time: the refreshing river 



to us now. And lastly art, from being the product of the few for 

 the few, will become the production of the many for the enjoyment 

 of all. 



But as regards what the East accepts from the West, and vice versa, 

 Haldane was undoubtedly right. Mechanical materialism, plus idealistic 

 religion, plus science for science's sake, plus capitalist economics, 

 plus fascist armaments, class-stabilisation, and war-philosophy, will 

 only spread misery, disappointment, and destruction. But there is a 

 hope elsewhere, a red morning star. In playing my part at the funeral 

 games of our lost kindly champion, what could I do else but point 

 towards it ? 



And here we approach a remarkable historical paradox, a paradox 

 of the greatest interest, but of which most people are still quite 

 ignorant. The red morning star of progressive social philosophy, 

 culminating in socialism and communism, has not always stood over 

 Europe. In former times, it shone in the East, in more senses than one. 

 Haldane discussed what the East was accepting from the West; it 

 never occurred to him that the West owed something to the East. 

 But there is a great debt, in general altogether unrealised, and here a 

 brief explanation of it must be given.^ I leave on one side, of course, 

 the obvious debt of christian civilisation to Hebrew culture and what 

 was bom from it. 



In traditional Western thought, the conception of ''original sin" 

 was dominant; Pelagius was the exception and the followers of 

 Augustine were orthodox. It seems that the social consequences of 

 this have never been fully explored, but it is extremely likely that a 

 doctrine of original sin was of no small help to the property-owning 

 classes in the propagation of the belief that the working masses could 

 never hope to run a State organisation successfully. However one 

 phrases it, the association between original sin and a pessimistic view 

 of the possibilities of social organisation is unmistakable. Conversely, 

 that optimistic view of the possibilities of social man which arose at 

 the Enlightenment prior to the French Revolution in the eighteenth 

 century, and which lies at the bottom of all subsequent optimistic 

 social thought, was connected with a denial, tacit or avowed, of the 

 conception of original sin. If the spirit of man is fundamentally good, 

 then obviously the prospects of social justice are better than if the 

 reverse is true. It may be granted that in strictly orthodox christian 

 theology, the intrinsic goodness of the human soul had always been 



^ See the forthcoming book by Dr. E. R. Hughes, The Great Learning in Action. 



138 



