HANOVER BROWSING

NOT LONG AGO I saw a reference to two women discussing what books had helped them the most. In the midst of the discussion a third woman appeared and on being asked the book which had been most helpful to her, she replied "My husband's bank book."

Without questioning the value of bank books I intend in this article to draw attention to books read this summer on the more immaterial questings of man. In these NRA days these questings may or may not have much of a lure. But in the history of mankind they are important. Civilization to some extent depends upon them, and may be defined by reference to them. Lessing remarked once: "Did the Almighty, holding in his right hand Truth and in his left Search after Truth, deign to tender me the one I might prefer, in all humility, but without hesitation, I should request Search after Truth." The search after truth or rather truths is the motive of much of the most fruitful work that is being done in science and philosophy. Man is at his best in such a search.

Someone has said that "On earth, there is nothing great but man, and in man there is nothing great but mind." Being a man perhaps it is not for me to question this consoling aphorism. The questing mind of man is undoubtedly a noble thing. But the search after truth is only one of our difficult questings. Equally significant is the quest after beauty in its varied incarnations. And despite the prejudice of academicians in favor of the search for truth, or of creative artists of the search after beauty, the quest after goodness is also of great significance. Man's poignant search for God is likewise an important part of the human story. It is true that these questings are stifled often by our more urgent passional and material questings. The imperative necessities connected with the evangel of "What shall we eat, what shall we drink, and what shall we put on" tends to crowd out "the kingdom of God and His righteousness." It also comes between us and the kingdom of truth and beauty and the good life. Man by his nature and culture is a citizen of all these kingdoms. That is a part of the tragedy and the comedy of life.

However, in this issue I shall ignore the sensual and the economic questings of man. I shall limit myself to those which have produced our sciences, arts, philosophies and religions. Not that these are unrelated to our material interests. But to try to follow out the connections between them would take me too far away. I confine my remarks, therefore, to the sort of questings discussed in Professor Overstreet's The Enduring Quest. I can recommend this to those who have not yet read it. I recommend also, with reservations, a book which appeared this summer by C. C. Jung on Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

IN THE JUNE issue of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE dealt with recent books on science and philosophy. Most of those mentioned concerned themselves with the accretions of new knowledge in physics and biology. They described and interpreted the new facts and data, and the changing concepts and redefinitions which have characterised the advances made in these sciences in the last thirty years. Some of the authors described these changes in revolutionary terms, but others were more modest in their linguist claims.

This month it is with the philosophical and religious implications of this new knowledge I shall write about. The growth of science is not merely a matter of adding to our systematic knowledge. Science has immense effects on our ways of living as well as on our general ideas and beliefs. The practical effects consequent upon the application of scientific knowledge to the subjugation of our environment in order, as Bacon phrased it, to "come to the relief of man's estate" are only one part of the story. These are direct and revolutionary in their nature. They have changed our ancient agrarian culture into the highly complex, industrialised, urbanised, technological, interdependent and confused thing it is today. But the effects on our traditional views and philosophies are more indirect yet not less unsettling. In both of these directions science has been the most revolutionary force in the modern world, although the effects of its operations have not worked themselves out completely. This is not the fault of science. We cannot blame science and its offspring technology for the present state of the world. Neither science nor the machine is responsible for our bungling inability to use fruitfully its inherent possibilities. In and of themselves both science and technology are capable of being man's most helpful servants. They are agencies of hope and promise in modern civilization. So far, however, the uses men have made of them have not been altogether to the good. We have misused them, or rather we have used them for the wrong purposes. And it is these misuses and abuses of science and the machine which give point to contemporary criticisms.

The economic confusion of the contemporary world is charged against science and technology by many critics. The depression is viewed by some as the price we pay for scientific and technological advancement. And if the practical effects have produced such a huge volume of unrest and confusion, the effects on the immaterial aspects of modern civilization are still more chaotic. We are passing through one of the worst crises in industrial history, but its counterpart in the world of ideas and beliefs is equally serious. This may be called a cultural depression. As such it is of longer duration and greater intensity than the economic. We have been in this cultural depression for many years. Indeed it has become chronic. And no President Roosevelt or "brain trust" or General Johnson has appeared yet with a helpful code or a Recovery Act! Man) critics see the corrosive effects of science on the body of our traditional beliefs, and consequently they view it with distrust as a disintegrating force. Indeed one may say of both the critics of science and technology that they see clearly their disintegrating effects but that they are blind to the new integrations in process of formation under the influences of the same forces. They see clearly the tearing down of the old Butterfields but they do not see the new Baker Memorial Libraries which are going up in their places.

The disintegration and the tearing down are real in the world of ideas and traditions. Evidence of this is found in the disillusionment which finds expression so poignantly in modern literature. One has only to read a book like Our Neurotic Age —edited by Schmalhausen—to glimpse some of its forms. In this respect the book is deserving of a close study in spite of its unevenness and lack of balance. I would say that some parts of the book are as neurotic as the age.

A more philosophical expression of pessimism is found in The Modem Temper by J. W. Krutch. His pessimism is unrelieved by any rays of hope. Nevertheless he has tried to make a philosophy out of it. It is grounded in his conviction that science and the world of man's ideals and values are irreconcilably opposed to each other. He postulates a gulf between man and his hopes and ideals and nature and its processes and facts. "The structures," he says, "which are variously known as mythology, religion, and philosophy, and which are alike in that each has as its function the interpretation of experience in terms which have human values, have collapsed under the force of successive attacks and shown themselves utterly incapable of assimilating the new stores of experience which have been dumped upon the world." Man, to him, is the most miserable of all animals, for in him the instinct of life is able to ask the fatal question, "Why?" But nature has no satisfying answer.

Human values find no support from nature. The universe is indifferent to them. They constitute a little world of their own—man's helpless little world. Nature is ruthless to man's ideals. And even man's faith in his own values is dying too. Science has revealed to him how shallow and trivial they are. This philosophical pessimism of Krutch is uncon- vincing to me. It is too extreme. The forbidding dualism he postulates between nature and its processes and man and his values is not grounded in reality. It is an artificial severance. Man and his ideals are an integral part of nature. They have come out of nature and are in vital touch with nature. To that extent at least nature is not indifferent to his values.

THIS POSITION of Krutch reminds me of Bertrand Russell's expression of a somewhat similar pessimistic mood in his essay on The Free Man's Worship. However, Russell does not allow nature to flatten out the free man as completely as Krutch appears to do. Russell is defiant of nature, and on a foundation of the unyielding despair engendered by nature he builds a temple of worship for his own ideals. I think Krutch's pessimism is as difficult to accept as the jauntiest of optimisms. To me there are too many massive miseries in this world to warrant me in being an unflagging optimist. Before one could be such, one would have to shut one's eyes to a large part of human suffering. On the other hand there is too much goodness and joy and beauty in life to justify one in being a dismal pessimist. One would have to overlook all of this side of life to be so. The perky optimist and the jaundiced pessimist have distorted visions. Both have magnifying glasses which they are wont to use when they view the world. One magnifies the goodness and beauty of the world, the other the pain and the evil. Both live in an unreal world and both refuse obstinately to see the facts militating against his own particular theory. Both falsify the facts of existence. Both misunderstand nature and her creative processes, and both blunder miserably in reading the riddle of life. Because the universe is not perfect but has flaws in it, and because life is not ideal but has evils in it, one concludes it is all flaws and evil; and because the world possesses some good and life some beauty, the other concludes it is all good and beautiful.

To me both philosophies of optimism and pessimism are adolescent if not infantile. Both attach too much importance to our clamant desires and strident wishes. Both tend to make us prisoners of our desires, and pander too much to our egoistic demands on nature and life.

A different type of pessimism is seen in two books by Freud on The Death of anIllusion and Civilization and Its Discontents. In The Death of an Illusion, Freud assumes that in the past religion reconciled or compensated man for his instinctive sacrifices in living in a social order. Here the discord is between man and his sensual instincts and society and its demands and disciplines. This is in line with Freud's general interpretation of the compensatory and sublimatory nature of human activities as embodied in art, science, philosophy and religion. It contains an element of truth but it is too fragmentary. It is not so much false as inadequate.

A great deal of modern literature also reflects this pessimism and scepticism.

OF COURSE it is not fair to science and technology to attribute too much of this disillusionment to their influence. It is true they have had a lot to do in making the civilization in which these reactions are prevalent. The trouble is partly due to the fact that many artists accept science intellectually but reject it emotionally. They are intensely sensitive to its effects in upsetting traditional faiths and creeds but rather insensitive to its message of hope and liberation. But the changed mood of science seems to be more favorable to a living faith than was the mechanistic naturalism of the past. This is the impression left on my mind by the best of the books I read this summer. Especially was this the case with the following: Joad. Faber and Faber. 2. The New Background of Science, Sir James Jeans. Macmillan and Cos. 3. Is There a God?, Professors Wieman, Macintosh, and Otto. 4. Adventures of Ideas, A. N. Whitehead. Macmillan Cos.

5. The Meaning and Truth of Religion, E. W. Lyman. Charles Scribner. 6. Scientific Theory and Religion, E. W. Barnes. Macmillan Cos.

I can recommend all of these books. In all of them Huxley's "advancing tide of matter and tightening grasp of law" are felt to be less oppressive than it was in the nineteenth century. Joad's Guide toModern Thought is a popular treatment of the subject. To the non-technical student of modern thought it has merits. He gives a clear exposition of the recent happenings in physics as well as in biology and psychology. He does not make too much of the world of physics—a common weakness in the popular philosophising of writers like Jeans and Eddington. One must consult biology, psychology, and the social sciences in addition to physics before one can get a clear picture of our total knowledge of the world and of man.

Jeans' recent volume on the New Background of Science is his best. He has done a better job in it both in exposition and interpretation than in his earlier works. Yet the old weaknesses of Jeans are in evidence here also. His scientific philosophising is shaky in parts. He has a tendency to build his philosophy on gaps in our knowledge, and his facility in using illustrations leads him to over-simplification and over-emphasis. He is a stimulating writer but not too rigorous a philosophic thinker. The implied idealistic elements in his former books are more fully stated in the present volume. But they fail to carry conviction to me. They are of great interest because they disclose the trend towards idealism in modern physics. This idealism of Jeans comes out in his interpretation of the laws of nature as statistical in nature, in his phenomenal and Kantian conception of the relations between mind and objective reality; his use of the mental as clue to his understanding of certain aspects of wave mechanics, and even of his treatment of causation and determinism and the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty, and in his disguised but persistent use of what Dewey criticises in his Quest for Certainty as a spectator theory of knowledge.

The furthest he goes in this direction is the statement: "Broadly speaking, the two conjectures are those of the idealist and realist—or, if we perfer—the mentalist and the materialist views of nature. So far the pendulum shows no sign of swinging back, and the law and order which we find in the universe are most easily described—and also—l think, most easily explained—in the language of idealism. Thus, subject to the reservations already mentioned, we may say that present day science is favorable to idealism. In brief, idealism has always maintained that, as the beginning of the road by which we explore nature is mental, the chances are that the end also will be mental. To this, present-day science adds that at the farthest point she has so far reached, much and possibly all, that was not mental has disappeared, and nothing new has come in that is not mental. Yet who shall say what we may find awaiting us around the next corner."

IS there a God embodies in book form the discussion of this question which appeared last year in The Christian Century. The participators were two liberal philosophers of religion and an agnostic humanist like Professor Otto. The book on the whole is disappointing as was to be expected from the nature of the conversation, as it is called. Professor Wieman's position is stated better in some of his books—especially in The Wrestle ofTruth with Religion. Professor Macintosh's realistic philosophy of religion is more impressive in his Theology as an Empirical Science and The Reasonablenessof Christianity, while the agnostic humanism of Professor Otto is to be found at its best in his interesting book on Things andIdeals.

Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas will appeal to the increasing number who seem to come under his influence. The volume adds nothing new to his system of thought but it throws a little light on his general social philosophy. Like most of his books it contains passages of rare insight and its share of pages shot through with Whitehead's usual provoking luminous obscurity.

The Meaning and Truth of Religion by Lyman is one of the sanest books on religion I have read for some months. It is written from a liberal point of view, and in it modern religious liberalism and realism are at their finest. He singles out for emphasis the creative, mystical, ethical, esthetic and spiritual elements in religion and uses them to interpret its function. God is viewed by him as a Cosmic Creative Spirit that progressively reveals Himself in the creation and enhancement of values. In the first part of the volume he shows what religion at its best may mean as a creative power in human lives, and how it can help mankind in its civilizing tasks. He then passes in the second part to a refreshing discussion of the truth-value of the insight of religion. This section contains an interesting analysis of contemporary scientific philosophy and its bearing on ethical theism. The new cosmology of physics, the philosophy of organism of Whitehead, the creative and emergent evolution of Bergson and Lloyd Morgan, and the unifying processes of history are submitted to an able discussion. They all seem to Lyman to demand a religious interpretation of the creative activity he holds is manifested in the universe. The final section discusses the difficulties which his ethical theism is bound to meet in explaining the evils and disorder discoverable in both nature and human life. A worth while book.

AN EQUALLY commendable book is Scientific Theory and Religion. The author is the Bishop of Birmingham, and is the leader of the opposition to the AngloCatholic group in the Church of England. By far the larger part of the volume is concerned with recent advances in science and scientific theory. The Bishop is at home in science, and his exposition of modern physics and astronomy and biology is as able a job as any educated reader can wish. It is exceedingly well done. The latter part of his discussion expresses his own spiritualistic interpretation of the world of modern science. In contrast with the idealistic leanings of Jeans, Bishop Barnes favors a moderate realism in his theory of knowledge. In some ways he is more careful of his claims than Jeans. He never exaggerates or minimises difficulties, and he keeps clear of the temptation to resort to a gap philosophy. His religious philosophy has many points of resemblance with the ethical theism of Lyman. This latest addition to the Gifford Lectures series of volumes deserves a place in every educated home interested in the relations between science and religion.

Bishop Barnes shows a robust faith in reason in man's questings after truth. In this sense he is a rationalist. He holds that "all beliefs must be subjected to rational enquiry, whether they be scientific or religious." His modernism comes out in his declaration that "We must set our religious intuitions and aspirations against the background created by the new knowledge. We must, whenever possible, test religious dogmas by the methods of scientific enquiry and refashion them in the light of scientific progress." But this demand of the Bishop would raise serious difficulties. What would be the effects of applying this test to claims to religious knowledge? It would doubtless make possible a larger measure of harmony between religious knowledge and knowledge gained in any other way. The valid in religious knowledge would then be that which is coherent and harmonious within itself, provided that at the same time it is capable of entering into a growing unity with the rest of our valid knowledge. This would not mean that religious knowledge must always be discarded as invalid when it conflicts with other systems. It only means that the same test of harmony be applied to it as to knowledge in general. Ultimately the inharmonious is bound to drop out of any really valid system of knowledge, be it religious or social or scientific. This is the implication of growth in religion as well as in the natural and the social sciences. Moreover the logic of the growth of harmony in our total knowledge implies that adequate consideration be given to all spheres of human experience. No one segment is justified in dictating to other segments of experience. All, however, must submit their insights and conclusions to the criterion of the widest degree of unity in knowledge. That seems to be the ideal of knowledge.

And in this growing unity of all knowledge what is intelligible and fruitful in the deliverances of religious experience will find a place. The first condition of validity in religious knowledge is that it should be in harmony with religious experience. The second would be that it should be capable of being progressively harmonized with all other empirically verified knowledge. This necessity will always be incumbent on claims to religious knowledge. Indeed this necessity is laid upon science and philosophy as much as on religion. No human discipline of any kind can escape the necessity of validating itself by squaring its ideas and conclusions with an expanding system of harmony both in thought and practice. The weakness of religion comes, however, from its slowness and often its unwillingness to unify its thought and practice with the rest of human experience. Religion in the past insisted often on its false right to dictate to the other than religious interests of human life. It did this of course in the name of a deeper insight into the meaning of human life. "Thus saith the Lord" has been the language of religion, and while it remains such it is with difficulty that this process of making its account with secular knowledge is achieved. Perhaps up to a certain limit it is not altogether a bad thing for either religion or the rest of human experience that this is so.

In the end, however, religion must fall back on experience. The actual spiritual experience of mankind in and through its questings after the abiding realities of truth, goodness, and beauty must be the basis of any vital religion. Religion after all is a part of the process of experience, and the reality of the process in one sense is the best proof and test of the validity of its objective goal. But here again the quest may be more significant than the goal.

I conclude therefore by a quotation from Malebranche similar to the one I used from Lessing. "If I held truth captive in my hand, I should open my hand and let it fly, in order that I might again pursue and capture it."

EDITOR'S NOTE: Professor Bowen,monthly contributor of "Hanover Browsing," has taught Sociology at Dartmouthsince 1922. He was born in Garnswllt,Glamorganshire, Wales, and he speaks andwrites Welsh as well as English. Most ofhis early education was received in SouthWales and at Ruskin College, Oxford. Afterlocating in this country following the War,when he served in action with the BritishArmy for three years, he studied at Yale,acquiring his doctorate there in 1924.Throughout his career of writing, traveling, studying, and teaching he has foundtime for attention to his first love, that ofbook reviewing, in which he made a namefor himself during years of journalisticwork in England.

There is much talk among college faculties and alumni groups of "continuededucation." The fact is bemoaned thatonce an undergraduate ceases to be such heloses, in the majority of cases, all contactwith academic affairs and particularly withthe progress and development of knowledge in fields in which he may have acquired an interest during his college course.The editors of the MAGAZINE are eager toencourage Dartmouth men to continue andbroaden their college interests. The courseoffered by Professor Bow en is open to allcomers. It is no "pipe." To follow him,book by book, through his monthly browsing demands more reading and study thanmost alumni can give. But his careful analysis of current books, and his recommendations of the best among many, offer a shortcut on this road to continued education thathis farflung student body will appreciate.