526
PARTISAN REVIEW
rather wistful symbol of peace, order, and continuity, it does not exist
in anything like actuality.
This may explain our feeling of indifference to the realism of
the commonplace. But our attitude toward the family must be under–
stood in a very large context, as but one aspect of our attitude to
the idea of
the conditioned,
of the material circumstances in which
spirit exists. From one point of view, no people has ever had so
intense an idea of the relationship of spirit to its material circum–
stances as we in America now have. Our very preoccupation with
things,
as Mary McCarthy once observed, is really a way of dealing
with the life of spirit in the world of matter-our possessions, al–
though they have reference to status and comfort, have a larger ref–
erence to the future of our souls, to energy and the sense of cleanness
and fitness and health; our materialism cannot be represented as the
Roman
luxus
has been represented, its style does not imply ease and
rest and self-indulgence but rather an ideal of alertness and readiness
of spirit. And this sense of the conditioned is carried out in our
elaborate theories of child-rearing, and the extravagant store we set
by education; and in our theories of morality and its relation to
social circumstance.
Yet it is to be seen that those conditions to which we do respond
are the ones which we ourselves make or over which we have con–
trol, which is to say conditions as they are virtually spirit, as they
deny the idea of
the conditioned.
Somewhere in our mental constitu–
tion is the demand for life as pure spirit. The idea of unconditioned
spirit is of course a very old one, but we are probably the first people
to think of it as a realizable possibility and to make that possibility
part of our secret assumption. It is this that explains the phenomenon
of our growing disenchantment with the whole idea of the political
life, the feeling that although we are willing, nay eager, to live in
society, for we all know that man fulfills himself in society, we do
not willingly consent to live in a particular society of the present,
marked as it is bound to be by a particular economic system, by dis–
orderly struggles for influence, by mere approximations and down–
right failures. Our aesthetic sense-I mean our deep comprehensive
aesthetic sense, really our metaphysics--which is satisfied by the
performance of a Bendix washing machine, is revolted by such a
politically conditioned society. The wide disrepute into which cal>"
