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of the supernatural. Or what is more likely and less banal, it will be
superseded by an ethos resting on a conviction of the absolute and
integral value of the human personality. It is up to Mr. Eliot to show
that an ethos other than a revealed religion cannot of necessity func–
tion as the "common faith and order" he declares indispensable to
a high total Culture.
3. Mr. Eliot maintains that culture is "something to which
a few can be raised," and "that a high degree of culture
in
an equal–
itarian society can only be attained if the great majority of men can
be raised to a level, and kept at a level, which has never been remotely
approached in the past." The same can be asserted of religion: that
only a few in the past have been capable of religion, and that the
religion of the mass of mankind has so far been little more than
superstition. Witness the unceasing complaints of medieval church–
men as to the quality of their peasant parishioners' faith, which they
denounce as crude superstitiousness. Witness the fact that over eighty–
five percent of the saints come from the upper classes. Religiosity
seems to have depended on much the same factor as culture: leisure,
which depends in tum on the economic level and security of the indi–
vidual. It is conceivable that if socialism were to provide leisure with
economic security at a sufficiently high level to most of humanity, a
great many more people would discover a religious vocation in them–
selves.
There are questions on which religion has given, and in most
cases still gives, more immediate psychological satisfaction than sci–
ence and philosophy: questions as to the purpose or significance of
existence, the assignment of responsibility, the justification for the
basic unsatisfactoriness of life, and so forth. In these connections the
consolations of a naturalistic outlook are pretty lame, aesthetically
speaking. Certain people may continue, therefore, to find some sort
of religion indispensable, and most likely there will always be religious
natures. But socialism could not countenance institutional religion as
the authority for public discipline, nor could it countenance official
specialists
in
the religious "mysteries." It will be enough for socialism
that every human being-his body no less than
his
soul-is regarded
as an end
in
himself. It is necessary to add, I suppose, that men can–
not regard each other as ends in themselves unless they are freed from
the necessity of exploiting and being exploited by one another.
4. A circumstance which partly determined the nature of total
Cultures in the past is the fact that each has been territorially circum–
scribed and that no one Culture has ever had the field to itself-not
even the Culture of the Egyptians. Now, however, that Western
