time: the refreshing river 



will enlarge our faculties so as to enable us to gaze without being 

 dazzled upon those sublime and radiant truths whose harmony as well 

 as splendour we shall then be qualified to discover, and consequently 

 with transports to admire." It was a thought not infrequendy met 

 with in the 17th century; thus Sir Thomas Browne said, "There is 

 yet another conceit that hath made me sometimes shut my books, 

 which tells me it is a vanity to waste our days in the blind pursuit 

 of knowledge; it is but attending a little longer, and we shall enjoy 

 that by instinct and infusion, which we endeavour at here by labour 

 and inquisition. It is better to sit down in a modest ignorance, and 

 rest contented with the natural blessing of our own reasons, than buy 

 the uncertain knowledge of this life with sweat and vexation^ which 

 Death gives every fool gratis, and is an accessory of our glorification."^ 



But it was left to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the last century, 

 building on the dialectic process of the idealist philosopher Hegel, but 

 profoundly influenced through Darwin^ by the new understanding 

 of evolution which was then dawning on men, to take the revolu- 

 tionary step of placing the resolution of contradictions within the 

 historical and pre-historical process itself. Contradictions are not 

 resolved only in heaven; they are resolved right here, some in the 

 past, some now, and some in time to come. This is the dialectical 

 materialist way of expounding cosmic development, biological evolu- 

 tion, and social evolution, including all history. 



However fascists may laugh, there is something divine about a 

 committee.^ One member makes a proposal, another points out that 

 for one reason or another it will not do; there are further proposals 

 and counter-proposals, and out of this strife of theses and antitheses, 

 the synthesis, or final decision, is born, only to become itself in due 

 time another thesis, again unsatisfactory, and to be subsumed in 

 further higher syntheses by later meetings or higher committees. This 

 is the dialectical process.* Marx and Engels were bold enough to 



^ Religio Medici, I. 9. 



2 Marx wanted to dedicate part of Capital to Darwin (cf. Psyche, 193 1, 12, 7). 



^ This is why I like that famous dictum of Conrad Noel's that the universe itself 

 is ruled by a committee. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity, "neither afore nor after 

 other," "without any difference or inequality," upheld by Athanasius, would thus have 

 been a democratic doctrine as against the totalitarian monotheism of the imperial and 

 Arian party. The same thought occurs in Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (London, 

 1854, pp. 66 and 288). "The mystery of the Trinity," he says, "is the mystery of par- 

 ticipated, social, life, the mystery of I and You," and he gives patristic sources in 

 support of it. 



* The best introduction to dialectical materialist philosophy known to me is tliat 

 of R. Maublanc; La Philosophie du Marxisme (Paris, 1935); it is a pity there is no English 



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