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stoy and Gogol (or, for that matter, Philip Wylie) I suspect there
may be a phase roughly equivalent to menopause, during which men
are specially liable to conversion. There is no room to discuss the
matter here.
Faith.
The religious man is aware of his faith; the non-religious
man, as a rule, is unaware. There seems hardly a question which kind
of faith is the more childlike. (The non-existence of God, for one of
innumerable instances, is no more provable than His existence; but
the atheist acts as if it were proved.) Many non-religious intellectuals
must be awakening from these unrealized, unexamined kinds of faith,
to a kind of skepticism which is at once more scientific and more
amenable to religious conversion.
A
note on starvation.
Allegiance to "the modem mind" must
have deprived countless intellectuals of most of their being. Certainly
among many I have known or read, feeling and intuition (even
regardless of religion) are suspect, sensation
is
isolated, only the
thinking faculty is thoroughly respected; the chances of interplay
among these faculties, and of mutual discipline and fertilization, are
reduced to a minimum. I assume that anyone who begins to realize
how profoundly he has been thus deprived and distorted makes
every effort to set himself free; for many, conversion is the way.
2. I have no idea what ,aspects may have become more credible.
I only suppose that in many the intellect, becoming less credulous of
the power and claims of intellect even at its best, becomes more
receptive to non-intellectual data.
Since the "validity" is super-rational, it cannot be rationally
determined.
Conviction, and change of conviction, depend less on quality of
intellect than on the urgent need of various temperaments for, or
against, conviction and change.
How can anyone who has swallowed the doctrines relating to
penis-envy, or the withering away of the State, strain at the doctrine
of Transubstantiation?
Religious and ration.alistic faith do differ in one crucial respect.
The latter
is
belief in the supposedly credible and is open to question
and change. The former requires belief in the incredible, in matters
beyond the corroboration of reason or the senses.
A religious person would doubtless say that all men are innately
