64
PARTISAN REVIEW
he merely substituted a metaphysics of matter for a metaphysics of
mind; and between a philosophic materialism and a philosophic ideal–
ism there is not nearly such an important choice as many people have
believed. The whole dialectic process of history is still made to occur
on the ground of the rational intellect. For the 19th century scientific
world:view, as has been often enough pointed out by this time, was an
abstract intellettual construction. However valuable it may have been
as a stimulus to practical science within its own circumscribed limits, it
can lay no more claims to being a description of absolute reality than
the idealist
Weltanschauung.
To Mann must be credited the abun–
dantly fertile suggestion that only in the myth do we get the dialectic
process working itself out on the
whole
ground of human reality. In
the myth the interplay is between reason and nature, between the
constructions of the mind and the immediate presentation of experi–
ence at any given moment of history, between the principle of form
and the principle of life. The myth is the concrete and dynamic image
of the human microcosm as a whole, of which the movements of the
mind and the feelings are to be taken as the defining processes. It
is
in this sense, as Mann has recently declared, that art supplies us with
"the pattern of the human." It
is
in Goethe's phrase, "the scale of
humanity," on which all of its moral, social, and political aspirations
must finally be weighed. And it is our only Absolute; "for it is pure
quality;
it
stands for the unsatisfied, the unsatiable demand."
