VOLUME V, NO.

2
JANUARY 9, 1952

GREAT QUESTIONS: VII

SINCE so much depends upon what man means
when he uses the word "soul," and since, with the
decline of dogmatic materialism and the increase
of interest in religious issues, the idea of soul is
gaining new prominence, the matter of what,
precisely, this word conveys, or ought to convey,
is a question of growing importance. From
general usage, it is plain that "soul" has become
one of the "all-or-nothing" words. With one
writer or speaker, reference to the soul may
indicate the acceptance of far-reaching moral
compulsions; with another, it may mean simply
that he speaks in an intellectually vague or even
frivolous mood.
Probably the most widely accepted usage is
that which intends "soul" to represent the more
elevated or "cultured" side of human pursuits,
including the arts, the sentiments, and the
sensibilities. "Recent psychology," as Webster's
tersely notes, "for the most part, dispenses with
the concept of the soul as an entity or explanatory
principle."
"Recent psychology," however, is very recent
indeed, and is far from persuading the great mass
of mankind that the idea of soul should be
abandoned. And even some psychologists who
were active during the period of the rejection of
soul took another view. One of these, William
McDougall, wrote in the first number of the
Journal of Parapsychology (March, 1937):
What are the relations of mind to matter? Are
mental processes always and everywhere intimately
and utterly dependent upon material or physical
organizations? Do the volitions, the strivings, the
desires, the joys and sorrows, the judgments and
beliefs of men make any difference to the historical
course of the events of our world, as the mass of men
at all times have believed? Or does the truth lie with
those few philosophers and scientists who, with or
without some more or less plausible theory in support
of their view, confidently reject well-nigh universal

beliefs telling us that the physical is co-extensive with

the mental and that the powers and potentialities of
mind may be defined by the laws of the physical
sciences?

The prevailing idea of soul, across many

centuries, has been in terms of an "explanatory
principle." In Webster's succinct definition, the
soul is "conceived as the essence, substance,
animating principle, or actuating cause of life, or
of the individual life, especially of life manifested
in physical activities; the vehicle of individual
existence, separate in nature from the body and
usually held to be separable in existence." For
those to whom the idea of soul is already quite
acceptable, and hardly needing, any defense, to
pursue the question further may seem
unnecessary.
Why not stop with Webster's
affirmation that the soul is the moral agent acting
from within the body, and that it is this soul which
is the real human being? The proper answer to
this question, we think, is that you cannot even
stay with Webster without going further. The
idea that the soul is the responsible being calls up
a number of other great questions for solution
unless, that is, one is content to rest with an
undeveloped conception of the soul as a mere
article of faith.
If, for example, the soul has an existence
independent of the body, what is its actual
relationship to the body, which relationship
obviously must exist? Has the soul any sort of
"anatomy" or metaphysical "physiology," or is it
no more than a bare abstraction incapable of
further analysis? If the soul is a free agent, how
free is it? What of the forces of conditioning the
sociologists tell us about? If our religion speaks
of freedom and moral responsibility, and our
science instructs in determinism and social
responsibility, how are we to relate these two
great groups of causes in human behavior? Is the
soul created or is it self-bornsui generis? Is the

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life of the soul static or dynamic? Is there

evolution of soul, or merely salvation? Are the
needs of the soul and of the body in conflict
essential conflictor have they a natural
harmony? Is soul a universal principle, or do only
humans "have" souls? And what about the
immortality of the soul? If a man dies, shall he
live again?
While no one religious tradition offers
complete answers to these questions, there is a
notable similarity of common beliefs about the
soul. In the words of a recent writer on this
subject, "Apart from the refinements of
philosophers and theologians, we find the popular
beliefs of all races and of all ages surprisingly
alike. Wherever we turnto Bantu Africa, to the
Indians of North America, to the pages of Homer
and Dante, or to the folklore of China and Italy
and Scotlandeverywhere we find the soul
regarded as a kind of airy, filmy double of the
body." This is clearly the doppelgnger of
Western psychic speculation, the "shade" of the
ancient Greeks, the ka of the ancient Egyptians,
the "astral body" of the Paracelsians, and the
orenda of the American Indians. It may even be
related to the "electrical architect" of the modern
students of morphobiology! This conception of
the soul as a luminous simulacrum of the body
survived in modern thought until about the time of
Descartes. For example, a French mystic of the
seventeenth century believed "that the body which
the soul parts with at death is only of the nature of
an outer bark or envelope, beneath which is a real
body of subtle matter to which the soul is
imperishably united." It was, he thought, "these
subtle bodies made visible which appeared to the
favored disciples who beheld Moses and Elias
discussing with Jesus at the Transfiguration."
While vulgar opinion among the ancient
Greeks distinguished between the physical body
and the psycheupon death the psyche speeding
to Hades for a shadowy existence, "destitute even
of the attribute of self-consciousnessthere is in
Homer a hint of another kind of soul than the
shade. In the eleventh book of the Odyssey,
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Odysseus speaks of seeing the shade of Hercules

in the Underworldbut this appearance he
declares
. . . a mere shadowy counterfeit
(He, the true form, among the gods of ease,
Wed to fair-ankled Hebe, still doth sit,
Feasting). While round him the dead pahntoms flit. . .

Plotinus makes of this passage an occasion

for discoursing upon the soul. The Shade of
Hercules in Hades, he points out, remembers only
events of life on earth, and is lacking in moral
judgment. What, Plotinus asks, would the other
Hercules saythe real soul of Hercules, freed of
the mundane influences now embodied by the
Shade? And beyond even the bliss of Olympian
existence is the Intelligible World where the valor
of Hercules will seem to him "trifling . . . when he
has risen over Hercules him self by the force
manifested in those struggles which are
characteristic of veritable sages."
(Fourth
Ennead, Book III, 27-32.)
In Western thought, when we arrive among
the Platonists, there is a distinct transition from
the "filmy double" idea of the soul to the
conception of soul as a moral agent, concerned
with "those struggles which are characteristic of
veritable sages." Plato and the Neoplatonists
made of the soul a warrior of the fight between
good and evil, and a quester after knowledge and
certainty. This idea of the soul is found preeminently in the Platonic mythsin the Phaedrus,
the Timaeus, and the tenth book of the Republic.
Plotinus, discussing the soul, undertakes to refute
some of the same doctrines of materialism which
were to dominate human thought some seventeen
hundred years later. Objecting to the Aristotelian
theory that the entelechy, or soul of the body, is
dependent upon the body for its existence,
Plotinus shows that were soul and body but
different aspects of the same thing, there could be
perception, but no intellection. For if, he says, the
body and the soul are really one, "there is an end
to the resistance offered by reason to the desires;
the total (of body and Entelechy-soul) must have

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one uniform experience throughout, and be aware

of no internal contradiction."
This is the classical criticism of all forms of
materialistic and monistic psychology. If mind is
but a function of body, exhibiting only responses
to physical stimuli, there can be no such thing as
thought, proper. A mind that is merely the reflex
of bodily activity can have no thoughts about the
body, because such thought is not independent,
but entirely determined by the body itself. It is
impossible for the Behaviorist to meet this
argument except by declaring himself independent
of the laws he has himself asserted. Unless this is
the case, he can tell us only things which are the
result of his own, unique, bodily stimuli. As
Plotinus puts it, "The very upholders of the
entelechy are thus compelled to introduce another
soul, the Intellect, to which they ascribe
immortality."
This is Aristotle's "Creative
Reason." Plotinus concludes this discussion with
a clear distinction between the Aristotelian
Entelechy-Soul and the Immortal Individuality of
the Platonists:
The substantial existence of the soul then, does
not depend upon serving as Form to anything; it is an
Essence which does not come into being by finding a
seat in body; it exists before it becomes also the soul
of some particular, for example, of a living being,
whose body by this doctrine would be the author of its
soul.
What, then, is the soul's Being? If it is neither
body nor a state nor experience of body, but it is act
and creation; if it holds much and gives much, and is
an existence outside of body; of what order and
character must it be?
Clearly it is what we describe as Veritable
Essence. The other order, the entire corporeal kind,
is process, it appears and it perishes; in reality it
never possesses acing, but is merely protected, in so
far as it has the capacity, by participating in what
authentically is.

Neoplatonic ideas of the relation between the

soul and the body are quite clear, at least
metaphysically. The soul, say both Plotinus and
Proclus, acquires its material envelope by
progressive steps of descent from its heavenly

Volume V, No. 2

origin; conversely, death is a process of release

from the weight of these earthly vehicles or
"bodies." As Proclus puts it, in Proposition 209
of his Elements of Theology:
The vehicle of every particular soul descends by
the addition of vestures increasingly material; and
ascends in company with the soul through divestment
of all that is material and recovery of its proper form,
after the analogy of the soul which makes use of it:
for the soul descends by the acquisition of the
irrational principles of life; and ascends by putting off
those faculties tending to temporal process with
which it was invested in its descent, and becoming
clean and bare of all such faculties as serve the use of
the process. (Dodds translation, Oxford, 1933.)

The Platonic soul is thus a striver after

perfection, an adventurer and a potential hero, like
Hercules of old. The "Christian" soul is a sinner
and a suppliant, a creature dependent upon the
will and grace of an outside power. For the
Greeks, and for the intellectual ancestors of Greek
philosophy and mysticism, further East, the
pursuit of knowledge about the soul was a form of
science, involving the strictest of discipline and
practical striving. But a science of soul could
survive the religious imperialism of medieval
Christianity even less than a science of matter. A
Galileo might be forgiven, but a Bruno, who tried
to revive the Greek teachings concerning the soul,
was made to perish at the stake.
The forefathers of modern materialism were
more careful in their formulations. They allowed
the Church full latitude in the realm of irrational
dogma, but meanwhile they pressed the authority
and governance of the laws of matter further and
further into the region of psychological
phenomenauntil, finally, with the success of
Darwinism and the intellectual defeat of
practically all the religious dogmas which had
pretended to "scientific" knowledge, the soul
could be denied altogether without disturbing in
the slightest any scientific doctrine or idea.
It was at this point in the history of modern
thought that "soul" became a term of mere poetic
licensea noun denoting the freedom of fancy or
the nuance of mood.

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January 9, 1952

Today, the temper of modern thought is

considerably different. We look with wonder at
the simple harmonious lives of peoples who have
not experienced our harrowing adventure with
dogmatic theology and who have escaped, also,
the materialistic reaction. We find such peoples
enjoying an enviable serenity of spirit, despite the
inroads upon their lives of Western civilization.
We are somewhat awed by the great philosophical
traditions of the Orient, where respect for life is a
central theme, and where the spirit of inward
devotion has never died away. Our doctors of the
mind work out from clinical experience formulas
for psychological recovery which are very like the
axioms of ancient philosophers of soul.
Meanwhile, even the greatest of our scientists
begin to think in the terms of ancient pantheism
Albert Einstein, for one, and Erwin Schroedinger,
for another.
And that latest branch of
psychological science, Parapsychology, or psychic
research, avoids overt expression of metaphysical
ideas only by practicing great self-denialout of
respect, of course, for the conventions of presentday scientific literature.
While these broad developments are
unfolding, the biologists, without even a casual
interest in metaphysics, seem to be building up,
step by step, a new version of the Aristotelian
"entelechy," or organizing principle or "bodysoul."
Somewhere, in some paper or article, it was
Dr. Julian Huxley, we think, who described a
remnant tribe of South American savages among
whom an odd custom was observed. These
natives would run for hours along a jungle trail,
then pause, all together, squatting on their
haunches for a considerable time. A curious
anthropologist, visiting among them, asked for an
explanation. "We are waiting," they said, "for our
souls to catch up with our bodies."
Just conceivably, the entire Western world,
without exactly knowing it, is now engaged in
such a period of waiting. It seems evident that a
bold, new philosophy of soul will not be

Volume V, No. 2

entertained for years to come; yet, on the other

hand, the obstacles to substantial moral
philosophy have today no more "body" than the
shades encountered in Hades by Odysseus. Both
theological dogma and scientific materialism are
but habits of mind, capable only of recalling the
past. They are shells of yesterday's conviction,
without either stature or dignity for thinking men.
Still, the processes of change in mass attitudes are
exceedingly slow. Another war, perhaps, might
accelerate the disillusionment and spur large
numbers of people to begin a fresh search for
moral certainty; but another war would also
reduce the greater part of the world to conditions
of barest survival, with consequent return to a
primitive level of existence.
We have not, simply, to revive the
philosophical ideas of the ancients, although that,
if we could do it, would be an extraordinary
achievementbut, also, to regain the depth and
profundity of ancient thought without losing the
breadth and scope of modern experience. In
Plotinus, for example, we have the sense of a man
who lived and thought with the idea of the soul as
primary reality always before him. Think of a man
who looks upon his fellows, not as rivals,
dependents, superiors, competitors, allies, or
enemies, but as intelligences, all upon a common
journey of soul evolution.
Whatever the
institutions of his time, and whatever ideas they
reflected. Plotinus created his own environment
of values and ideals. Closer to our own time,
there were the Emersons, the Thoreaus, and
Alcotts.; and more recently a Gandhi. All of
these, we may say, lived by, thought and practiced
a philosophy of soul.
This moving conviction can, apparently,
become the light in a man's life. It can scale his
judgments, animate his human relationships, and
raise by all these modes of living the level of the
lives of other men.

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January 9, 1952

Letter from

ENGLAND
LONDON.There has recently been published
here a biography that has had a notable success, It
is Leslie Stephen, by Noel Annan. Of course a
good biography, with a good subject, may always
hope for a generous reception; but in this case the
subject is a man whose name is now known and
remembered only by the elderly. And today
interest in him centers mainly upon his role of
iconoclast in an era of orthodoxy and intellectual
self-satisfaction. For Stephen was an Agnostic.
There were, of course, other Agnostics in those
piping times when the Thirty-nine Articles of the
Church of England were regarded as final and
absolute.
There was, for example, Charles
Bradlaugh, the English counterpart of Bob
Ingersoll, and others, such as Voysey, too.
Stephen, like Voysey, entered the Church of
England, being ordained soon after graduating at
Cambridge. He became a Fellow of his College,
and a tutor. But when he came to that point
where he could no longer believe, he left the
Church and became, if not its opponent, then most
certainly a deadly critic. This biography took me
to another half-forgotten book by Stephen himself
in which he tells of the intellectual difficulties that
induced him to forego the life of ease and cultural
opportunities that belong to an university
appointment and the easy money of a beneficed
parson.
He wrote: "The difficulty which finally upset
me was commonplace and prosaic enough. I had
to take part in services where the story of the
flood or of Joshua's staying the sun to massacre
the Amorites were solemnly read as if they were
authentic and edifying narrativesas true as the
stories of the Lisbon earthquake or the battle of
Waterloo, besides being creditable to the morality
of Jehovah. . . . Divines, since that day, have
discovered that it is possible to give up the history
without dropping a belief in revelation. I could
not then, as I cannot now, take that view." He

Volume V, No. 2

proceeds to refer to the terrible calamity loss of

faith in the absolute truth of the Scriptures was
considered to be, adding: "I have no such story to
tell. In truth, I did not feet that the solid ground
was giving way beneath my feet, but rather that I
was being relieved of a cumbrous burden."
The significance of the present-day
widespread interest in Stephen, I think, is due to
the intellectual sympathy he arouses today. Were
a masterpiece of biography to be produced with
Paley as its subject it could never have more than
a curiosity interest for those intrigued by the
spectacle of the successful fraud. (For Paley,
whose
Evidence
of
Christianity
every
undergraduate of Oxford and Cambridge had to
master, "lifted" the major part of that dreary work
from a contemporary German theologian and
writer.) But that is an aside.
Today that (Church which Stephen left on the
grounds that it propagated dogmas not only
dubious but repellent to any intellectually honest
man, is entering upon a phase of its history which
can fairly be described as a steady decline. There
are, I think, two explanations of this failureone
that becomes at every moment of national crisis,
more and more apparent. First, that its priesthood
is not a vocation, but a profession like any other
medicine, the Law and so onin contrast to the
Catholic Church, which draws on all strata of
society for its priesthood; secondly, because the
Church has, with a few exceptions (Inge and
Barnes, for example), firmly refused to bring
outworn and no-longer-tenable dogmas into line
with modern knowledge and modern philosophy.
The first factor, by introducing professionalism,
has expelled the spiritual force of the man with a
vocation, of the dedicated man, in the sense that
Albert Schweitzer may be regarded as dedicated.
The second factor has driven from the Church a
very large body of men and women who can no
longer believe its Creed or subscribe to its
dogmas.
The Church of England is a State institution.
It is exceedingly wealthy and the owner, through

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January 9, 1952

the Ecclesiastical Board, of about one-fifth of the

land of England. The beneficed parson enters into
a sinecure from which he can be ejected only for
the grossest immorality. He has security of
tenure, a certain income (sometimes too large,
sometimes too small). In Law he has only to
perform the Statutory services, or to delegate a
substitute to carry out this duty, in order to fulfil
the minimal require meets of his office. As
readers of Trollope will recall nobody thought it
curious or immoral that one of the high dignitaries
of Barchester Cathedral should reside permanently
in pleasant Italy.

The success of the present biography may, it

seems, be taken as an omen and a good one, too.
ENGLISH CORESPONDENT

Throughout the country the churches are

empty or nearly so. And so the Church is apt to
denounce the laity as godless and to lament the
decline of religion. Actually, this revulsion from
the absurdities, the contradictions and obscurities
of orthodox Church teaching indeed, of the central
Christian Dogmas altogether, is nothing new. It is
merely an historical trend which has become more
pronounced with the advance of education and the
new view of man of the Universe in which he finds
himself for some brief moment of Eternity. Only
in one way, in this writer's view, could the Church
redeem itself. First, then, by an act of selfimmolation, that is, by the surrender of its wealth.
Secondly, by an intellectually-honest restatement
of its teaching. There is no chance that it will take
either of these steps.
It is some time now since M. Loisy
characterized the Acts of the Apostles as little
better than a forgery, and a longer time still since
numerous scholars drew attention to the parallels
of Orphism and Christianity, but the official
Church remains where it was when Leslie Stephen
elected to leave it and devote himself to the truth
as he saw it. In his Agnostic's Apology your
correspondent found more intellectual sustenance
as a youth than he derived as a boy from the
dreary services and meaningless liturgy which
darkened his Sundays and piled up theological
rubbish in his mind that had, at some pains, later
to be destroyed.

Volume V, No. 2

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January 9, 1952

Therefore, it is treasonable to argue for pointed

lightning rods.

REVIEW
SEMANTICS AND SANITY
STUART CHASE, addressing himself to the
problem of "Language and Loyalty" in the
October Progressive, a worthy plea for
recognition of the immediate usefulness of wordstudy in untangling the contemporary political
schizophrenia. Mr. Chase illustrates his point
convincingly at the beginning of his article:
With the highly publicized investigations into
the loyalty of Americans, the term "guilt-byassociation" is becoming increasingly familiar.
Unfortunately, not everybody understands what it
means. I have seen letters in the newspapers from
angry gentlemen declaring that of course a person is
known by the company he keeps, and only agents of
Moscow would question the validity of guilt-byassociation.
The angry letter-writers have a point. A man is
known by the groups he frequents, and if they are
second-story men, we are quite justified in locking the
windows. But they miss the real point. I therefore
propose a change in the phrasing. A more accurate
term would be "guilty-by-verbal-association," for the
trouble is primarily word trouble, not physical
association. Here is a specific and notorious example,
put in the form of a syllogism to sharpen the logic:
Communists are in favor of government
housing.
Sen. Taft is in favor of government housing.
(His bill finally passed, you remember.)
Therefore, Senator Taft is a Communist.
This argument was actually used by embittered
members of the real estate lobby. It is, you see,
entirely a matter of words, and has nothing to do with
physical association.
The device is an old one. After Benjamin
Franklin discovered the principle of the lightning rod,
there was much heated argument whether sharp
points or round knobs were better conductors.
Franklin favored points, but George III belonged to
the knob school. The King urged Royal Society in
London to rescind its resolution in favor of points, on
the ground that Franklin was a leader be insurgent
American colonists and so a traitor!
Franklin favors pointed lightning rods.
Franklin is a rebel and a traitor.

Volume V, No. 2

By the use of similar syllogistic devices Chase

is able to prove that Senator McCarthy is a
Communist, that Stalin is a Catholic and that the
Pope is a Stalinist. (If such treatments amuse and
delight you as much as they do us, you are invited
to procure and enjoy further details in the October
Progressive). But Chase is trying to do much
more than amuse ushe is attempting to awaken
us to our appallingly sloppy habits of critical
analysis. Chase is a devoted semanticist, his
popular Tyranny of Words having for many years
made it clear to the layman that it is better to use
no language at all than to use it inadequately.
Many have doubtless felt that "semantics," as
defined by leading exponents such as Hayakawa,
in Language in Action, and subsequently by
Wendell Johnson's People in Quandaries, is a
science much too dull and complicated, if it be a
science at all. Sometimes the semanticists, too,
seem to be excessively wordy, as one may verify
by a perusal of the Journal of General Semantics.
Other critics feel that the extreme care shown by
semanticists to avoid the vagueness of
"imponderables" has led them to also avoid most
of the issues which most vitally concern men
issues involving "ultimate principles," ethical
values, etc. Mystics and religionists, we think,
have ground, too, for objecting to the theme that
nothing is worth talking about unless it is
"precise." But, when all these partially derogatory
remarks have been made, there is still a
considerable residue of value in what the
semanticists have been contending, especially in
relation to understanding the meaning of
"scientific method."
Johnson's People in Quandaries emphasizes
this point:
We may say, in briefest summary, that the
method of science consists in (a) asking cleat
answerable questions in order to direct one's (b)
observations, which are made in a calm and
unprejudiced manner, and which are then (c) repotted
as accurately as possible and in such a way as to

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January 9, 1952

answer the questions that were asked to begin with,

after which (d) any pertinent beliefs or assumptions
that were held before the observations were made are
revised in light of the observations made and the
answers obtained. Then more questions are asked in
accordance with the newly revised notions, further
observations are made, new answers are arrived at,
beliefs and assumptions are again revised, after which
the whole process starts over again. In fact, it never
stops. Science as method is continuous. All its
conclusions are held subject to the further revision
that new observations may require. It is a method of
keeping one's information, beliefs, and theories up to
date. It is, above all, a method of "changing one's
mind"sufficiently often. . . . The language of
science is the better part of the method of science.
Just so, the language of sanity is the better part of
sanity. . . .
Science as method in this general sense need not
be confined to laboratories. It is not something that
can be used only by men in white coats, wearing
goatees, squinting at test tubes, and speaking sixsyllable words in a strange dialect. It may be thought
of simply as organized common sense. It is the
method whereby ordinary individuals in their daily
lives may forestall shock and disappointment, avoid
or resolve serious conflicts, increase their efficiency
and zest for livingin short, live sanely.
Calling it common sense might be a mistake. It
is simple sense, but it may not be very common. It
tends to be very obviousonce stated or
demonstrated. It is so obvious that one has to be
extremely careful not to ignore it. Scarcely anything
is more difficult to learn than something that is
obvious. It is very much like trying to learn nothing
at all, and it requires tremendous alertness to learn
nothing. For example, most people, according to
experienced swimming teachers, find it very difficult
to learn how to floatapparently because there is
nothing to learn. You don't do anything in order to
float. What you have to learn is to do nothing that
would keep you from floating. . . . Most of us seem
not to realize the extent to which we learn
misinformation and adopt unsound theories. A bright
child can be trained to act quite stupidly. . . . The
psychiatrist, Dr. Adolf Meyer, of Johns Hopkins
University, has said that what ails most people is not
that they are ignorant but that they know too much
that isn't so. For such people, the better part of
further learning is forgetting, and forgetting of welllearned misinformation and inefficiency is not easy as
a rule.

Volume V, No. 2

The view of "true science as method" is the

semantic view. And, when we come to think of it,
it is easy to see that most of the difficulties and all
violent divergences of' the world very largely
result from methods of thought and social action,
which are the proven essence of whatever beliefs
actually exist, and which are sometimes quite
different from professed beliefs.
Totalitarianism is a violent method for the
application of the doctrine of environmental
determinism. Roman Catholicism, in its most
reactionary aspects, is also a method employing
violence. The exploitations of Capitalism, too, are
matters of "violent" method. Conversely, the
socially progressive forces are characterized by
their methods, and these are characteristically
"non-violent," or persuasive. Now, while each
segment of persons or opinions involves formal
content of thought, as well as the method chosen
for its promulgation, the area of method is where
intelligent discussion and debate may most
logically be able to take placeif we can agree on
the necessity for a consciously formulated science
of desirable method.
Each method of political or religious
promulgation, of course, has its own form of
implicit metaphysics in terms of the principles
invoked, and this metaphysics is bound to be
related to the content of belief.
Yet
"methodology" can nonetheless be profitably
discussed and argued in terms of the immediate
social context, as well as in terms of "ultimates."
For such discussion the study of semantics can
indeed be useful.

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COMMENTARY
THE REAL ISSUE
A REALLY crucial consideration, it seems to us,
is the relationshippossibly an interdependent
relationshipbetween the idea of the soul
discussed in this week's lead article and the
problem of civil liberties dealt with in Frontiers.
Modern liberalism of the Nation and New
Republic school ignores this relationship entirely,
and as a result the penetration of its analyses and
criticism suffers accordingly.
This is equivalent to proposing that the
foundation of freedom lies in the idea of self. The
psychiatrists, although they do not as a rule
employ the libertarian vocabulary, have been
saying this, or something like it, for several years
now; and while the psychiatric conception of "the
soul" is empirical rather than metaphysical, this
psychiatric version of the self is by no means in
conflict with philosophical ideas of a very ancient
origin on the subject.

All national institutions of churches, whether

Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other
than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave
mankind, and monopolize power and profit. . . .
Infidelity does not consist in believing or in
disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what
[one] does not believe.

It was the moral vigor of men like Paine

which brought the United States and its principles
of freedom to birth A similar moral vigor, founded
on principles as profound or even profounder, will
be needed for the rebirth of the love of freedom,
and for the rebirth of the moral discipline that is
needed to transform that devotion into institutions
which honor freedom above all.

Quite possiblyand we should like to

propose it as a probabilitya genuine renaissance
of liberal thought will come only as a result of the
inspiration of intensive thinking about the human
soul, with consequent development of a new
moral psychology, which will, in turn, be amplified
in terms of its social implications into a new
political credo.
It may be noted, at this point, that the
Founding Fathers of the United States were nearly
all representatives of the Deist tradition. Freethinking religion was a vital force in all their
declarationsincluding the Declaration of
Independence. Deism was a religion of individual
responsibility and individual moral authority, and
its advocates, inheritors of age-old metaphysical
ideas which had come to them through later
thinkers of a Stoic and Platonic cast of mind, were
determined to put their convictions into practice.
Thomas Paine, for example, wrote in The Age of
Reason:
. . . My own mind is my own church.

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CHILDREN
. . . and Ourselves
THE debate on religious education in the public
schools continues to be a warm one, occasionally
publicized by such episodes as Vashti McCollum's
defiance of the released time" religious instruction,
or the opposition in the California State
Legislature to tax exemption for private religious
schools. But there is another phase of the subject,
having to do with the casual, even sometimes
unwitting, indoctrination in Christian belief which
filters into American instruction of the young.
If your kindergarten-aged child has never
brought home from school the solemn information
that "Jesus loves us," you are likely, at some time,
to share this experience with some other parents,
unless your community runs out of kindergartners
before the law of averages asserts itself. For,
despite the Constitutional safeguards against
official preference for any particular religious
creed, many teachers have obviously felt it their
clear duty to uphold Christian tenets, either by
insinuation or by matter-of-fact asides in the
course of the school day. While a teacher's "Jesus
loves us" hardly appears to be dangerously
"theocratic," thoughtful agnostics and students of
comparative religion will point out that this
formula infuses school life with an atmosphere of
special pleading for a special theology.
So far as we know, only a few anti-religious
fanatics would object to the legend of Jesus,
portrayed as a great, good, and knowing man.
The ethics of the Sermon on the Mount are
universal, and if studied may lead to a better
comprehension of the ideals behind all the
humanitarian formulations of creed in history. To
say that Jesus "loved everybody," similarly, cannot
be amiss, for even if the Prophet of Nazareth be
considered as only a legend, he would still
legitimately symbolize the power of a man to
conquer hate and fear in himself and to illumine
his life with compassion.

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Yet "Jesus loves us" is quite a different

matter, having reference to the presumed
existence of Jesus as a super-natural being,
existing in a separate world of his own, and
enjoying separate and miraculous powers. If Jesus
was a man, however "superhuman" a man, then
that inward power which made the Christ great
can make us great also. But if he is something
other than man, a unique creation, or the only
"son of God," his greatness and compassion serve
only to emphasize our own inferiority and innate
insufficiency.
We wonder if the many sincere kindergarten
and primary school teachers who think they are
giving the best they know to the children, via
simple repetition of Christian teaching, can ever
understand why agnostics take offense. It may
even be necessary for such agnostics occasionally
to pretend that they are Buddhists or
Mohammedans or Confucianists, in order to make
clear the fact that there are many different
approaches to religious and ethical verity, and that
the Christian approach is by no means the only
one which can be regarded as inspiring. "Jesus
loves us" unmistakably implies an ex elusively
Christian, even a partisan, doctrine, while belief in
the existence of Jesus as a Great Teacher of
humanity may easily become, and has often
become, common ground for Buddhists,
Mohammedans, Hindus, Tibetans and Christians.
One of the first Christian (Catholic) travelers
to Tibet recounted in detail the reception of his
own religious pronouncements, uttered in hope of
conversion. He found the Tibetans quite willing
to accept the reality of various forms of truth in
the new religion, and quite willing to respect the
objects of Western religious veneration. The
Tibetans had no difficulty in moving their own
religious traditions over a bit to make room for
others, recognizing in them all the presence of
universal symbolism. But the travelling Abb Huc
saw in this friendly hospitality only an opportunity
to press his own claims more strenuously, thinking
that "conversion" of the Tibetans to the arbitrary

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insistence of his own Church would be easy. The

Tibetans, of course, refused to succumb, finding it
difficult of comprehension that anyone should
actually believe that his truth was the only truth.
Many of the dark-skinned peoples of the East
seem to have a far better understanding of the
principle implied in the American Constitution in
respect to religion than have those of our wellmeaning elementary teachers who reflect navely
partisan Sunday-School backgrounds. Of course,
it is not the occasional use of a Bible story, nor its
dramatization in such recent motion picture
extravaganzas as Samson and Delilah and David
and Bathsheba which will irk the agnostic, but
merely the surrounding atmosphere of attitude and
belief. Any story, just as any legend or symbol,
can have deep psychological meaning, but if it is
related to some doctrinal absoluteif it involves
supplication or blind subservience to an external
powerwe have immediately entered the area of
sectarianism.

type of religious bias in their conduct as public

servants.
For our PTA suggestion of the year, we
submit the topic of "Religion and Religions in
Relation to our Children," for at least a ten-week
seminar. From an educational point of view, no
religious beliefs can be taken for granted,
certainly not our own, which we usually tend to
accept categorically, nor those of others, which
we tend as categorically to reject. Excellent
background reading for such discussion would be
Eric Fromm's Psychoanalysis and Religion, and
Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand
Faces, the latter suggesting the possibility of a
common ground upon which all beliefs may be
given respectful attention, but none erected as
imperative fact.

Lack of sophistication in respect to a number

of the world's great religionssuch as could be
accomplished by impartial and appreciative
comparisonhas caused most of us to accept
innumerable "Christian" provincialisms. The habit
of provincial thinking, in turn, may have serious
political consequences. An implicit theocracy is
not essentially different from an explicit
totalitarianism. The process of turning clichs of
political faith into militant righteousness should be
familiar enough to us, today, while the
documented history of past religious wars
provides justification for a wholesome distrust of
blind dogmas of any kind.
Though public school teachers may play but a
small part in perpetuating religious factionalism,
we suggest that all agnostic parents look for ways
in which they can courteously draw this point to
the attention of the public schools. Of one thing
we are positive: we cannot trust the reports of
teachers as to the reactions of their pupils to
opportunity for "religion in the schools" unless
those teachers have proved themselves free of any

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FRONTIERS
Training in Principles
A RECENT decision by the Supreme Court of
Westchester County, New York, illustrates the
sort of problem which confronts the judicial
system of the United States, as a result of the anticommunist hysteria which has swept the land. In
this case, the Court ruled that the so-called
"Peekskill riot ordinances," passed by Courtlandt,
N.Y.,
are
either
partially
or
wholly
unconstitutional.
Doubtless, the town fathers of Cortlandt are
puzzled by the decision of Justice Robert Doscher.
It may be assumed that they felt they were giving
expression to "true Americanism" in making laws
designed to prevent a repetition of events such as
the notorious Peekskill Riots, which occurred on
the two occasions in 1949 when Paul Robeson,
noted singer and outspoken sympathizer with the
Soviet cause, was to perform there.
The first of the ordinances adopted by the
town council, shortly after the riots, required that
application for a permit to hold a parade,
demonstration or public gathering be made seven
days before the scheduled date of the event. The
second ordinancea "prohibitory ordinance"
forbade acts which would disturb the public peace
by causing consternation and alarm.
Regarding the face value of these measures,
and without considering their implications, a
citizen might easily be persuaded that they could
hardly fail to serve the public good. Justice
Doscher, however, accepted the arguments of the
American Civil Liberties Union that the
ordinances are unconstitutional.
The first
ordinance he held to be illegal on the ground that
it set no standards for the issuance of a permit,
noting that "the grant of such uncontrolled
discretion invades constitutional rights."
In
outlawing the prohibitory feature of the second
ordinance, the Justice observed: "It is almost
impossible to envisage where the heritage of
protest ends and the violation of this ordinance

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begins." He thought that it might be made to

apply to a "group of citizens standing on a street
corner and deciding to breach the provisions of a
burdensome tax ordinance." "Such dragnets," the
Justice declared, "must be declared void."
What has to be realized, in reflecting upon
this decision, is that it ought not to be taken as an
approval of "consternation and alarm," or a
favorable attitude toward assemblies which seek
to break down the processes of law enforcement.
Rather the decision was reached out of a high
regard for the right of citizens to take steps of
protest against the exercise of excessively unjust
authority. Every repressive measure in the form
of law has within it the potentialities of tyrannical
authority. As Woodrow Wilson once observed:
The history of liberty is the history of the
limitation of governmental power, not the increase of
it. When we resist concentration of power we are
resisting the powers of teeth, because concentration of
power is what always precedes the destruction of our
liberties.

The duty of a judge on the bench, then, in the

United States, is not to approve laws because they
have been passed "for a good purpose," but to
weigh each measure that comes before him in
terms of its full implications.
The maintenance of enlightened public
opinion in this area of public affairs is a
continuous and continuously difficult task.
Fortunately, there are jurists in all parts of the
country who are thoroughly aware of the
importance of public education on the subject of
liberty, and who are willing to speak their minds.
In Los Angeles, for example, Chief Judge Leon
Yankwich of the federal district Court recently
addressed a Bill of Rights Week audience in his
courtroom with these words:
The test of the rule of law is the manner in
which we, as judges, see that it is applied to those
who come in conflict with the law. If we live up to
this spirit, then our profession of faith in
Americanism will not be merely an empty gesture,
repeated on national holidays or to satisfy those who
think that it is enough to profess belief, but a living,

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working philosophy. For the test of our loyalty to

American principles must be the way in which in our
daily lives we personify them.
In this way, we pay real homage to those who
gave us the Bill of Rights and lay a foundation for its
further unfoldment and adaptation to a richer, better
America.
Lincoln, addressing the Congress, in 1861, in
the early days of the Civil War, asked the question:
"Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal
weakness?"
The answer is No. The Bill of Rights does not
stand in the way of protection against real danger.
But we should not undermine its broad guarantees by
resorting to totalitarian methods, impelled by illusory
fears. Surrender of liberty is not a necessary price to
pay for our attempt to preserve it.

It takes a certain courage to ask a question

like Lincoln'sto look at the "republican" form of
government in a questioning mood, as though to
say, "Perhaps, if this fatal weakness does exist, we
should exchange our form of government for
another." To do this amounts to declaring that
governments are made by men, not men by
governments. It is to say, further, by implication,
that the best possible government is that
government which not only permits, but
facilitates, questioning of this sort.
But if a government so "conceived in liberty"
loses its savor and begins to seem burdensome in
operationwhat then?
When this happens, we can either look for the
"fatal and inherent weakness" in ourselves, or we
can weaken correspondingly the principles of our
government so that they will support our new
"ideal"the ideal of timid security behind the
barricade of unquestioned authority. Worst of all
would be to choose the latter course, while
imagining that we defend thc high principles
cherished by men like Abraham Lincoln.

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January 9, 1952