But be it noted5 that from first to last my method has been descriptive. Not one single “Ideer” of my own has been thrust upon the reader. He has not been put upon. I have observed. I have recorded. Simply.
In the preceding chapter, for example, as part of that description, the declaration comes out simply and necessarily that there can be only one philosophy and only one religion in a civilised world order. There may be readers who will be disposed to regard this as an opinion rather than a statement of fact. They will murmur6 such names as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, William James, Bergson, Maritain, Santayana, Croce, Pavlov, Russell, the Behaviourists and so forth7 and so on. They will wave towards a vast literature of commentary, over-elaboration, misrepresentation and the like. But if they will, come and stand a little aloof8 in an attitude of entirely9 disrespectful attention, they will begin to realise how much of this cerebration is as superfluous10 as the caps, gowns, titles, ceremonies and pretensions11 with which it is associated. Let us blow away what we can of this almost overwhelming froth and s^e whether there really is at bottom more than one philosophical reality for the purposes and within the limitations of Homo sapiens.
People who, like Edward Albert, have grown up in an atmosphere of unqualified partisan12 monotheism in which God is, so to speak, everything; originating and sustaining everything and accounting13 for everything, have scarcely a suspicion of the immense unsoundness of this-assumption. It is not even justified14 by Holy Scripture15. Therein it is plainly admitted that the whole religious process arose out of a dual16 system, — like the Zoroastrian antagonism17 of Ormazd and his twin brother and undying opponent, Ahriman. Satan confronts God at the outset of the Jewish–Christian story, and has his way with Man, Eden is lost and God’s goodness is defeated. God is exasperated18 and takes it out of Man. Read your Bible. Only gradually does the story weaken down to a predestinate servitude to an invincible19 Deity20. Islam, Judaism, Christianity, are all, so to speak, apostate21 dualisms that have taken sides and declared outright22 for one Supreme23 Being, and a very large part of the philosophical turmoil24 of the past two hundred years has been a confused return first to an essential and incurable25 dualism and then, going further, to a polytheistic universe, after the long predominance of one unlimited26 god,
Yet from the formulation of the so-called Apostles’ Creed27 onward28, there have been signs of an uneasiness about the soundness of this assertion of omnipotence29, betrayals of a feeling on the part of the faithful that perhaps they were professing30 just a little too much. Throughout the centuries the Church has never desisted completely from explaining the Almighty31, just as Stalin for the past score of years has never completely desisted from explaining the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. And for quite parallel reasons any denial of the Dictatorship of God in Christendom or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Russia has been discouraged as strenuously32 as possible — all the more strenuously because they are fundamentally unsound dogmas and cannot stand examination.
Directly the dispassionate student of theology sets out to rescue the idea of God from the partisan extravagances of the pious33, it becomes manifest that the idea of His omniscience34, omnipresence and omnipotence must be abandoned. These terms are entirely incompatible35 with the idea of a personal God with whom anyone or anything can have a relationship in time and space, A God who knows everything must be entirely stagnant36 mentally. How can he think, since everything is there in his mind already? And if he fills all space, then he is fixed37 for ever. How can he move? He cannot think; he has thought it all; he cannot move; he is there already. And since he is incapable38 of mental or physical change, then so far from being omnipotent39 he is powerless, he is fixed rigidly40 in an everlasting41 strait-jacket. Theology can only become a science of Godship when it abandons these preposterous42 absolutes.
But having abandoned these absolutes, the fresh-minded theologian can go on to some very entertaining considerations. According to any intelligent theological teaching, God, in some manner altogether mysterious and incomprehensible, came into Being in time and space, and our universe began. That is beyond understanding. He had withdrawn43 himself from an inconceivable infinitude in order to have relationships with creatures outside himself. He opened proceedings44 by saying: “Let there be light.” And having manifested himself by light, in that moment he must have cast a shadow, coterminous45 and reciprocal to himself, the anti-God, Satan, his Zoroastrian twin. Before ever he began to knead the red earth into Adam, the opponent was beside him ready to wreck46 the work. How else could it have been?
Upon this idea Nietzsche seized, and presented the world with a modern version of the Zoroastrian. (He found it more picturesque47 and impressive to call it in “Old Persian” the the “Zarathustrian” idea.) A lot he knew of Old Persian! Literary artistry, erudition, classical pretentiousness48, and a dislike for Jews gave his writing its peculiar49 qualities. He swallowed Persian dualism uncritically and took the side of Satan, because it was the most emphatic50 way of repudiatingY the orthodoxies and ungentlemanly beliefs about him. He drew his contrast. God wanted to keep man a naked respectful slave in the Garden of Eden, amidst a great boredom51 of carnivores and suchlike frustrated52 creatures. Satan wanted to get him to eat the tree of knowledge and go out into the great world. Eden meant “Safety First”; Satan whispered “Live dangerously.” That was the current of revolt. It was not very original. It followed the drift of the period. There is indeed about one week of clear hard thinking in the whole of the Nietzschean bubble. After that he just blew and blew.
Years before him, Hegel had been developing a philosophy that had a close relationship to that same necessary association of light and shadow. After the manner of philosophers, he exaggerated and universalised his bright idea until he saw the whole universe as a system of copulating contrasts. If a definite thing exists, said he, its opposite exists and struggles to replace it, and out of the conflict comes a synthesis. He spent an industrious53 life, like Og, King of Bashan, fitting everything to his universal formula.
Schopenhauer, in the same spirit of laborious54 revolt against established values that had become intolerable to him, insisted that the one thing stirring under the fabric55 of appearances was Will; the Will to live or the Will for Nirvana. He spun56 the web of this thread of thought to impressive dimensions, and it lived on in Shaw’s Life Force, Bergson’s Elan Vital and the sustaining spirits of Thomas Hardy57. But elsewhere hardly at all.
The revolt of the modern mind against the idea of a professedly benevolent58 divine autocrat59 responsible for its infinite confusion, has now gone much further than that sort of thing. William James put up a case for polytheism, and Pavlov and the Behaviourists produced excellent reasons why we should regard the individual man as no more than a still very incompletely assembled bundle of conditioned reflexes.
None of this multitude of thinkers and their satellites brought his thoughts into really conclusive60 contact with the others. To do it would have been to discover much practical identity and so lose distinction. After their fashion, each bombinated abundantly with only the slightest regard to other bombinators. We cannot be too disrespectful at their stupendous, fussy61 and often quite disingenuous62 voluminousness. We who are looking on can perceive that the common effect of this tidal flow is to strip off any conceptions of good or evil from our interpretation63 of the world. Philosophical synthesis is mainly a process of cancellation64 and denudation65. The net result of the philosophical-theological activities of mankind up to date has been almost entirely destructive; it has been a cleansing66 and not an accumulation; it has swept away a vast amount of interpretations67 and imperatives68 from life, and left it bare for us to do what we like with.
That freedom is the one universal philosophy to which the world is evidently coming. As I have said in the previous chapter, a gathering70 number of people, stirred by a great variety of motives71, are resolved upon a world revolution and a new ordering of the world that will save Homo Tewler from putting an end to himself and carry him on to Homo sapient73. But they do that wilfully74 and dogmatically. And there is no absolute imperative69 to prevent anyone having a hate of them, deciding to be Satanic to them and opposing them openly or betraying them secretly. You can easily persuade yourself that you prefer destruction and death to life. Many people do nowadays. The thought of happier generations fills you with malicious75 envy. It may please you to do what you can to destroy not simply human hope but the whole race. It may gratify your craving76 for power to think you are doing that.
But then it will be will against will. Possibly you may win. But if you lose and the world revolution gets the upper hand of you, there is nothing to prevent it declaring you, quite dogmatically, a criminal or a lunatic. It may try to alter you if that can be arranged. It may have to kill you. Some killing77 may be absolutely necessary if there are too many implacables. A rationalised world cannot turn sane78, good men into warders and asylum79 attendants for the implacable, Or you may come over to us, for, like yourself, the revolutionaries will be Tewler and you must be stirred by fluctuations80 and concentrations of motive72, closely similar to theirs. They are in no way superior to yourself, only they have had the luck to catch the light and crystallise about a comprehensive, unifying81, infectious system of1 new ideas, sooner than you have done.
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1 philosophical | |
adj.哲学家的,哲学上的,达观的 | |
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2 straightforward | |
adj.正直的,坦率的;易懂的,简单的 | |
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3 permanently | |
adv.永恒地,永久地,固定不变地 | |
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4 malice | |
n.恶意,怨恨,蓄意;[律]预谋 | |
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5 noted | |
adj.著名的,知名的 | |
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6 murmur | |
n.低语,低声的怨言;v.低语,低声而言 | |
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7 forth | |
adv.向前;向外,往外 | |
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8 aloof | |
adj.远离的;冷淡的,漠不关心的 | |
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9 entirely | |
ad.全部地,完整地;完全地,彻底地 | |
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10 superfluous | |
adj.过多的,过剩的,多余的 | |
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11 pretensions | |
自称( pretension的名词复数 ); 自命不凡; 要求; 权力 | |
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12 partisan | |
adj.党派性的;游击队的;n.游击队员;党徒 | |
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13 accounting | |
n.会计,会计学,借贷对照表 | |
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14 justified | |
a.正当的,有理的 | |
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15 scripture | |
n.经文,圣书,手稿;Scripture:(常用复数)《圣经》,《圣经》中的一段 | |
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16 dual | |
adj.双的;二重的,二元的 | |
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17 antagonism | |
n.对抗,敌对,对立 | |
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18 exasperated | |
adj.恼怒的 | |
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19 invincible | |
adj.不可征服的,难以制服的 | |
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20 deity | |
n.神,神性;被奉若神明的人(或物) | |
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21 apostate | |
n.背叛者,变节者 | |
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22 outright | |
adv.坦率地;彻底地;立即;adj.无疑的;彻底的 | |
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23 supreme | |
adj.极度的,最重要的;至高的,最高的 | |
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24 turmoil | |
n.骚乱,混乱,动乱 | |
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25 incurable | |
adj.不能医治的,不能矫正的,无救的;n.不治的病人,无救的人 | |
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26 unlimited | |
adj.无限的,不受控制的,无条件的 | |
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27 creed | |
n.信条;信念,纲领 | |
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28 onward | |
adj.向前的,前进的;adv.向前,前进,在先 | |
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29 omnipotence | |
n.全能,万能,无限威力 | |
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30 professing | |
声称( profess的现在分词 ); 宣称; 公开表明; 信奉 | |
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31 almighty | |
adj.全能的,万能的;很大的,很强的 | |
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32 strenuously | |
adv.奋发地,费力地 | |
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33 pious | |
adj.虔诚的;道貌岸然的 | |
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34 omniscience | |
n.全知,全知者,上帝 | |
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35 incompatible | |
adj.不相容的,不协调的,不相配的 | |
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36 stagnant | |
adj.不流动的,停滞的,不景气的 | |
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37 fixed | |
adj.固定的,不变的,准备好的;(计算机)固定的 | |
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38 incapable | |
adj.无能力的,不能做某事的 | |
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39 omnipotent | |
adj.全能的,万能的 | |
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40 rigidly | |
adv.刻板地,僵化地 | |
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41 everlasting | |
adj.永恒的,持久的,无止境的 | |
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42 preposterous | |
adj.荒谬的,可笑的 | |
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43 withdrawn | |
vt.收回;使退出;vi.撤退,退出 | |
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44 proceedings | |
n.进程,过程,议程;诉讼(程序);公报 | |
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45 coterminous | |
adj.毗连的,有共同边界的 | |
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46 wreck | |
n.失事,遇难;沉船;vt.(船等)失事,遇难 | |
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47 picturesque | |
adj.美丽如画的,(语言)生动的,绘声绘色的 | |
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48 pretentiousness | |
n.矫饰;炫耀;自负;狂妄 | |
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49 peculiar | |
adj.古怪的,异常的;特殊的,特有的 | |
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50 emphatic | |
adj.强调的,着重的;无可置疑的,明显的 | |
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51 boredom | |
n.厌烦,厌倦,乏味,无聊 | |
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52 frustrated | |
adj.挫败的,失意的,泄气的v.使不成功( frustrate的过去式和过去分词 );挫败;使受挫折;令人沮丧 | |
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53 industrious | |
adj.勤劳的,刻苦的,奋发的 | |
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54 laborious | |
adj.吃力的,努力的,不流畅 | |
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55 fabric | |
n.织物,织品,布;构造,结构,组织 | |
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56 spun | |
v.纺,杜撰,急转身 | |
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57 hardy | |
adj.勇敢的,果断的,吃苦的;耐寒的 | |
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58 benevolent | |
adj.仁慈的,乐善好施的 | |
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59 autocrat | |
n.独裁者;专横的人 | |
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60 conclusive | |
adj.最后的,结论的;确凿的,消除怀疑的 | |
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61 fussy | |
adj.为琐事担忧的,过分装饰的,爱挑剔的 | |
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62 disingenuous | |
adj.不诚恳的,虚伪的 | |
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63 interpretation | |
n.解释,说明,描述;艺术处理 | |
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64 cancellation | |
n.删除,取消 | |
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65 denudation | |
n.剥下;裸露;滥伐;剥蚀 | |
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66 cleansing | |
n. 净化(垃圾) adj. 清洁用的 动词cleanse的现在分词 | |
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67 interpretations | |
n.解释( interpretation的名词复数 );表演;演绎;理解 | |
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68 imperatives | |
n.必要的事( imperative的名词复数 );祈使语气;必须履行的责任 | |
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69 imperative | |
n.命令,需要;规则;祈使语气;adj.强制的;紧急的 | |
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70 gathering | |
n.集会,聚会,聚集 | |
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71 motives | |
n.动机,目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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72 motive | |
n.动机,目的;adv.发动的,运动的 | |
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73 sapient | |
adj.有见识的,有智慧的 | |
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74 wilfully | |
adv.任性固执地;蓄意地 | |
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75 malicious | |
adj.有恶意的,心怀恶意的 | |
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76 craving | |
n.渴望,热望 | |
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77 killing | |
n.巨额利润;突然赚大钱,发大财 | |
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78 sane | |
adj.心智健全的,神志清醒的,明智的,稳健的 | |
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79 asylum | |
n.避难所,庇护所,避难 | |
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80 fluctuations | |
波动,涨落,起伏( fluctuation的名词复数 ) | |
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81 unifying | |
使联合( unify的现在分词 ); 使相同; 使一致; 统一 | |
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