460
PARTISAN REVIEW
the record would otherwise be incomplete, this
does
seem to be the
place for such
confessiones fidei,
and, more important still, I may
be able to draw from my very private case some general conclusion
relevant to the common situation. The story goes back to a simple in–
cident some years ago when I was teaching a class in the history of
philosophy: the subject was Leibnitz, including his argument for the
existence of God, after the exposition of which I turned easily and
naturally to Kant's famous refutations, and thus dismissed the
students with their minds presumably both enlightened and purged.
The stroke of fate in this case was something not uncommon in
American universities: I had to give the same lecture in the after–
noon; feeling a little like a phonograph record being played over the
second time, I could nevertheless let my mind wander freely, and so
in the middle of Kant's refutations the meaning of Leibnitz first
dawned on me. There was nothing very dazzling or blinding about the
experience; no emotional factors at all were involved, so far as I can
tell; I was not even intellectually predisposed for this turn of thought,
since at the time I was a positivist ; it was simply that my mind,
relaxed, saw another way of coming at Leibnitz's argument-a way
that Kant never saw. I don't think I gave any sign to the class or
changed the routine of the lecture in any way; but the next few
years I spent thinking about very little else. It seems to me quite
clear that Kant did not understand the argument he was attacking,
and all modern refutations have been Kant's, in more or less purified
form. This does not, of course, establish Leibnitz's argument, since
the elimination of a refutation does not make an argument conclu–
sive; but being unable to dismiss the argument from my mind after
ten years of applying all possible rational erodents, I have on my hands
at least this conclusion: that I am unable to think of the world except
as opening toward the possibility of God.
This may be very little. I agree; but perhaps it is a fact for our
time that a good many people, straining every nerve for what religious
belief they can possess, can come up with so little. My own belief
leaves me at an uncomfortable distance from any Church, and I am
inclined to be a little hostile toward some of the recent converts be–
cause I suspect their belief has come a little too easily. It is not that
I object to the demand of a faith beyond reason, but I am unwilling
to accept a faith
in
what is logically contradictory. The great medieval
