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PARTISAN REVIEW
naturalistic ideals, and that the assumption that it can has the
result, in actual experience, of causing such ideals to be frustrated.
The introduction of mystical emotion into political controversies
brings about the fanaticism which has, in our own day, almost des–
troyed civilization.
As
for the belief in progress, it is losing its appeal
not only because it is now extremely improbable that the future of
the human race will be any better than its past but also for the more
important reason that its effect is perpetually to deprive the present
of any consummatory value. Today must forever be subordinated
to a constantly receding tomorrow. This cult of the next generation
(which the United States shares with the Soviet Union) is one of
the reasons for our pervasive sense of futility and insignificance.
My own attitude is that man's need for religious self-transcend–
ence is genuine and cannot be explained away as really a desire
to return to the womb or a derivation from animal instinct; and
the argument that any inherent need implies the existence of the
appropriate object seems to me to have some validity. I do not
think that the conviction of mystics that they have contact with a
transcendent reality can be dismissed as merely a mental aberration.
But since this reality is indefinable and can be suggested only
through symbols, mystical experience cannot be used as an argument
for accepting the specific dogmas of any particular religious or–
ganization. It is true that the individual who has strong religious needs
cannot adequately satisfy them without institutional guidance and
support. But since joining a Church must normally mean believing its
symbolic system to be literally true and accepting some historically–
conditioned code of morals, it seems to me preferable to leave the
needs unsatisfied. Personally I find the politics and the ethics of
most churches harder to swallow than their theology. This situation,
however, may change. The fact that some intellectuals are becoming
religious is not, in itself, of much significance. Intellectuals have been
returning to the Church at intervals ever since John Donne, without
perceptibly checking the secularization of western society. But there
are other reasons for supposing that the western world may perhaps
be approaching a fundamental change of sensibility, comparable to
that which occurred at the end of the Middle Ages. And since man
always makes the universe in his own image, this would be followed
