THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN SCOTT HALDANE " 



unite by a remarkable continuity the developed communism of the 

 future with the antique primitive communism of the far past. 



Modern Manichaeism. 



All this is a manifestation of the consciousness that what ought to 

 be is distinct from what is. In a fine passage, Haldane comments on 

 this. "However what is evil, or what ought not to be, is interpreted, 

 we find that the distinction bet^^een what ought, and what ought 

 not, to be, is generally acknowledged, together with the obligation 

 to further what ought to be. It is on the recognition of this obligation 

 that the religions of the world are founded; and although they differ 

 in matter of detail, they are united in their recognition of what is 

 good, or what ought to be, and the obligation to further it. The belief, 

 however, in spiritual powers of evil is now, I think, a waning one in 

 all civilisations; and evil has come, or is rapidly coming, to be regarded 

 commonly as the unchecked prevalence of what is interpreted as 

 belonging to the physical world over what is spiritual." A good 

 beginning but a bad ending. I pardoned myself for the fleeting thought 

 that not all living religions only, but also all the dead ones, were to 

 be represented at the Congress. The Manichaeans themselves could 

 hardly have put their case better.^ Such a conclusion, violently at 

 variance with Christianity and communism alike, could only lead, it 

 genuinely followed through, to a retrograde asceticism. For marxism, 

 the origin of evil, like the ultimate origin of everything else is, I 

 suppose, inscrutable, and the problem of evil is not a problem of 

 fixing the responsibility on some one, some being, or some constituent 

 of the universe, but a problem of biological engineering. "Philosophers 

 have talked about the world enough, the time has come to change it." 

 We must, of course, accept in all probability an irreducible minimum 

 of pain and sorrow so long as man is a patient being immersed in 

 space-time, but this is like that irreducible minimum of the alogical,^ 

 to which scientific explanation is always asymptotically tending. The 

 reduction of the alogical in our picture of the universe is what Haldane 



^ Manichaeism was one of the many religions which disputed with Christianity 

 for the mastery of the late Roman world. Its founder, Mani, maintained that matter 

 was utterly and irredeemably evil. Its adepts were, therefore, under the necessity of 

 pretending not to eat or to perform any other bodily functions (see The Religion of 

 the Manichees by F. C. Burkitt, Cambridge, 1925). 



2 Tennant, F, R., Philosophical Theology (Cambridge, 1928), Vol. I, ch. 13. Dingle 

 calls it Deus ex aequatione with the character of an arbitrary constant. 



