METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM 



been struggling for political freedom, and everything which assists 

 this struggle is right. The later years of work in the Labour movement 

 of my wife and myself, including a long membership of the Cambridge 

 Trades Council, all originated from this time. 



By 1933 the general movement among all kinds of intellectual 

 workers in England towards political activity was becoming v/ide- 

 spread. In the Universities it was evident in the much increased interest 

 of the undergraduate in political thought, and the concomitant decline 

 in organised large-scale jokes and similar amusing, if childish, exhibi- 

 tions. A certain loss of lightheartedness was unavoidable. Even in the 

 world of science, our witty periodical "Brighter Biochemistry," 

 which in its day had had a wide reputation and had been very worth 

 while, died after some seven vears of life about this time. The situation 

 was, in fact, getting beyond a joke, and the shadow of the Second 

 World War was upon us. 



The Creativeness of Contradictions. 



I must now turn to sketch the general world-view at which I 

 arrived after I began to realise man as a social being, and in which 

 the various forms of experience which I had so carefully distinguished 

 found their place. Essentially what I had unearthed from these sharp 

 antitheses was a series of contradictions.^ Now contradictions and 

 deadlocks are far from being a calamity in practical thought; they are 

 only so in formal logic. In practice they find themselves overcome by 

 syntheses at higher levels. And the idea that "the principle of contra- 

 diction is only valid for our reason" is an ancient one; it is found in 

 the mystical writer Dionysius the Areopagite, and again when the 

 middle ages were giving place to the modern era, in Nicholas of Cusa, 

 and in Giordano Bruno.^ For example, in Master Eckhardt we find 

 the following, easily decipherable through its archaic German:^ "Waz 

 ist widersatzunge ? Lieb unde leit, wiz unde swarz, daz hat wider- 

 satzunge, unde die enblibet in wesenne niht. Swenne diu Seele kumt 

 in daz lieht der Vemiinftekeit, so weiz si niht widersatzunge." 



All these thinkers placed the reconciliation of contradictions, 

 however, in the realm of the divine, and did not consider it as attain- 

 able by man in his earthly state. This was the position I too adopted 

 in my earlier thinking,* quoting Robert Boyle: "When we die God 



^ Cf. p. 182. 



^ See "The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno" by Dorothea W. Singer, Isis, 1941, 33, 

 187, and her forthcoming book on this remarkable man. 

 ^ See Nicholas of Cusa by H. Bett (London, 1932), p. 127. * Cf. SB, p. 225. 



13 



