of love, not what is worthy of it in certain respects, unworthy of it in others. And nothing which simply exists is absolutely worthy of love. We must therefore love that which does not exist (God). This object of love which does not exist is not thereby a fiction. Freedom to Plato is not then that we can stop ourselves from loving - but that we can love that which is worthy of love and that is of course God - And if we are Christians we say that we love love. And this is of course what was meant by the Trinity - that God is love loving itself and that we, when we love absolutely, are just love loving itself. Freedom is then our ability to love what is worthy of love - rather than simply to love that which is not worthy of love.

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But, and this is the difficult 'but/ it seems to me that the experience of all the metaphysicians and mystics down the ages has been that this loving of the absolute rather than the temporal is not a grasping of the absolute by man but man being grasped by the absolute. I could go on to describe this in great detail but the classic statement of it is certainly - we could not have loved God, if God had first not loved us. (S. Weil 259.)9 I think this is a little easier to understand if we recognise that God can never be an object and it is in this sense that he is loving before being loved. We can only love him perfectly when he loves himself through us as a medium. The most complete way one can say this is in the following kind of sentences. The creature is nothing and believes itself to be everything. It has to believe itself to be nothing in order to be everything. That is, (a) that the ultimate act is to surrender absolutely to God - and this is why Gethsemane, and (b) that this ultimate act is not one that we do ourselves - this is why Trinitarianism. Are we then saying that really there is no choice? That we cannot choose what we love. That is, that we really say there is no such thing as ethics. That we are not really free. Miss Weil 217. Read and explain.10 Excerpt from 'World-centred Ethics' Grant argues his case against the claim of 'positivism' and the criterion of verifiability as part of his confrontation of what he has called, earlier in the lecture, 'world-centred' philosophies, including also under that designation British empiricism, American pragmatism, and Marxism.

To refute a world-centred ethics we must go deeper - we must say where we think it goes wrong - where it does not seem to face the truth - and that is what I want to speak of this morning, and to do so I want to take the world-centred ethics at what seems to me its most intellectually powerful, and the most intellectually powerful of these worldcentred ethics seem to me to lie in that tradition of positivism which just recently has had a very powerful expression in England and in the USA - we might call it logical positivism or ethical empiricism or what you will.

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Now what does the positivist say about ethics - put quickly he seems to me to say this. A proposition has meaning if it is logically possible that it could be verified in experience. All other propositions, if not analytic or tautologous, are meaningless. That is, they are nonsense. That is, thought has meaning when it can be verified by the senses, otherwise not. Now apply that to ethics - what is the place of thought in telling us how to act - thought in our life helps us to find the means to a choice [about] what our passions lead us to desire. Thought can show us the probable consequences of pursuing one course of action as against the other. What it cannot do is tell us whether those consequences are good or bad. It cannot tell us what is the proper end of all conduct. That is the function of the desires in our conduct and they, like the impressions of the world, are something which thought cannot control. They are just given. Reason is the slave of the passions - that is, an instinct to realize worldly pleasure. That is, thought cannot tell us what is good and bad. I have talked about this the first term but will some more. Let us compare it with Plato and Kant who, despite their disparities at certain points, here speak with one voice. Now what Kant and Plato say is that over against our desires thought gives us the knowledge of that infinite Good in terms of which all our particular desires can be brought into order and unified.11 But do you see what the verifiability principle does to such an idea as the good or as Kant calls it duty. The statement that the Good exists or that there is a categorical imperative - is shown to be just a nonsensical proposition - for it is neither verifiable by sense - nor is it tautologous - as Kant says, it is an a priori synthetic proposition. That is, the statement of the moral law or the Good's existence is a statement about existence which cannot be verified from the world and therefore is nonsense. That is, when we talk what has been traditionally called ethically what we are really doing is either (a) stating a preference of our desires - when we say it is good to be just to one's fellow man - because that is the moral law - what we are really saying is I like to be just, or else (b) we are saying I command you to be just and of course when I say command if I have enough force to back me I can make you. That is, do you see, that ethics are really just a catalogue of how different people have liked to act at different times - that is, there is nothing objective about ethics. The situation just is - some people desire

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one thing, other people desire other things - that is the human condition and certainly thought or reason has not the power to tell us what is in itself objectively desirable. Now as I have said I am not going to argue from consequences though of course the consequence of this is just force - lynching in the south. Nor, would I point out, can you say that this is an alright consequence, for after all men do generally and naturally like to be decent to other people - for in positivism you couldn't make any statements about human nature in general - we can't talk about what man naturally is - all you can say is that man appears to be like this at certain moments etc. Nor am I going to take up the argument about how you prove the verifiability principle when it is not itself either verifiable or tautologous - because that is often a fruitless debate. What I want to answer is at the level of ethics. You see what the positivists say finally - what the world-centred philosophy says finally - is that we are just in this position in the world where some people desire some things and others desire others and where people cannot by definition know what is in itself desirable that is, we must get along as best we can - and if we like certain things we must use all the irrational means of religion and art and psychiatry to convince other people to desire what we like them to desire. The world is just the world and there we are. Now what would I say to that? I think first we must recognize that it has a great truth - that at the level of everyday action most people get along that way - that they just desire what they desire and reason is just a tool to calculate consequences of what they like or dislike and the best means of achieving what they like and dislike. But what I would also say and this is ultimately where I reject such a world-centred ethics - there come moments which are what I would call as near moments of total decision when we are forced to judge what is, ultimately, that by which we live. And I would say that these ultimate moments of decision come when we are making decisions which are going to make our total life. That is, there are some moments when we not only use reason as a tool to judge between conflicting objective desires as means to realize those desires - but when we are faced with the decision of what is ultimately desirable. This will not

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come for some people and for others it will arise in different ways. Here I can only speak existentially - it arose for me when my whole being desired certain objects in the world - when my whole being seemed taken over by that desire and I knew that if I realized those desires I would be committing myself in one set of actions to a pattern of life and I would be more here than simply just acting in a certain way at a certain point. I would be making myself - and that ultimately I was here free not in the sense of acting in a particular way at a particular time - but free ultimately to make myself. And I would say when one is faced with this kind of total decision as to making oneself - and we all at moments come near to that - this is what is meant [by] a man must be born again - at such total moments when one's anguish is total and indeed when the price to be paid either way for the way one is going to act is total - for here the self is not surrendering to its decision part of itself - but to its total self - at that moment I would say one is forced not to ask the kind of partial questions that the positivists ask about what this or that part of the world is like - but what I would say is the total either/or question - what ultimately is the whole - what is my life for - that is, at such moments of total decision when indeed one asks not in part is this meaningful or is that meaningful - but is there any meaning at all - then at these moments when nothingness or notbeing is really present to one - because the decision would not be total unless not-being was present to one - then at that moment when the possibility of absolute meaninglessness as a simple theoretical possibility but a meaninglessness which would engulf one's very self - at such moments - and they are many - and they may arise over a long course of time - at such moments the absolute dawns for one in thought not as an idea in the sense of a concept which implies the possibility of there being an absolute - but as a presence - that is, as the immediate apprehension in thought of the perfection of meaning in the world that is, of an absolute or total meaning. And as it appears this presence in thought - to him who asks [it] shall be given - but the asking must be total - it appears not as a realized completeness, for a realized completeness would deny the reality of the anguish out of which the completeness came - but as the existence of completeness - an existence which appears in decision or action and thought about that decision and action as a kind of limit - that is, as a presence which says that

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towards oneself and other people there are some things which one must not do and there are some things which one must do. Now it seems to me that it is the presence of the absolute in thought about decision which Plato means by the Good and its descending into the world through the Forms and what Kant means by the categorical imperative - that duty which is not done for this or that reason - but for its very self as apprehended - and of course what Kant adds to Plato is the supreme idea of the primacy of the practical reason - that is, that it is above all in ethical decision as distinct from artistic creation or in ethical thought that this absolute does dawn to consciousness; for it is (and this is what Kant saw so splendidly) in ethical decision that the absolute must dawn in the most real way - because it is in ethical decision where the cost is greatest - where we lay down the most where indeed we are called upon to lay down our very selves - that is, give up what at a certain level we have known as most dear to ourselves. Positivists cannot explain this. Yet what they would say. Excerpt from a Fragment on War In this excerpt Grant takes up questions about the individual and the state during war, casting light on his thinking at the time about pacifism, Christianity, and loyalty to one's country. (1) Duke et decorum est pro patria mori12

Now the arguments against that position, and it seems to me to boil down to this - has the individual no higher loyalty than to his society? And if there is such a higher loyalty - then how does that loyalty affect his loyalty to his society? Now in saying what I am going to say I want to make perfectly clear a rather subtle point - namely that those who hold one must support one's country - do believe in something higher than society, namely God. Take Niemoller, for instance, or Eisenhower - but what they say is that that higher being under no circumstances would require of one that one did not fight for one's country, and they would say that in the awful responsibilities of time - there is a conflict between the interests

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of different groups - and loyalty to one's own group is the first consideration.13 This is necessary to say, for in North America real conservatism has never had its intellectual due and I here want to see that it has. Now the argument against this my country right or wrong position does turn around the question of a higher loyalty and its relation to loyalty to one's country, and it must be clear that when you say that you will fight for your country right or wrong you are ultimately saying that there is no loyalty higher than this. Now can such a position be defended? Now this higher loyalty, if it exists, may of course take varying forms. Take the case of Gousenko, for instance (let us not debate the case whether Gousenko was honest on not - but discuss as if he really meant what he said).14 Gousenko was the man who gave the Canadians the information about the Russian spy ring in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Gousenko said this - I know that Russia is trying to conquer the world by every means. My loyalty to the human race makes me see that this is not good - therefore I will betray my country and give its secrets to Canada. Now was he right or wrong? I have heard some Canadian officials talk as if he were a traitor - and morally wrong as such. Do you see that if you say my country right or wrong - then Gousenko was wrong. For if my country right or wrong is a universal ethical standard then it must be applied to other countries than our own. You see it was sloppy ethical thinking on this issue that led to that terrible iniquity, the Nuremberg trials, after the last war. The English and the Americans at one and the same time were trying their own citizens like Joyce (Lord Haw Haw) and Ezra Pound and such like, for betraying their country to the Germans15 and at the same time they were trying certain Germans and part of that trial (only part indeed) depended on the idea that these Germans had broken a more universal law in the interests of their country - But you see you can't have it both ways. You can't be ethically consistent and try people for being traitors to their country and try people for not putting some universal standard above their country. Senator Taft - an American conservative - as against the sloppy

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thought of Roosevelt and his cohorts - Mr Justice Jackson - the English should have known better.16 And of course the loyalty to human welfare in general as against the welfare of your particular society is not the only form of higher loyalty. There is [?] the question of means. Are there no means that you will not use to safeguard your country's interest? For instance, if the Americans as of now - and certain of the American military are saying this or were saying this till the Hydrogen Bomb explosion in Russia - if the Americans could gain victory in the Cold War - by just laying waste the other half of the globe - China and Russia - should they do so? And if such a war had broken out, should the individual support such a war - that is euphemistically called a preventative war? That is, are there no limits to what you should do - is there no loyalty which should limit what you should do in the interests of your society against other societies. You see it seems to me that the ethic of my country right or wrong flounders at exactly this point, the point of a higher loyalty. It is what Edith Cavell said when she was shot. Patriotism is not enough. Discuss here.17 That is, we must be clear - and it is this which Lindsay is writing about in The Two Possibilities - what we mean by the higher loyalty.18 Now it is very clear it seems to me what is meant by the higher loyalty in Christianity and it is indeed just an historical fact that the doctrine of the higher loyalty - that denigration of patriotism - has particularly arisen in countries where Christianity holds sway. Put at its basic it is this. Jesus tells us that the nature of ultimate reality ... [text breaks off]

C. PHILOSOPHY 7 - PLATO Grant taught a Plato course to third- and fourth-year students in five different years. Knowledge of the Republic was assumed, since all the students had taken Philosophy 1. Most of the course consisted of exegesis and discussion of the Phaedo, Timaeus, Parmenides, Symposium, Theaetetus, and Philebus (the editors decided not to present the exegetical lectures here), with Grant interjecting about the problems of modern people studying the Greeks and the relation of Christianity to Platonism.

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Table of Contents 1. Paradoxes in Plato 2. TheEleatics 3. On Heidegger's Plato 4. Lecture at the end of Plato Course 5. Excerpt: Lecture preparing for a study of the Timaeus Paradoxes in Plato The paradoxes in Plato are indeed many and I am less and less able to expand or understand them. But one I would like to say something about today for a moment. Let us admit from the Republic that as we pass beyond the world of images and the world of bodies and the world of mathematical objects we have a fourth world - the real and intelligible world of pure eternal forms, grasped by pure intelligence. And that though each form is one, there are many forms and that we have still to understand them as one system and to grasp the principle of their systematic unity. And let us admit that Plato finds this principle in what he calls the Form of the Good and that in that principle we find the unconditional condition, the ultimate ground and explanation of the being and nature of everything else. And let us also admit that from the Republic we know that the Good can be known to exist through a process of logical thinking which he calls dialectic. It is apprehended in an act which is beyond dialectic, [as] we know from the Symposium.19 Read Republic 247.20

That is, the ultimate moment for which philosophy is only a preparation is when we have passed beyond thought. That is, the way of thought is a way of negation. Gradually as we pass beyond contradictions - we are able to say that ultimate reality is not this nor that, but in thought we can never say what it is - at the end of our going this reality will be revealed to us directly. For now we know in part - but then face to face.21 That is, here is described a way of going from the contingent to the necessary which gives us a clear definition of the nature and contrast between Time and Eternity. Diotima's great speech, about the soul's mounting up by ever

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greater purification and abstraction to the momentary vision of a union with the Eternal Beauty, tells us of an eternal which is not the empty abstraction of Parmenides' one - but a Reality - which described as Beauty seems for a moment rich in self-communication. Its power as an account of human existence must be stated as against Parmenides. (a) the way of philosophy is not cut off from the social and political and individual life of man. Because in any monism all distinctions are overcome. In such a position there can be no place for the practical life. It can have no meaning. I think we see this with quite unusual clarity in Spinoza - and this leads to part (b). (b) because of the practical life - the way of thought is not detached from the way of purification. Thus in the struggle for eternity the whole man is engaged - the Thumos - that is, spiritual passion, is involved as well as the intellect and thus we are not left with that view of philosophy wherein its conclusions are abstractions - cut off from a Way and a Life. I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, says Our Lord.22 Well, because of this understanding of the place of Thumos - as well as reason - Plato's account of philosophy as a Way and a Life - as well as the entrance to Truth: This, for instance, is very much lacking in Aristotle. (c) As I spoke of last time there is a continual striving in Plato whether successful or not - not to deny multiplicity - but to find multiplicity in all unity and unity in all multiplicity. That is, before criticising Plato - we must admit that the Symposium so richly has the sense of the inexhaustible and transcendent nature of Beauty and Truth and Goodness and the sense that our love of these is the very thing which constitutes our worth. Yet I think we must admit that there is in the Symposium with all its love of the beautiful, something missing, and I think as has so often been said, it is this: It is the self-communication of the Beautiful to us. Eros or love is the soul's movement to that which is alone lovable - the ascending love of man for God - but what is said of the love of God for man - and this related to if that is so? Now this can be seen in various ways and I would like to speak of them separately - going from what I would call the immediate and empirical to the more difficult metaphysical problems involved therein. In fact I will leave that latter - till some of you have prepared your papers on these.

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But I would just mention this question at its level of empiricism. Now the question arises it seems, at its simplest level, just at the level when one sees that eros as described here in Plato seeks to justify love from the standpoint of the happiness of the agent - that is, the inescapably egoistic element connoted in the doctrine of love. And that raises the question if that is a true definition of love - or is there such a thing as pure and disinterested love. Comparison of Socrates - Apology and Jesus - Father forgive them. Moses. The Eleatics I will speak today of the Eleatic school. That is, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Zeno. Xenophanes first really set the permanent unity of all things in opposition to all their diversity and change. Now he particularly expressed this in an attack on the anthropomorphism of Greek mythology - that is, on humanized polytheism. 'If the oxen or lions had bards and were able to paint pictures or carve out statues like man, they would have given their own forms to the gods.' But from this attack on polytheism there came the idea of God as the negation of the finite. 'There is one God - he unites the greatest of all gods and men, who is like to mortal creatures neither in form nor in mind.' That is, what Xenophanes sees as illegitimate is any attempt to raise one particular kind of being - into the place which should be given to the absolute. Now he does this by a kind of abstract monism. But we can see this monism worked out more clearly in the case of Parmenides and Zeno and therefore we should discuss it in relation to them. Now in Parmenides we are at last in a world which seems very close to us - a world where philosophy is going on at a level we can understand though it is extremely difficult to know what he meant by what he said. All I can really say is that we must be careful, as Copleston says, not to turn Parmenides into a 19th century idealist - nor must we on the other hand, it seems to me, go so far as to think what he is saying is really materialism, as Copleston says.23 I think we can definitely say that philosophy proper starts with Parmenides, for, as I said last time, he is the first to really see that the absolute principle of

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unity in the universe [?] is deeper than any of the special forms of existence. Here indeed we come to certain basic ideas which are implicit in Plato's thought and which indeed are implicit in all later thought. Now the idea of the one, or unity, which is basic to Parmenides, seems to me to be so basic to all thought, and yet something which is not easily thought in an empirical society like ours. (The dogma with us is not to accept Parmenides - but to doubt him.) Therefore I want to discuss it for a moment in general before stating what Parmenides says about it. I would speak this way. When a person starts to think about himself and the world he is confronted with the appearance (I will not say fact, for he will see in Greek thought) of plurality and disorder. And he achieves understanding, it might be said, in so far as he finds what seemed disorder is really order and that the plurality is not mere plurality but manifests also unity. Such unity may on the face of it be of different kinds - for instance a machine - [?] see it as a unity etc. at all levels - higher and higher - scientific, moral, artistic - all kinds of unity. The simplest proposition - the table is brown - is buying into unity. Now we may express this fact that in understanding something our words are looking for unity - it is a demand of our reason that the nature of things should exhibit system or order or unity; we try and see in what sense the real is the rational. We mean that we know for instance that where our judgments are inconsistent - there is a mistake somewhere - that reality must be different from what we have judged it to be. This is true of both scientific and philosophic thought. But the unity which philosophy seeks is not a specialized or departmentalized unity. That is, it belongs to philosophy to see what unity it can prove in reality as a whole - in the cosmos. That is, philosophy - if it exists - is not trying to show that reality is self-consistent. It knows that it is - and the attempt to say in words that it may not be, cannot be thought. (Now do you see this?) Now it seems to me that it was this basic recognition which Parmenides saw - now I am not saying he saw it with absolute clarity or that the consequences he drew from it are true - but what makes him, it seems to me, the father of philosophy is that clearly he sees for the first time that all thought presupposes a unity - and that what is particular to philosophic thought is that it presupposes an ultimate unity.

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Now in the grasping of this Parmenides of course throws away the multiplicity of manyness as unreal and in grasping that it is, as I have said, that the absolute principle of unity in the universe is implied in all thought and that thought will not rest in any special form of existence - he goes so far as to say that any form of special existence is just illusion and that only the absolute principle of unity is real. The doctrine of Parmenides is that only the One - is real or has Being and that everything else is illusion - that is, all particular forms of existence which are changing, or as he uses the word Being, are illusions. And I would point out here that we have the [?] basic problems which Plato must deal with. The One and the Many. Being and Becoming Not settled, but raised by Parmenides. Now I want to make clear that Parmenides in his proof of this absolute monism - that only the one is - and that plurality is illusion makes use of two principles, neither of which, from what we know, he makes any attempt to prove - and which are basic. 1. Intelligibility - that is, real, which is thinkable. What cannot be thought cannot be real. Now this proposition of course has been ... [Text breaks off- page missing]

On Heidegger's Plato (1958-9) This fragment contains Grant's response when he read Martin Heidegger's account of Plato in Plato's Teaching on Truth.24

What I say now is not for this course or for your understanding at this stage of your lives or perhaps never - but I say it because perhaps someday it may interest one of you. It is this: that I have found in Martin Heidegger, the most famous of German existentialists - indeed the founder of existentialism as a philosophical movement - an interpretation of Greek philosophy which is very similar to some of the remarks I have been making this year. Not in his early works - but in his later works which are only now becoming available. What he says at great length and great subtlety is that western thought has floated out upon a great tide of nihilism, and the origin of that nihilism is what hap-

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pened to philosophy somewhere between the time of Parmenides and Plato. For Parmenides, being and awareness were one, and according to Heidegger human existence was rooted in that oneness; man was truly appearance, not illusion; for the being of Being was again at one with Being, not the mere flux which modern interpretations of Heraclitus have led us to think it was. What he is saying is that all our traditional separations like subject/ object, substance /accident etc. - in fact, all the words we use to talk about philosophical problems - are so many veils over Being, so many chasms between ourselves and Being. To understand the true preSocratic insight we must penetrate far into the first roots of our own language, cutting out ruthlessly all the deceiving growth of the centuries. For the pre-Socratics' truth was what Heidegger calls the unhiddenness of Being. In the Republic of Plato we find, as against this first and greatest insight, the beginning of a less profound and misleading conception. In the analogy of the cave, for instance, with its shadows of imitations of real things, in the line, with its parallel hierarchies of knowns and knowers, and in the very conception of the idea itself that seeing, the appearance which is cut off from the flow of our perceptions, we have the beginning of the lie - Truth comes to belong not to Being but to propositions. Lecture at the End of Plato Course (1959)

At the end of a lecture the other day I quoted [Erichl Frank's comment about Plato's unreconcilable opposition to the Aristotelian concept of philosophy as a merely theoretical science of being which is able to know the world and the objects in it, even those of ethics, through the logical analysis of their phenomenal appearance and to comprehend and teach them through general concepts which are equally true for anybody.25 Now I think this is not a bad way to look at Plato - to see in Plato himself the union of two ways of philosophising - which perhaps in some of us are divided - that is, the cosmological and ethico-religious approaches to philosophy. The cosmological trend [?] of Plato's thought is evident everywhere - Plato is aware of the great cosmologists of the pre-Socratic period - especially the greatest of these, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and the Parmenideans or Eleatics - those men

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who in different ways seemed to believe that the cosmos itself was a divine being - and of the lesser men such as Empedocles - but he is also in an entirely new relation to this cosmology because of the inwardness of Socrates - Let me put it this way: the old thinkers had posited the mind of the world; but the very word mind assumed a new meaning after Socrates had lived and died and revealed his own mind in all its intensity. Indeed I do not think it wrong that in trying to make some generalizations about the Platonic philosophy - we start from Socrates. It is particularly important I think to do so if, as I hope, some of you intend to go on with some other person to the study of Aristotle (some other person because the trouble about a small university is that teachers are supposed to know too much) - for in Aristotle there is a return to the cosmological vision of the Greeks. What is so wonderful about Aristotle is that in his system all the systems of the preceding cosmologists are not destroyed but preserved - illumined, systematized - but what seems lacking is the Socratic daemon. In Plato this is not so. Indeed Plato is not Socrates - but he has lived in his presence. Therefore as a preliminary let us look at the mystery of Socrates. He seems suddenly to appear in the midst of Greek life. I think what Kierkegaard says about him is a good starting point - remember who Kierkegaard was, the first existentialist; the enemy of Hegel; the supreme exalter of Christianity over the philosophers - the exalter of faith - and Kierkegaard turns to Socrates as the original existentialist. He calls the position of Socrates 'passion of inwardness in existing' and speaks of this as an analogy to faith - meaning by the latter that here in a Greek you seem to pass beyond the distinction between knowledge and opinion - to the modern distinction, quite different, of faith and reason. Now indeed I think one must always take Kierkegaard's remarks carefully - one must be wary of them but one must take with that wariness as nevertheless illuminating. But if one takes it as meaning that philosophy is always related to the purgation of the individual in all his concreteness - that is, to use other language, that philosophy cannot be detached from the question of salvation - then indeed Socrates is an existentialist. Yet as soon as we have said that - as soon as it is asserted categorically - the tremendous sense of inwardness of subjectivity that Socrates brought into the Greek world - we must not say it in any

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simple way because Socrates insists over and over again that it is the impersonal truth which alone makes men free and towards which he strives. Yet this new inwardness in Socrates can be seen at every point. Let me take for example the question of political philosophy with which I am most concerned in my own studies at the moment. Socrates says in the Apology that his secret voice, his own daemon (let me say in parenthesis that this very doctrine of the daemon - the inner voice - the conscience - is the very mark of his religious inwardness - of, as I have said, a new religious inwardness in Greek life) has prevented him from being a politician. Yet he says in the Gorgias T am the only or almost the only, living Athenian who practices the true art of politics; I am the only politician of my time.' What he means by this is, I think, his tremendous recognition - his overcoming of that dilemma which has ruined so much political theory - the dilemma of power and freedom. In my own words I would say that he recognized that the art of the use of power is to make men free. Indeed Socrates renounces cosmology. He could not or did not go back to create a new cosmology even on a new level. But Plato after he had learned from Socrates this inwardness and the journey of the soul into the invisible - the idea that the priority of soul was the end of life - could go back to the questions of cosmology and in terms of the new inwardness find a new hope in solving the riddles of the older philosophers. So, as I have said, the first stage of Plato's writings [is] the commentary on simple moral definitions - like the Laches. Then we pass to the stage where from the original inwardness and stress on moral purity of Socrates one passes to an account of it that has far reaching consequences that surely we may say never entered the mind of Socrates himself. The Republic and the Phaedo are crucial [?] here. We may make an analogy to St John's Gospel. Here we have the cosmos of the Ideas, the ontology of the Ideas. The personal and individual interest of Socrates is transformed into an objective and systematic creed. The conception of the realm of Ideas was Plato's epistemological and ontological statement of the ethical faith of Socrates. To Socrates the practice of moral purity was of absolute value - but though we can't be sure, it is probably so that he was

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so intent in teaching such values that he did not ask the theoretical question which proceeds from their practice - what reality have they. But the conception of the realm of Ideas is just the answer to that question. Thus the realm plays it seems for us - who perhaps think in other terms - a rather ambiguous role (and this is what Kant so brilliantly expresses in his praise of Plato in the Critique of Practical Reason); it is at one and the same time that which draws us to it - an ethical ideal the idea of perfection - but it is also what is Being - the Existent as Parmenides had analysed and described it - it took the place of the cosmos itself. Now I do not know if this is for you a difficulty in the Republic - but it seems to me the difficulty of the cosmos of the ideas [is] just this, that as an expression of reality it is more than just an object of speculative intention and intelligence as the existent in Parmenides is - it is also the ethical norms which should govern human life. This is what I tried to express one day when I talked about the modern insistence on the distinction between what is and what ought to be. The realm of ideas the cosmos of the ideas as found in the Republic - quite overcomes such a distinction (and probably rightly) in the sense that as a metaphysical system it unites the ethical faith of Socrates and the cosmological ideas of Heraclitus and Parmenides. The realm of absolute reality has to be for Plato both ethical and cognitive - it is both a guide for doing and an object of knowing. That this is so - this union of the faith of Socrates with the attempt at ontology - is the central fact to be got at to understand the cosmos of the Ideas. In the Republic as I have said so often, the logical function of the idea and its ethical function are united. Now before proceeding to the later dialogues from this first stage I would like - and it seems to me valuable to speak in general - and for a moment of this distinction between what is and what ought to be - not in the hope of answering the question for you - This will obviously be a question I will have to discuss with modern theories of ethics next year - but rather of saying how it is possible for some moderns to think beyond it. I say it also because I think the root cause of this distinction between fact and value lies in an inadequate philosophy of nature which is absolutely so with us that we cannot think outside it. Now let me make a distinction here. I do not mean by saying that our philosophy of

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nature is inadequate that I wish for a return to some archaic philosophy of nature - Aristotelianism for instance. Aristotelianism as a philosophy of nature has been shot to pieces. Let us simply take the example of evolutionism in biology and think [what] it does for the Aristotelian forms, and you will see how shot it has been. But an alternative is not either to accept the adequacy of our own philosophy of nature or to seek an archaic. As I have said all this year, we study the Greeks not to become Greeks but because we are so likely to think our own conceptions adequate and we study them only properly when we are not sure of the adequacy of our modern philosophy of nature and seek all we can from the past for a reassessment. I am sure of the inadequacy of our modern philosophy of nature - the absurd behaviour of the Americans and Russians over fallout should convince anyone of that, and I am sure that the distinction between fact and value is created [by] and helps create this philosophy of nature and that therefore we shouldn't just assume it. I also of course in no sense imply that because I reject the distinction between fact and value - ['does not' deleted-ed].mean[s]thatIacceptquitethesameidentifcationofthemthatwefindinthecosmosoftheideasasexpressedintheRepublicP , haedoa,ndtheSymposiumL . etmethendiscussthisquestionshortly. that we find in the cosmos of the ideas as expressed in the Republic, Phaedo, and the Symposium.

Let me then discuss this question shortly. Let me put the position in its barest logical outline. Logic establishes that no 'is' implies an 'ought/ no factual assertion allows the inference of an imperative. There is nothing from which a claim upon an action can be deduced from the descriptions we give ourselves of what it is like. Thus to take an example our relations to our neighbours - our duties to our neighbours. It is said that our duties are what we decide to be done. I presume it is obvious that this is different from the old Greek and Christian metaphysical worlds where our duties to our neighbours were decided by what was due to a neighbour by way of duty, was due to him by what the neighbour was. Now I have taken the example of what is due to our neighbour just because it puts, it seems to me, the distinction between fact and value at its weakest. It seems to me a very perverse way of speaking to say that what is due to our neighbour is what we decide to be due. Here it seems to me the very strangeness of the view that we are the measure, as against the

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Platonic view, is most exposed. Can we really say that an action is due because we decide it shall be. Surely what we decide is what is in fact due. Towards our neighbours we decide that such and such an action is due - but this is not simply a decision about the action. Surely what we decide is that our neighbour is such that we should not cheat him about change or let him live in a slum to the best of our ability whether he happens to enjoy the advantage of our acquaintance or not. And so it seems to me perfectly proper to say we see something about him or her - namely that his [or her] humanity puts a claim upon us. And if I may return to Plato this is what the word 'idea' comes from - from the Greek verb idein - to see. It means something that can be seen with the eyes of the mind - an intellectual image or vision. This I think explains the ethical import of the ideas better than anything else. Now to return to my general modern argument. It is of course a logical truth that the claim made on us by our neighbour cannot be deduced from any genuinely descriptive statements we may make either about him or about ourselves (it is this I think which the modern natural and social sciences have made clear), but to say that is in no sense to deny that the claim arises from what he is and what we are. All the logical negative excludes is that the claim arises from descriptive statement by way of logical implication. But nevertheless it still arises. It is not something that is deduced - but acknowledged. And if we speak, in saying that we have decided to act upon such a claim, we mean, it seems to me, that we have come to an acknowledgment of it, after whatever contemplation or consideration we use for getting into a position to be capable of such acknowledgment. That is, it seems to me, that when we recognize the claim of our neighbours] upon us - it arises from our knowledge of them. But to use the distinction I made once in an earlier class of knowledge by description / knowledge by acquaintance. Is this claim upon us knowledge about them as well as knowledge of them. Can we say, to use Professor [illegible]'s word, 'claimingness' in the moral sense that is, that our neighbours put claims upon us? Is this a characteristic which we can add to such [a] list of characteristics about some neighbour such as stooped, 60 years old, irascible etc. ([a student] will get the reference)26 - This is a difficult logical and epistemological question. But this I would say - there seems to be some kind of analogy between physical knowledge and moral knowledge here. In the end

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my knowledge of the physical properties of things is reducible to my discovery of the ways in which they limit and condition my bodily being and action. I can't jump out of the window without crashing that is, I can't escape the gravitational pull. I can sit in this chair and not crash. I cannot walk on the water. And we know [?] or at least I do and the tradition does -1 must not cheat over change in a store -1 must care about people etc. In some sense there is not [impartability] of the will - and the claims that people put upon [us] are facts in the same way. This seems to bring together, at least closer, the dichotomy between fact and value. Now I could go on about this at great length and it would have finally to overcome that separation between thought and reality which so bedevils the modern world. But I have said it here only for the purpose of making plain that in the cosmos of the ideas there are indeed, as I have said all along, great difficulties in the conception of ideas as ethical ideals and as ontological realities - but that this difficulty is by no means one which we in the modern world should take as final. We may think that in the cosmos of the ideas as found in the Republic the ethical, the aesthetic, the logical, and the ontological are not properly distinguished, that indeed in a certain sense this is too naive [?] for us - but we are still faced with the problem of how, after they are properly distinguished, they can still be properly united. Now of course as I have said over and over again the sheer force of the cosmological question grew and grew with Plato in his later dialogues. But I think I have said enough for one day, and I better make some general comments about that in a last lecture. Excerpt: Lecture Preparing for a Study of the Timaeus Last night my mother said 'Do you have a difficult day?' And l said 'Oh no, l just have to write a lecture on why God created the world.'

So great geniuses as Plato sometimes appear to have taken such a leap beyond what was before, that to study them as a series of insights from the past is to forget that creative leap. Nevertheless on looking at the Timaeus it may be best for the purpose of understanding it (a) to look

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back at what elements are so obviously present in Greek religion, and (b) to look forward to the differences between Plato and the Christians so that from that difference his scheme can be seen more clearly. Now I think the problem for Plato is this: (a) God is good. The idea of the Good is the supreme reality and the supreme transcendence, (b) Every man desires the good. There is no will that is intrinsically bad. I think these two propositions cannot be doubted in Plato. Yet also (c) Evil is there. I don't think any philosopher has ever felt this tragic fact more powerfully. There is more evil than good in the world. If, because of the Idea of the Good there is more good than evil in the totality of the universe, still it is a fact to Plato that on earth evil predominates. Now it seems to me that it is with that question that Plato is striving and to which the Timaeus is an answer - along with the rest of his philosophy. But I want to say something here which is of the greatest importance in understanding the great theological schemes which have tried to answer such questions in the world, Buddhist, Hebraic, Greek, Christian, Idealist - any of them - the answer must be seen as a whole to be understood at all. Let me for example take the Christian one to illustrate what I mean - Creation - Fall - Redemption. If you isolate the idea of creation from the ideas of fall and redemption - it immediately becomes an absurd idea. One can't possibly understand, for instance, why men for centuries accepted it. So equally with Platonism - if you isolate one part of his moral scheme from the rest it becomes absurd. [line drawn in the text, perhaps tying this point to a later point in lecture, or perhaps emphasizing the points made in each for a later treatment] That is

what I was rather guilty of last week. Let me illustrate. It is certainly true, it seems to me, that the philosophical aspiration of man toward God is central to Plato (though, and this is a long parenthesis, this does not mean that Bishop Nygren's folly is true,27 for after all the absolute central pin of Plato is that man is not the measure, God is, and indeed in the Timaeus itself, the Demiurge in its marvelous ingenuity in making the human soul makes it a little more of the other [necessity] than of Reason, and so it will be destined to debase itself gradually save for the corrective intervention of God. Man's fall is inevitable from the Timaeus, if he relies upon his own strength. He somehow miraculously avoids this, if he leans upon God, who never fails to look after man

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and to lend him at the right moment the additional strength. That is, to say that the philosophical aspiration towards God is central in Plato is not to misinterpret him in the absurd way certain Christians have. To use old fashioned language, Plato is par excellence a theologian of grace - indeed who often emphasized grace in my opinion at the expense of freedom - end of parenthesis). But I was saying that when you see the philosophical aspiration of man towards God as central in Plato - it is completely taken out of its context - unless you see that to Plato a situation implying the need of man to seek reconciliation with God is a better situation than a passive submission on man's part. That is, a paradoxical situation where man is in passive submission to God is inferior to a situation of rupture between man and God which is corrected by man's impulse to love taken up and disciplined by a rigorous philosophical discipline. And in an analogous way this is present, for instance, in the Prodigal Son in the New Testament. The youngest son who had left his father and then came back to him, obliging his father to run to meet him is made out more the hero than the eldest son who remained faithfully at home on the basis of habit. That is, the Gospel seems to imply here, better a repentant sinner than an upright man. And in the holy communion as found within the rite of the Roman Church when it comes to talk of Adam's sin which ruined the state of man's direct dependency on God, says Ofelix culpa que talem et tantum [meruit habere] Redemptorem [O happy fault that deserved to have such and so great a Redeemer]. Which seems to imply as I have said that the situation of a split is preferable to the state of innocence when it permits on the one hand the redemption from God and man's faith (Another short parenthesis. Now of course to be fair to the Christian conception of Fall - this has not always been taken - there has always been a split between calling it a felix culpa and a primordial calamity. Mr C.S. Lewis, the clear Anglican apologist - is one of the clearest in making it out a calamity - while the liberal theologians of the nineteenth century who talked about a Fall upwards obviously were saying the same thing as o felix culpa.28 Ministers and the Prodigal Son.) But what I want to make out here with Plato is that with him I think it is clear that he takes the position that philosophical aspiration of man toward God is better than blissful passivity - and the point I want to make is that if that is so (that is, to put it in Christian terminology, that a redeemed man is better than an unfallen man), then I hope you see

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that it raises absolutely crushing problems about his doctrine of why the world. That is, his doctrine of creation cannot possibly be detached from his doctrine of human evil and the possibility of redemption therefrom. Now on the other hand can what he says about the possibility of redemption from evil be understood if it is detached from his account of creation? Now I hope you have got this point and as I try to proceed to compare Plato backward and find in time as with earlier Greek religion and with the Christian theologians that you won't think Plato's doctrine can be taken out of its total setting. And to repeat what I said earlier - just as humanist thinkers have been able to ridicule quite unjustly the Christian doctrine of creation by detaching it from its proper place in a whole scheme of creation, fall, redemption - we must not misinterpret Plato's cosmology by detaching what he says about the origin of the world from what he says about evil, and our possible liberation therefrom. I hope you will bear that in mind. D. PHILOSOPHY 16 - ST AUGUSTINE Grant taught this course in seminar form to MA and Honours students five times. Other interested parties from the university and the community also sat in on the sessions. Grant concentrated on the Confessions, the City of God, and On the Trinity, always bringing his own religious concerns to the lectures and discussions.

Table of Contents 1. Some Comments about St Augustine 2. The Necessary and the Good in the Crucifixion Some Comments about St Augustine When I try to understand what St Augustine means (for whatever reason) it becomes patently obvious that he considers that certain events the life, teaching, passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth - are of absolute significance. Indeed by way of parenthesis it will be

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obvious that I do not mean that he meant that these events are to be taken in isolation, for obviously he does not mean these events to be contemplated apart from certain other events of Hebraic history. Nevertheless, though these other events are known to be of absolute significance, it would appear to me that to St Augustine it is clear that these other events are only known to be of significance because of the events of Jesus' life etc. And this would seem to me clear in the order of knowing simply from the fact that these other events are not known as significant in a universal sense (that is, to put it crudely, to the mass of men) until their significance is illustrated by the events of Jesus' life etc. Now this leads Christianity to be a religion of the Word of God. Certain events are the Word of God. And these events have supreme authority. I do not want here to make that statement more explicit by raising the subsidiary theological questions of the relation of the Bible or of tradition to that Word. For instance, it is perfectly clear that a narrow identification of the Bible with the Word is not required by the Bible itself, though any orthodox Christian of any tradition (I am not speaking for myself) will rightly insist that the Bible alone is the Word of God more directly and fully than any of its other expressions, since it alone is so inspired by God as to have Him for its author. St Augustine makes this clear when he writes to St Jerome: 'To these books of Scripture alone that are now known as canonical I have learned to pay the honour and respect of believing firmly that none of their authors made any mistake in what they wrote.' Neither can I speak at length about the relation of the Word to tradition. Though I would point out that the Roman Catholic Church (that is the organization with the most powerful instruments for making tradition) never asserts (despite the way some Protestants misinterpret its teaching at this point) that the Word of God is anywhere but in those events. The job of the Church is simply to maintain the living fidelity of that Word, not to add to it. Its job is to keep alive the revelation made to the apostles and none of the means [by which] she does this - the theological formulas - the promulgation of dogma - are or ever can be for her the Word of God. As a great Catholic theologian, Boyer, has written - p 203 - and he quotes St John of the Cross.29 Now I have said this about the Bible and tradition only to put in clear light the truth that I think anything which calls itself Christianity

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is a doctrine of the Word of God. This is certainly what Augustine believed and I say this because it seems to me just this which makes his thought so difficult to understand. What on earth does this doctrine mean - that certain events in history are of unique importance for understanding all that which it concerns us to know - call it the word of God - our salvation - the truth - certainty - hope - faith - what you will? Now in writing about this question in what I would call an objective sense - that is, in what may perhaps be called a scholarly sense - it is easy to see in the Hebraic vision of the world and the fulfilment [?] of that in Christianity, a sense of new conceptions about man and God particularly centring around the conception of time - time viewed as history - as the medium through which the divine plan of salvation for man is worked out; and that this is so because the inner unfolding of the life of God can be understood from the perspective of the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ (which inner unfolding of the life of God is given specific formulation in the doctrine of the Trinity). Seen objectively this is of course the belief that history is explained by the unique, unrepeatable, essential fact of the life and death of Jesus Christ. Here is the view of history which is seen as a process which draws its meaning from an irreversible end - an end which draws events towards it like a magnet - and indeed one must say about that end, however much certain parts of the Catholic tradition may object to it, that it is a futuristic end. There is indeed present in the view of history which arises from the Christian Church this strange mixture - history as a divinely ordained process of man's salvation in which time is made meaningful asmovingtoanappointedend,andtheideathattheendoreschatonisinsomesensenowrealized-hasbrokenintopresenttime.F ' orinthatChris

in some sense now realized - has fbroken into present time. 'For in that

Christ died, He died unto sin once.' That is, the Kingdom of God is in some sense already realized in history in the Church, and that as Mark says The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand.'30 [Beginning of long insert] I think it is indubitably clear that the waiting for the approaching end of the world shaped the whole attitude of the early Church. They believed, which seems to me perfectly natural for them, that the crucifixion was the actual beginning of de-creation; and hence the incarnation was indubitably unique. They thought they had to announce a fact, namely the approaching end of the world. It was crucial to spread the news, for those who didn't believe in it neglected to put themselves into a state of perfection and would be

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therefore consequently lost. It was necessary to tear people away from their beliefs, in order to place them face to face with this tremendous fact - the end of the world. Let me compare it with the time in my youth when there were still believing communists around in Canada, who believed in the imminent fact of the World Revolution. Whoever doesn't believe in it - that is, doesn't say that this necessity is desirable - will be destroyed by it when it comes. Therefore the communist, in so far as he is compassionate, longs to convince you. That is, the early Christians, like the modern communists, believe they are moving not only towards that which they believe to be good, but towards what they believe must soon successfully happen. That is, they are able to believe in quite a close relation between the necessary and the good. But of course we cannot identify the crucifixion with the idea of the imminent decreation of the world. This is what makes Cullmann's book so much nonsense. Nonsense, not as scholarship, because it is obviously I think a very clear and important account of the New Testament idea of time. But nonsense as anything total we could possibly believe.31 If we are to make anything of the crucifixion obviously [we] have to cut it off from the imminent end of the world, and therefore have to 'metaphysicise' it into an event interpreted within the mystical tradition which is outside the Hebrew tradition in general - that is, see it as decreation - see it in the way St John of the Cross sees it etc., etc. Now with St Augustine it is hard to know how far this relationship between the crucifixion and the imminent decreation of the world is maintained. I think a very hard question. [End of long insert] And if I was concerned with this subject of eschatology I would be interested in discussing, as far as Augustine is concerned, the question how in the City of God - the futuristic end which sees the working out of evil is integrated with the realised Kingdom embodied in the Church, so that the power of the Church as the realized Kingdom, and the way that that integration is achieved at the expense of the futuristic spiritual hope, is in the name of the metaphysical and social power of the Church as a realised authority. This contradiction between an end achieved and to be achieved is very deeply felt throughout the City of God. And if we looked at this scheme of history as it must have been subjectively considered by the early Christians, we would see that for them the Incarnation as the union of the creator with the creature

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which exposed the aims and purposes of the creator in history allowed the individual to see meaning in his temporal life, as that temporal life is judged as part of God's plan of salvation. And of course were we to look at the Word of God in this way - that is, to see in it the understanding of time not as the moving image of eternity but as the process of man's salvation - we would have to proceed to discussing (as shortly [?] we have) the idea of God as will, the idea of purpose as applied to the divine. And above all we would have to discuss what value there is in taking the idea of end or purpose and seeing it futuristically. And obviously what would arise here would be to discuss what truth there is in the modern conception of progress, seeing its very obvious relation to this concept of purpose or end viewed futuristically. And on the one hand we could see this idea as one of the poisons within Christianity. If we were to say this we would say that the idea of progress arose through the idea of a divine system of education, preparing men so as to make them fit to receive Christ's message, and that this idea of the divine schoolmaster dissolves the individual destiny, which alone counts for salvation, into the salvation of peoples in general; and that this idea of seeing a general harmony in history - of history being a directed continuity - this idea taken over by Hegel and Marx - is indubitably a Christian idea, and indubitably an idea held by St Augustine - but is a completely false idea. By seeking harmony in the sphere of Becoming it dissolves the idea of individual salvation, and fails to see that the Eternal and Becoming are exact opposites, and that to unite them is to destroy the eternal. Now sometimes throughout the year I thought that it was this that [a student] was saying as against Augustine, and of course against the whole modern spirit in general. Of course to discuss this we would have to be fair to St Augustine, and point out that he seems to hover between 'already fulfilled' and 'not yet fulfilled' - so we can interpret him as not falling into the system of divine pedagogics in which the individual is swallowed up as he stands for 'already fulfilled.' Do you see that one can then have it so many ways? One can say as a Jew that by speaking about 'already fulfilled' in the Church one reduces salvation simply to the individual and seems to think that history does not matter. One can say as a mystic that speaking about 'not yet fulfilled' he denies the eternal. And as I have tried to say all year I am much too confused to see any true answer to this problem - for to put it explicitly, if we are to

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loathe the domination of one man by another we must always speak in the language of 'not yet fulfilled'; and yet on the other hand if we are to affirm the eternal meaning, we must accept what has been (the domination of one man by another) as being part of salvation. And indeed if Christianity is to mean anything we must say that it is as one man is dominated and lets himself be dominated by others that alone the distinction creator-created can be overcome. And of course it is hardly necessary to say that the overcoming of this distinction is the only way that one can believe in the divine love. For obviously (and oh how I would insist on that 'obviously') that which we love is absent. So I would not be as jejune as to say that I could know whether or not Augustine's philosophy has within it the essential principles (leaving aside foolish details which we can properly scorn) on which the 'already' and 'not yet' are properly reconciled; for who am I not to loathe and to accept the domination of one man by another - accept it because therein and only therein can the divine love be manifest, if we are to escape being tawdry about love - loathe it because if we do not loathe it we say the world isn't worth anything, and if the world isn't worth anything then of what exactly does evil deprive us? You just cut off the branch on which you are sitting; in other words, if you do not loathe the domination of one man by another you have said that the divine love does not exist - just as much as if you had refused to accept this domination. But all this, even though it skirts around, perhaps helps us to see our own world better; nevertheless it does skirt around, because it simply leads us back to the question of the Word of God. That is the question of why the unfolding of the divine life is vouchsafed for us in the Incarnation - that is, the doctrine of the Trinity. How on earth are we to approach this? Now perhaps we could say something metaphysically (though I don't think it will get us very far) but perhaps it is worth saying before going on further. Let me therefore indulge in some Trinitarian apologetics. If we were to conceive God simply as love, we should be forced to conceive Him either in the form of becoming, or else in that of act directed towards that which is not Himself. Now obviously either of these positions [is] impossible. We therefore conceive Him as act which is still not directed towards the not-Himself by representing Him to ourselves as being two and at the same time three, through the union of the two. But these three are persons, because to take the Ian-

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guage of subject-object, here the lover is subject - the loved is subject and the love is subject. And this kind of language is some help - but what matters is to see how this language arises to the mind from the contemplation of Jesus of Nazareth, and that is altogether a harder and more subtle matter. It is doubly hard because I can certainly see that other languages (though I do not mean by this any language - not at all would I mean that) can so arise from that contemplation. But still it is necessary to see how that language does arise. Now obviously there are a variety of what I would call experiential complexes from which one can start looking at the question. The events of the crucifixion, resurrection etc., whatever else they may be are in their wonderful mystery a most remarkable source of philosophic pondering and from them all kinds of images arise to be preserved. But I am going to start from two Platonic terms which I have used consistently - the Necessary and the Good. Immediately the Biblicist will say why start about this question from concepts which arise in an alien tradition from these events? But of course my answer has been given earlier in this paper. And anyway let us affirm as a categorical philosophic proposition that if these events are worth looking at they must be universal events, and the concept 'universal events' implies a continuity between all criticism of Marxism. And from it one is driven back to some form of Trinitarianism. But to criticize other positions as unsatisfactory is not to put oneself in the position of not seeing the very valid criticisms which the unsatisfactory position makes of the more satisfactory. And that criticism is this - put most generally: To say evil is part of the Godhead - indeed to have any doctrine of reconciliation at all - is a justification of the world as it is - a sheer lack of interest. Now let us grant that the more general conclusion of this argument is unsatisfactory still the less general conclusion is not, and perhaps as we try to bring the full weight of our intellects to bear upon this criticism to see how it can be included in Trinitarianism (and we can only do that as we think about how this language of will purpose - can be used about the divine). We may also (I think indeed it is very likely) understand how the difficulty about thinking constraint and consent in the life of the Trinity is overcome. 'Batter my heart three-personed God.' Sorry this is so scrappy.

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The Necessary and the Good in the Crucifixion Now we may easily see that in the crucifixion the necessary and the good are at an infinite distance. The good man is being stripped of all sensible help - here the good man renounces prestige, public esteem, has no rights - passes, we can completely see, beyond the sphere of social life and the categories of justice. And here let us remember that phrase of Plato's about the good persuading the necessary.32 Here then it is an absolute persuasion because essentially non-active. It is justice sheerly supernatural without any mixture with the necessary. It is clearly redemptive suffering - persuasive suffering - the completely innocent takes upon himself penal suffering, that is, in the fullest form, persuades the necessary. This is, we can see, beyond the categories of the brave and the courageous - we cannot be innocent, and therefore cannot choose this redemptive suffering. And here is the difficulty the redemptive or penal suffering must be the suffering of the just, but it also, if it is to be perfected (that is to be absolutely supernatural) must be an absolute surrender to the necessary. 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?' That is, the persuader is absolutely stripped of help, even of the love of God, in so far as it can be felt. Here an innocent being sheds the light of salvation upon evil - because here necessity is being infinitely persuaded. That is, because the suffering is no longer supported by a sense of the good - that is, it is no longer seen as meaningful, then the good which bears the suffering is a purely supernatural good - purely supernatural because not depending on any help outside itself. Dereliction has been extended to the very extreme limit beyond which the very possibility of good disappears. The harrowing of hell has taken place. Because if we see necessity as that which imposes conditions, here we see Christ consent to the imposition of these conditions - just to be human material, and then (and this, it seems to me, must be considered the really and truly supernatural part of the whole story) he no longer consents, he passes beyond the point where there is any consolation. Now this raises a sheerly technical issue which I think important if we are to think upon the Passion as the inner life of the Godhead. Obviously what I have said previously includes within it an answer but that answer is not explicit - so I will try and make it so. Several times this year I have quoted the remark - that Christ does not save us

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on the Cross by acting out a parable of divine love but is a parable of divine love because He saves us. That is to say, the question, which is certainly the central question I am discussing, how we can think of the Passion as the inner life of the Godhead - means that this Passion is not an image of the Trinity - as for instance 'Lear' is a noble image - this must really be seen as the life of the Godhead itself. We see the Trinity here or not at all. These events are indeed useful to the Churches as the source of moral maxims (though of course not too useful, as indeed, when truly seen, impossible of imitation). We are not able to choose the Cross. As Miss Weil so brilliantly has put it: 'We might choose no matter what degree of asceticism or heroism, but not the Cross - that is to say penal suffering'33 - but of course these events are not for Christians images or parables or analogies of something else - they are the very life of the Godhead. This is not analogical reasoning and there can be no analogical reasoning whereby we say of God - He is Triune. Now this is in no sense to discuss the question whether analogical reasoning has any place in the whole compass of thought - I just am not concerned with that (I happen to think it is based on a trick). But all I want to insist is that the Trinity is no analogy. It is simply the clearest word to express what is seen directly in the Passion of Christ. Now here is the difficulty. How is all which I have spoken directly about suffering seen to be directly God? Let me put this difficulty in a clear light, and the question of Christ's consent. (All this should indirectly throw some light on the questions we have raised around Pelagius and Augustine.)34 Let me start by a quotation from Augustine himself. He once said, 'He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent.'35 The argument is something like this: we must love that which is worthy in all respects. Nothing which exists is worthy in all respects. Therefore we must love that which does not exist. In loving God we must recognize that we must decreate ourselves - put off the illusion of self etc., etc. God gave me being in order that I should give it back to Him.36 I could obviously speak about this at great length. But the question is not the truth of this way of looking at ourselves. For we are trying to see what Christianity saw as its truth, and obviously this is the only way of looking at ourselves in which Christianity could be true. (I might have to argue this among some Biblical theologians, but I do not think I will have to argue it here.) There-

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fore we must look at the Trinity within this view. But within this view there is still the difficulty I am trying to illustrate. How, if Christ is God (though very man too), are we to think the idea of his consent? This seems to me the crux of the problem. For do you see that, let us say, here in the crucifixion we can see a human being (obviously that) decreate himself - oblate himself to be human material, necessity itself. He lays down the human 'I.' Yes, this is all true. And we have here an ethical theory of redemption - if I may distinguish such a doctrine from a sacramental theory of redemption. In this sense Christ is the Exemplar, and what an exemplar! But the difficulty of such a doctrine is just the one of consent. We have said He is thoroughly supernatural love - that is, all the T on the side of creature is laid down. One has said that one can take upon oneself martyrdom, asceticism etc., but one cannot take upon oneself the Cross. This cannot be a matter of consent. At one level, it cannot be a matter of consent because it must be absolute purity - absolute love which somehow bridges for us the infinite distance between the necessary and the good. As Augustine wrote, and as I have quoted to you: 'It was not by nature that He was born; it was the power of His mercy that He died. This is what it cost Him when He ransomed us from death.'37 This is what the sacramental doctrine of redemption must mean. As the Christian Church has always said, Heaven crossing the infinite distance between itself and earth - coming down to earth and raising earth to heaven - because earth of itself could not do it. We would not have loved God if He had not first loved us.38 This is - there is no consent in the process. Why I call this the sacramental conception of redemption is that the good itself consents to be absolute necessity. It is always strange for those outside the Catholic tradition to see why people can spend their lives literally nearly all their lives - in the continuous living out of the Eucharist. Dear Mr Nicholson,39 for instance, said to me the other day that he thought it was so iniquitous the way Roman and Anglo-Catholic churches went on and on performing the Eucharist; and what he meant (and of course I agree with him) is that it should be rare, because if one is thinking of one's own life and decisions in terms of it, this is something which should be used sparingly in the Christian Church. That is, if you take an ethical view of our redemption (whatever that may mean) you do not take the Eucharist seriously. But of

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course this is not the view the Catholics take of it. The good has become human material, bread and wine (things absolutely at our disposal), and in the Eucharist is the inner life of the Godhead - of God absent from God - and crossing that infinite distance in love, etc., etc., etc., as I have said. But where then is the consent? And without the consent what have we? What is the garden of Gethsemane if we see it outside consent? It is play-acting. As I have quoted over and over again, 'His sweat was as great drops of blood falling down to the ground.'40 (This which [a student] said did not happen) - this is an act of will by a human being. Here there is a veil in Christ as to what He is doing. He suffers this appalling affliction because He does not see the act solely from the side of God. He sees it from the side of creature and so suffers in His createdness. He sweats blood. And there is no room for this in the simply sacramental doctrine of redemption. What I am saying is that both the sacramental and ethical doctrines of our salvation break down - fail. The ethical doctrine because it ultimately denies that He was and is very God. It makes the Cross a kind of martyrdom very wonderfully borne, and such a doctrine is no answer to the absolute distance which separates the necessary from the good. The sacramental doctrine fails because it denies He was very man. It denies the final curtain which is drawn for man between the necessary and the good - or rather I should say that curtain which is necessity and which blinds us from seeing God, that curtain which somehow cannot be simply swept away (I refer you to what I said about the false elevation of contradiction) but before which we must believe that somebody (that is, a man) freely chose to take upon Himself. This is then what seems to me the difficulty (intellectual) we have with saying that the Trinity expresses the life of the Godhead. Now of course there is the answer which says that there is not any evil or disorder for the Father - there can only be for the Son. But that is to say that the Son is God in so far as we ought to imitate Him. But I have already tried to say why a doctrine such as that is not satisfactory. Now I have said enough already but I ought perhaps add that the only place I can look for an answer is in trying to sort out in my mind that question which has cropped up time and again in our discussions of Augustine; how words such as plan, purpose, will can be used of the divine. What can they mean? When I will something I subordinate a

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certain thing as a means toward a certain other thing regarded as an end, or certain things as parts toward a certain other thing as a whole. But how can such language be applied to the divine? Yet we must use it if we are to think of the divine. Even Plato, who often is close to the denial of such language, and whose successor Aristotle was full of the language which excludes will and purpose and plan from the Godhead - yes, even Plato at the end of his life wrote in the Sophist, 'Shall they then easily persuade us that absolute being is devoid of motion and life and soul and intelligence? That it neither loves nor thinks but abides in awful sanctity, mindless, motionless, fixed?'41 If I may end on a modern note - a note which I have uttered often this year, but which needs uttering again - everything which I have said about the Trinity so far (and thus about St Augustine) is that the Trinity can only become sufficiently intelligible for us to be a mystery in which we can live, if we assume that suffering, struggle, and even dereliction are seen as part of the life of the Godhead. Now against such a doctrine it is the supreme power of the Marxist to say that this is not a way in which evil is driven away but a doctrine in which the continuance of evil is justified before the court of our impotence. And no Trinitarian can for a moment do anything but take this criticism with the deepest seriousness. Earlier in the paper I have given the Trinitarian criticism of Marxism, namely, that by making the good appear of necessity in history you can really give no place to necessity, no account of necessity. I think this criticism of Marxism is most clearly put (and it is a criticism I would take as final) that in the Marxist heaven one chord (absolutely irreconcilable) must blot out the joy of the unrepressed generations - namely the memory of the suffering of those in the time before the achievement of the classless society. This chord is irreconcilable by definition. For all that can be said is that the suffering was necessary. That is, it is left unreconciled. This kind of argument leads one back to Trinitarianism, at least as far as the general principle that reconciliation must be by definition supernatural. Now as I have said I consider this the experience of all men. And that therefore the profound way the Greeks pondered in their experience is as much as anything else a preparatio evangelii [preparation for the Gospel]. Often in this course I have spoken of Greek and Hebrew ways of looking at questions, and this is a useful distinction for looking at the history of the race and for seeing what is involved in our tradition. But

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I am sure it will be perfectly obvious to all of you that it can be no final distinction - simply a methodological one. Because to say the opposite is to make nonsense of the idea of God, history, or man. When, for instance, certain Biblical theologians of the modern world (and a liberal like Harnack is as guilty of this as reactionaries like Cullmann and Niebuhr) say that certain thought patterns are not Biblical but Greek,42 they are right in the unimportant sense of scholarship, that we should be aware, as educated men and women, of where certain ideas come from - but they are wrong in the important sense of judging what is true and false, for they add the quite unacceptable minor premise that ideas to be included in Christian theology must be Biblical ideas. And let me point out that this premise is not only unacceptable to the philosopher, but to any Christian, because, as I have said, does not Christianity claim to be universal? They can only be right if they want to rest in a ghetto mentality, but such a mentality contradicts the first principle which they advocate. Nor can they justify it as keeping pure the Word of God, because, as I have said so often, the Word of God is not a set of propositions. Indeed in the averred name of a supernatural position they fall into the most formal naturalism [?]. Now perhaps to most of you this does not need saying (your errors do not turn to an absurd Biblicism - though I would point out that [a student] has been talking in a pretty Barthian way recently). Still it needs saying if I am to start from the two concepts - Necessity and the Good. Now if I understand Plato correctly (and before such an immense genius how can we be sure?) - the famous passage in the Republic about the transcendence of the Good arises from his recognition that the central contradiction which must arise to our thought is the contradiction between necessity and the good, call it if you will the contradiction between justice and force, between love and worldly power.43 Plato seems to have seen with such clarity, as surely we must, that human beings have from their very being the desire for the good, [but] are at the same time under the rule in their very selves - that is, in their thought as well as in their flesh - under the entire rule of a blind force, an absolute necessity, which at least appears absolutely indifferent to the good.441 think one can see this worked out (though not at the deepest level) in the Timaeus. And this bitter contrast is in my opinion something which thought cannot escape. It is a contradiction which we

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attempt to reconcile, for as is clear, I hope, thought is always mediation; that is, it is the instrument of reconciliation. And for fear of an error I would like to say something about the role of thought as mediator in contradiction, which it seems to me Plato knew well, but which is easy to forget when one embarks upon philosophy, and which indeed may easily lead us astray into a phoney account of the Trinity. That is, this: there is a legitimate and illegitimate use of contradiction. The illegitimate use insists on joining together incompatible thoughts as if they were compatible. Thus, as I have said earlier, the argument that this world isn't worth anything and to bring forward evil as the proof is this kind of argument - for if the world isn't worth anything, of what exactly does evil deprive us? This kind of argument seems to me a perfect example of getting over a contradiction in a phoney way. The legitimate use seems to me this, when two incompatible thoughts present themselves to us we must exhaust every recourse of our intelligence to try to eliminate one of the conflicting and incompatible thoughts. If this is impossible - if both insist on imposing themselves on our minds, it becomes necessary to recognize the contradiction as a fact. Then it becomes necessary to use this contradiction as a kind of pincers, to try and enter directly in contact with the transcendent which otherwise is inaccessible to human beings. This is what the doctrine of mystery means. If, as I believe Plato did, you say that the good and the necessary are separated by an infinite distance - that is that we cannot see that they have anything in common - then if nevertheless we are forced by thought to say they must be in unity in some way, then we must say that the unity is a mystery - it is an unknown unity. And as all the great mystics have said, it is the mark of the authentic religious life to contemplate these unities. Thus, for instance, we might say, taking my example from the early Christians and the authentic modern Marxists, that what is wrong with them is that they take it to be true that the good is an automatic product of necessity - that is, they seek an overcoming of the contradiction between necessity and the Good, which puts together the incompatible illegitimately. While Plato - and oh it is the understanding of what he means by this which has made me admire him - says that the Good finally rules the necessary by persuasion. But this is obviously a mystery. In the same way in the 5th chapter of St Matthew our Lord says, 'He sends his rain upon

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the just and the unjust.'45 Here certainly I should say the idea that the necessary has no direct relation to the Good is very clearly expressed. God seems to veil His purposes by this world of necessity. Now let us say that we contemplate the world under these Platonic terms - the necessary and the Good - and we are simply forced to say in so contemplating that every attempt to overcome the infinite distance between the two only leads to attempts to justify evil by some other argument than the fact that that which is, is, - and that any such attempts are always offences against the truth.46 Or to put it in the language of Luther, which those of you who know me will know I admire, and which it seems to me for all Luther's explicit rejection of philosophy is still a recognition of this truth: "The theology of glory says that evil is good and good evil. The theologian of the Cross says that the thing is as it is. And that therefore he is not worthy to be called a theologian who sees the invisible things of God as understood through the things that are made.'47 Unworthy because he is identifying the Good with the necessary. E. PHILOSOPHY 14-KANT Grant taught this seminar course to MA and Honours students four times. He concentrated on the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason.

Table of Contents 1. Kant's Antinomy between the Self and the World 2. Metaphysical Deduction of Categories Kant's Antinomy between the Self and the World Of one thing I am sure: I am much too confused and in need of solitude to be in any position to say the last word about anything - let alone an intelligible first word. Let these then be taken as random jottings which are simply an expression of my mind's despair as it rushes from positions to contrary positions. When I read any of those works of Anglo-Catholic piety written by

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a well-trained philosopher of that tradition48 there are always a few moments when the clear ordering of the work, and the sense of the possibility for man to find his proper place in the scheme of things so fills me with rest that I say yes, the old European world was not only good but had the heart of the matter in its affirmation of the primacy of Being over thought, and one must make oneself an incarnate citadel of this truth - that one must be consciously and live consciously as a creature, and that one's lot is to live this way in a world that must become increasingly depersonalized because it has forgotten its creaturely status, and that the cross is limited to this for us - our part in recreating this sense of creatureliness in man. But such softness lasts but a few moments, and one recognizes the terrible lack of courage in such Catholicism; and this lack of courage is of course corrupting in its failure to meet practically the imperfectability of the world; and in its sweetly smoothing away evil, telling us to do what we can but not to be above ourselves in this matter. Eat, they say, the living bread and drink the actual wine, and then you will recognize that this cup is not really yours to drink, except within limits. That is, put in its broadest, all would be well with Catholic (that is traditional Christian) thought if we could grasp what is meant by the doctrine of creation. But try as we can - and of course one only tries because there is such hope, if only we could - we cannot accept the traditional Christian doctrine of creation, because we cannot accept the primacy of being over thought. Now our reasons as I have said for this non-acceptance are not based on any violent rationalist solution like that of Parmenides, but on many reasons which comprehend the whole range of our lives. For me it is more likely to occur when in such a work of Catholic piety I come across a quotation such as Paul's - about 'the grace of God which works all things together for good' - ah, the mind says, how wonderful - till it all comes crashing down in the qualifying phrase 'to those that love him.'49 The doctrine of creation is here in a cleft stick. It cannot surrender the qualifying phrase, 'to those that love him,' - for if it does it has lost its reason for being propounded - but if it includes this qualifying phrase, I have lost my reason for accepting it. And I think we cannot get away from the fact that more than any other it was that queer, narcissistic, barren, limited pedant from Konigsberg who has taught us this. It is he who does more than any other once and for all show us that the doctrine of creation will not do.

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Without committing ourselves to the old Catholic language, we may say that this is the cup he has made us drink from and that that cup is our grace and joy. When he taught that man himself is the creator of order and law and that our ideas do not conform to the things - but the things to the wholeness of the sensibility, and to the synthetic forms of the understanding called categories; that is in general that intellect is before things - that is when he saw more clearly than ever before the terrible significance of subjectivity (I need not expand that as I have so often) that is when he saw that our relation to all things and to their totality, the world is unique in that it is not a relation between things belonging to the world alone and that indeed no such relation could possibly reveal the world to our subjectivity, because the world can be revealed as world only to a subject which stands over against the world and which by virtue of this, its transcendence to the world, can enjoy a perspective of the world. Such a doctrine meant that the idea of creation as held by the Catholic philosophers was gone. (Protestantism was inescapably a necessary forerunner to idealism.) Now use the word creation as we all do - but recognize it is entirely different. Also of course I must observe, in line with what I said about Collingwood the other day,50 that though I said it was Kant who first saw this with clarity, I do not mean by this to say that in the other traditions it hadn't been begun to be seen. St Augustine begins to see it, the early scientific philosophers and their allies, the mystics, have glimmerings of it. Bdhme, Nicholas of Cusa, Eckhardt,51 and in the scientific field, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz - but none see it and formulate it with the same certain power throughout their works as does Kant. Kant is inescapably the first formulator of subjectivity in the sense that he makes evident without escape certain consequences of it - and thereby he is the founder of modern idealism, and modern idealism breaks down once and for all the old citadel of Christian Aristotelianism. It is a profounder idealism than that of Plato or Aristotle. Once man has recognized the consequences of his own subjectivity, the primacy of being over thought, as it was held by the medievals, can no longer be held - let Marcel try all he will.52 Existentialism may say many things, but it cannot, nor does it try to reject the subjectivity. Heidegger, for instance, the profoundest of the modern existentialists, may reject Descartian rationalism, but the sheer fierceness of his idealism is inescapably there in what he says about the world-forming

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power of the Dasein. Existentialism is not a return to pre-Kantian thought and those (particularly the Thomists) who use it for that purpose are just perverting it to their own ends and are not interested in what it is saying in itself. But once one has said this about Kant, and seen the full power of idealism's attack on the traditional Christian metaphysics, the difficulty arises of seeing the relation of this in Kant to another aspect of this thought. I use the word 'aspect' here loosely, because I do not mean to imply by the word that Kant's thought is here in itself divided (because that would be the most adolescent presumption in the face of genius). Rather what I mean by 'aspect' is that as one studies Kant the part of his doctrine I am now going to talk about often is hard from my side to see in relation to the indubitable idealism which I have been speaking of. 'Aspect' is then used as applying to my state of mind in studying Kant, not as he thought. That is, this: Kant is the philosopher of criticism - that is, by criticism he uncovers the limits of knowing and so shows the impossibility of a comprehensive system of thought, and this, to use Buber's phrase, deprives man of his shelter in the known cosmos.53 It is this as you will know that turns a philosopher such as Jaspers back to Kant as his master.54 Kant destroys the old metaphysics as I have said earlier by his Copernican revolution, but he also rejects the possibility of any metaphysics as science. To put it simply as I have so often, it is surely indubitable that the intention of The Critique of Pure Reason was to state the priority of practical reason - that is, the priority of faith over knowledge. To use Jaspers' phrase, his real intention was to consign man to his own freedom (not to prove his freedom). That is, man is more than a rational animal - man's 'act' is the only possible approach to ultimate reality and therefore it is this act which is the goal of theory and as this is so important I would repeat its consequences. Man cannot be known theoretically by metaphysics - that is our human nature can not be known theoretically by metaphysics, [man] can only be known scientifically as phenomenon. But in our freedom as subjectivity we cannot be known theoretically (our subjectivity, that is) either by science or metaphysics. This does not mean that thought is disregarded because it is included in the act. Also when it recognizes its limits it has the task of science, but it must recognize its limits. I could go on about this at great length, but won't. But the question which arises here - let me put it simply - how does

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one see together in Kant that side of his thought which makes him the first idealist - that is, the recognition of the infinite dilemma of our subjectivity and on the other hand the side of Kant which recognizes the limitations of our thought - the presence of the given in all our cognitive acts, and therefore the impossibility of metaphysics. Let me for a moment put the question in an historical way. Isn't the truth of subjectivity which Kant stated for the first time in an unavoidable way, and which is as I have said the basis for idealism - isn't this truth only made explicit in Hegel? He sees that it means that consciousness experiences itself and nothing but itself in all spheres, and that the journey of the mind is necessary just so it can know this fundamental truth, learn that it is itself the Absolute. Now in saying this I do not mean for a moment to imply that Hegel does not cope with the idea of the given. Indeed exactly the opposite. If you will put your minds back to the end of the last class you will remember that I was saying that one of the least satisfactory parts of The Critique of Pure Reason was that Kant uses the word experience in a very narrow sense namely in the sense of that knowledge which is fulfilled in science and that he forgot to see that an ordinary common sense is not only a necessary good of rational science, but also that this common sense that is, this immediate experience of the surrounding world - does not only fulfil itself in rational science, but in all manner of activities. And indeed it was one of Hegel's chief powers and [his] greatness to remind philosophers, who had been so long caught up in an arid rationalism, that this is so, and to bring out in his Phenomenology of Mind particularly the full significance of immediate awareness and acquaintance not only as it fulfils itself in scientific experience, but in all spheres of our activity. In the Phenomenology of Mind he takes the reader through all the worlds of experience, personal and impersonal, individual and common, intellectual and emotional, moral and political, aesthetic and religious, with a prodigiously rich sense of the given. Anybody who doubts that has not opened the work. Nevertheless at the end he arrives at that kind of knowledge which takes into itself all previous stages and which has the name 'Absolute Knowledge,' and in that knowledge the fundamental truth which at the earlier stages has been observed is at last made clear: consciousness experiences itself and nothing but itself in all spheres - that is, it is itself the Absolute. That is, shouldn't we interpret Kant as a genius of the highest order

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who because he had pondered on the rich tradition of Greek and Christian metaphysics, and had seen what was added to these both by the scientific philosophers and Protestantism, was able to reveal to men the infinity of his own consciousness? Or to put it negatively - the security [?] of the finite is quite wiped away for those who seek the Truth. And the completely explicit revelation of this truth to man namely that the transcendental unity of apperception is God - allowed Hegel to take this thought and work it out in a way it is not adequately worked out in Kant. That is one way that the question about what I have called the two aspects in Kant should be put. Let me start to say something about this though I am sure you will not think it pedantic if I say that the main thing is to formulate the question, and for the rest you should study not only Kant, Hegel, and Schelling, but many other philosophers before even the beginning of an answer could be manifest to the mind. Let us therefore to begin state what Kant said (and please remember the caveat to that sentence. When I say 'state what Kant said' do remember it is what I think he said - though also remember that I feel more certainty about Kant than most philosophers) - and after stating what he said discuss whether it is impossible to rest in what he said. For basically it always seems to me the question which a man faces on thinking about Kant and Hegel - if as I do he sees them as the great philosophers for us as moderns - is this: must we rest in the antinomies with which Kant leaves us, or is it possible to reach a reconciliation of them in thought as Hegel claims he has? Let me make explicit that I mean a logical reconciliation, for that religion is concerned with reconciliation and can provide for these antinomies a perfectly allowable reconciliation in the immediacy of consciousness is indubitable though beside the point here except as a fact which in itself presents us with another antinomy. Or must we say with some philosophers that Hegel's thought does not succeed in that reconciliation and only gives the appearance of succeeding? Therefore the problem is to state the antinomies as Kant states them. I think the antinomy which Kant starts with, and indeed earlier I have said that his statement of this antinomy clearly was his supreme contribution to thought, is the antinomy between the self and the world. And this is more than the mere subject-object relationship. It is that I belong and yet do not belong to the world. As it has been put

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elsewhere (Jaspers), in so far as the world comprises all things and all beings I do belong to the world. But in so far as I cannot even speak of the world without making the world the content of my thought, I do not belong to that content. Indeed that very content would not be itself if my thought did not separate the world as its content from myself as the subject who thinks. What Kant sees so clearly here against Descartes' simpler rationalism is that it is arbitrary to draw from that, as a starting point, that I exist; it is rather I should draw from that as a starting point that I exist in distinction from whatever is the content of my thought. That is, Kant so wonderfully recognizes that we meet both the self and the world in experience and that therefore any philosophy which tries to separate them is ab initio false. The Descartian 'cogito' is a false starting point just as deeply as empiricism, which in denying the self denies the experience from which world and self come. What is important in this connection is that to Kant the antinomy between the self and the world is one which breaks up the very self; for the basic fact of the subject-object distinction is that man can be just as much an object to himself as anything else. If as with Kant we say that the 'world' is the totality of all things in contrast to the self, then indeed man is both of this world and not of this world. Put in another way, Kant is really working out Pascal's thinking reed.55 (Indeed so often one finds in Kant that attempt to state systematically what Pascal puts in a flashing intuition.) That is, how can I myself who am the minutest speck in the totality of things (and we must remember how the totality of things had been so greatly expanded by Kant's day, to put it quickly) be at the same time the centre of the universe, the maker of the world a self-legislating member of a Kingdom of Ends? And I do not need here to emphasize beyond [illegible] how sharply and without equivocation Kant sees this antinomy. Kant sees this split in the self and, as I have said earlier, it is the recognition of this split which smashes Catholic theology once and for all. And Kant leaves the self so divided, the transcendental self underlying all experience and the individual self, so that men's individual characters are simply worldly traits while his universal self is non-worldly. Now I just cannot here discuss what we have discussed in our conversations throughout the year, whether this split as Kant works it out in his philosophy is, as Kant has so often been accused of, of such a radical nature that no relation can be posited between the individual and universal self and that therefore the split

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ceases to be a problem for man. For let it be clear: if the split as Kant works it out was in the form of a radical disjunction he would be sawing off the limb he was sitting on - because the antinomies which he lays down in his philosophy all are based on the assumption that there is a split (to use that metaphor ad nauseam) in the self, but a relation between the individuality and universality of the self. If there was no such relation there would be no antinomies. And I cannot say what I think in this matter for I think Kant is basically right and only sometimes says things which cannot be reconciled with that basic Tightness (and to expand that would take a more detailed exposition than I have here). But I would say that the denial that there is any radical disjunction is most indubitably seen in what surely is the central affirmation in Kant: that the transcendental self manifests itself in the act, and not simply as a theoretical condition of experience. The centrality of the act of faith for Kant is surely indubitable proof that he is no final crude dualist. The question then which seems to me to lie very central to the philosophy of Kant is this. If one accepts that it was Kant who first stated clearly the antinomies involved in subjectivity (and of course one of the questions we will have to answer in that will be why human history is of such a kind that man did not state this clearly but only hinted at it in earlier philosophy; and that 'why' cannot simply be a psychological and historical 'why/ that is, we must have a philosophy of history) - but once one has accepted that the question between Kant and Hegel is the split within the self (or as Kant would say, a situation to be lived out), and from which there can be an approach to reconciliation in the act as it is a split for which there can be no particular reconciliation - but a reconciliation which can through the principle of identity establish a true self-unification by means of thought. It is this which the dogmatic philosophy (and I use the adjective in all its nobility and dignity) of Hegel asserts - that here there is the possibility of success. A critical philosophy such as Kant's denies that possibility of success without falling into scepticism, and thus asserts that we must end finally by living in faith. Now I do not mean to go beyond that except in one word about where chiefly I think some kind of answer lies to the question that presents itself to the modern philosopher who has seen that the truth of subjectivity destroys the old Aristotelian theology, and yet who wants

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to ensure that no shoddy idealism which bypasses existence and the 'act' should take its place. What I will say will be very simple. Let me put it this way: the great power and force of the old Catholicism for our minds today is its forceful hold onto the Christian doctrines of the Cross and Resurrection. While only the greatest of the idealists, Hegel, recognized that these doctrines - though they could not be interpreted as Catholicism had - were still the central key to the understanding of the relation of finite to infinite, the result was that after Hegel idealism degenerated into a cheap immanentist cosmology characterized by the most superficial and childish optimism. It has been the greatness of Barth to recognize that these doctrines were central to thought; it was his tragedy that he tried to bring them into thought in an empirical way.56 Now I do not mean to speak here of the relation of the particular events of Christian history to the doctrines of the Cross and the Resurrection. That is, I do not mean in any way to raise in what sense this event in history is symbol or more than symbol. That is a question which everyone must raise for himself, but it is not a question necessary to have answered anyway to say what I am saying now. That is, to say that the doctrines of the Cross and Resurrection will be central to any proper philosophy is something that can be agreed upon by any western men - in the sense that the theological problem that Kant and Hegel raise for modern men (whatever their differences as to the possibility of an answer) is in what sense is evil necessary. And because of their understanding of subjectivity this question is asked within new limits from the way it was asked by Plato (I feel that Aristotle never asked it) or by Christian theology. And that question not only could not be asked as it was without the doctrines of the Cross and Resurrection - that is the question does not appear to thought until one has taken Christian theology in deadly seriousness (if you can doubt that, I would just refer you to the section on Absolute Religion in Hegel's Philosophy of Religion) - but it cannot possibly be begun to be answered in so far as it is a question of the relation of finite and infinite outside the conception of a love which takes into itself penal suffering. Our predicament is - how can we worship, once, through the idea of subjectivity we have seen that the question of evil is thrown straight into the infinite? Yet there is no philosophy, no hope, nothing, if we do not worship - (I do not have to expand that) - if philosophy is simply concerned with a bare concept of the infinite, or a simply negative

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principle, with an ultimate dualism. Therefore an answer can only be somewhere in the doctrine of understanding - that is of thinking through theologically how the cup is to be taken with thanks - that is, how the infinite void across which the divine love must cross is really the supreme fullness. Though man is not permitted to know it (as Our Lord himself was at one moment completely unaware of it) and though Miss Weil says in another connection, how we can find selfunification while admitting that if we knew it in our base fashion there would no longer be any void to be a fullness57 - nevertheless though this were true we would be able to give thanks that were indeed an infinite thanks, to that infinite love world without end, which truly loves so that all will be well in the world. Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories These few remarks which were written out in great haste today may seem to you impertinent as every remark I make may be already completely clear to you and it is difficulties beyond this which you want to raise. If so, so much the better. Kant sees the problem of metaphysics which cannot be solved by any of the traditional empiricisms or rationalisms - as how are synthetic a priori judgments possible? That is, he is concerned with judgment and his purpose is to make plain the ultimate assumptions upon which our judgments of matters of fact lie. And what Kant is concerned with is that judgments of matters of fact all show one feature, they carry an objective reference with them, that is, they give us information about what is true not only for this or that subject - but for all subjects. Now Kant is interested in what does the objectivity of such judgments lie - what is the criterion of objectivity - by which we will be able to distinguish what is simply our private impressions from what is objectively true. Kant in the Analytic is interested in mind as it seeks objectivity. But I must insist, which for you will be obvious but must necessarily be insisted upon, that to be concerned with objectivity or the object in general, as Kant speaks, implies that mind can transcend being objective because it can judge what it is to be objective. This is what transcendental philosophy is, and I would point out to you a phrase which suddenly illumined my interpretation of Kant when I read the meta-

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physical deduction again - B 113 - "n the transcendental philosophy of the ancients/58 That is, he assumed that the ancients were doing exactly what he is doing - though this is not to say that he doesn't think he is correcting the ancients - but I am just insisting that Kant thought they were doing the same thing. That is, in saying that the analytic is concerned with objectivity, I am not denying that the Critique of Pure Reason is first and foremost a treatise on metaphysics. That is, we entirely misconstrue Kant's intention in the Critique if we explain that work as a theory of experience or even more, as a theory of the positive sciences. It is concerned with the positive sciences, but as what they say is influential as regards the problem of being itself. Let me quote you here two quotations from the Critique on this matter. First B 183: In speaking of transcendental truth he says it is that 'which proceeds all empirical truth and renders empirical truth possible.' B 87: 'For no knowledge can contradict it without losing all content, that is, all relation to any object and therefore all truth.' Or again in the Prolegomena (which is such a useful little book to read as an introduction to the Critique) he says of the Critique: 'This work is difficult and requires on the part of the reader the resolution to penetrate step by step into the understanding of a system which presupposes no other given than reason itself and which thus without supporting itself on any fact, seeks to develop an account of knowledge by setting out from these original sources.' Now I have insisted on this at the beginning because if you are going to study Kant your are going to have [to] read commentators and many modern commentators of Kant just overlook this. As I have said when one is reading a genius of the highest order, and Kant is this, it is almost inevitable that we first take from him what suits one's presuppositions - let me take examples. (1) Thus the English commentators on Kant and to some extent the Americans, are apt to see Kant's philosophy as simply a theory of experience or a theory of the positive sciences, because of the very deep roots that empiricism and liberalism hold over the English-speaking world which results in such a prejudice against metaphysics. That is, when one reads English-speaking commentators on Kant, beware.59 (2) Roman Catholic philosophers are, through the institution which is for them authority, committed to Aristotle as the philosopher whether they are right or wrong about this I am not concerned with

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here - the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns is not one I am prepared to make quick statements about - but what can be insisted upon is the result of this Roman Catholic view on the study of Kant. As metaphysics is identified with St Thomas and as Kant obviously criticises the traditional ontology, often the deduction is drawn that Kant is an enemy of ontology (I prefer the word ontology to metaphysics) itself - that he denies the possibility of ontology. Thus you have popular Catholic writers emphasising also the empiricist side of Kant as against the side which is concerned with the establishment of a foundation for ontology in a Critique of Pure Reason. I will point out in passing that this tendency among Roman Catholic philosophers is decreasing. The encouragement of philosophy in Catholic institutions since the Bull, 'Aeterni Patris/ has led many men to come upon the pure desire to know and not to be limited by propagandist slogans and thereby to the recognition that Kant is an ontologist of the first order.60 To recognise indeed that in as much as the principles contained in reason itself constitute the possibility of a priori knowledge, the unfolding of the possibility of ontological knowledge ought to become a clarification of the essence of pure reason and that the delimiting of the essence of pure reason returns at the same time and by the very same means to determine its non-essence and is thus a critique of pure reason. Thus in modern Catholic philosophers you have the fullest desire to take the Kantian philosophy (and also the Hegelian interpretation of it) as an ontology and not a denial of ontology. The dialectical situation in an authoritarian church which results from this is manifest in France - at the same time as the worker priests were suppressed, also such men as Father de Lubac were silenced and his book on the supernatural criticised.61 At the same time Father Lonergan's great book Insight is quite ununderstandable outside his recognition that Kant's Critique is more than a criticism of ontology, it is itself an ontology - non-Aristotelian, though of course dependent on Aristotle.62 Marechal - "Le Thomisme avant la criticisme Kantienne.'63 At a low level I say this just to warn you against popular Thomistic books which describe Kant's place in the tradition as simply a critic of ontology. At a higher level I raise it so that one may be aware through one's reading of the transcendental analytic - that though the problem is one of objectivity, he is not only interested in the problem of objectivity as part of the theory of the positive sciences - but in its bearing on the problem of Being Itself - that is,

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the study of ontology. As has been said so often in the last years by theologians (see for instance Vol 1 of Tillich's Systematic Theology p. 90),64 the categories are a definition of the structure of finitude in so far as finitude is essential for reason, as it is for everything that participates in Being. Indeed I may be allowed to say in parenthesis that this insistence on Kant as an ontologist can in my opinion be used as the first principle for answering the important question which [a student] raised last day, namely what is left of Kant when we recognise his dependence on Newtonian science, a false interpretation of mathematics and an acceptance of the traditional logic. To put it in detail in terms of the passages we are concerned with throughout, why is Kant's discussion and teaching about the origin of the categories still of great significance for us, why is his teaching in the transcendental deduction supremely illuminating when the formal logic from which Kant proceeds [is] everywhere discredited so that nobody could possibly accept the list of forms of judgment he accepts as at all adequate? It is, it seems to me, that in the general idea of knowing being through categories, the whole problem of human finitude is exposed in an ontological setting and therefore the mistakes in detail do not affect his statement of the problem in principle. The same argument would apply in general, though it would not settle the problem in detail, to Kant's argument about time. In general the argument means to be finite is to be temporal - and we cannot break through the limits of temporality any more than we can those of causality and substance, to reach the first cause, the universal substance. As Tillich puts it (and I think here he is right - though he makes mistakes in detail in his interpretation of Kant) I quote: 'By analysing the categorical structure of reason, man discovers the finitude in which he is imprisoned. He also discovers that his reason does not accept this bondage and tries to grasp the infinite with the categories of finitude, the really real with the categories of experience, and that it necessarily fails. The only point at which the prison of finitude is open is the realm of moral experience, because in it something unconditional breaks into the whole of temporal and causal conditions. But this point which Kant reaches is nothing more than, in part, an unconditional command, a mere awareness of the depth of reason.'65 I hope, in no spirit of gamesmanship, isn't this correct description of Kant's position a very close description of what you said, [a student], in

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your sermon on Sunday, and isn't this why Kant's argument has power for us - despite his mistakes in logic and his being tied to the science of his day? It is because he is an ontologist who defines the modern problem of finitude with greater care and with greater awareness of all the problems concerned than any other philosopher. With this general statement in mind, now let us turn to the particular passage, the metaphysical deduction of the categories. Now what are categories? They are a particular type of concept - they are fundamental concepts. Aristotle considered it essential to his logical activities to seek for these fundamental concepts (to use Kant's actual words - B 107). Now Aristotle started from the assumption that the concepts in general use are composite and that by analysis this composite can be resolved, and that any definition of terms into genus and difference is just this analysis, a triangle is a three-sided figure. (The great document on definition is after all the Republic.) The question then arises whether this analysis of composite concepts can be continued to infinity or whether it has a finite conclusion. Kant is quite agreed with Aristotle that it must have a finite conclusion. The analysis of composite concepts must reach unanalysable fundamental concepts after a finite number of analyses. These fundamental concepts are the categories. Now here I think it is important to emphasise how the Copernican revolution makes Kant approach the categories differently from Aristotle. Aristotle seeks to enumerate the kinds of being found in the different things that are; Kant is interested rather in the question how there come to be for us objects having these diverse modes of being. To go back to an earlier stage in his argument he maintains that in our apprehensions of objects we are not merely passive and receptive, but also the apprehension of objects which can result in making objective judgments about them involves on the part of mind the relating to one another in various ways of the elements of what is apprehended; if the elements were not so related they would not be elements of one object (this is the Copernican revolution) and they cannot be related except the mind at the same time relates them - that is, relation exists only for consciousness and in time. To make the obvious statement: an object cannot be an object of knowledge and therefore cannot exist for us, except through being perceived and thought in certain categorical ways. As we have seen these

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forms of perception are the forms of sensibility 'space and time' - the forms of conception are the categories. That is, the pure forms of sensibility and the pure concepts of the understanding - if they can be justified - impose limits on our mind and its possibility of knowing - they are the definition of our finitude. But are there such concepts? Can we find them already prepared in the human understanding? How could the understanding give itself a content considering that it is only a simple function of relating ordered to an intuition which furnishes it to it? Can one find then in the understanding such a content, represented as given, if, as is the case, this understanding is pure, that is, cut off from all intuition? These are the questions which Kant must answer in the affirmative if he is to deduce the categories - both metaphysically and transcendentally - though tonight we are only concerned with the first stages in the argument. This then is the difference between pure concepts (categories) and all other concepts, they are the same in form but different in so far as matter. Let me further explain this by speaking about the form and matter of concepts as Kant saw the problem (I take what I say directly from Paton Vol I Chap IX Part 6 where he gives Kant's doctrine as found in Kant's work in logic) - Read 198-99.66 That is, because representations make themselves concepts in the fundamental act which discerns previously what is common to several concepts, [theyl are said by Kant to be also representations which have been reflected upon. Representations have a conceptual character, that is, what the representation represents has the form of an element common to several - and this arises from reflection. Therefore the central question about the categories is just this. All concepts are made, they all get their form from the understanding. The question arises when we come to the content of the concepts. Now the origin of the content of empirical concepts is not difficult to understand - it arises by comparing and abstracting the matter given in intuition. But the question arises around the content of pure concepts - the categories. For the term pure concept has in mind a representation reflected upon of which the content cannot by definition be derived from phenomena. This content must then be able to be obtained a priori.

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Let me then turn back to the questions I asked earlier - are there such pure concepts? And Kant's answer is (which I think is the central point in his doctrine of the categories), his answer is: If the understanding by itself alone must be the originator not only of the form of these concepts but also of the content of these concepts (which I must remind you are determining) then this origin can only reside in the fundamental act of conceptualisation itself - that is to say, in reflection. That is, all determination of anything as such and such (this table is brown) - that is, all judgment contains (and I quote Kant B 93) the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representation. The act of reflecting unification is however only possible if it is led in itself by a foresighted [?] vision of a unity which makes possible all unification by standing above as a guiding light. The act of reflexion itself is then, whatever may be the concepts which issue from its activity, the previously necessary representation of a unity taken as such and which directs the work of unification. If there is then a representation of unity in the very act of reflecting itself, this shows that the representation of unity belongs to the essential structure of the acting understanding itself. The content of the pure concepts then is the unity by setting out from which a further unification is itself made possible. These pure concepts then have no need to be ordered with a conceptual form, they are that by which the understanding endows everything else with a conceptual form. They do not result from an act of reflexion - that is, they are not concepts reached by reflexion, but the representations inherent from the outset of the essential structure of reflexion itself. They are reflected - they are reflecting itself. They are immediately set to work in every act of reflexion. In discussing this part of Kant, Heidegger quotes a posthumous manuscript of Kant in a quotation which I find very illuminating. 'All concepts in general from wherever they happen to draw their matter, are reflected - that is to say constitute a representation raised to the power of a logical relation of general scope. It is nevertheless only possible because they are derived from concepts of which the function is only to constitute such and such an act of reflection and under which the representations which occur can be ordered. One can name these concepts the reflecting concepts and since every kind of reflection

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realizes itself in judgment, they must carry in themselves absolutely, as foundation for the possibility of judging, the pre-activity of the understanding which in judgment applies itself to relating.'67 Thus I think one can see why Kant believes that the table of judgment is the source of the categories. Now I think also that it becomes clear in this why Kant's account of categories does not depend for its cogency on the science from which he takes the table of judgments. I think what makes the argument of the metaphysical deduction particularly difficult to follow is that the categories are finally known from the absolute unity of the subject and that is not discussed in full till the transcendental deduction. Now the next question is how are the categories related to pure intuition - that is, how the relation between intuition and pure thought together unite to institute the essential unity of pure knowledge. To understand that, it is necessary to turn to section 3 of Chap I. But I just have not had time to sort out that argument. I would depend on his account of synthesis above all. LIST OF DALHOUSIE LECTURES AND FRAGMENTS The following list includes all the 1950s lectures found so far that do not appear in the foregoing selection. The numbers (and capital letters in parentheses) identify particular documents. The titles follow Grant's headings or the first line of the text. The numbers of legal-size foolscap pages of the original lectures are given in brackets.

Philosophy 1 - Introduction to Philosophy 10 12 14 30 31 32 33

Phil I Doull (G) [14] Phil I 'Essays marked ...' [6] Phil 1(1) [4] Phil I 'The Soul and Justice' [4] Phil 1 Plato's Theory of Knowledge [2] Phil 1 Miss McLeese [3] Phil 1 MacKay [4]

List of Dalhousie Lectures and Fragments 34 95 97 98 99

'Before Mr J's paper' (C) [11] Phil 1 'Today it is necessary ...' [4] Phil 1 'I was saying that the myth of Er ...' [4] Phil 1 'The Guardians have been chosen ...' [6] Beginning of Argument with Thrasymachus [7]

Philosophy 3 - Ethics 1 Phil III Ethics Kant [10] lb Phil III Ethics - Kant 3rd chapter [3] lc Phil III Kant Freedom [9] Id Hartmann on Kant [2] 3 Ethics Kant (F) [8] 4 Analytic and Synthetic (L) [3] 5 Phil III Kant 1st lecture (K) [4] 6 Phil III Kant Lecture I p2 (H) [28] 7 Kant quotation: 'es ist iiberall...' [1] 8 '... apprehended by his reason.' (L) [13] lla Phil III Ethics N: New Criticisms of Kant [4] 13 'I have decided ...' (on Acceptance and Rebellion) [2] 15 Ethics - Finite and Infinite 17 Phil III 'The State' (St Augustine) [4] 18 Ethics - Loyalty to State (Withdrawal and Participation) [8] 18b 'My difficulty with teaching is ...' [2] 19 Phil III Ethics 'Natural Law' [4] 20 Phil III Ethics 'Pleasure' [4] 22 Ethics 'Have textbooks ...' [3] 23 Phil III 'Marriage and Family' (incl. Sexuality) [7] 24 Phil III 'Sexuality' [4] 25 Phil III 'Sexuality' [14] 26 Ethics III 'Progress' [11] 27 Ethics III 'Hume' (Is there ... ?) [6] 28 Ethics III 'Hume' [5] 35 'Now with all this in mind ...' [?] 43 Phil III Ethics 'I... end on a personal note' [2] 46 Phil III Augustine's Theory of the State [10] 68a Phil III Hume T have been lecturing ...' [4] 68b Hume 'I have to emphasize again ... history' [4]

507

508 Lectures at Dalhousie 69 70 71 71b 72 74 75 76 77 79 80 81 82 83 84 86 87 88 89 90 91

Hume as an Ethical Thinker [1] Ethics 'It is hard to teach ...' [5] Phil III Ethics 'I am going to talk...' [4] Phil III Ethics 1st Lecture [4] Ethics 'My difficulty with teaching ...' [2] The Grand Inquisitor - Negation and Affirmation (possibly McMaster) [3] Phil III 'I was trying to point out...' [4] Phil III 'Some of...' (On Kant and Bentham) [6] World-centred ethics Phil III Ethics 'We return now ...' [4] Phil III Ethics 'We are now turning ...' [4] Phil III - The Just War Theory [6] Fragment on War Phil III - War (cont.) 'D Reisman and N. Glazer ...' [3] Phil III - Garbo 'Now the difficulty... State' [7] Christian Ethics - The Just War ... (probably from McMaster) [8] Withdrawal and Participation Marx - Phil of History (I) (possibly McMaster) [3] Hyppolite - Marx and Hegel [6] Ethics - Work and Sexuality Marx and Freud [6] Ethics - Property (cont.) 'I had a feeling ...' [5]

Philosophy 7 - Plato 37 Phil 7 Plato's Politics [8] 39 Phil 7 Parmenides and Unity [8] 40 The Symposium - Central Speech [7] 40c Fragment of a lecture on Plato (starts on page v) [6] 47 The Platonic View of God [7] 48 Philosophy 7 - The Sophist [8] 49 The Sophist - 'As I said last fal1...' [8] 50 Sophist - 'I tried yesterday ...' [4] 51 Hegelian Interpretation [1] 52 Symposium - Comments on Love and Mysticism 53 Philebus - 'I was going to give ...' [7] 54 Philosophy 7 - 'I obviously ...' [5] 55 Phil 7 - 2nd Lecture on Timaeus [9]

List of Dalhousie Lectures and Fragments

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56 Philosophy 7 - Final Lectures on the soul [7] 57 Philebus - 'My interest in Plato ...' [2] 58 Christianity and Platonism 60 Plato's Politics - Phil 7 1st Lect. [4] 61 Fragment:'... who do not... as the good life.' [2] 62 Phil 7 - The Phaedrus [8] 63 Phil 7 - Timaeus Lecture III [6] 64 Parmenides' arguments 5-8 - Phil 7 [10] 65 Lecture on Parmenides [10] 66 Parmenides - Charles Williams ... Idea of Beatrice [9] 93 Phil 7 - The Theaetetus - Strauss' article [8] 94 Theaetetus - 'Stop me at any point...' [9] 100 Plato and the Timaeus I (1st 4 pages published) 101 Greek Polytheism (Greenspan and Murray) 102 Greek Polytheism ('I do not think we need ...') 103 Where to start a problem (Davis and books) Philosophy 16 - St Augustine 44 45

Phil XVI 'I was going to ...' (On incarnation) [24] 'I have a tendency to be compulsive about philosophical questions ...' (On Augustine and Aristotle) [13]

Philosophy 14 - Kant l i b Kant and Aristotle on Nature 36 'I have three objections to stating anything ...' Notes 1 Grant is referring to a phrase of Henry James from The Ivory Tower (London: Collins 1917), 4: 'He was a person without an alternative, and if any had ever been open to him, at an odd hour or two, somewhere in his inner dimness, he had long since closed the gate against it and now revolved in the hard-rimmed circle from which he had not a single issue.' 2 This reference to the article on Russell probably locates this lecture in the 1952-3 year. See 'Pursuit of an Illusion: A Commentary on Bertrand Russell' (Dalhousie Review 32, no. 2 [Summer]: 97-109), in this volume, page 34-48. 3 Pelagius - see note 4 in 'Dostoevsky' (419). St Augustine found his views

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heretical and had them condemned at the Councils of Carthage in 416 and 418. Grant believed with Augustine that Pelagianism (like the modern spirit) weakens trust and patience and causes humans to seek security in their own achievements and emotions rather than divine grace. 4 Francois Mauriac (1885-1970), French Catholic novelist, essayist, and dramatist, wrote about middle-class characters tormented by the absence of the grace of God. Grant was fond of Therese Desqueroux, who could not achieve either earthly happiness or the salvation of divine love. She is possibly 'the lost soul' to which he refers. 5 The great dictum according to Grant is 'Posse non peccare; magna est libertas. Non posse peccare; maxima est.' 'To be able not to sin is a great freedom; not to be able to sin is the greatest one.' For a statement that is not exactly the same as Grant's phrasing but is very close, see 'De Correptione et Gratia,' Caput xii, 33, Patrologia Latina, vol. 44: 936. For an English translation by Father Courtney Murray, SJ, see 'Admonition and Grace/ chap. 12 (33) in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 2:285. 6 Baron Friedrich Von Hiigel, in Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, First Series, 156-7, presents Ernst Troeltsch's argument against the identity of the Christian Ethical Ideal with the Kantian formalist Ethic; the subordination of the individual to the community in Jesus's preaching of the Kingdom of God cannot be derived from the concept of autonomy because autonomy makes the independent individual the starting-point and centre of the relations within the community. 7 John Laird (1887-1946), in the last chapter of On Human Freedom (London: Allen and Unwin 1947), called 'Theism and Human Freedom/ argues as follows: 'If God, that omniscient and omnipotent moral being, predetermines every human action, he is morally responsible for all that he predetermines' (151). 8 Georges Rouault (1871-1958), French painter of religious subjects including Christ's passion. 9 See The Notebooks ofSimone Weil, vol. 1, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1956), 259: 'God can never be an object, and it is in this sense that he is loving before being loved. We only love him perfectly when he loves himself through us as medium.' 10 Ibid., 217: 'The institution of slavery hides from men (both masters and slaves) this truth, that man as such is a slave ... to bear witness to the truth, namely, that one is composed of human material, that one has no rights.' 11 Grant was aware that Kant did not allow practical reason to dictate the content willed by the good will. At the same time he believed (in the 1950s) that Kant provided a foothold for a Platonic-Christian position inside the modern approach to reason.

Introduction to Philosophy 511 12 The passage is from Horace, Odes, IV ii 13. Grant is probably also thinking of the poem by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) that concludes: My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Duke et decorum est Pro patria mori 13 Martin Niemoller (1892-1984), Lutheran pastor and outspoken opponent of Hitler, was arrested and confined from 1937 to 1945, yet he also volunteered (in vain) to join the German navy in 1941, citing 'Render unto Caesar, the things which are Caesar's.' He also loudly condemned abuses of the denazification courts after the war. Dwight David Eisenhower - see note 4 in 'The Paradox of Democratic Education' (181). Perhaps Grant mentions him here because he was a Christian conservative who was an uncompromising partisan on the side of the Allies during the war. 14 Igor Sergeievich Gousenko (1919-82), Soviet intelligence officer, defected in 1945 exposing Soviet espionage activities in Canada. He wrote a memoir, This Was My Choice (1948), and a novel, The Fall of a Titan (1954), which was awarded the Governor General's Award. 15 William Joyce (1906-46), American-born British traitor, broadcast antiBritish propaganda from Germany (1939-45) and was known as 'Lord Haw Haw.' He was tried at the Old Bailey in 1945, convicted because his British passport was valid until 1940 (meaning nine months' treason), and executed. 18 Ezra Westin Loomis Pound (1885-1972), American poet and critic, made pro-Fascist broadcasts from Italy in the early years of the Second World War, leading to his indictment for treason in 1945. He was not convicted, but judged insane and placed in an asylum until 1958, at which time he returned to Italy. 16 Robert Alfonso Taft Jr (1889-1953), Republican senator from Ohio, was a prominent isolationist. Taft, along with the American diplomat George Kennan, argued that justice applied unevenly was no justice at all and that a regime with a lamentable record of misdeeds was represented on the bench at Nuremberg. He was referring to the long history of Soviet atrocities, but his main point was that a completion of the war by the victors should not be confused with duly constituted courts and justice. (See David Myers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy [New York:

Oxford University Press 1988], 84.) Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War under Roosevelt and Truman, gives us a glimpse of 'the thought of Roosevelt and his cohorts' about Nuremberg in On Active Service in Peace

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and War (New York: Harper and Bros. 1947). Roosevelt stated in January 1945:'Wehad better stage up a big trial in which we can prove the whole Nazi conspiracy to wage a totalitarian war of aggression violating in its progress all the regular rules which limit needless cruelty and destruction' (587). Stimson argues that the trial advanced moral life by setting 'a penalty not merely for war crimes, but for the very act of war itself, except in selfdefence' (590). The British, who according to Grant 'should have known better' (perhaps because of Lloyd George and Versailles?), opposed the American idea, but had to give in when the French and the Russians supported the Americans (587). On 2 May1945President Truman appointed Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson as chief of counsel for the prosecution of major European war criminals and as U.S. representative in negotiations with other nations concerning the establishment of an International Military Tribunal. 17 Edith Louisa Cavell (1865-1915) was an English nurse who was first matron at a Red Cross Hospital in Brussels. She was tried by court martial and executed by the Germans on 12 October 1915 for helping Allied soldiers to escape to Holland. The words she spoke to her last English visitor, Stirling Gahan, the English chaplain in Brussels, became famous: 'I know now that patriotism is not enough/ she said. 'I must have no hatred and no bitterness towards anyone.' 18 A.D. Lindsay (1879-1952), Grant's mentor at Oxford, in The Two Moralities: Our Duty to God and to Society (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode 1940), attempted to strike a balance between 'the morality of my station and its duties, or playing the game' and 'the challenge to perfection or the morality of grace.' 19 Grant had the Hamilton edition in his library: The Symposium, Plato, trans. William Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1951), 94-5:'... in the acquisition of this blessing [knowing absolute beauty, nurturing true goodness, and having the privilege of being beloved of God] human nature can find no better helper than Love. I declare that it is the duty of every man to honour Love...' 20 Grant may be referring to the Cornford edition that he used: The Republic of Plato, trans, with intro. and notes by F.M. Cornford (London: Oxford University Press 1945). On page 247 Cornford introduces Plato's use of astronomy in the dialectic to train the mind to think abstractly. 21 'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.' 1 Corinthians 13: 11-13. 22 'Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.' John 14:5-7.

Introduction to Philosophy 513 23 Frederick Charles Copleston, SJ, A History of Philosophy Volume 1, 'Greece and Rome/ part 1 (Garden City, NY: Image Books 1962), 66-8. 24 For a later discussion of Heidegger on Plato, see George Grant, 'Justice and Technology,' in Carl Mitcham and Jim Grote, eds, Theology and Technology (Lanham, MD: University Press of America 1984), 237-46. See also an interpretation of Grant's two responses to Heidegger in 'Justice and Freedom/ in Arthur Davis, ed., George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, and Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press

1996), 151f. 25 Erich Frank (1883-1949), German philosopher. The essay Grant treasured was 'The Fundamental Opposition of Plato and Aristotle/ in American Journal of Philology, 1940,34-53,166-85. The essay concludes: 'Aristotle is the most imposing representative of that attitude of purely theoretical objectivity and faithful phenomenological observation which are the chief characteristics of the descriptive sciences of nature and philologico-historical research. Without Plato, however, there would not exist what since has been and alone should be called philosophy: that power of thought which is able to change man in his innermost existence by stimulating his moral volition together with his desire for the knowledge of exact science' (183). 26 The reference is to a prior discussion with a student about Raskolnikov and his 60-year-old victim in Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment: 'She was a diminutive, withered-up old woman of sixty, with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp little nose.' Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Heritage Press 1938), 10-11. 27 Anders Nygren - see note 8 in 'Two Theological Languages' (63). Grant strongly opposed Nygren's radical separation of the Christian agape from the Greek eros. 28 See 'The Invasion' in C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Geoffrey Bles 1952), 36-7. 29 Charles Boyer (1884-1980), French Catholic philosopher who published, for example, L'idee de verite dans la philosophie de Augustin (Paris: Beau-

chesne 1945). The editors were unable to find the book Grant is referring to here. 30 'For in that he [Christ] died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God' Romans 6:10.'... the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent ye and believe the gospel' Mark 1:15. 31 Oscar Cullmann (1902-99), German American theologian, was noted for his notion of Heilsgeschichte. Grant is probably referring to Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, trans. Floyd Filson (Phila-

delphia: Westminster Press 1950). 32 Grant may be referring to one of the following passages:'... in the present

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state of society, any character that escapes and comes to good can only have been saved by some miraculous interposition' (Republic 492); 'Perhaps however, because there is something in a fine nature that responds to the voice of reason, he might be sensitive to the force which would draw him towards philosophy and begin to yield' (Republic 493-4). The Republic of Plato, trans. KM. Cornford (London: Oxford University Press 1941), 200, 202. 33 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crauford (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1952), 80. 34 Pelagius - see note 3. 35 See Sermon 169 in St Augustine's Sermons, vol. 2 (Oxford: John Henry Parker 1845), 866: 'He then Who made thee without thine own self, doth not justify thee without thyself.' For the original Latin see Patrologia Latina, vol. 5, Caput xi, 13, 923: 'Qui ergo fecit te sine te, not te justificat sine te.' 36 Simone Weil's account of decreation is in Gravity and Grace [see note 33], 2834. 37 See the anti-Pelagian work On Nature and Grace, chap. 24 (26), entitled 'Christ died of his own power and choice.' In Whitney J. Oates, ed., Basic Writings ofSt Augustine, vol. 1 (New York: Random House 1948), 538: 'His being born also was of the ability of His mercy, not the demand of His nature: so, likewise, did He undergo death of His own power; and this is our price which He paid to redeem us from death.' 38 See St Augustine's 'Ninth Homily on I John 4:17-21/ in John Burnaby, ed., Augustine: Later Works, vol. 8 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press 1955), 329ff. 1 John 4:19 states: 'We love him, because he first loved us.' 39 Reverend J.W.A. Nicholson - see note 1 in 'What Is Philosophy?' (122). 40 'And being in agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground' Luke 22:44. 41 Sophist 249a. Benjamin Jowett translated the passage as follows: 'And, oh heavens can we ever be made to believe that motion and life and soul and mind are not present with absolute being? Can we imagine being to be devoid of life and mind, and to remain in awful unmeaningness as everlasting fixture?' B. Jowett, ed. and trans., The Dialogues of Plato, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1875), vol. 4:465. 42 Adolph von Harnack - see note 6 in 'Two Theological Languages' (63). Oscar Cullmann - see note 31. Reinhold Niebuhr - see note 7 in 'Two Theological Languages' (63). 43 'And Goodness is not the same thing as being, but even beyond being, surpassing it in dignity and power' (Republic 508). The Republic of Plato, ed. Cornford, 220.

Introduction to Philosophy 515 44 Grant was influenced by Simone Weil's essay 'Y a-t-il une doctrine Marxiste?' See Simone Weil, Oppression et liberte (Paris: Gallimard 1955), 227-9. For the English translation see Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty, trans. A. Wills and J. Petrie (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1973), 173-4. 45 Matthew 5:47 46 See Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 95. 47 Luther's Heidelberg Theses 19 and 21 in reverse order. Martin Luther, Werke (Weimar: Herman Bohlau 1883), 1: 354. 48 One example of such 'works of Anglo-Catholic piety' would be those of Austin Farrer such as Finite and Infinite: A Philosophical Essay (Westminster: Dacre Press 1943), and The Freedom of the Will (London: Adam and Charles Black 1958). Grant was deeply moved by Farrer's lectures at Oxford and read his work carefully in the 1950s, but he always felt there was a gulf between Farrer's approach to the world and his own. 49 Romans 8:28 - 'And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.' 50 Robin George Collingwood (see note 1 in 'Fyodor Dostoevsky/ 418) wrote The Idea of History (1945). Grant read and cited him often in his classes. 51 Jakob Bohme (1575-1624), German mystic and Lutheran philosopher, thought that God is the 'Ungrund,' the undifferentiated absolute. Nikolaus Krebs or Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa (1401-64), German mystical philosopher, argued that the nature of infinite being is philosophically unknowable. Meister Johannes Eckhardt (c.1260-1327), German Dominican who taught in Paris. He argued that through contemplation it is possible to attain to the ground of the soul. 52 Gabriel Marcel - see note 2 in 'Jean-Paul Sartre' (134). 53 Martin Buber (1878-1965), Jewish philosopher. In I and Thou (New York: Scribner's 1958) he argued that the modern way of seeing has caused our 'universal dwelling place ... the spiritually apprehended cosmos' to 'tumble in' (119). 54 Karl Jaspers - see note 2 in 'Jean-Paul Sartre' (135). Jaspers argued, for example, that the philosopher should follow 'three Kantian imperatives/ think for oneself, put oneself in the place of every other human, and think in unanimity with oneself. See Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Yale University Press 1951), 171. 55 Blaise Pascal (1623-62), French mathematician, philosopher, and theologian, was perhaps the most famous of the Jansenists. His defence of the Christian faith was published posthumously as the Pensees, or Thoughts

516 Lectures at Dalhousie (1669), wherein he made the statement to which Grant refers: 'Man is no more than a reed, the weakest in nature. But he is a thinking reed' (vi.347). 56 Karl Barth - see note 4 in 'Two Theological Languages' (63). 57 For a discussion of the void by Simone Weil see Gravity and Grace [see note 33], 10-22. 'The void is the supreme fullness, but man is not permitted to know it. The proof is that Christ himself was at one moment completely unaware of it. One part of the self should know it, but not the other parts, for if they knew it in their base fashion, there would no longer be any void.' (21). 58 Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan 1989,1929), 117. The designation 'B 113' refers to the location in Kant's text. 59 Grant presumably refers to the English empiricist commentators dominating philosophic discourse in the mid-twentieth century. He was of course well aware of an earlier generation of English commentators (such as Paton [see note 66]) who were held by Kant and Hegel. 60 Grant seems to overstate his point on the Catholic control over thought. In other moods he admired Catholic writers and thinkers. 'Aeterni Patris/ entitled 'On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy,' is the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII promulgated on 4 August 1879. 61 Henri de Lubac - see note 10 in 'Fyodor Dostoevsky' (419). 62 Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan (1904-84), Canadian Jesuit theologian and philosopher, published Insight: A Study of Human Understanding in 1957. 63 Joseph Marechal (1878-1944), neo-Scholastic Belgian philosopher, in The Point of Departure of Metaphysics, 5 vols. (1922-47), began with the critical philosophy of Kant, and attempted to show that it led back to Thomism. 64 Paul Tillich (see note 10 in Two Theological Languages,' 64), Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1951), 90. 65 Ibid., 82. 66 Herbert James Paton, Kant's Metaphysic of Experience: A Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (New York: Macmillan Co. 1936). 67 The quotation can be found in Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans, with an intro. by James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1962), 58. Heidegger cites 'Erdmann, Reflexionen, II, 554, Kant's Posthumous Works in Manuscript Form, vol.V, No.5051.' Grant may have had an earlier translation of Heidegger's book or translated himself from the French edition. James Churchill translates the passage as follows: 'All concepts in general, no matter whence comes their material, are reflective, i.e., representations raised to the logical relation of general applicability. But there are concepts the entire sense of which is nothing other

Introduction to Philosophy 517 than to be constitutive of such and such a reflection, under which the actual representations as they occur can be subsumed. They may be called concepts of reflection (conceptus reflectentes), and since every act of reflection takes place in the judgment, they must, as the foundation of the possibility of judging, be in themselves, and in an absolute way, the pure activity of the understanding which in the judgment is applied to the relation.'

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Appendix 1 Comments on Hegel and on Religion and Philosophy Notebooks 1,2, and 4 (1956-7)

Sheila Grant found 14 black-covered notebooks from the late fifties and the early sixties with Grant's papers. She gave them numbers and pagination. Eight belong to the period of this volume, and from these the editors have included excerpts from numbers 1, 2, and 4, all from the 1956-7 year. Notebook 3, as well as 5 to 8, contains quotations from books Grant was reading for the most part, with few comments or thoughts of his own. The first group of excerpts presented here contains comments on Hegel gathered by Sheila Grant. She took most of them from notebook 1 but also included a few from 2 and 4. Grant went to England for the 1956-7 year intending in part to study Hegel's thought, especially concerning questions about freedom and evil. He hoped to come to terms with Hegel's philosophy of history (which he considered the greatest of its kind), while at the same time thinking through and articulating the strong objections he had to certain elements of such a philosophy of history. The second group of excerpts contains comments on various questions about religion and philosophy. Most are taken from notebook 1 and the rest are from notebooks 2 and 4. Grant was reading widely during this year. In addition to Hegel, Marx, and Freud, he was reading Michael Foster, Max Weber, St Bonaventura, Gabriel Marcel, Karl Jaspers, Martin Buber, Carl Jung, A.N. Whitehead, Herbert Marcuse, Simone Weil, Leo Strauss, George Santayana, Jacques Maritain, Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Horkheimer, H.D. Lewis, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Pieper, Jean Guitton, and Karl Lowith. He also mentions reading some works of Heidegger in French and English translations.

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Comments on Hegel Notebook 1

Hegel's wonderful insight that the unfolding of reason in history is not a process which will be identified with the increase of happiness. See Marx and Freud on this. See instinctive life and freedom. See Hegel's idea of the rise of reason - how fantastic.1 [From a passage responding to Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization.] The trouble with Hegel is that as it is so inventively practical, it cannot tell us now in the twentieth century - it has to do what is at the end of the 18th century. Jung makes the distinction spiritual-instinctive - just what I dislike in the whole rationalist system, - and particularly in Hegel's asides. At this point I think Freud's monism wrong but preferable.2 Write out as against your feeling [here communicating with himself] that freedom is essential - why it is that people find liberation in the acceptance of necessity - Freudianism - Marxism - Hegelianism. Adoration/Acceptance - Rebellion The terrible difficulty of adoration, acceptance, joy, for modern man - in the light of history and evil and subjectivity - and how the acceptance we want cannot be non-modern acceptance. This impossibility of acceptance is the cause of fear in modern America. In the light of what do you change the world? Compare Hegel - without the world, God is not God - and Emily Bronte: Though earth and moon were gone And suns and universes ceased to be And Thou wert left alone Every Existence would exist in Thee

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Which is nearer?3 Yes I believe in God ... The great and central attack on Christianity in the modern world is the attack on the idea that suffering leads to God. What the Marxist says is that this was perhaps a necessary doctrine for a world where suffering was necessary - but as suffering arose essentially in relation to man's relation to nature, suffering is no longer necessary. This indeed takes us into deep waters for it raises the question of how much evil is necessary to the divine economy. Why is it? Now to Hegel and Leibniz it is necessary - in Leibniz necessary, in Hegel part of God. It is, of course, against this more than any part of Hegel, that a Marxist revolts, and he revolts in the name of human happiness. Now the question it seems to me is this: Is it true that human happiness in the world is an adequate end? One of the Christian arguments is that because of the Fall happiness is not possible, that the Marxist Utopian dream of a pleasant life in this world will always be poisoned by human sin. I find this a particularly repellent argument - but of course it is not an argument - but a statement of fact (and more power to it for being so). Now apart from whether this is a fact or not - and whether indeed the argument is true (it certainly has some appeal, and is indeed the basis of all fundamental conservatism) where does it lead you? - and it is where it leads you - namely to the place where the evil was necessary to man's destiny as was the redemption, that one turns away from it. In other words, an Hegelian God just don't interest me [intentionally colloquial], a Christian God I cannot conceive as admirable. ... Basically one proposition I am certain of for all time -1 will not be content to argue from the incompleteness of this world to God. (See Bona ventura.)4 Marcel, Being and Having: 'If there is one single conclusion forced upon us by the spiritual history of mankind, it is that the growth of faith is hindered, not by misfortune, but by satisfaction.'5 Now this is where I get the moment of deepest revolt, because have we not come back again close to Hegel?

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I now see that the act of faith is primary, is included in all arguments what is it? Is this act of faith the starting point that the real is the rational as Hegel would say?6 'seek to determine the conditions of an intelligible world, the only world with which we have any concern' - good God, in what sense are we concerned with the unintelligible? Gnosticism is the question - why do I not only think it is not true - but think it evil. The unknowable to Hegel is a meaningless conception - a direct contradiction in terms - in what sense is it a possible conception? It is important to remember Hegel's criticism of Spinoza, and the grounds of that criticism.7 See the fantastic account in Hegel of tragedy - e.g. Macbeth - the ambition of the strongman is part of the good.8 Hegel on existence - To exist is to present oneself thus in space and time, and if this form of presentation turns out to contain contradiction, the conclusion is not that it does not exist, but that existence itself is an inadequate and abstract mode of thought and reality. For Hegel philosophy is a concrete attitude of mind. It is not mere practice, nor yet is it what is usually called mere theory. "The truth of things is that, qua immediate and particular, things are only appearance and show.'9 Is this basic idealist tenet acceptable? Philosophy is thus both receptive and active. It transforms the given, but at the behest of the deeper truth in the given. Hegel allows to empiricism the truth of its assumption that the rational is the real - but breaks both with Kant and empiricism by denying that the immediate object, the relatively uninterpreted datum, is what is truly there. (Oh yes, this is the question, and how many

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questions it raises - particularly the whole business of the ruse of reason.) Hegel, I always feel, is consistently unfair to Kant. Indeed, some of his criticisms are brilliant, but he seems to disregard so many of the reasons for Kant's agnosticism. If you start by saying there are no possible grounds for agnosticism, then you are inclined to laugh and ridicule these grounds, and this it seems to me Hegel does - falling back into the position of the spectator which at other points he rejects. For instance, 'Having made a cleavage between matter and form, and given to reason control merely over the latter, Kant is unable consistently to find any real content for the legislation of pure practical reason.'10 Hegel on the objectivity of the Good in the Introduction to the Phenomenology - what is wrong with this position - if human beings didn't count it would be true.11 Hegel, when questioned about the horror of the rational being the real wrote in the smaller logic: 'We must presuppose intelligence enough to know ... that existence is in part mere appearance, and only in part reality ... In common life, any freak of fancy, any error, evil and everything of the nature of evil, as well as every degenerate and transitory existence whatever, gets in a casual way the name of reality. But even our ordinary feelings are enough to forbid a casual (fortuitous) existence getting the emphatic name of the real; for by fortuitous we mean an existence which has no greater value [than] that of something possible, which may as well not be as be.'12 That is to say that Hegel repudiates the interpretation which sees in his statement the doctrine that existence as such is right; he says not that the existent, but that the real, is the rational. According to Hegel, existence we can pass beyond; according to Marcel we cannot. What is it to pray for Willie in Hegelian terms - in Christian terms?13 I am just mind in one of its forms.

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Hegel and the owl of Minerva14 what is the relation of the 'owl of Minerva': a) to his own undertaking? b) to his thought that the idea of the unknowable is contradictory? c) to the idea of social reform? History and its course must be explained within theology - this is Hegel's greatness. If in my book there is a chapter upon Hegel - then say that you do not know, but this is a position. Also, say what is indubitably clear, that the English objection to Hegel is a cheap one.15 Don't let the flesh be without sin, Else spirit has no fight to win. Hegelian and Calvinist. Isn't this what is the same in Calvin and Hegel? Oh think of this. Put in Marx part of first chapter the idea that Hegel's claim that now providence is not a general and empty idea, but something we can follow out - just as he says that the logic is the ideas of God before the creation of the world - see the effect of this on Marx. See the difficulty to me of Hegel's providence in the beginning of the Philosophy of History the difficulty it seems to me lies in the fact that at one and the same time he promises (a) that it will be an explicitly explained providence, not just a general unknowable doctrine, but (b) then he says the units of history are not the whims of individuals but peoples - Now is that really good enough? Though I agree that in general Hegel's recognition that the contradictions for man which cause the alienation cannot be overcome in an objective sense as Marx does - 'a man without contradictions' - still I think Marx's account of the alienation of the modern world is far more realistic than Hegel's. For whereas Hegel had preached the eternal recurrence of his dialectical process, Marx by inserting the process in time, represented history as soon about to come to an end.

Excerpts from Notebooks on Hegel and on Religion and Philosophy 525 Notebook 2

One is reading along splendidly in Hegel and thinking ah yes, for once I agree and then he says 'We believe in God's infinite goodness in Nature, since He gives up these natural things which He has called into existence in infinite profusion to one another and to Man in particular.' Well, I just can't say that.16 Notebook 4

Though I would agree with James [Doull] that Hegel is right to say that the philosopher is only concerned with reconciliation in thought - he must, qua philosopher, take into his thought and not forget, that he is not in truth reconciled. What I always feel about Hegelianism is that I have been gypped - is this really the only hope theology has? It is all very well to say with Sheila and James [Doull] that man is not the measure - but in Sheila's case doesn't that lead you to the Hegelian position - exactly the position you do not want to be led to?17 To Hegel: the cunning of reason is that it uses the vital forces of individuals and natures in order to realise itself. The difficulty of this idea is that it makes extremely difficult any ethical decision. It is grand for religion - because it is the perfect answer to the questions of providence, namely how the dreadful things of (human life?) are made well. Why should life come to a halt with Hegel? The great question is history and you [Grant, that is] have been continually right to refuse to interpret history in rational terms as so many do - see this and don't give it up. Kroner, Culture and Faith. To see in this book above all an account of the inadequacy of Hegel - is that possible? How true it is - 'Whatever the philosopher may adduce as testimony

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to his basic principles is already informed by them.' How far does Hegel see this - according to James [Doull] entirely - Hegel is indeed the first philosopher to found philosophy on itself - that is to recognise the infinite as a true infinite.18 The whole question to me is what can be meant by a phrase 'the limitations of thought.'19 On Religion I never seem to doubt Christianity when I get down to it - so why not admit that to thought. Barth's certainty is just putting himself up as God. GPG -1 think it is a significant fact that even many years after the war I would not speak to Charles Gimpel about faith. How can one say to him I believe, that is, that the world is ultimately good. The Incarnation fixes the hand of God in history - in a way it should not be fixed - and here is the line of demarcation between Catholic Christianity and philosophy. This myth-making was not done by Jesus himself - 'Why callest thou me good?'20 What I have to put together is (a) the really open faith which seems to me in Protestantism, which can find no set place in the world - the infinite possibility of transcendence once one has made the discovery of subjectivity - Kant a great Protestant - and of this I am sure as against Catholicism - the denial of the soul as substance, [and] (b) on the other hand, since coming to England - the discovery of the world, the importance of sex and economics, of shaping the world - historically - put these together. And it is not easy to put these together - because it is just in (a) that I want to escape from cosmological thinking as Jaspers would call it and here I am at one with people like Wittgenstein, Wisdom, etc. (even here I can accept the love business). On the other hand, it is just the living with sex and economics that requires a cosmology. After all, Freud

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and Marx are the most cosmological of thinkers and at one and the same time I want to destroy them by an appeal to the transcendent the mysteries - and at the other end I want to learn from them. The mistake of historicism is the aesthetical attitude of the spectator who forgets that he cannot be the spectator of his own life - that his present is not yet past. Sex, Economics, Reason, and Love - those are the four things I have been thinking about. See how immanentism draws the other studies into theology while a proper transcendence separates them. The greatness of Protestantism was to break the bonds of the old culture - culture always has to do with nature - it broke them in the name of subjectivity - and broke not only nature which must be put together again - so that we must now find a new view of nature. When Bonaventure writes that few people find God and that is so because man is so deeply plunged in the life of sense - it is just the worst example of the theologians wanting it both ways.21 One thing is sure, man is not responsible for being in a body. If there is a creator God - He is. The whole theological tradition seems to me full of this having it both ways. God is good yet hard to find. Grace is necessary man is responsible. I can never get around the fact that if God is the measure then he sets up the conditions - then he is caught another way - (a) if man is responsible - what nonsense (b) if grace, then discrimination. The philosophy of mystery automatically leads to the society of inequality because everything is in the providence of God, therefore inequality is, while the philosophy of materialism leads to the philosophy of equality. This has often been taken as a mark of failure in materialism - on the contrary, I think it is its greatest and perhaps only strength - is the society of equality. It is indeed in Marcel - the scandal that along with the liberating and wonderful remarks on mystery and problem should go the futile remarks on equality - must the Roman Catholics always miss that which was so great in Protestantism22 - and

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which lack I find so terrible in-----is letter to----- Is it that if you make the world the development of God you are left to inequality? Is metaphysics committed to a doctrine of authority or to futility? 'On a New Interpretation of Plato's Political Philosophy' - Leo Strauss Social Research 1946 'Simply Brilliant' In the third chapter [of 'Acceptance and Rebellion'] a lot of half-lights if one does not set oneself up as a prophet. At the beginning of chapter 3, write that half-lights and lacks of understanding are no excuse for verbal confusions. In the beginning was the Word. In third chapter I must put down clearly why I am in such doubt - it must be made existential. Why we are tortured by doubt. Is it true of MacKinnon and the like that they do not want to give up their agony because it may be a mark for them of being spiritual prefects?23 The world of religion constitutes a realm where the subject is confronted with something over which he can obtain no hold at all. On Philosophy [Responding to Whitehead's Process and Reality] Philosophy to the man who sees himself as a pilgrim - as against Whitehead who sees himself as a spectator. To the end I want to be a pilgrim not a spectator - like JWA.24 The risk, the gamble, the agony taken out of life by Whitehead. But what is philosophy in such a vision of a pilgrim? Whitehead a supreme enemy of Christianity - much greater than Marx. The question Whitehead's philosophy raises for me is this: (a) the scientific spectator - that is, particularly the natural scientist even more than the social scientist cannot be the ultimate arbiter of philosophy - the ultimate arbiter must be the man who yearns to know what his life is about - but (b) we cannot say either practically (obviously) or theoretically that what natural or social science tells us is unimportant.

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A point Marcel brings out very well is the strange mixture in the modern spirit of denigrating and yet exalting the importance of man - see what he says a modern man will say of the effect of the Copernican Revolution.25 As far as style goes, do not start from too much history - which will lead one to an infinite regress - but from a statement of a concrete occasion. Difficulty of starting - in philosophy - everything though. One thing about life: How is one to suppose that one's position at the moment is final, when already one knows so much from life, and has learnt it on the way - presumably one is going to learn more. Miss Weil's book is written by somebody outside the family - a single person - a person who has no idea. Paradox that people who are single have more time for philosophy yet just write junk because they are so outside it.26 'Remarks about abortion' The argument that it is murder seems to me irrefutable unless the mother is to die. But that raises the question if or if not murder is wrong. What do we mean by the sanctity of the human personality? On the one hand I cannot see that God has treated the human personality as sacred when left to himself. Youngsters are born dead or starve through no fault of any human person - that is, nothing anybody could have done could have prevented it - that is, as far as one can see. The Communists' understanding that some have to go down the drain for others is just that - they say that they substitute themselves as the workers. On the other hand if one does not believe human personality is sacred what does one believe? Marcel says (p 103) that the mind does not create but discovers necessity. Yes, but it also fails to discover it.27 GPG - Experience: When does experience become of universal interest, as for instance it does in Freud and Marx? This is very important - if

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one is not an Hegelian and yet believes in the possibility of philosophy - whatever it may be. [Marcel] On freedom (120) - is he right? Crucial passage (120-6) on freedom28 Guitton sees Freud far too much as the scientist and not sufficiently as redeemer.29 Marxism is a great heroic religion with a profound philosophy underlying.

Notes 1 See John B. Baillie, ed., Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology ofMind, trans. J.B. Baillie (London: Allen and Unwin 1931), 616 (happiness); 298 (instinct and freedom); 272ff. (reason). 2 Grant gave a talk on Jung for the CBC series 'Architects of Modern Thought' on 21 November 1961, in which he also argued for Freud versus Jung. The talk was later published in Architects of Modern Thought, 5th and 6th Series, 12 Talks for CBC Radio (Toronto: CBC 1962) and will appear in volume 3 of the Collected Works. 3 This is the last verse but one in the last poem Emily Bronte wrote, 'No coward soul is mine' (2 January 1846). Poems of Emily and Alice Bronte, Shakespeare Head Bronte (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press 1934), 158-9. 4 St Bonaventura, The Mind's Road to God, trans. George Boas (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1953), 9-10. St Bonaventura (1217-74), Italian scholastic philosopher, bishop, and cardinal, was an Augustinian Platonist in orientation and was elected minister general of the Franciscan Order. See also note 21. 5 Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary (New York: Harper and Row 1965), part 2: Faith and Reality, sect. II, 'Some thoughts on faith,' 211-12. 6 See J.N. Findlay, ed., Hegel's Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975), 9. In this passage Hegel refers his readers to his Philosophy of Right (see Knox edition, 10), where the propositions 'What is rational is actual' and 'What is actual is rational' can also be found. 7 See Robert F. Brown, ed., Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: The Lectures of 1825-1826, vol. 3, Medieval and Modern

Excerpts from Notebooks on Hegel and on Religion and Philosophy 531 Philosophy, trans. R.F. Brown and J.M. Stewart with the assistance of H.S. Harris (Berkeley: University of California Press 1990), 154ff. 'This idea of Spinoza's must be acknowledged to be true and well-grounded. There is an absolute substance, and it is what is true. But it is not yet the whole truth, for substance must also be thought of as inwardly active and alive, and in that way must determine itself as spirit' (154). 8 See Baillie, ed., The Phenomenology of Mind, chap. VII, 'Religion in General/ sect. B, 'Religion in the Form of Art,' division c, 'The spiritual work of art: art expressive of social life,' sect. (2) 'Tragedy/ p. 736ff. The references to Macbeth are on page 740. 9 For a discussion by Hegel on truth in relation to appearance and show, see Baillie, ed., Phenomenology, chap. III, 'Force and Understanding - The World of Appearance and the Supersensible World/ 190ff. 10 For a discussion by Hegel of Kant's formalism as a problem for practical philosophy, see Brown, ed., Hegel, 244ff. 11 See Baillie, ed., Phenomenology, 405ff.; 519ff. 12 See Findlay, ed., Hegel's Logic, 9. 13 Grant's son William, born in 1950, was seven at the time. 14 See T.M. Knox, ed., Hegel's Philosophy of Right (London: Oxford University Press 1967), 12-13. 15 See the third chapter of 'Acceptance and Rebellion' (271-84), where Grant undertakes a lengthy critical response to Sir Isaiah Berlin's 'Historical Inevitability.' 16 For one statement by Hegel about the goodness of God see J.N. Findlay, ed., Hegel's Logic, 114-15. 'In nature, for example, we recognize the goodness of God in the fact that the various classes or species of animals and plants are provided with whatever they need for their preservation and welfare. Nor is man excepted, who, both as an individual and as a nation, possesses partly in the given circumstances of climate, or quality and products of soil, and partly in his natural parts or talents, all that is required for his maintenance and development.' 17 Grant knew his wife Sheila shared many of his objections to Hegel, while his colleague James Doull was a Hegelian. Grant wondered if the objections could be thought consistent with the claim that man is not the measure. 18 Richard Kroner (1884-1974), German theologian, taught at Dresden and later, in America, at Union Theological Seminary, New York, and Theological School of Temple University, Philadelphia. See Richard Kroner, Culture and Faith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1951). 19 See 'The Limits of Thought' in Kroner, ibid., 271-4. 20 Matthew 19:17: -And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the com-

532 Appendix 1 mandments.' See also Mark 10:18 and Luke 18:19. Grant appears to have held an unusual interpretation of the Incarnation at this time (and perhaps later as well). He wrote down in Notebook 2 a quotation from St Augustine that Sheila Grant believes expresses his view of the matter: 'Who although He be God and man yet he be not two but one Christ - one however not by conversion of Godhead into flesh but by taking of manhood into God/ 21 The Mind's Road to God, trans. Boas, chap. I, 'Of the Stages in the Ascent to God of His Reflection in His Traces in the Universe/ 12. 'From these (mutable and corruptible) visible things, therefore, one mounts to considering the power and wisdom and goodness of God as being, living, and understanding; purely spiritual and incorruptible and immutable/ 22 See the conclusion to 'Outlines of a Phenomenology of Having' in Marcel, Being and Having, 174. 23 Donald MacKenzie MacKinnon - see note 13 in 'Two Theological Languages' (64). 24 Grant's good friend Reverend J.W.A. Nicholson was for him a positive exemplar of good works. See note 1 in 'What Is Philosophy?' (122). 25 Grant may be referring to the discussion by Gabriel Marcel in 'Faith and Reality/ the concluding chapter of volume 2 of Mystery of Being called (Chicago: Gateway 1960), 186-210. 26 This statement was written at the end of a set of notes in response to a Simone Weil article, 'Beyond Personalism/ translated by Russell S. Young and published in Cross Currents (1951-2), 59-76. The editor states: 'The present essay was written in London in 1942 and appeared in La Table Ronde, December 1950/ (The article has been reprinted in several anthologies including David McLellan, Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist [London: Macmillan 1989], appendix: 'On Human Personality/ 273-88.) By 'Miss Weil's book' Grant may have meant to say 'article,' or perhaps he was reading and referring to one of her books at the time, such as Waiting on God, Gravity and Grace, or The Need for Roots. 27 Marcel, Mystery of Being, vol. 2,103. 28 'One may, in fact, say almost with certainty that there is nobody who has all his life been so unlucky as to have found it impossible ever to unite himself with another, or obliged to deny the other as a real presence/ Marcel, ibid., 120. Chap. VII, 121ff., is entitled 'Freedom and Grace.' 'Thus the real problem would now turn on the intimate relation which must be established between gift and freedom, between freedom and grace. Everything will depend on the answer we ultimately give to this most difficult of all questions; whether we shall be able to make up our minds about the existence of God ../ (122). 29 Jean Guitton, Essay on Human Love, trans. M.C. Pearce (London: Rockliff 1951), 16,18,39,143.

Appendix 2 Poems

The editors have chosen three poems (of uncertain date) to accompany one published poem, 'Good Friday.'

TO S.V.G.1 She breaks into my soul when I'm away Her face seen through the lilacs, joy and pain. Her eyes remembered in the purple May Nothing complete, till I am home again. Yet though so perfect she makes all else less Still through her love I touch God's Love and then Can see He moves through all this smoke and dross Moves through the faces of ambitious men. Yes, though her vision cracks the golden bowl So that all runs till I can see her face Yet I remember that it was her soul Taught me that love is flesh, and this God's grace. Then home I meet her heart; gone the ideal Oh dim remembrance pale beside the real. TO ELIZABETH2 Even in spring the mark of the beast Is written upon nature. Cruelty rides over the violet Death is within the creature.

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But here rises another spring Here is no thoughtless dread Hope trembles in her glancing laugh And love in the turn of her head For the mark of her soul is upon her cheekbones Her song with God's spring is a part Truth meets with body in her sweetness The fall of her hair is her heart

GOOD FRIDAY Originally published in the United Church Observer 14, no. 3 (1 April 1953): 3, and reprinted in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 447.

Oh dearest word, the very word indeed, Breathes on our striving, for the cross is done; All fate forgotten, and from judgment freed, Call Him then less - Who shows us this - Your Son? Look it is here at death, not three days later, The love that binds the granite into being, Here the sea's blueness finds its true creator, His glance on Golgotha our sun for seeing. Nor say the choice is ours, what choice is left? Forgiveness shows God's Will most fully done, There on the cross the myth of hell is cleft And the black garden blazes with the sun. Hold close the crown of thorns, the scourge, the rod, For in his sweat, full front, the face of God. EASTER Did the joy break, bonds loosed for us to see Body and mind shown one, limits now alter? Love lifted up love's loveliest to be

Poems

535

Taken when sparrows fall and children falter? Faint before the folly of it? not that, Nor before the majesty lose despair. Remember it is finished, consummate Take it, the affirmation is elsewhere. Yet wonder, wonder on the children's faces, Magdalen's meeting with all grief forgot, And Peter by the shore finds where God's grace is, That he be carried whither he wouldst not.

Notes 1 S.V.G. refers to Grant's wife Sheila Veronica Grant. The Golden Bowl is a novel by Henry James. 2 Elizabeth Douglas was the very beautiful daughter of George Vibert Douglas, a science professor at Dalhousie during the 1950s. Grant, Sheila, and their daughter Rachel lived in the Douglas house during the 1950-1 year.

Appendix 3 Radio and Television Broadcasts by George Grant Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

The list was compiled from CBC records and from Dr Grant's letters. It is as complete as available records allow.

49/11/01 'On Human Happiness': A talk on the radio series Points of View.

52/12/16 'On Waiting on God': A review on radio of Simone Weil's book Waiting on God. 52/

[full date unavailable] An appearance on the radio program series Critically Speaking.

54/06/02 A first appearance on the television quiz program, Fighting Words, with Moderator Nathan Cohen, in which participants must identify the authors of, and discuss, controversial quotations. During most of the period from 1952 to 1962 the television programs were repeated on radio station CBL two days after the televised version. 54/10/26 'Charles Cochrane': A 30-minute talk on the radio series Anthology.

55/08/19 'The Atomic Age and the Mind of Men': A talk given at the Couchiching Conference and later broadcast on CBC radio. 55/11/09 'Jean Paul Sartre': A talk given on the radio series CBC Wednesday Night, later published in Architects of Modern Thought.

CBC Radio and Television Broadcasts by George Grant

537

56/08/27 Another appearance on the television series Fighting Words, with the radio version two days later. 58/01 /06 'Philosophy in the Mass Age': A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the first of nine talks later revised and published as Philosophy in the Mass Age. 58/01/13 'The Ancient and the Modern World': A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the second of nine talks. 58/01/20 'Natural Law': A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the third of nine talks. 58/01 /27 "The Rebellion of Enlightenment': A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the fourth of nine talks. 58/02/03 'The Ethics of Marxism': A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the fifth of nine talks. 58/02/17 'A Criticism of the Progressive Spirit: Middle Class Morality': A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the sixth of nine talks. 58/02/24 'The American Pragmatic Spirit': A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the seventh of nine talks. 58/03/03 'The Limits of Freedom': A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the eighth of nine talks. 58/03/10 George Grant answers questions from listeners: A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the last of nine talks in the 'Philosophy in the Mass Age' programs. 58/11/05 'Dostoevski': A talk given on the radio series CBC Wednesday Night, later published in Architects of Modern Thought. The series was introduced by John A. Irving. 59/01/11 An appearance on Fighting Words, with the radio version two days later.

538

Appendix 3

59/02/08 An appearance on Fighting Words, with the radio version two days later. 59/03/05 'Belief: A 60-minute program prepared from interviews by George Grant of Miss Bessie Touzel, Dr Keith MacDonald, Dr Victorin Voyer, Dr Wilder Penfield, Mr WJ. Bennett, Robertson Davies, Mrs Viola Halpenny, and Mr Archie Bennett on the television series Explorations. 59/10/18 An appearance on Fighting Words. 59/12/27 'Christ, What a Planet!': A 10-minute talk on the radio series Our Special Speaker, reviewing the year 1959. 60/01/10 An appearance on Fighting Words. 60/05/22 An appearance on Fighting Words. 61/01/10 An appearance on Fighting Words. 61/07/12 'Four Philosophers, Part 1: Plato - Belief and What It Is': A 30-minute television drama with commentary by George Grant on the series Explorations. 61/07/19 'Four Philosophers, Part 2: St Augustine - Belief and What It Is': A 30-minute television drama with commentary by George Grant on the series Explorations. 61 /07/26 'Four Philosophers, Part 3: Hume': A 30-minute drama with commentary by George Grant on the series Explorations.

61/08/02 'Four Philosophers, Part 4: Kant': A 30-minute drama with commentary by George Grant on the series Explorations. 61/11/21 'Carl Gustav Jung': A 30-minute talk on the radio series CBC Wednesday Night, later published in Architects of Modern Thought.

CBC Radio and Television Broadcasts by George Grant

539

61/12/18 'What Is History?': A 30-minute talk on the radio series University of the Air, in which George Grant is one of three professors discussing E.H. Carr's six talks. 62/09/?

'On Peter Fechter': A short radio talk about a man who had been shot while trying to cross the Berlin Wall.

63/01/08 'The Best of All Possible Beasts': A panel discussion on the human brain and the computer in the field of memory was held, with George Grant, two physiologists, a neurosurgeon and Dr. Keith MacDonald, a physicist, on the television series Science Review. 63/10/07 'Crime and Corruption': A talk on the radio series Preview Commentary, later published in Christian Outlook. 65/06/27 'The Future of Canadian Nationhood': A defence by George Grant of the thesis of Lament for a Nation on the television series Venture. 65/10/10 'Revolution and Response': A speech delivered to the U of T International Teach-in on the radio series CBC Sunday Night. 65/10/21 'Talking with Diefenbaker': A television broadcast with George Grant talking with John Diefenbaker on the series Political Telecasts.

65/11/21 'Power and Society': A program with George Grant as host and Professor John Porter as guest on the series Extension Educational Television.

65/11/28 'Power in Practice': A program with George Grant as host and Professor John Porter as guest on the series Extension Educational Television.

65/12/05 'Leadership and Power': A program with George Grant as host and Professor J.H. Aitchison as guest on the series Extension - Educational Television.

540

Appendix 3

65/12/12 'The MP and Parliament': A program with George Grant as host and Pauline Jewett and Gordon Fairweather as guests on the series Extension - Educational Television.

65/12/19 'Politics and the Professor': A program with George Grant George Grant of the thesis of Lament for a Nation on the Educational Television.

65/12/26 'Politics in Society': A program with George Grant as host and Professor John Meisel as guest on the series Extension Educational Television.

66/01/02 'Parties in Canada': A program with George Grant as host and Professor Gad Horowitz as guest on the series Extension - Educational Television. (On 9,16,23, and 30 Jan., the

series continued with Gad Horowitz as host and Ramsey Cook, Charles Taylor, and Brough MacPherson as guests.) 66/01/07 George Grant talking to graduate students about Lament for a Nation and Canada on the radio series 2967 And All That.

66/02/07 'Political Action in Canada': A program with Gad Horowitz as host and George Grant as guest (co-host) on the series Extension - Educational Television.

66/02/14 'A Canadian Identity': A program with Gad Horowitz as host and George Grant as guest on the series Extension Educational Television.

66/02/20 Segment (g) about the Edmonton Teach-in on Canadian Identity with George Grant among the speakers on the television series This Hour Has Seven Days (Program 42). 66/06/02 George Grant is interviewed by Adrienne Clarkson about the effects of modern technology on man's ideas, on the television series First Person.

CBC Radio and Television Broadcasts by George Grant

541

66/07/30 The radio broadcast of the Couchiching Conference, 'Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions/ includes George Grant. 66/07/31 The radio broadcast of the Couchiching Conference, 'Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions/ includes George Grant. 66/08/07 'Comments on the Great Society': Excerpts from a speech by George Grant delivered at the 35th annual Couchiching Conference: 'Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions.' The speech was published in Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions, ed. John Irwin (Toronto: CBC 1967), 71-6. 66/08/14 'The British Fact': George Grant is among those interviewed by Larry Zolf in a 30-minute program on the series Compass.

67/01/01 George Grant talks about Canada, Lament for a Nation, and Diefenbaker, on the television series Sunday. 67/03/09 A program that includes extracts from an address by George Grant on nationalism in the modern world on the radio series Second Century Week.

67/08/13 George Grant talks about Duff Roblin and Dalton Camp on the television series The Other Eye. 69/11/12 'Massey Lectures': A 30-minute talk on the radio series Ideas, the first of five, later published by the CBC as Time as History.

69/11/19 'Massey Lectures': A 30-minute talk on the radio series Ideas, the second of five, entitled 'Time as History.' 69/11/26 'Massey Lectures': A 30-minute talk on the radio series Ideas, the third of five, entitled 'Time as History.' 69/12/03 'Massey Lectures': A 30-minute talk on the radio series Ideas, the forth of five, entitled 'Time as History.'

542

Appendix 3

69/12/10 'Massey Lectures': A 30-minute talk on the radio series Ideas, the fifth of five, entitled 'Time as History.' 69/12/17 'A dialogue in which Dr Grant's theme and the suggestion that God is dead are discussed and challenged by theologian Dr Charles Malik ... a Lebanese diplomat.../ on the radio series Ideas, as a sequel to the 'Time as History' programs. This dialogue was not included in the book Time as History, but is included in the set of long-playing records issued by the CBC for their International Transcription Service. 71/12/07 'To Be a Tory': George Grant is among those interviewed by Larry Zolf in this one-hour documentary on the Tories in the television series Tuesday Night. 73/01/28 'Lessons of Vietnam War': A phone-in discussion of the lessons Canadians have learned from the war, on the radio series Cross-Country Check-Up, includes comments by George Grant. 73/08/05 Ramsey Cook interviews George Grant on the Second World War, French Canadian nationalism, and the problem of feeling at home in a homogeneous technological world, on the television series Impressions. 73/10/10 A program includes George Grant discussing Lament for a Nation, Canada, Lester Pearson, and the 'mental health state' on the radio series This Country in the Morning. 74/03/05 A program on the need for changing attitudes: George Grant on the Gross National Product in the light of reevaluated goals, the James Bay Project, and Quebec, on the television series Canada Tomorrow. 75/03/27 'The Technological Imperative': The fourth of five lectures in the 'Beyond Industrial Growth' series on the radio series Ideas. The lecture was originally delivered at the University

CBC Radio and Television Broadcasts by George Grant

543

of Toronto on 31 Jan. 1975, and later published under the title 'The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used/ in Beyond Industrial Growth, ed. Abraham Rotstein (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976), 117-31. A revised version of this same essay appeared as "Thinking about Technology' in Technology and Justice (Toronto: Anansi 1986), 11-34. 77/10/20 Segment (e) of a 90-minute program. Peter Gzowski interviews Peter Newman, Dalton Camp, and George Grant discussing Diefenbaker's memoirs on the television series 90 Minutes Live.

80/02/13 'The Owl and the Dynamo': A one-hour profile of George Grant produced by Vincent Tovell and narrated by William Whitehead on the television series Spectrum. 87/05/31 'George Grant Profile': Linden Maclntyre reports from Halifax on the television series Sunday Morning. Clips of George Grant on Canada, Diefenbaker, Vietnam, Abortion, Mozart, Technology, Conversion, walking in the park, and the fact that he is a believer not a pessimist. 88/02/13 'On the Morgenthaler decision': A five-minute talk on the radio series Commentary. Sheila Grant says letters requesting copies of the script came in from all over Canada. 88/09/28 'Tribute to George Grant/ by David Cayley during hour three of the radio series Morningside. 88/10/02 'Reflections': Tributes to George Grant and bp Nichol, with clips from the 87/05/31 program, on the television series Sunday Morning.

89/08/24 'Tribute to George Grant/ by David Cayley (repeat of 28 Sept 1988) on hour three of the radio series Morningside.

Appendix 4 Editorial and Textual Principles and Methods Applied in Volume 2

The purpose of the edition is to provide readers with a complete collection of reliable reading texts. Editorial interventions identify the sources of the writings; explain Grant's allusions to persons, places, and events; and describe any changes made to the writings during the preparation of the volume. They consist of headnotes, annotations, and a chronology of Grant's life. A general index of names and topics is provided in each of the first six volumes of the edition. Copy-text The material included in this volume did not pose difficult questions regarding the versions that ought to be chosen as copy-text, that is, the ones closest to the author's intentions and preferences. No substantially different earlier versions of these particular writings have survived, as far as I know. Hence the copy-texts consist of the works as they were published and unpublished writings as they were found in Grant's papers. The one exception is Philosophy in the Mass Age. I have chosen the second edition of 1966 as copy-text because I don't know for sure if Grant would have approved the inclusion, in the third edition of 1995, of the original broadcasted passages omitted from the first and second editions. Accuracy of the text I have corrected the human and mechanical errors that occurred in the process of scanning the documents into computer files. In addition, I have checked the original sources of Grant's quotations for accuracy.

Editorial and Textual Principles and Methods: Volume 2 545

Headnotes I have provided short headnotes for each piece of writing to identify its source and date. For the special case of 'Acceptance and Rebellion' I decided to provide a more substantial note to help readers to see the work in relation to Philosophy in the Mass Age. I have also written a longer headnote to introduce the selection of Dalhousie lectures. All headnotes are in sans serif type to distinguish them from Grant's writings. Annotations Annotations are intended to supplement and clarify Grant's references as unobtrusively as possible. The notes have been kept concise. They identify persons, events, or places that might be unknown to some readers. I ask for patience from readers who may find that some of the notes give information that seems obvious to them. In 'Acceptance and Rebellion' and Philosophy in the Mass Age where many annotations appear along with Grant's original notes, I have reproduced Grant's as footnotes and ours as notes at the end of each work. There was no need in this volume for notes that explain revision and emendation of texts. Minor textual notes are included in the annotations. Appendices There are four appendices in this volume. The first contains excerpts from the notebooks of 1956-7; the second a selection of three unpublished poems along with Grant's single published poem; the third a list of CBC broadcasts that extends in time from the 1950s to the 1980s; and the fourth this account of editorial principles. Correction, Regularization, Standardization, and House Style When I judged that absolutely no question of meaning was at stake, I silently corrected minor typographical and punctuation errors in Grant's texts. Whenever I judged that a correction might affect the meaning of the text, the error has simply been flagged with [sic]. I have corrected mistakes that obviously occurred because of an oversight by either Grant or the typists who worked on the original works. For

546

Appendix 4

example, Grant regularly used the expression, 'that is/ without a following comma. I have added commas in such cases. Grant's frequent slip, 'loose/ has been corrected to 'lose.' All foreign words have been italicized. In some cases we have retained Grant's spelling and punctuation because we judged they were essential parts of his voice and presentation in the time and place he was writing. I have kept his spelling of words with -ise endings that now tend to be -ize endings. However, all instances of 'judgement' have been changed to 'judgment.' Apart from the exceptions mentioned, texts adhere to the University of Toronto Press house style. I have used the inverted style for dates. Single quotation marks are used; quotation marks are removed from displayed quotations; punctuation is placed inside closing quotation marks in accordance with the prevailing modern practice; dashes are removed when put beside a comma; periods have been removed from abbreviations such as 'Dr' and 'St'; hyphens are added or removed in accordance with current practice; and, finally, the serial comma is used. Such regularization, standardization, and house-style emendations have been done silently, without annotation. Selection of unpublished work This volume required some difficult decisions concerning which Dalhousie lectures should be selected for publication. The final selection is a compromise that reflects the work and advice of many editors over a considerable period of time. Preparation of handwritten material The handwritten manuscripts prepared for this volume are the extractions from Grant's notebooks and the lectures he delivered to his Dalhousie classes. The editors worked with photocopies of the originals found in Grant's study. The work was carried out by several editors during many long sessions. Sheila Grant deserves special mention for her indispensable contribution interpreting Grant's sometimes difficult hand and fathoming his meaning. I have checked the finished text against the original by having one person read the original while another corrected the computerized version.

Index

abortion, 335-6,529; and birth control,255 acceptance: and evil, 224-40; Grant on, xxvii-xxix; and mystery, 224-5; spirit of, 221 Acheson, Dean, 421, 424n.4 Adrian, Edgar Douglas, 1st Baron, 216, 220n.8 adult education: in Canada, 105; in the expanding economy, 100-8; leisure and,71-2; philosophy and, 66-73,106-7; as self-liberating, 69 agnosticism: and evil, 57-8; of Kant, 523; transcendence and, 61-2 Aitchison, John H., 446, 539 Aitken, William Maxwell. See Beaverbrook, William Maxwell Aitken Albigensians, 276, 298n.4O Alger, Horatio, 22, 32n.l, 250-1, 371 alienation: Freud on, 239; Marcuse and, 239; Marx and, 524; Sartre on, 133 Allen, Sheila. See Grant, Sheila Allport, Gordon, 115n.4; on Augustine, 113 All This and Heaven Too (movie),

65n.l9 American War of Independence, 140-1

ancient cultures: assumptions of, 322-31; sense of time of, 390-1 ancient Greece, and natural law, 332 ancient Rome, and natural law, 332 Anderson, Fulton H., 302; criticism of Grant, xxiv, 3-4; Grant's attack on book of, xxii-xxvii Anglican Church, 30 Anglo-Catholicism, 490-1 Ansley, J.W., 166-81,181n.l anti-colonialism, 349 archaic man, 323n. See also ancient cultures archetype: divine model, 324-5; meaning of, 390 Aristotelianism, 244; and philosophy of nature, 471; Protestant rejection of, 245 Aristotle, 121; conceptualism of, 82n.; cosmology of the Greeks and, 468; education and reason, 172; Ethics, 337; Grant's reassessment of, 402; on moral law, 333; on philosophic studies, 16; Popper on, 81-2; rational theology in, 51-2 arts: and democratic society, 260-1; progress of and philosophy, 19-20; Puritanism and the, 259-60; in society, 200; in the Soviet Union, 305-6

548

Index

arts faculties: community obligations of, 440; functions of, 439-0; liberalism of, 28-9; principle of, 437-9; sciences in, 25 Assumption University, 167 atheism: heroic, 60; of Sartre, 128-9 atomic age, minds of men in the, 156-64 Augustine, St, 339,451-2,485; City of God, 40,479; and Cochrane, 113; De Civitate Dei, 344; and despair, 180-1; and the Passion of Christ, 484; on philosophy, 394; and Plato, 78,344; seminar on, 476-90; and subjectivity, 492 Augustus (emperor), Cochrane on, 111-12 Auschwitz, 136n.7; torture at, 130-1, 289 Bacon, Francis, 121 Bakunin, Michael, 347,404n.l9 Banff School of Fine Arts, 70,74n.6 Barth, Karl, 53,54,55,63n.4,242,498; Popper and, 85; and Protestantism, 242n. Beauvoir, Simone de, 296n.25; existentialism of, 287; on North American society, 253 Beaven, James, 300, 303n.l Beaverbrook, William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron, 247,296n.21 Benedict, Ruth, 67, 73n.3 Bennett, Archie, 538 Bennett, R.B., 96,151 Bennett, W.J., 538 Bentham, Jeremy, 88,91n.ll, 222, 246,295n.15; on idea of divine law, 347-8 Berkeley, Bishop, 389 Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 271-2,298n.38;

empiricism and, 272n., 280n.; 'Historical Inevitability,' 272-84 Biblical theology, xxviii-xxix; Christianity and the Old Testament, 342, 342n.; and Methodism, 261; of old Nova Scotia, 208. See also New Testament Biblicism: degeneration of, 217; Protestant, 242-3 birth control, 255; and world population, 420 Blackstone, Sir William, 334-5, 403n.l2 Bohme, Jakob, 326n., 515n.51; and subjectivity, 492 Bonaventura, St, 521,527,530n.4 Borden, Sir Robert, 150,153 Bosanquet, Bernard, 294n.3 Bourassa, Henri, 150 Boyer, Charles, 477,513n.29 Bradley, F.H., 294n.3; 'My Station and Its Duties/ 228 Braithwaite, Richard Bevan, 298n.39; on Berlin's propositions, 275, 275n.; compared to Sartre, 290 Braun, Wernher von, 330, 379, 403n.9 Brett, George Sidney, 11,20-ln.3,302 British North America Act, 1867,147 Bronte, Emily, 520, 530n.3 Brown, George, 147 Brunner, Emil, 53, 55,63n.4 Buber, Martin, 493,515n.53 Bultmann, Rudolph, 124,135n.2 Burckhardt, ]., philosophy and history disjunction, 275n. Cabot, John, 138 Calvin, John, 121,242; doctrines of, 243-4,369; and Protestantism, 242n. Calvinism, 31,242-3; Deus Abscondi-

Index tus, 243, 248, 261; and educational theory, 248; and Puritanism, 368n.; secular, 368-9 Camp, Dalton, 541, 543 Camus, Albert: existentialism of, 287; The Plague, 291

Canada, 146-55; Act of Union (1840/ 1), 144; Anglo-French rivalry, 13940; boundary disputes, 145-6; colonial era, 137-9; Constitutional Act (1791), 141; development (1885-1918), 148-50; external relations since 1867,153-5; history of, 137-55; home affairs from 1918, 150-3; internal development (1791-1867), 141-3; Newfoundland becomes province of, 154; population 1871-1911,149; reciprocal trade agreement with USA, 146; religious traditions of, 30-1; and responsible government, 143-5; transcontinental railroad, 147-8; C.-USA relations (17831867), 145-6; C.-USA relations after 1871,154-5 Canadian Association for Adult Education (CAAE), xxxii, xxxiv. See also Food for Thought

Canadian Pacific railway, 148 capitalism: in Canada, 318; hostility to from abroad, 250-1; Marx's criticism of, 362; and mass society, xxxi; and means of production, 353-4; predatory, 421; state, 235n., 315, 393 Carleton College, 95 Carnegie, Dale, 200-1, 203n.8, 213 Carr, E.H., 539 Cartier, Sir George-Etienne, 147 Cartier, Jacques, 138 Catholicism. See Roman Catholicism

549

Cavell, Edith, 461,512n.l7 Cayley, David, xx-xxi, 543 CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation): Anthology, 536; Architects of Modern Thought series, xxxii; Canada Tomorrow, 542; CBC Sunday Night, 539; Commentary, 543; Couchiching Conference, 536,541; Critically Speaking, 536; Cross-Country Check-Up, 542; Explorations, 538; Extension - Educational Television, 539-40; Fighting Words, 536-8; First Person, 540; Ideas, xx-xxi, 541-3; Impressions, 542; Massey Lectures, 541-2; Morningside, 543; 1967 And All That, 540; 90 Minutes Live, 543; The Other Eye, 541; Our Special Speaker, 420-3; Points of View, 536; Political Telecasts, 539; Preview Commentary, 539; Science Review, 539; Second Century Week, 541; Sunday, 541; Sunday Morning, 543; This Country in the Morning, 542; This Hour Has Seven Days, 540; Tuesday Night, 542; University of the Air, xxxi, xxxii-xxxiii, 537,539; Venture, 539; Wednesday Night, 536, 537, 538 CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation), 153 Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 134 Chambers, Whittaker, 406n.33 Champlain, Samuel de, 138-9 Chateaubriand, 136n.7; torture at, 130-1, 289 China, decadent influence of American music, 266n. Chisholm, Brock, 67, 73n.3 Christian, William, xxiv, xxxii-xxxiii, 3-4 Christianity: as the absolute religion,

550

Index

229-30n.; Cochrane and history of, 112; doctrines of the Cross and Resurrection, 498; and the Fall, 475; and grace, 60; influence of Hebraic thought on, 244; and man as the maker of history, 341; Marx and Hegel and, 229-30; and modern man, 265; mystery of equality, 167-8; and practicality, 371n.; religion of the Word of God, 477-8, 480-1; and Sartre, 124; theological schemes, 474; time as history, 343 Christian tradition: of education, 24, 26,183-5; and teaching of philosophy, 4-6 Churchill, James, 516-17n.67 Churchill, Winston: on philosophers, 277 Cicero: De Legibus, 332; on morality, 336; on positive law and natural law, 335 civilization: American, 240-64; Freud on, 237-8 Clarkson, Adrienne, 540 classical naturalism, 112,114 classical philosophy, 113 Cochrane, Charles Norris, xxiii, xxvii, 14, 21n.4,110-15; CBC talk on, 536; Christianity and Classical

Culture, 13, 111; patriotism of, 115 Cohen, Matt, xx Cohen, Nathan, 536 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 86,90-ln.8 Collingwood, Robin George, 409, 418n.l; and subjectivity, 492 communism: and patterns of western society, 160-1; and Sartre, 132; similarities among states, 214; World Revolution and, 479 Communist Party, 355; and Sartre, 132

Community Life Training Institute, 70, 74n.6 Conant, James Bryant, 171,181n.4, 197, 203n.5 consciousness, mythic and modern, 321-31 conservatism, 167-8; natural right, 266; in Nova Scotia, 219; theological, 50; truth of, 386 Conservative party, 151,153 Constantine 1,113,115n.3 contemplative life, 262-3 Cook, Ramsey, 540,542 Copleston, F.C., 464 Corbett, Edward A., 69, 73-4n.5; Father, God Bless Him, 96; Grant's review of Henry Marshall Tory: Beloved Canadian, 95-8 Coventry, John: Morals and Independence: An Introduction to Ethics, 446 creation, doctrine of, 491-2 Creighton, D.G., 96, 98n.3 Cromwell, Oliver, 395 Crosby, Bing, 266 Cullmann, Oscar, 479,488,513n.31 Dachau, 136n.7; torture at, 130-1, 289 Dalhousie Review, The, xxv, xxxii

Dalhousie University: Grant and Doull at, xviii-xix; growth and change at, 207; idealism at, 301; lectures at, 443-517; union and economic conditions, 186-7 Darwin, Charles, 101-2,349; evolutionary theory, 446; The Origin of Species, 232

Davies, Robertson, 538 death, and suicide, 125 democracy: Athenian, 76; demands of philosophy on, 66,68-9; and

Index despotism, 168-9; distinction between social and political, 167-8; and education, 170-1; Plato's description of, 169-70 democratic liberalism, rhetoric in North America of, 268-9 Descartes, Rene: rationalism of, 496; and subjectivity, 492 Dewey, John, 47-8n.l2,73n.2,203n.6, 222,301; and the American dream, 199-200; on education, 103,161, 184-5,188,377-8,430-1,435; finite world of, 101; influence of, 169-70, 173,175-7; on man's nature, 46; pragmatism of, 67,319,373-8; and Protestantism, 262 Diefenbaker, John, 153,539,543 Dien Bien Phu, 105,109n.6 Don Mills, and mass society, 157 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 124,134n.l, 408-18; The Brothers Karamazov, 408,445; CBC Wednesday Night series, 537; Crime and Punishment, 408,445; The Diary of a Writer, 412; The ldiot, 408,409-10,415-16; Letters from the Underworld, All, 413;

and Pelagian heresy, 413; The Possessed, 408,410, 413; psychological insight of, 411-12; and scientific humanism, 126 Douglas, T.C., 153 Doukhobours, in British Columbia, 282n. Doull, James, xxix, 525-6; influence on Grant, xviii-xix dualism, in dominance of nature by freedom, 259 Dulles, John Foster, 421-2,424n.5 Duns Scotus, John, 52 Duplessis, Maurice, 153 Durham, Lord, 144

551

Eckhardt, Meister Johannes, 515n.51; and subjectivity, 492 economic expansion: adult education and, 100-8; black side of, 183; choices and consequences, 163-4; as dominant goal in society, 158-9; materialism of, 100-1,183; as moral activity, 371; North American, 250-1; and the teaching profession, 182-9; and technology, 257; and universities, 169 economy: Marx on, 352-3; of obsolescence, 157-8; and philosophy of education, 105 education: ancient definition of, 102; anti-intellectual position within, 435; in Canada, 102-3; classical, 173-4; and democracy, 70,166-81; egalitarian technologism and, 369-70; and freedom, 108; Grant on, 430-7; humanities in Soviet Union, 305-8; mass, 161,171; materialist view of, 432-3; and Plato's allegory of the cave, 183-4; pragmatism and, 377-8; progressive, 173,430,435; Protestantism and, 30-1; reason and natural law, 334, 338; as social engineering, 67; teaching profession and, 187-8; of technicians, 5,14; treatment of teachers, 434-5; and vested interests, 69-70 Einstein, Albert, 101-2,117 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 171,181n.4, 216,421,459,511n.l3; theistic materialism of, 101,426 Eleatic school, 464-6,467 Eliade, Mircea, 265,297-8n.33,323n. Eliot, Charles William, 203n.5 Ellul, Jacques: The Technological Society, 402

552

Index

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 322,403n.6 Empedocles, 468 empiricism, 271-2n.; and Canadian philosophy, 301; and corruption, 276-7; English, 270-2; inadequacy of, 231n.; philosophy of a scientific age, 231-2; and Sartre's existentialism, xxx Engels, Friedrich, 349,362 Enlightenment, 246,346,361,363, 383 equality: and Calvinism, 369; classless society of, 355; and democracy, 42; principle of in North America, 253-5; scientific society of, 255 eschatology, 478-9 essentialism, Popper on, 81-2 ethical rationalism, 40,41-2 ethics: distinction between morals and, 312; in medical schools, 175-6; and morality, 449-51; to Plato, 454; and values in education, 171,175; world-centred, 455-9 Europe: and Christianity, 341-2; philosophy in, 269-70 evil: as absolute, 289-92; denial of reality of, 105-6; and existentialism, 414; Grant on, xxvii-xxix; and human freedom, xxix-xxx; and Marx, 350-1; meaning of the word, 223; in the name of progress, 365-6; and Plato, 474; problem of, 57-8; and the question of theodicy, xxviii; in rational theology, 57; Sartre and the reality of, 129-31 existentialism, xxix, 62-3,270; and absurdity, 287-8,287n.; Biblical language and, 60; and freedom, 223; movement of, 124; philosophy

of freedom and anguish, 132-3; rise of, 126-7; of Sartre, 284-93; and sexual love, 259,287,287n. Fairweather, Gordon, 540 faith: and doubt in Dostoevsky, 414-16; of historical man, 268-9; moral code based on, 381-2; and philosophy, 8,49-50; in progress through technology, 400 Farm Radio Forum, 70, 74n.6 Farrer, Austin, 515n.48 Fechter, Peter, 539 Feuerbach, L.A., 228,405n.21 Food for Thought magazine (CAAE), xxxii; philosophy and adult education, 66-73 Foster, Michael B., 223,293n.l, 342n. Frank, Erich, 467-73,513n.25 Franklin, Benjamin, 242,242n. freedom: Biblical categories of thought behind, 194-5; in Biblical language, 52-3; Dostoevsky on, 412-13,417-18; Grant on, xxviixxix; history of, xxix, 345-6; and Jews in North America, 192; language of existentialism, 60; language of rational theology, 52; and law, 383; for leisure, 158; negative form of, 199; and North American society, 191-2; in the philosophic tradition, 223; to Plato, 454; Sartre's meaning of, 129,285-6; and subjectivity, 125; theological conceptions of, 56-7; universal idea of, 235; use of the word, 190-202; of the will, 222-3 French Revolution, 346 Freud, Sigmund, xxix-xxx, 101-2, 222; on alienation, 239; on civilization, 237-8; The Future of an Illu-

Index sion, 346; humanist Utopianism, 236-40; versus Jung, 520,530n.2; on man's nature, 46; metapsychology of, 238; and modern culture, 324; and Oedipus legend, 325; selfanalysis of, 237,237n. Frontenac, Louis de Buade, Comte de, 139 Frye, Northrup, xxiii, 21n.5; Fearful Symmetry, 13-14 fundamentalism, Christian, 217 Funk, Walther, 104,108-9n.4 Gahan, Stirling, 512n.l7 Galbraith, John Kenneth: The Affluent Society, All, 424n.6

Garvey, Edwin Charles, 167,181n.2 Genet, Jean, 286n. Gimpel, Charles, xxviii, 526 Glover, Edward, 237, 294n.7 Gore, Charles, 243-4, 243n., 295n.l3 Gousenko, Igor, 460,511n.l4 grace, 527; and Christianity, 60; and Platonism, 60; theological clarity and, 50 Graham, Billy (William Franklin, Jr), 177,181n.5, 217 Grant, George: 'Acceptance and Rebellion,' xxx, xxxiii, 528; beliefs of, 269; clash with professional philosophers, xxii-xxvii; critique of Berlin's 'Historical Inevitability,' 272-84; at Dalhousie University, xvii-xxi; on the Incarnation, 531-2n.20; method of teaching, xix; philosophical and religious conversion, xix-xx; on philosophy, 528-30; Philosophy in the Mass

Age, xxxi; poems, xxxiv; as public commentator, xxi-xxii; on religion, 526-8; theology of the cross,

553

64n.l4; 'Two Theological Languages/ xxviii-xxix; 'The Uses of Freedom: A Word and Our World/ xxviii-xxix; works (1950s), xxxiixxxiv; at York University (Toronto), xvii Grant, George Monro (grandfather), 32n.2,371n.; principal of Queen's University, 23 Grant, Sheila, xviii, xxxiii, 3-, 525, 531n.l7,543 Greek mythology, anthropomorphism of, 464 Green, T.H., 294n.3 Greenspan, Louis: and McMaster University, xx Gregory VII, 404n.l8 Guernica, 276, 298n40 Guitton, Jean, 530 Gzowski, Peter, 543 Halifax: drugs and teenagers in, 383-4; ethics in, 205 Halpenny, Viola, 538 Harnack, Adolph von, 63n.6,488; History of Dogma, 54

Harvard School of Business Administration, 196-7 hedonism, 201 Hegel, Georg W.F., xxix-xxx, 31,390, 531n.l6; Absolute Religion in, 498; on art, 261; cunning of reason, 341; on empiricism, 522-3; on existence, 522,523; freedom in the thought of, 222-3; Grant's comments on, 520-6; Grant's reassessment of, 401-2; and historical religion, 229-30n.; History of Philosophy, 246; Marx's criticism of, 228-9, 236; Marx's debt to, 352; owl of Minerva aphorism, 316,

554

Index

327,524; Phenomenology of Mind,

384,494-5; philosophic reconciliation of, 230; on philosophy, 262, 316; and Popper, 75-6; and Sartre, 291-3 Heidegger, Martin, 61,132,134n.2; Being and Time, 133; compared to Sartre, 285,285n.; existentialism of, 124,492-3; and Kant, 505; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,

516-17n.67; on Plato, 466-7; and Socrates, 61-2 Henry IV (Holy Roman Emperor), 404n.l8 Henry Marshall Tory: Beloved Canadian

(Corbett), review of, 95-8 Heraclitus, 467,470 Himmler, Heinrich, 40,47n.8 Hiss, Alger, 376,376n., 396,406n.33 historical man: assumptions of, 322; as the maker of history, 328-31; scientific society and, 340 history: concept of in North America, 329-30; Hegel on, 240; and its limits, 264; h.-making spirit, 364-5; man as the maker of, 265; as progress, 340-8; time as, 478 Hitler, Adolf: Mein Kampf 127 Hoffman, Paul Gray, 196,202n.3 Holbein, Hans: Descent from the Cross, 415-16,418 Hopkins, Harry Lloyd, 197,202-3n.4 Horowitz, Gad, 540 Howe, Clarence Decatur, 97,98n.5, 213,219n.5,393 Howe, Joseph, 206,218,219n.2 Hudson's Bay Company, 139,143, 147 Hiigel, Friedrich von, 453,510n.6 human existence: and existentialists,

125-6; and freedom, 158-9; modern man, 264-6 humanism, 67-8,339,347; agnostic, 72; from Catholic tradition, 373; existentialism and, 293; Grant on, 448; of Marx, 229,355-6,358; from Protestant climate, 373 humanist liberalism, 234 Hume, David, 222,271 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 128-9, 136n.6,246,295n.l7; theoretical Darwinism of, 226 immanentism, 247 immigrants: and Catholicism, 248; and educational tradition, 247-8; in Toronto, 192,248; and the U.S., 192,248 imperialism, and American power, 252 individualism, 251-2 industrialism, 7; and freedom, 320; repressive nature of, 321; and the self-made man, 251 industrial revolution, utilitarianism and, 88 Innis, Harold A., xxiii, 21n.7,32n.6, 111; Empire and Communications,

14,25 Institute of Child Study, 67,73n.3 investiture controversy (11th c), 344,404n.l8 Irving, John A., 537 Jackson, Robert H., 461,511-12n.l6 James, Henry, 260,409 James, William, 73n.2,301,406n.32; on Augustine, 113; pragmatism of, 67,319,373-8 Jaspers, Karl, 124,132,135n.2,493, 496,515n.54,526; Way to Wis-

Index dom: An Introduction to Philosophy, 444 Jerome, St, 477 Jesus Christ: meeting between Pilate and, 121; and Peter after the Resurrection, 379; significance of, 476-7; and Socrates, 61-2 Jewett, Pauline, 540 Jewish institutions, and Protestantism, 368 Jewish prophets, God of the, 342 Jews, in North America, 192. See also Judaeo-Christian tradition Joachim of Floris, 344, 404n.l8 John of the Cross, St, 326n., 477 Johnson, Dr, 390, 406-7n.40 Jones, Ernest, 237, 294n.5 Jordan, William George, 23-4 Jowett, Benjamin, 514n.41 Joyce, William (Lord Haw Haw), 460, 511n.l5 Judaeo-Christian tradition: idea of history, 345,356, 362; moral values of, 171,176 Judaic tradition, idea of history, 343 Julian, Flavius Claudius Julianus, 90n.2; and Plato, 78 Jung, Carl Gustav, 520; CBC Wednesday Night series, 538; versus Freud, 530n.2 Kant, Immanuel, 121,451-2; antinomy between the self and the world, 495-7; and Aristotle, 503; categorical imperative, 456,459; Critique of Practical Reason, 40,470; Critique of Pure Reason, 493-4,500; on freedom, 384; Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, 82, 383,444,

449; Grant's lectures on, 490-9, 499-506; as ontologist, 501-3; Pro-

555

legomena, 500; and subjectivity, 492-4 Kerouac, Jack, 390,407n.41 Kerr, Alex E., xvii, xxii, xxix, 222 Kertesz, Istvan, 441 Keynes, John Maynard, 88-9, 91-2n.l2 Khaki University, 95, 98n.l Khrushchev, Nikita, 363,405n.24, 421,422-3,424n.3 Kierkegaard, Soren, 134n.l, 242; existentialist, 124,126; and Protestantism, 242n.; and Socrates, 468 King, Martin Luther, 403n.l0 King, W.L. Mackenzie, 96,150-2 Kinsey, Alfred Charles, 201,203n.9, 258n. Kipling, Rudyard, 247, 296n.20 Kirke, Sir David, 138-9 Kitimat, 163,165n.l0 Knox, Sir Thomas Malcolm, 223, 293-4n.l Koninck, Charles de, 303,304n.ll Korean War, 73n.4 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 406n.39 Kroner, Richard, 531n.l8; Culture and Truth, 525-6 Labour Party, and Methodism, 246 Laird, John, 453, 510n.7 language: of the Bible, 51; of modernity, 61-2; moral, 372-3, 378; theological, 49-63 Laurier, Wilfrid, 149,153 Laval theologique et philosophique, 303

Laval University, teaching of philosophy at, 303 law: and freedom, xxxi, 379-88; judicial condemnation of the innocent, 375-7,395-6; limit in, 367;

556

Index

and natural law, 334; and progress, 379-88. See also moral law League of Nations, 154 Leibniz, G.W., 289; and subjectivity, 492 Leinsdorf, Erich, 441 leisure, 372; and education, 71-2, 255; freedom for, 158; in industrial society, 320; and technology, 171-2; and worship of dominance, 257-8 Lenin, Vladimir: materialism of, 361-2 Leo XIII: Aeterni Patris, 303,304n.l0, 501, 516n.60 Lever Brothers building, 260, 297n.27 Lewis, C.S., 475 liberal idealism, 301 liberalism, 24-5; decline of, 28-30; and Dostoevsky, 413-14; faith and reason, confusion of, 28; objectivity and detachment of, 27-8; as positivistic, 61; from Puritanism, 26; and Reformed theology, 54-5; theological, 23-4; as theology of technique, 399 Liberal party, 96,150-1,152-3 Lindsay, A.D., 512n.l8; The Two Possibilities, 461

Lodge, R.C., 301,304n.6 logic, principles of, 43 Lonergan, Bernard: Insight, 501 Longfellow, Henry Wads worth, 371, 405n.27 Lubac, Henri de, 416,419n.l0, 501 Luther, Martin, 10,242,313,345; and Erasmus, 452; on good and evil, 490; Heidelberg Thesis, 21st, 64n.l4; and Protestantism, 242n; rejection of Aristotelianism, 194, 243; at Worms, 341

Lutheranism, 31,369; mysticism in, 243 MacArthur, Douglas, 66,73n.l MacCarthy, Sir Desmond, 405-6n.30 McCarthy, Joseph Raymond, 105, 109n.6,266,394 McCulloch, Thomas, 206,219n.2 MacDonald, George, 339,339n., 404n.l6 Macdonald, John, 301,304n.6 Macdonald, Sir John A., 147,148, 149,153 MacDonald, Keith, 538,539 Maclntyre, Linden, 543 Mackenzie, Alexander, 143,148 Mackenzie, C.J., 165n.8 Mackenzie, William Lyon, 144 MacKinnon, D.M., 57,64n.l3,528 MacLaine, Shirley, 421,422-3,424n.3 McMaster University, and Louis Greenspan, xx Macmillan, Harold, 424n.2 McNaughton, A.G.L., 165n.8 MacPherson, Brough, 540 Malenkov, Georgi, 108n.l; atheistic materialism of, 101,426 Malik, Charles, 542 Mann, Thomas, 409,419n.3 Mannheim, Karl, 89-90n.l Manson, T.W., 55-6 Marcel, Gabriel Honore, 124,132, 293n., 299n.44,527,529,532n.28; Being and Having, 134n.2,521-2,

530n.5 Marcuse, Herbert, 222,294n.8; alienation and, 239; Eros and Civilization, 520

Marechal, Joseph, 501,516n.63 Maritain, Jacques, 130-1,136n.8,289 Marshall, Alfred, 25,32n.7

Index Marshall, George, 421,424n.4 Marx, Karl, xxix-xxx, 222,348; alienation and, 524; critique of religion and theology, 227-9; finite world of, 101; humanism of, 229, 229-30n.; on man's nature, 46; and modern culture, 324; and moral ideals, 205; philosopher of history, 350-2; and Popper, 75-6; proletariat and, 234-5,354; revolutionary prophecy, 230; as social theorist, 349, 349n. Marxism, 7,348-58; in Asia, 361; class struggle, 353; dialectical materialism of, 231-2,267; and economic prosperity, 160-1; failure of in the West, 358,359-61; finite ends of, 100-1; and history making, 266-8; power of, 356; of Sartre, 291-2; and scientific reformism, 196; and scientists, 249,356-7; and social engineering, 87; Trinitarianism and, 487; universalism of, 234; as Western philosophy, 329-30 Massey Commission Report, xvii,

xxii-xxiii Massey Lectures, 541-2 mass society, xxxi, 157-9; and mass education, 171; philosophy in the, 313-21; world of, 251 materialism, 361-3; of the expanding economy, 100-1,183; philosophy of, 527 Matthew, St (Gospel of), 489-90 Mauriac, Francois, 452,510n.4 Mead, Margaret, 67, 73n.3 medical profession, ethical standards of, 209-13 medicine, and science, 249-50 Meisel, John, 540 metaphysics: and the doctrine of

557

God, 387; Eros and Thanatos, 237-9; freedom of the will, 199-200; of Kant, 499-506; of law and freedom, 385; Popper's denial of, 81, 89; scientific and idealist, 24 Methodism: faith and inspiration of, 248-9; and Labour Party, 246; and theology, 50 Mill, John Stuart, 61,231,231n., 246, 271 Mills, Charles Wright, 268,298n.35 modernity: equality and liberty in, 255; language of, 61-2; in North America, 240-1 morality: American, 368-78; and freedom, 452; and natural law, 335-7; in Nova Scotia, 204-19; Popper's ambiguity on, 80, 84-5; principles of, 43-4; of salesmanship, 213; of scientific experiment, 255-6; and sexual conduct, 204-6. See also moral law; moral values moral law, xxxi, 24; abuse of, 384; Aristotle on, 333; justification of, 380-1; and pragmatism, 376-7, 396-7 moral philosophy, 398-9; on essays about, 311-13; Grant's reassessment of, 401-2 moral values: of efficiency, 213; medical doctors and, 211-12; of premachine Nova Scotia, 206-8; and secularizing of universities, 23—4 Morel, E.D., 38,41 Morgan, John Pierpont, 372,405n.29 Morgentaler, Henry, 543 Morrison, Herbert Stanley, 246, 295n.l8 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: Magic Flute, 336; review of works of, 440-2

558

Index

Murchison, Clinton William, 196, 202n.3 Mure, Geoffrey R.G., 223,293n.l Murray, John Clark, 303-4n.2; Outline of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, 300

mystery: and contradiction, 489; philosophy of, 527; of Socrates, 468-9 mysticism, 326,326n.; emerging of, 262 mythic consciousness, 321-31; in Greek drama, 325 Nagasaki, 276,298n.40 Namier, Sir LewisB.,271,298n.38; empiricism of, 272n. Napoleon, 40; and historical judgment on, 276 National Education Association, 176-8; Moral and Spiritual Values in the Public Schools, 171

National Electronics Conference, and bio-control, 366-7 National Research Council, 95,97, 162,165n.8 natural law, xxxi, 331-40; and ancient cultures, 325-6; and desegregation in the U.S., 331; European rejection of, 340; and morality, 338-9; truth of, 364-5 nature: and history, 387; man's domination of, 215-16,231,233,263, 353; philosophy of, 470-1 Nazis, 366 NDP (New Democratic party), 153 Neatby, Hilda, 161; So Little for the Mind, 103,108n.3,435 Necessary and the Good, the, 490; in the crucifixion, 483-90; Plato and, 482. See also Plato; reason neo-orthodox theology, 54-5,56

Newman, John Henry (Cardinal), 26 Newman, Peter, 543 new morality, principle of American power, 252 New Testament: idea of time, 479; Prodigal Son, 475 New Yorker, 321

Nichol, bp, 543 Nicholas II, 404n.l8 Nicholas of Cusa, 515n.51; and subjectivity, 492 Nicholson, J.W.A., 117,122n.l, 485, 528,532n.24 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 54,55,63n.7,87, 488; Nature and Destiny of Man,

114-15 Niemoller, Martin, 459,511n.l3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 61 nihilism, 448; Heidegger on, 466-7; of Sartre, 123 Nixon, Richard M., 396,407n.45 nominalism, Popper on, 81-7 North America: achievements of, 253-6; and concept of history in, 265, 328-9; elite of, 268-9; modern spirit in, 240; morality and, 368-78; scientific civilization in, 314; society in, 314n.; and state capitalism, 235n. North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, 155 Nuremberg trials, 460 Nygren, Anders, 55,63n.8,474 objective idealism, 300-1 obsolescence, economy of, 157-8 Ockham, William of, 85,90n.7 Oman, John: Grant's doctoral thesis on, xvii, xxvii Ontario Teachers' Federation, philosophy of education, 171

Index Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 117,249, 296n.23 Oradour, 136n.7; torture at, 130-1, 289 Origen, 90n.2; and Plato, 78 paganism, 30-1 Page, Hilton, 425 Papineau, Louis Joseph, 144 Parkinson, Joseph Frederick, 156-7, 164n.2 Parmenides, 464-6,467,470 Pascal, Blaise, 119-20,496,51516n.55 Passion, and the Godhead, 483-4 Paton, Herbert James, 504 Paul, St, 121 Peale, Norman Vincent, 56, 64n.l2, 163 Pearson, Lester Bowles, 97,153, 542; Nobel Peace Prize, 98n.5 Pelagian heresy, 419n.4 Pelagius: and Augustine, 452, 50910n.3; and the Passion of Christ, 484 Penfield, Wilder, 538 Phillips, Charles Edward, 105, 109n.5,188-9,189n.6, 435 Phillips, General, 156-7 philosophy: in Canada, xxiii, 12-13, 300-3; criticisms of, 120-1; and democracy, 70; of education, 171, 173-81,187-8; empiricism and, 271-84; ethics, 446-61; German, 352n.; Grant's commentary on, 116-22; of history, 263, 271-84; mystery of existence, 118-19,122; of Russell, 34,36-46; and scientific knowledge, 117; as a secular study, 10-11; teaching of in Quebec, 302-3; teaching of in universities,

559

4-5,15-16,17-19; and theology, 262; and wisdom, 116 Pike, James A., 420,423-4n.l Plato: allegory of the cave, 68,183-4, 431-2; and Augustine, 113; as a dualist, 77, 77n.; and the Good, 456,459,462,474,482; and grace, 60; and Grant, xix-xx, 402; in Greek history, 78-80; Grant's lectures on, 461-7,467-73; the Necessary and the Good, 482; paradoxes in, 462-4; Parmenides, 58, 78; Phaedo, 79, 326; on philosophy, 16, 118; Popper on, 75-89; rational theology in, 51-2; realism of, 82n.; Republic, 40,53,78,80-1,83,168-9, 326-7,337,444,445,462,488; society and the soul, 168-9; Symposium, 462-3; Timaeus, 473-6,488 Plotinus, 90n.2; and Plato, 78 pluralism, and North American democracy, 172 Point Four Programmes, 196,202n.2 political philosophy, 469 polytheism: attack on, 464; Greek, 79-80 Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 9,18 Popper, Sir Karl R., 271, 298n.38; on Athenian imperialism, 79n.; empiricism of, 272n.; historicism of Plato, 82-3; nominalism of, 82n.; The Open Society and Its Enemies,

75; social engineering and, 76,277 Porter, John, 539 positive law, and natural law, 335 positivism, 456-7; existentialist freedom, 61; linguistic, 199; philosophical school of, 7; refutation of, 455-9 Pottle, Herbert, 213,220n.7

560

Index

Pound, Ezra, 460,511n.l5 pragmatism, 262,301; critique of James and Dewey, 373-8; and education, 170; finite ends of, 100-1; and the idea of categorically wrong, 375-6,380,394,395; influence of, 199; of James and Dewey, 67; and knowledge, 431; and moral law, 396; in North America, 319; philosophical school of, 7 predestination, 244 Presbyterianism, 10; at Queen's, 301; and theology, 50. See also Protestantism Priestley, Joseph, 246,295n.l6 primitive man: ahistorical beliefs of, 265; and the sacred, 324 progress: dogma of, 22-3; idea of, 347; limits of, 358-67; Marx and doctrine of, 349 progressive enlightenment, 225 progressive social democracy, 55 progressivism, 270; of modern society, 386 proletariat. See Marx, Karl Prometheanism, 379 Protestantism, 527; in Canada, 30-1, 61; and Catholicism, 317; influence of, 242n., 369-71; and liberalism in England, 246; loss of direction of, 193; and manipulation, 201; and mass secular society, 163; nonintellectual control of, 70; of North American society, 241-6,369-71; in Nova Scotia, 206-7; and philosophy, 9-10,11; of Queen's University, 24; and science, 194-5, 245; and scientific mythology, 67; secularized, 61,368; Will of God and, 266, 371-2

Protestant Reformation, and adult education, 71 psychiatry, and religion, 211-12 Puritanism, 368-70; influence of in North American society, 193,241; influence of in Nova Scotia, 206; mystery of equality, 167-8; and scientific cosmologies, 26-7; truth and falsity in, 194 'Pursuit of an Illusion: A Commentary on Bertrand Russell' (Grant), xxv-xxvi Pythagoras, 467 Quebec Act (1774), 140 Queen's Quarterly, xxxii

Queen's University: philosophy at, 10-11,300; and separation from Presbyterian Church, 23 radicalism: theological, 50; truth of, 386 rationalism: of Descartes, 496; and freedom, 223; and man's conduct, 41 rational language, 51; use of word 'freedom,' 53 rational theology, xxviii-xxix; and problem of evil, 57 reason: and desire, 41,51-2; idea of the highest good, 43; instrumentalist view of, 319-20; and natural law, 334,337-8 rebellion: against evil, 225; Grant on, xxvii-xxix; against idea of God, 263; spirit of, 221-2 redemption: ethical theory of, 485-6; and evil, 291; and Freud's selfanalysis, 237 Red River Rebellion, 148

Index Reformation, 361, 363; and religious freedom, 345 Reformed Christianity, 55 Reformed Churches, 59 Reformed theology, 54-5 Regis, Louis-Marie, 303,304n.l2 religion: and ethics/freedom, 451-5; Marx's criticism of, 350-1; medieval period, 453; and societal values, 318-19 Remington, William Walter, 396, 407n.45 Reuther, Walter, 423,424n.7 revelation: and natural law, 332; and Protestantism, 85-6 Rhodes, Cecil, 246-7,295n.l9 Richelieu, Cardinal, 139 Riel, Louis, 148 Roblin, Duff, 541 Rockefeller, John Davison, 372, 405n.29 Roman Catholic church: in Canada, 30-1; and education, 31; and natural law, 331; and philosophy, 9,18, 302-3, 382n.; rational theology and, 55,59 Roman Catholicism: of Europeans, 241; Grant on, 448; and history, 266; and Kant, 500-1; and Protestantism, 368; and scientific reason, 194-5; to U.S., brought through immigration, 248 Roosevelt, F.D., 151, 461, 511-12n.l6 Rouault, Georges, 454, 510n.8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 61 Rudolf, Max, 441 Rue des Saussaies, 136n.7; torture at, 130-1, 289 Ruskin, John, 295n.l9 Ruskinian justice, 295-6n.19 Russell, Bertrand, 46-7n.l, 231n.,

561

271n.; contradictory principles of, 35-8; critique of, xxv-xxvi, 3446; empiricism of, 271 n.; A Free Man's Worship, 44; 'Gladstone and Lenin/ 38; History of Western Philosophy, 45; Living in an Atomic Age,

35,44-5; and modern culture, 324; on problem of conduct, 35-7,3944; on reason, 35,39-4,338; traditionalism of, 39 Russia. See Soviet Union St Francis Xavier University, 74n.6; 'Antigonish Movement/ 70 St Laurent, Louis, 152 Salinger, J.D., 403n.5; The Catcher in the Rye, 445; 'Zooey,' 321 Sandwell, B.K., xxiii Santayana, George, 253, 253n, 2967n.25,373,405-6n.30 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 54, 74n.8,222; and the absolute, 287,287n.; on accounts of torture, 286n.; atheism of, 124; Being and Nothingness, 132,

133; and Braithwaite, 290n.; CBC Wednesday Night series, 536; contradictions in, 131; empiricism and, xxx; The Flies, 129,132; Grant on, 123-34; and historical man, 284-93; humanism of, 380; life of, 127-8; and modern culture, 324; Nausea, 104,132; under the Nazis, 128; on negation and alienation, 133; philosophy of, 123-4; power of, 72; primacy of politics for, 291-3,291n.; Red Gloves, 132; religious belief and, 292-3; The Roads to Freedom, 127-8,132; What Is Literature? 130-1

scarcity: and class dominance, 353-4; and freedom, 254-5; and industrial

562

Index

civilization, 320-1; religious societies and, 365 scepticism: as foundation of tolerance, 394-5; Grant on, xxiii, 20; and Russell, 35-6,37-8; Socrates on, 40 Schelling, Friedrich von, 495 Schurman, J.G., 301,304n.4 Schurz, Carl, 248, 296n.22 science: and Biblical reformism, 249; domination of nature by man, 231; limits to, 257; and mass society, xxxi; and the problems of mankind, 425-30; and redemption, 231. See also nature

scientific humanism, 26-7; after 1918, 127; finite ends of, 100-1; and problem of evil, 130 secular humanism, 454 secularism: of Europeans, 241; of North American society, 193, 368-78; pagan, 31; Protestant, 241-2 self-consciousness: in ancient cultures, 323; of young people, 321 Selkirk, Lord, 143 Seth, James, 301 sexuality, 258n.; and acceptance, 258-9; and economics, 526; and the ecstatic, 259; and expediency, 397-8; and otherness, 201 Sifton, Clifford, 149 Skelton, O.D., 25,32n.5,97; Life of Laurier, 96

Skouras, Spyros P., 421,422-3, 424n.3 Smart, Christopher (Kit), 390,4067n.40 Smith, Donald (Lord Strathcona), 148 Smith, Logan Pearsall, 253,253n., 297n.25

social control, of means of production, 354 Social Credit movement, 153 social engineers, 86-9,86n. social equality, and democratic education, 167 socialism, 354 social sciences: and adult education movement, 67; and liberalism, 25; Popper and, 76; reason as, 319 society: church and state in, 172; forces that shape, 198-9; pleasure and force in, 202; repressive nature of, 228 sociological determinism, 77-8, 82 Socrates: Apology, 69,469; and beliefs of the ancient world, 328; and Christ, 61-2; and education, 68; and Platonic philosophy, 468-70; Popper on, 79,81; on scepticism, 40; trial and death of, 79 Socratic rationalism, Heidegger on, 62 Solandt, O.M., 97,99n.5 Sophocles, Grant's critique of Oedipus Rex, 325

Sorel, Georges-Eugene, 87,91n.l0 Soviet Union: American music in, 266n.; humanities in education, 305-8; and Marxism, 392-3; power of, 349; salvation through technology in, 426 Spencer, Herbert, 246, 295n.17 Spengler, Oswald, 82,90n.5 Spillane, F.H. (Mickey), 40,47n.9 Spinoza, Benedict de, 522,530-ln.7; and subjectivity, 492 spirit: of acceptance, 221; historical, 240-1, 329-30, 364-5; idea of, 183-4; of rebellion, 221-2

Index Sputnik, 309n.l; effect of on the West, 305-6,329,372 Stalin, Joseph, 349; historical judgment on, 276 Standard Oil, 421 Statute of Westminster (1931), 154 Steacie, E.W.R., 165n.8 Stern, Isaac, 441 Stewart, H.L., 301,304n.5 Stimson, Henry L., 511-12n.l6 Strauss, Leo, xx-xxi, 528; Thoughts on Machiavelli, 402; What Is Political Philosophy? 402

subjectivity, and subject-object distinction, 125,427-9 Taft, Robert A., Jr, 460-1,511-12n.l6 Tawney, R.H., 194,202n.l, 243,243n. Taylor, A.E., Does God Exist? 444, 445-6 Taylor, Charles, 540 Taylor, Edward Plunkett, 393, 407n.44 technology: dominance of, 398-9; and expanding economy, 257; god of, 29; Grant's reassessment of, 401; and leisure, 171-2; and mass society, xxxi; moral problems and, 214-16 Tennant, F.R., 56, 64n.ll Tertullian, 113,115n.3 theology: dependence of philosophy upon, 18-19; as faith seeking understanding, 49-50; means of communication, 50-1; modern criticism of traditional, 226-32; training for the ministry, 93-4; unbiblical, 56 Thomas, St, 52,55, 501 Thomas Aquinas, St, 9, 59,303,344 Tilley, Sir Samuel Leonard, 147

563

Tillich, Paul, 56, 64n.l0; Systematic Theology, 502

Timaeus (Plato): study of, 473-6. See also Plato Time magazine, and Sartre, 124 Tolstoy, Leo, 409 Toronto: culture of Canada, 315; immigrants in, 192,248 torture: in the name of progress, 366. See also Sartre, Jean-Paul Tory, Henry Marshall, 95-8,165n.8 totalitarianism, Popper on Plato and, 76-7,81 Touzel, Bessie, 538 Tovell, Vincent, 543 Toynbee, Arnold J., 82, 90n.4, 392; Study of History, 114-15 transcendence: agnosticism and, 612; and the Calvinists, 224; doctrine of, 58-9; of the Good, 488; and western peoples, 61-2 Trinitarianism, 455; doctrine of, 481-2,484,485-7 Trotsky, Leon, 200,203n.7, 377 Truman, Harry, 202n.2,511-12n.l6 truth: Biblical and secular division, 262; philosophy and, 121-2; pragmatists' definition of, 373-5,378 Tucker, Robert C, 405n.21 Tulle, 136n.7; torture at, 130-1, 289 Tupper, Sir Charles, 147 Union Nationale party, 153 United Auto Workers, 423,424n.7 United Church, 50; and Presbyterianism, 219; and salesmanship, 213-14 United Church Observer, on training for the ministry, 93-4 United Empire Loyalists, 140-1

564

Index

United Nations, Canada's role in, 155 United States: and the immigrant, 192,248; salvation through technology in, 426 universities: break between Protestantism and the, 197-8; and expanding economy, 162,169; as factories for technicians, 184; humane values of, 24; secularizing of, 23 University of the Air radio talks, Grant's response to listeners' letters, 388-98 University of Alberta, 95; adult education movement, 97; teaching of philosophy at, 301 University of Montreal, teaching of philosophy at, 303 University of Toronto: graduate school curriculum, 17; teaching of philosophy at, 300,302 University of Toronto Quarterly: the West and launch of Sputnik, 305-8 utilitarianism: of Bentham, 88; finite ends of, 100-1; of liberals, 26,29 Utopianism: and Freud, 238-9; humanist, 236; of Marx, 386; as totalitarian, 76 Van Home, Sir William, 148 Vinson, Frederick Moore, 336 Virgil, 112 Voltaire, Francois-Marie Arouet: Candide, 346 Voyer, Victorin, 538 war, individual and the state during, 459-61

War Measures Act (1914), 152 War of 1812,145 Watson, John, 11,20n.2,23-4,32n.3, 301 Weber, Max, 242n.; historicism of, 244n.; and worldly asceticism, 243-4,369 Weil, Simone, 109n.7,415,455,484, 529; and the faculty of attention, 107-8; purpose of existence, 380; on the void, 516n.57; Waiting on God review, 536 Weizsacker, Carl Friedrich von, 406n.38; The History of Nature, 388 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, 30, 32-3n.9 Wesley, John: theology of, 50 Westinghouse Company, Canada's Tomorrow, 159-60 Whitehead, Alfred North, xxiii, 20, 21n.8,56,64n.ll; Process and Reality,528 Whitehead, William, 543 Winters, Robert Henry, 213, 220n.5 wisdom, 116-17 Wisine, Natalya, 416,419n.8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 526 Wolfe, James, 140 Woodhouse, Arthur, xxiii, 21n.6; Puritanism and Liberty, 14 Wrong, George M., 24,32n4 Wrong, Humphrey Hume, 97,98n.5 Xenophanes, 464 York University (Toronto), xvii Zeno, 464 Zolf, Larry, 541,542