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PARTISAN REVIEW
men. He is certain that the naturalists will never forgive him for his
defection, as if he were being persecuted by a camorilla of intellectual
thugs in behalf of a church, and as if anyone ever asked anything of
him but convincing arguments. After all, most philosophical naturalists
are renegade Platonists or Christians, and our secular culture happily
has no state or official philosophy.
In an article in
The Western R eview
some years ago, largely in–
corporated in this book, Mr. Vivas tells us that the world in which we
live is "a sewer," not because of its social institutions but because man is
what he is. And he is speaking not merely of Hitler but of Hitler's vic–
tims, not merely of imaginary enemies but of those near and dear to
him. "As one looks around him he sees in his neighbors and in his friends
an appalling indifference to the human problem and one is frightened.
The man you are talking to suddenly loses his human appearance and
you see in his eyes the look of the ferret or the fox, or playing barely
under the surface of the false smile, the snarl of the jackal." And more in
this vein.
Even allowing for rhetorical exaggeration, Mr. Vivas is evidently
not in a state to give an objective report of the nature of man.
If
the
generality of human beings is as bad as it seems to his suspicious eyes,
we can understand why he is tempted either to follow the advice of
Job's wife to curse God and die, or take the Kierkegaardian leap to
absurdity. Certainly, the values of civilization which he seeks to defend
against naturalism would be irretrievably lost were men as depraved
as he thinks. Nor is it easy to see why belief in God would improve man's
character more radically now than in the last two thousand years.
The premises from which Mr. Vivas derives the eternal sub£istence
of an objective ideal of human perfection, which together with the
order of nature intimates the existence of God, are emotional, not logical
or scientific. The necessity which in his mind ties premises and conclu–
sions together is one of emotional compulsion.
It
reveals more about
Mr. Vivas than about the cosmos.
A naturalistic moral philosophy by making more modest claims
than those of Mr. Vivas may yet achieve more in building a society
fit for man.
It
will not attempt to fly outside the realm of nature and
experience in quest of man's good, or mistake moral imperatives for
cosmic necessities. Confronted with the spectacle of the agonized con–
science, it will recall the closing lines of Santayana's prematurely en–
titled
The Genteel Tradition at
Bay:
When therefore a tender conscience extends its maxims beyond their
natural basis, it not only ceases to be rational in its deliverances, and
