268
PARTISAN REVIEW
economy and cultural development are merely two aspects of the same
basic process, which we are a<; yet far from being able to define.
Two examples from other spheres may help to bring this vague
sounding assertion into relief. The first
is
the old mind-body problem
where the antithesis between materialistic and idealistic schools was
much the same as between historical materialism and historical ideal–
ism, until the double-aspect theory brought the quarrel about which
is the cause and which the effect, which is the hen and which is the
egg, to an at least temporary close. Thus your gastric acid is neither
the cause nor the effect of your nervous state, but both are aspects,
consequences of your total mode of living. The second example is
the relation between physics and mathematics. When Einstein was
faced with the contradictory evidence of two perfectly sound physical
experiments (Michelson-Morley and Fizeau) he was able to develop
the theory of Relativity only because the apparently abstract and
useless non-Euclidian mathematical fantasies of Bolyai, Riemann
and others were waiting for him just at the right moment, ready-made
around the comer. The mathematical and the physical elements of
Relativity were developed quite independently, and their coincidence
would appear miraculous, without the recognition of a fundamental
trend of evolution in scientific thought, of which the various faculties
are merely isolated aspects.
The rise of the Third Estate and of the progressive middle classes
was thus neither the cause nor the effect of humanistic liberal phi–
losophy. The two phenomena sprang from the same root, they were
entwined and correlated like colour and shape in the same object.
The basic function of the Encyclopaedists and of all later intelligentsias
was this correlating of social and intellectual evolution; the.y were the
self-interpreting, introspective organs of the social body;
and this
function automatically includes both the iconoclastic and the peda–
gogic, the destructive and the constructive element.
III
THE
DECAY
OF THE THIRD ESTATE
This function gives a clue to the always peculiar structure of
the intelligentsia.
Social behaviour has a much greater inertia than thought. There
is always an enormous discrepancy between our collective· ways of
living and the accumulated data of science,
art,
technique. We wage
wars, go to church, worship kings, eat murderous diets, conform to
sexual taboos, make neurotics of our children, miseries of our mar–
riages, oppress and let ourselves be oppressed-whereas in our text-
