476
PAR,TISAN REVIEW
masses will follow those who promise them salvation rather than
those who deny its possibility. This eminently practical, political
consideration also points to the desirability of faith.
Yet, of course, to be convinced of the desirability of faith is
not the same thing as to have faith; to possess an idea of religion is
not the same thing as to possess religion. Most intellectuals who can
achieve the first but not the second of these alternatives can appraise
their own position only in negative terms. Is desire for something
not forever inferior to its possession?
But I wonder whether this self-condemnation of the man of
good will, strong intellect and feeble faith is without appeal.
Would it not be possible to find positive potentialities inherent in
this position? I cannot develop this hint here any further, but I
would at least raise the question.
DWIGHT MACDONALD
I take "religious belief" to mean a belief that God exists.
And God? Not certainly the Old Testament Jahveh, with a beard
and a human, all too human personality. Nor, to me anyway, the
other extreme: the Eddington-Jeans kind of God, whose presence
manifests itself in the physical order of the universe. That the 5tars
run in their courses, that the atoms split as per schedule- these reg–
ularities I can accept without calling in God to explain them. In such
matters, I agree with the astronomer Laplace : "God? A hypothesis
I have not found to be necessary." No, I take God to mean some
kind of supernatural consciousness or order that is related, in a
value sense (good, bad), to our life here on earth. This God I can
neither accept nor reject. In fact, I cannot
imagin~
him.
This insensibility is not because I am unconcerned with the
moral problems that have driven men in the past to religious belief,
and that today, in the age of Nazism, Stalinism and bombs from A
to H, have understandably made many religious converts. On the
contrary, since the 'thirties, when my mind was busy with all sorts of
deep social, economic and historical problems (theories of capitalist
crisis, historical materialism, unemployment, progressive v. imperialist
wars, etc. ) that now seem to me superficial, I have come to be in–
terested in ethics to such an extent that I am constantly charged, by
