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PARTISAN REVIEW
tion of equality in economic opportunity. These desirable ends
were held to be a necessary outcome of common understanding that
was sure to follow the continued advance of science.
For while the intellectuals of the nineteenth century abandoned
that part of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment which believed
in a speedy because revolutionary establishment of a new and bet–
ter order, it did so by accepting belief in a slower, longer, more
gradual, but surer,
evolutionary
process. What might be lost in the
time taken to reach the goal was to be more than made up by
absence of the destructive violence of the revolutionary process.
It goes without saying that the foregoing is so summary that
qualifications have to be introduced. But in the main the statement
fairly reflects the Victorian optimism entertained by intellectuals of
the liberal type. Moreover, the absence of qualifications which are
needed is more than compensated for by an event to which no
reference has been made. The close of the military alliance in which
the Fascist and Nazi states were defeated by the union of the
U.S.S.R. with political democracies has resulted in transforming the
previous state of disorganization into downright cleavage. Even if
the disruption should continue for a long time to be a Cold War,
the chill is already so severe as to bury previous warm hopes and
ardent confidence as in a glacial avalanche.
It seems incredible that such a widespread and pervasively pene–
trating collective overturn could take place without an equally serious
shift in the attitudes of those involved in the institutional arrange–
ments upset. While intellectuals are those most sensitive to distur–
bance and most reflectively aware of it, they are far from being
the only ones affected. In a practical, less reflective way, loss of nerve
and upset of equilibrium affect the mass of human beings. Indirect
confirmation on this point is found in the position of those intel–
lectuals who remained faithful to the old attitudes permeated with
supernaturalism. In effect they are now saying in chorus: "We have
long been telling you what would be sure to happen if you cut loose
from the anchorage of supernatural authority. Now that it has taken
place you can see for yourselves that your only hope of security
lies in return to the supreme authority of religions claiming superna–
tural origin and support." Just as I write, this assertion is emphatically
punctuated by the appeal, echoing around the whole globe, that all
