8
PARTISAN REVIEW
spokesmen of the supernatural hear voices, but it cannot accept
these voices, as they are reported, as valid testimony .about the
world of fact' or the world of value. It judges the truth of what
is heard by what it logically leads to in the realm of empirical
behavior. It seeks to draw what is reported about this world or
any other into some community with the limited but precious
store of responsible assertions that constitute knowledge. The
attack upon scientific method, in order to be free to believe what–
ever voice speaks to us, is a flight from responsibility. This is
the dominant characteristic of the failure of nerve.
Social Crisis and Metaphysical Hunger
The causes of the failure of nerve in our time are multiple
and obvious. Economic crises, world war, a bad peace, tragically
inept statesmanship, the tidal waves of totalitarianism, tell the
story of the twentieth century. These are the phenomena that are
behind the interrupted careers, the frustrated hopes, the anxiety,
the sense of being lost and alone, the growing bewilderment, fear
and horror-that feed the theology of despair and the politics of
wish. It is important to remember this. The "arguments" of
those who have been panicked into embracing the new varieties
of transcendental consolation may be met a thousand times over.
But not until a democratic, freedom-and-welfare-planning economy
is built out of what is left of our world, in which stable traditions
can absorb the conventions of revolt of political man and the
experiments of growth of individual men, will these intellectual
excesses subside from epidemic to episodic proportions. Until
then it is necessary to prevent intellectual hysteria from infecting
those who still cling to the principles of rational experiment and
analysis.
There is still another source of the new fusion of super–
agony and superstition. This is the inability of those liberal,
labor, and socialist movements which have prided themselves on
being scientific and which have lost one social campaign after
another, to supply a positive philosophy, that would weld emotion
and scientific intelligence, as a new rallying ground. Wilsonian
idealism is dead although some do not know it, syndicalism is a
fascist changeling, and orthodox Marxism is bankrupt. The grand
visions of the socialist prophets have giv;en way to petty political
horse-trading and fixations on the good will of bourgeois statesmen.
