If civilisation is to survive, if the emergent civilisation is to achieve the fulfilment of its potentialities, the coming age must be an age of spiritual as well as social integration.

Today the human mind is torn and divided between positivism and irrationalism. The endeavours of pragmatism succeeded in making important discoveries concerning a number of basic attitudes in thought and morality, and in what might be called the sociology of knowledge. As a universal system of knowledge and life, as a philosophy, however, pragmatism has been a failure.

What is essentially needed is a renewal of metaphysics. The conceptions of modern science—the unification of matter and energy, physical indeterminism, the notion of space-time, the new reality recognised both as to quality and duration—are invaluable means of deciphering material phenomena. A cosmos of electrons and stars in which the stars are the heavenly laboratories of elements, subjected everywhere to genesis and transmutation, a universe which is finite but whose limits cannot be attained because of the curvation of space, and which dynamically evolves in a definite direction, namely toward the highest forms of individuation and concentration and toward a simultaneous degradation of the quality of its total energy—all this is external description and scientific imagery rather than ontological insight. Such knowledge can never directly serve the purpose of any philosophical or metaphysical extrapolations. Yet all this constitutes at the same time a basic representation of the world incomparably more favourable to the edification of a philosophy of nature and more open to the deepening labour of metaphysical reason than the old Newtonian physics.

This little book is introduced by a quotation from William Jennings Bryan attacking the Gold Standard but it turns out to be a plea for a restoration of a gold currency as the only kind of currency likely to maintain its value. Money is generally defined as anything—from cowrie shells to cigarettes—which is generally acceptable in settlement of debt and is not consumed but used as a medium of exchange and standard of value. The fact that gold has been used as money for thousands of years suggests that there is much to be said for its use; it is homogeneous, portable and, above all, though it may vary in value is not likely to vary very much or become valueless because the supply is limited. Paper money, on the other hand, is liable to be issued in excessive quantities, as happened in Germany after the Great War and in China, Hungary and other countries after the second world war, and to lose its value practically altogether. Even the pound, in spite of price subsidies, blocked sterling and other devices, is worth less than half what it was worth in 1930 and is likely to be worth still less, especially if people expect its value to decline further instead of recovering. The best way to maintain the value of the pound, says Mr Pepler, is to restore a gold currency; and he reinforces his argument about the solidity and intrinsic value of gold with analogies about the sun and moon, magnetism, eggs, anchors, keels and barnacles.

The value of the theories of Freud, in dealing with juvenile delinquency (publicly debated recently) brings up the whole question of their assessment of the problem of abnormal moral behaviour. For Freud the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is something more than an allegory. It is also a code in which Mr Hyde figures with immense preponderance. ‘It is’, says Jung, ‘a detailed elaboration of man’s shadow-side such as had never been carried out before. It is the most effective antidote imaginable to all idealistic illusions about the nature of man’. (Integration of the Personality. Jung.) The conservative estimate of the theories of Sigismund Freud is that they contain much that is true and much that is new, but that unfortunately that which is true is not new and that which is new is not true. When Freud tells us that the media axiomata of the psycho-analytic theory of the mind rests on the assumption that the cause of all mental processes is automatically regulated by the pleasure-principle (Beyond the Pleasure-Principle), he merely declares himself a disciple of Epicurus. He merely proclaims that the object to which all men are attracted is Pleasure and that when a pleasure is consciously rejected it is only in order to make room (albeit unconsciously) for a greater pleasure. In other words, if we take ‘Pleasure’ in its broadest sense and define the word as meaning conscious satisfaction (not necessarily sensual, and often stimulated only by the prospect of benefit) there are few who do not subscribe to the obviousness of such a limited Hedonism.

On comparing the major and some of the smaller exhibitions held in London during the winter and spring, the striking factors were the vividly contrasting choice of subjects and the widely differing styles of expression: to name three examples, The Indian Art, Marc Chagall, and Vincent van Gogh. At the outset it seemed impossible to imagine that a common note could be found. Upon greater reflection, however, it appeared that perhaps their unity lay in the variance that previously seemed to ridicule any notion of coherence—briefly, that the completion of a work of art is, either consciously or unconsciously, an act of worship, and a record of the artist’s experience of God. Broadly speaking the common purpose exists in this context.

From a Christian standpoint a notable feature was the almost entire absence of ostensibly religious paintings—as distinct from those which could be religious in their implications—completed in the course of the last fifty years.

This was especially obvious in the exhibition recently held by the Institute of Contemporary Arts entitled ‘Forty Years of Modern Art’. The exhibits were drawn solely from British private collections, which may account for the inadequacy of some of them, for instance the Matisse ‘Head of a Girl’ which was the only example of his work. Also, on recalling the selection of Georges Rouault’s paintings, none of his religious works were included, although from the aesthetic point of view the water-colour ‘Odalisque’ was a superb choice, displaying the characteristic simplicity of his draughtsmanship and the resonance of his colours.