{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

(January 21st, 1954. Philosophy 57.)

...seven and -- no, it was in -- a course then called American Philosophy in 20. A boy from New York gave a report on Henry Adams. He stood up there. Was a six feet -- foot six tall boy, blond and very healthy looking and he said, "Gentlemen. This is us, the part of us that has to be buried." And he made quite an impression on the class. That was during the war even, 1942, I think.

Henry Adams is in all of you, in all of you, much more than you are inclined to admit. It's there in a very primitive form, but it's there. And it is all the negative elements of your time with -- for which you are not in the sense responsible, but which is -- may explain to you what original sin is. That is, it has just -- is around you. It's everywhere in the nicks -- nooks and niches of your veins, and of your vocabulary, and of the environment, and of the wavelengths on which you can speak to other people in your fraternity or at a commencement, or wherever it is. And therefore it is so terribly important that you should see this man, because such a report is -- the -- the two reports are the beginning of your power to master him. If you shun him, if you say, "That's not for me. I'm an optimist," or so, you have not -- at all really conquered him. He's there. And therefore I want you to understand that in no other case is it so much your own life that is at stake.

We -- you can say that Mr. Adams has made an attempt of a Newtonian sociology. A Newtonian sociology would be perhaps a good summing-up of what you gave us, I mean -- you -- you see. The third person, you see, an inanimate object -- and I like very much your -- your -- explanation of his being driven into this third person to escape the conversation with his wife and the confession that he was, after all, a -- a man who had been loved by a woman.

The third person, gentlemen, in all these modern psychologies and sociologies of the naturalistic caliber is a repression. If you speak of yourself as "he," and if you try to speak of mankind as "it," as is perfectly possible -- modern man tries even to treat of man as "What is man?" There is now this new book by Mr. Hocking and {Blanchard} and all the rest, which begins with the chapter, "What is Man?" Now, if what is -- man is "what," then it is "it." This is -- still one step further than Henry Adams. He -- at least said "he," you see. But Mr. Hocking already says "it." And all psychology says, "What is man?"

Anybody who asks "What is man?" must get as an answer, "He is something." Now man is neither "what" nor "something." He is -- the only thing you

really know is that you are somebody to whom somebody has said -- is saying all the time "thee." You are "thees." When the Quakers say, "to thou and thee," they very clearly place man in his right frame of reference. This man, as long as his wife was alive, was to her, "thee." You may call it "you," but this is ambiguous. I only choose "thee" to make clear that it is not "thou." "Thee" is a very important form of "thou," because I become somebody as a child in the cradle, because my mother smiles at me, you see. "Me" and "thee" are clearer for a status of man than "I" and "thou." That's why I have a -- some grudge with the modern fashion of talking of the "I" and "thou." I have -- nobody can be "I and thou," because you are either "thee," you see, or "me," through the other person. That's a very great difference, you see. If "I" and "thou" are only two people, then they are still two "hes," or "he" and "she." No difference between the {undeclensed} -- the unchanged "I and thou." It's really just a projection of what we had formally with "he" and "she."

The radical change is when you see that this man, as long as his wife was alive, in 1885, he said -- had somebody who told him, "Henry, put on your raincoat. It will -- it's going to rain." That is, he is under orders. Gentlemen, where we are loved, we are under orders. And this being under orders keeps a man sane. As soon as you are not under orders in any respect, you are in great danger. That's why a monk takes a vow of obedience, because the monk thereby is aiming at perfection. A man who has no orders to take is by this very fact imperfect. That's why the dream of the self-made man is so terrible, because a man who has no orders to take cannot be free, because how he handles this order shows his freedom. But if you con- -- think that freedom consists in no -- having no orders to fulfill, then you have no meaning.

The second thing that follows, gentlemen, if the "thee" is that first starting point for my health, for my sanity, then the "I" is the real response. Because somebody gives me orders, I can then turn to the world and say, "In the name of this order which I have received to be such-and-such, I can tell you." The "I" is always the answer to your calling. When a painter says, "{Paint thee}," it is because he knows perfectly well that he has to crush the world by his painting. So he must be very cocksure that he has received this command to be a painter. If you are weak, and the painter meets with no success, and the public says, "You are a fool, we won't buy your pictures," then the weakling who hasn't this real order must, you see, give up painting and become a plumber, or a statesman, or what-not, you see, and say, like Churchill, "Painting is only for my pleasure. If they won't buy my pictures, I'd better become prime minister."

But where you are serious, gentlemen, you can resist -- in y- -- in you -- as "I" -- the disapproval of the world outside. You see, "I" is a force in life, which is indifferent, more or less, of course -- only in degrees -- to the disapproval of the

rest of the crowd. Mr. Mc- -- Eisenhower must say "I" and he must be indifferent to your pleasure and displeasure, because otherwise he can't be president. But he must have received his order to become president from a source which has nothing to do with your -- my approval or disapproval.

Now what I'm driving at is -- gentlemen, is that man is always in this triangular relation, and that Newtonian sociology, which makes him an inanimate being, is not just reducing man from an "I" into a "he." That would be not the tragedy. But what you are faced with, in your own thinking is that you try to consider yourself as being deprived of two relations, not of -- only of one. You are not only treated impersonally by statistics or questionnaires, but you are also treated without this dangling command over your heads which tells you what to do. This is declared to be { }, not existing. Now, no "I," gentlemen, exists without this -- this "thee" and the marriage of -- and the father and the grandfather, especially -- express this. When he was on the staff of his father, he had it just naturally, you see, as having to work within a team in London. And no doubt about it, of his loyalty, you see. And James -- Henry Adams' problem is that he outgrew those natural situations of command and obedience, of loyalty -- and we all do. Only in his case, he -- they lasted somewhat longer. They -- you already have outgrown them at this moment. Perhaps when you go to the army, you have it again. But your first loyalty -- now this man was privileged. He had a father, and a grandfather, and Jefferson to worship. So he -- in three layers he finally got rid of his loyalties. But you must see that Adams is the better American, and the better model case of your own life, because his loyalties carried him to his -- to -- until 1877. Only when he resigned from Harvard and was -- finished his history of the Jeffersonian administration, was he through with his loyalty, you see, with the things that ordered and commanded his respect, his service, his explanation, you see, his -- application of their life.

Of course all this is only another form of describing you once more the Henry Adams and William Ada- -- Will- -- Henry James and William James situation, because I tried to show you that William James, as long as he said "I," had always the eloquence of the father in front of him, who had made it conducive to him to speak in his own name, but within this frame of reference of a loving father who had preceded him, and whose vocabulary, or whose way of speaking he could supersede, but who was still there all the time. We have talked about this at great length, but I want you -- to furnish you with some vocabulary which is now not taken from the real situation of the James family, but from this modern ideology of the "it" and the "he" about man. The -- Henry Adams was in a way still less degenerate than you, because you actually think that the question "What is man?" can be asked.

I've just published an essay in Germany in which I refute this. In the

name of the laity, the layman, I say all these experts who ask this question do something -- senseless, ridiculous.

So would you kindly see these four stages: I, two, three, four. That's the abnormal sequence through which, so to speak, or -- in which direction our poor Henry Adams traveled. And you all find yourself already in this fourth, hapless stage. Anybody who asks about himself, "What am I?" can never find an answer. Never. So the question has to be dismissed. And as long as you do not dismiss the question, you are a Newtonian sociologist. A Newtonian -- Newtonianism is superseded, is ridiculous.

To put it from another angle: if you take the fixation of the atoms, everybody will -- mentions his -- second thermodynamic law, which is entropism. Up above this, as you -- very rightly said, is for the living things, devolution. Above this in society is -- there is degradation. Above this, there is crisis. And above this there is catastrophe, the end of the world.

Now I do not agree with you, gentle- -- {Reed}, that he did not prophesy correctly. This isn't -- he did prophesy I think correctly. All prophecy says a little more than what happens. But you cannot dismiss the two world wars from not being part of the prophecy. That is the catastrophe of the democratic dogma. After all, we have today a -- absolutism, state absolutism with Mr. -- Mr. -- the people raging in the state department on mere suspicion. We have a new form of government. There is no democracy in the United States at this moment. We have a complete change of all the -- all the principles of government. And we have two armed camps. And we have the atomic bomb. And before, we have destruction and complete -- certainly -- destruction of Europe, which -- in -- of course, entails the vision of Henry Adams, that by 1917, the human mind -- you'll remember, {Reed}, will have to take a jump, because it will not longer be able to deal with reality, and we'll not understand it any longer. Well, that's exactly what happened, when the United States plunged into the World War I. Ever since, the Unite- -- people of the United States have not known what they have been doing. Do you know what we are doing now? Nobody knows. We're just in the dark. And they are always -- ever since 1917. Man has lost control. In Europe, they lost control in 19- -- 1819, is -- is my guess. In America, it happened a little later. We had here a kind of respite. But do you think we are not drifting at this moment? Just wait and see what happens in three days in Berlin. You will be surprised.

Well, look at this. These are five forms of { }. What -- which term is lacking here, gentlemen? Which makes the naturalistic mind, the "he" mind, the "it" mind, the inanimate object mind seemingly scientific? If you look at these entropies, and devolution, degradation, crisis, and catastrophe, which very

simple experience of humanity is not in it? They are all negative terms.

(Salvation.)

Wie?

(Salvation.)

I speak of negative terms. What happened to Mrs. Adams?

(Death.)

Yes. She died. Now, you see, in the days before the inanimate dogma, the "it" dogma of Mr. Henry Adams, people were naive enough to say, "I must die." And they tried to build an -- edifice of creeds, and faiths, and beliefs around this very simple fact that all men must die. And so the word "death" appears in all traditions before 1600 at the foremost place. You will see that all modern science tries to evade the term "death." This is -- has become unnecessary. We have the machine age. We shall replace all the appendices, and eyes, and brains, you see. We have an artificial brain, and Mr. Lindbergh went so far to invent an artificial heart, as you know, and death is unnecessary. And when you -- when people can help it, they don't speak of death. That's unappetizing, I mean.

A friend of mine, I told you, died in his own house, very meaningfully to the great blessing of his family, and the neighbor said, "How indecent, not to go to the hospital," because a -- decent man is not seen when he dies. It's obscene, you see.

That's the p- -- point of the -- that's -- would be the point of the dyna- -- age of the dynamo, you see. Death is never to be mentioned. So you can see that all the people, since Herbert Spencer, and Stuart Mill, and all these apostles of the Enlightenment for -- the human society, Mr. Comte, and Henry Adams -- foremost in his books -- have to project the reason why they have to think so hard into terms that omit the cause of their thinking: death. It's all projection. And you know what projection is in psychoanalysis: it's an inability to face the cause for your -- mental processes.

Modern man cannot fathom why he thinks, as long as he d- -- isn't confronted with the simple truth that we think because we have -- must die. Or some -- our beloved die. But I mean, it is just as urgent that we think, because your parents die, or your comrade in arms in Korea dies, as you yourself die. I'm even inclined to think that we -- we think, our mental operations are feverishly at work more, even, because other people die, the people whom we love, than

that we die. I don't think that man's mind is just concentrating on his own survival. He's much more puzzled when somebody he has taken for granted is suddenly eliminated. That's a very hard thing to believe, and that's your thinking. Any gap in your -- in that what you for -- take for granted as your environment makes your thinking. And death is the form in which this -- this occurs, that you must think. Without death, we would not think, you see. Any boy who wouldn't have fea- -- to fear dying -- fear death in some form would sleep with 10,000 women, would go to all kind of debt, because after all, if we do not die, there is no vindication. Why shouldn't we behave very badly, like the Olympian gods? And you know, they behaved very badly, because they couldn't die. Not to -- not to die means that you are unpunishable.

What I have tried to say is, gentlemen, that the era of -- from 1600 to today, in which -- into which you are born more than -- than people in -- on other continents, because of the history of America, these people from -- Mr. Descartes onward -- Coperni- -- and Galilei, too, to today, all live under the superstition that by projecting death into some process in nature, you will escape the nearness of death in your own life. This looks so objective. Entropism is the getting colder of the whole world -- well, it freezes out, and we would, you see, die in the process, but very indirectly. All this is indirection. Nothing is directly pointing to you. It is all indirect. And this is what the scientific generalization always does.

Any generalization, gentlemen, you see, omits the -- the real motive -- the ulterior motive by which we are forced to generalize. And only he is master of his destiny who knows what makes Sammy run, what makes you and me think. And we do think because we must die. If only we would live, we would not think. And since most Americans have removed death from their thinking processes, consciously, they make -- give the impression very often to me that they cannot think. I mean, most American boys and girls -- as you know, girls no less than men, and politicians and men in the public eye -- I have the impression that they are all like Grover {Vale}. They cannot think. They think anything that's needed at this moment -- they're pragmatic. Today they think that the Communists are bad, and in 1940, that the Communists were wonderful. So they think every day, but is it thinking? That's reflection -- like a mirror. You hold a mirror before them, and they -- it will show the -- the picture of the moment. A kaleidoscope is not thinking. The American mind, gentlemen, is not thinking because the -- I think I gave it in the other class, this -- great sentence of a man who died a thousand years ago. He had on his tombstone: "He fluctuates, who wants to live forever" in Latin. Very wonderful word. Will you take this down? He fluctuates, who wants to live forever. And to think means to stabilize the truth beyond your fluctuations. And the American mind wants to fluctuate, and therefore it has no truth. No truth whatsoever, except for the unimportant things of the inanimate

world. I mean, how oil behaves, you know. And how stones behave. It's -- it's rather uninteresting. We would like to know how you behave. But this is un- -- impossible with this -- with this {pipedream}.

Now take Henry Adams' situation within these -- gentlemen, this would be the {farrest} future, the catastrophe, which he prophesies for 1922. The crisis would be on hand, the present. The degradation would be the immediate past, so to speak -- yesterday -- or even today. The devolution would be the -- from 1600 onward, from America's founding, from the Pilgrim Fathers. And the entropism would be the universal law of all the past. If you put it in terms of Henry Adams' relation to time -- allow me to put it strictly this way -- to him the -- the -- all these times before 1600 are his museums. That's a museum past, or "antiquity," they call it. The {virgin} is very old, it's ancient, it's gone. You cannot revive it. Put here the word "antiquity."

As to America's devolution, degradation, this is -- if you take the whole thing -- this is the tradition, or the "history" you can also say. This would be the loyalties. This would be your task. And this would be your destiny. Any man, gentlemen, is faced with all these five relations, you hanging in this network. Certain parts of the world are definitely over. You cannot go back to the tertiary or the -- you see, or the -- any geological age, before our time. That's antiquity. Wherever you draw the line, you see, you say, "This is no longer anything," you see, "I can do anything about it." With regard to tradition, it's different. You can do something about tradition. You can keep this tradition of Jeffersonian democracy -- you can keep alive. Loyalties to your father, in -- as in London, when he worked at the embassy, you can enact. They are still operating. The task, that's your own. And Henry Adams said, "I have nothing to do in this world." He absolved himself, after his wife had died, from any task. Isn't that true? And destiny he only described in term of his entropism, you see, which is certainly the opposite, the negative destiny. The destiny of the earth is to turn burn up -- to freeze up, I should say. Not to burn up by atomic energy, but to freeze up, to die by -- by -- {inernition}.

So you see there is a great relation between these minuses. This is all minus. Every word here which I have put is plus, because even a museum is plus, because it is that which has to be respected of the past. The beauty that was Rome, the beauty that was Greece, you see. That is, museum, but not indifferent antiquity, you see. Something highly respectable.

Here we have five pluses. I think that's quite interesting, gentlemen. You can describe the scientific bluff of the last hundred years as putting everywhere the minus before the -- instead of the plus. Only in Henry Adams' case it's so very purebred, it's so very complete. Most of your -- the people you meet are

half-baked. They have one minus: "Decline of the West. That would be no task for us, it's -- you see, Europe is doomed anyway, and we just retire into isolationism or whatever. No task. Let me alone." Or whatever -- how you express it. That would be just a minus with regard to the present-day crisis. If you say, for example, that you are against universal service, that means that you -- not even this minimum of a task for a modern American is given to you. "Let's evade the draft," as most Americans at this moment think. "Let me alone, and I've be- -- we have been confused enough for the last 35 years." Degradation -- you see it from Mr. Edgar Hoover, or from Mr. -- Mr. -- how is this man called in the state department who makes the investigations?

({Scott McLloyd}.)

Wie?

({Scott McLloyd}. {Scott McLloyd}.)

Yes, yes, yes, you see. Suspicion makes law. Well, it does. It is the demo- -- degradation of the democratic dogma, the dogma -- the government is there without the support of the people, and it has -- a right to suspect the people, and suspicion is enough to be fired. That's a new one. It's the degradation of the democratic dogma, as it is inevitable, gentlemen. In -- in Cleon, the tanner Cleon, after Pericles, had -- produced the very same effect in -- in Athens. The abuses of democracy must always lead to some form of absolutism. And that's what we have all over the world. Wherever you look, it's just inevitable. Abuse leads always to some -- you see -- other form of government. And you can only hope it's very mild with us. We -- I mean, we have -- we are blessed still that we go slowly in this. But the degradation of the democratic dogma certainly has done its -- its -- has worked -- wormed itself into our history. And 70 years after Henry Adams, even the man on the street knows it. He w- -- at that time, he was the only man who knew it.

Now gentlemen, if you now look at The Education of Henry Adams, let me now -- or say one thing more. If you see that destiny, task, loyalty, tradition, and antiquity, which we may call "respect," or what we no longer do ourselves, "reverence" perhaps is go- -- better word still than "respect," that then you see that his great tragedy was, of the naturalist, that he in a way tried every one of these directions of action -- for action, but I think he never understood as you and I must understand, gentlemen, that we do in our lives these five things -- five different things in time, at a different degree of directness, of immediacy, of exposure to God or reality, or the Devil, or whatever you call the open road of real life.

When the war is declared and you are sent to Pearl Harbor, that is a catastrophe which is -- takes over and your des- -- the destiny of America is at stake. Your life disappears as a -- in importance. You have no -- task of your own. It is the destiny of the nation, and you may believe very well, of mankind which on December 7th, 1941, was suddenly challenged. I'm -- I feel this way. And a man who is asked to enter upon an enterprise of these dimensions of undecided openness, where the whole destiny of man may take a turn in a new direction, is dealing with firsthand life, the question of life and death. And you can be sure that where there is no risk of death there is not the highest degree of life. That which cost- -- doesn't cost life, you see, usually is not very important. A martyr is more important than 10,000 books on theology. That's obvious, because one is ink and the other is blood. And General Booth is 10,000 more -- times more important than the people who wrote at his time that Christianity was finished. Since -- thanks to the primitive spirit of General Booth, who founded the Salvation Army, there is still another branch of Christianity alive today. And all the people who -- in 1870 who wrote up Christianity as finished -- they are just forgotten. They are not very interesting.

All this deals with -- with death. "Destiny" means that we have to decide whether we'll believe in a cause and are willing to die for it. Now, Henry Adams said, "We'll die, anyway. Therefore, nobody must die for anything." His wife, of course, defied him by her suicide. And that is the great tragedy, that he never understood in this perversion, in this distortion what life is all about in -- under Ivan the Terrible in Russia in the 16th cen- -- 17th century. Yes, Ivan is the 16th century, isn't he?

(Yes.)

16th century. The first journalist of Russia wrote that politics was only serious when heads were at stake, that all other politics are just a game, as they were in American democracy, you see, down to 1917. You get persecution, and you get McCarthy, and you get all these things today, because politics begin to become serious, and then they require risk, you see. Before, it's just a game, and makes no difference. It's just a -- a racket. Now rackets are not serious, but politics is very serious.

You know, civili- -- generals in peacetime want to make a career, three stars, four stars, five stars they want to get, these West Pointers. But Clemenceau, Georges Clemenceau, the great Frenchman said, you know, the Second World -- the First World War, you see, wars are too serious to be left to the generals. You understand? Wars are too serious to be left to the generals, because to the general, that's a civilian career. That is something within his life. But for Clemenceau, it was a risk of his existence, of his -- of his -- of his reputation, of his after- -- life

and -- as Churchill now writes in the -- in his memoirs that in modern wars, the leaders are just executed who lose the war. The reason is because we have so competent officers, generals. And since they make it just a lifetime career, and not a question of dying on the battlefield, somebody has to pay the penalty for wrong leadership. The generals are not the ones who pay any penalty. They get a pension, and a lackey, and a car, and a staff.

It's very serious, gentlemen. We have so much competency, so much expert knowledge in an army, that the real leadership of the army can no longer be in the expert. Never can an expert lead in catastrophe, gentlemen. Catastrophes invite much deeper forces of men. There -- the -- are -- is always a religious situation in which the man who has faith is the important man. Not the man who has an office. What's an office? Lee -- take Grant, he has to be -- he's swept into office, you see, because all the generals are nobody. He's a drunkard, and he's bankrupt, and he's nobody, but he can win battles, as Lincoln says. So give me any man who can win battles. If he has no antecedents of a general, I still make him commander-in-chief. The commander-in-chief is not just the general with five stars. It's a great mistake. I'm afraid but we just {learned that}.

Gentlemen, catastrophe is inherent in our exposure to death. Catastrophe invites us to invest our life into a -- the risky business of dying for the good cause. That is the character of cri- -- catastrophe, and the destiny of man, gentlemen, will never be found by shallow philosophies, or by shallow theologies, or by sermons on Sunday. The -- what your des- -- what you consider the destiny of mankind becomes only known by those acts of you where you risk your life. Any -- young man who jumps into the river to -- save a drowning child does more to the destiny of the human race than all the nice programs written in ink, you see. That has nothing to do with our destiny. The man may lie. The man may have illusions. He has dreams, you see. But the man who jumps into the river, says -- what does he say? What's in this act so great? What does he proclaim as a destiny of mankind? Which dogma is -- prevails in such a moment, can you tell me?

{ }.

What? What is -- what -- why is a man who -- who saves -- at the danger of his own life -- a drowning child, why is restoring the destiny of the human race into reality? Because he believes in the solidarity of the human race. That is, he defies the idea that man was created single, as an individual, you see. He says, "The opposite is true," you see. We have created an -- nobody can be saved without saving the last, other man. That is Christianity. That's all religion, gentlemen. You cannot be saved unless everybody else is saved. That's the difference from the -- an objective point of view of the scientist who says, "I describe your life, and I describe another man's life, but I know nothing, you see, of your desti-

ny." Well, the destiny of man is very simple, gentlemen. Since we are on this earth, the solidarity of the human race is the whole problem of history, isn't it? What I'm trying to -- have tried to show you is the very profound solidarity between the various generations of man. It is very easy to -- jump into the river and to save a drowning child, or to go into a third story where there -- a blaze and save a baby in the cradle. That's nothing compared to the difficulty of saving your grandfather from oblivion, because you are inclined to put fire to his memory, and to have him drown. And so I told you, William James woke up to the fact that his father could not drown. That's -- that -- then meant -- begins when there is solidarity. When you feel solidarity with a Stone Age Indian, then you begin to live as a human being; 58 and 10, as you know, are devoted to this.

Now, let us look into this further please, gentlemen. Tasks would be lifetime appointments. That is, not the whole life from birth to death, but purposive living, which is only one-half of life. You see, if you are president, or judge, or teacher, or professor, or a research man, this is not your whole existence. You have still your private life, you have your friends, you see, you have your -- your offspring. Your vocation, to most people, this looks as the whole of life. It's only one-half of life. It's only the waking part of life, you see. You are not this when you sleep. But a man in prison who is to be executed, these poor boys in Korea, they are there under destiny. That is, their sleep is wrecked; their nerves are ruined. Their total existence is involved, which again, people st- -- don't seem to realize at this moment with these -- with these poor prisoners. Well, we had some argument about this in this class, I suppose.

And I only want to remind you that any prisoner is nearer to the destiny and the catastrophes of the human race than all these smug people who go on the subway to their offices downtown New York. That's why you have to pray for prisoners. They need it. And you cannot be indifferent to their fate, as everybody seems still to be, with these Korean prisoners. That is your participation in the faith of the human race. You have no religion if you are not deeply more excited over these prisoners, and more interested in the -- in the investment of $1 billion of General Motors, because the task is a lifetime task, but it is not your whole existence. It is not in this total sense life -- your life and your death. That's why a man in business retires at a certain age and dismisses it because it isn't he who is this business, you see. It's a part of him.

The loyalties, gentlemen, make you into an appendix of something that has lived. You live on. You are lived by loyalty. If you are, in your town, distinguished -- like Senator Taft -- if he had stayed in Washington, he would have remained just an appendix to his father's memories. But he went to Ohio, and that was a very clever move, a very intelligent move, in order to build up once more his own, you see, -- following and his own loyalty. And I think that's his

greatest political act, in -- in -- in -- in -- in Taft's life, that he began from scratch again, and did not simply live on the loyalties of the people to his father's memory.

So, loyalties, gentlemen, are once more removed from the challenge of your individual soul, of your own life. They are still very alive, very much alive. Anybody who is junior, anybody who follows in his father's footsteps -- don't say that he is not carrying on life, but he is not creating it. He is respecting it, he is continuing it, and that's -- needs to be done. So it is -- in the sense, however, of challenge, of risk -- it is the third degree of vitality. Don't mean that I'm disparaging any of these vitalities. I'm a museum character by -- by birth. That is, I would love to have to do only with antiquity and antiquarianism. I'm a philologist by nature, so to speak, and I worship at old texts, and old vases, and old -- old pyramids. But I had to learn in my life that there is a very severe order of direct responsibility and indirect. Tradition, gentlemen, when he wrote -- when -- when -- when Henry Adams wrote the history of Jeffersonian democracy, he wrote a very good book. It's -- I recommend it to you. It has come out now in an abbreviated edition -- condensed, rather cheap. It's very good reading; a very brilliant writer, he is. And another man -- a mean here at Dartmouth, a professor, would be proud if he only had written this book his whole life, and done nothing else. And that's enough for the ordinary man, this one work of his. So he is -- Henry Adams, after all, is a man of some capacity and some scope; because that's just a sideline between 1870 and 1877: he is a professor at Harvard, and so he has then this professorial book coming to him, you see, as his output. How many volumes?

(Nine.)

Imagine! Well, as I said, nowadays a modern man at Harvard s- -- just says, "That's all I can do." And then he gets the Nobel Prize for bad literature.

So this man just, as a sideline, wrote up his -- his -- the tradition of America, the Jeffersonian tradition. And finally he went to France, and saw the 12th century, and fell in love with the museum and did this.

So if you would kindly see. This is here London. This is here his history book. This is his Saint-Michel and Chartres. He has -- that's The Education, and that's the degradation of the democratic dogma. That's his other book; instead of a vocation, this -- this accusation of his time, which doesn't offer him any task, negative to his task.

I think what is the trouble, gentlemen, with the scientist is something which you can study in -- in Adams. We all live today a monistic life, something

-- anything that happens in any one year seems to be on the same level of historical happening. That is, here in 1954, let's say, you graduate, I write a book, President Eisenhower is -- is moving -- giving a message to Congress, war is declared in -- in Berlin or what-not, I don't know, and France and England are severing their ties with the United States, and you put this all on the same level, and you say this -- all this happened -- as a gazetteer really does -- and say, "This is all what happens." And I think all scientific thinking, gentlemen, has no yardstick of evaluation, the directness or the indirectness of an event, with regard to real life.

Now I would suggest, gentlemen, that we live in five rings of immediacy. And that any event that demands death, sacrifice of life is first-rate action. That anything that -- asks personal devotion, that is, somebody saying "This is my business, since it is nobody else's business," you see, this taking-up of something that nobody else does is already second, but very great, very needed; that anything third, loyalty, is to be carried on, is in the third ring of mediated life. And so on it goes, gentlemen, until we come to the mus- -- objective description of myself, or the Museum of Modern Arts, or ancient arts, or what-not, where I try to look at myself as an inanimate object, there I live the world of museums and the ivory tower of Dartmouth College, or however you describe this attitude of looking at things. Wherever you have this attitude of looking at things, you are in the fifth environment, in the fifth sphere, so to speak, you see. You are outside the realm of risk, obviously. You see, when you look at the -- world as consisting of things, you have forgotten that you are mortal. You have forgotten that the whole world may come to an end. You have forgotten, you see, all danger and death. You have finally projected all this into a process, you see, that takes care of itself without your having to do anything about it. And that fits modern man. And that's you.

And since you grade the dignity of your thinking in the perverted order of thinking that you think better when you think in the fifth sphere of -- of indifference, and objectivity, and that you think least when you know that the destiny of mankind is at stake, you are counted out. You are degenerates. You are frozen. You are on the side of Henry Adams. That's -- is his tragedy which he has lived, so that you may not live it, that you may reverse the process, that you may not think that in these five circles, the fifth circle is the best, the Einsteinian circle. That is Einstein here. That is the entropism, the -- that's the law of the universe, or however you call it -- the relativity, here. Let's put it here. "Relativity" is the purest expression of this, which makes no difference for the physicist, whether he does blow up the universe by the atom bomb. He wants to construe it, so he leaves it to us and say, "Do what you please. I don't { } when to use it, when not to use it," you see.

I'll give you -- in a moment, again, shall give you a little -- oh, Heavens. My time is up? Would you allow me another five minutes?

(You want these { }, Sir?)

{ }. This would be the sphere which you -- what you use -- call "criticism," or "free criticism," or "free thought." Instead of a personal task, we -- you sit there and say, "The times are really very decadent, and very degenerate," and what can you do? Weeping on somebody else's shoulder, you see, and have a cocktail and say, "It's really too bad." That's what most of us do, instead of a task. The task, gentlemen -- that's what the contemporaries of -- of General Booth did, you mean. They criticized already the downfall of -- already then of the Church and Booth said, "I don't know. { } -- people have to be saved." And you { } absolutely right, you see, then I'll save them five minutes before the end." So I prefer always Booth to the critics. Booth and { }, {he had} a very good name.

This here, you see, you see very much in American business: tradition, loyalty kept going. But I wished it would do more. Men should follow their pa- -- fathers in their footsteps, if there is any hope that the office or the business can be kept alive, because there's so little loyalty in this country that I think we need every bit of loyalty and fan to some little fire, and some little flame. I think -- you find it -- all the -- quite some feeling about these loyalties. I -- they remind me of the alumni fund. It's not a laughable thing. It's a remarkable achievement.

Then you have traditions. The traditions are not represented by physical bonds of the grandfather. But the Pilgrim Fathers today and Jonathan Edwards, and Cotton Mather, the men I have tried to invoke in this course, you see, they are tradition. But the loyalty has to be re-tapped, re-attached. Isn't this clear. I mean, there is no loyalty to Jonathan Edwards. You have considered him a fool. And Cotton Mather -- he's notorious because of the Salem witch trials. Certainly, you see, a negative tradition. But you see, he's still within a context of which we have a certain immediate understanding, although gone through a very critical mill. And this would be then the revered part of humanity, Jerusalem, and Palestine, and the so-called sacred places, which nobody thinks to be sacred, but he talks about it, like our poor Melville, going there in 1858 and -- and finding just def- -- decadence is there. And doing -- being unable really to see more than a museum.

Gentlemen, no -- no. This is all wrong. Pardon me. I made a -- I made a -- quite a --. You obviously -- pardon me. Going all wrong. So you see, here is the destiny, in the center. Here is the task. Here is the loyalty. Here is {tradition}. And outside, there is the relativity. Now, I have not -- I could have put in perhaps one ring in between physics and -- and history, the biological -- or medicine, but

it wouldn't -- it wouldn't change the -- the importance, gentlemen, of this scheme. The scheme means that by modern man thinking, by modern man thinking, he is hip to think at the most indifferent, the most superfluous, the standard of living, the relativity, the machine. The -- this is all very nice, gentlemen. Everything -- all the four others are living. But what you have to solve is to care for these prisoners, and to drown -- to save drowning people, because otherwise the whole meaning of all the four other rings disappears, because then you have no direction.

Gentlemen, here at the kernel of your own existence, and of everybody's existence today the direction in which we are meant to travel has to be reaffirmed. And this is the center of being. The meaning can never come from this periphery. Never can physics give any meaning to your existence.

(Sir, would you say the -- the outside ring is important to us only as the inner rings, or {essentially} more important? In other words, we realize that the most important is -- what you're calling there as the inner ring, and you can also attach importance to the outer rings, too, but if you say...)

Well, let me put it this way, gentlemen. Every man is at stake here. Some men are delegated to the periphery. Some -- more men are delegated to the traditions. Still more men to the loyalties. Still more -- more to the courage of personal task. And all -- everybody, child, woman, and man, are -- have to be dedicated to our destiny. This must be universal. But this is the { } for a few. I don't have to understand physics. Let Mr. Einstein do that. I don't have to understand chemistry, you see. These are things for specialists. And we -- they are delegations from the core of mankind. They have forgotten this. They think they are making us. They are making us. We are delegating them. I allow Mr. Einstein to be a physicist, because I am {then a true} layman, and you do, you see. The child of man, the child of nature, the -- God's child, the man who is sure of the solidarity of the human race, he can even keep solidarity with the scoundrels who threw the bombs on Hiroshima. But if everybody would throw always bombs on Hiroshima, gentlemen, there would be no mankind; there would be certainly no meaning in our existence. It must remain an exception, isn't that true? Cannot be the rule. Now who sets the rule, and who says it is an exception? Can the man whom we hire to be the exception -- the physicist -- can he set the rule for our existence? He cannot. We allow him to think in such general terms about the universe, that it doesn't matter whether it happened 600 million before Christ or 600 million after Christ.

To give you now a last point of -- it's not so much a pointer to your understanding of this disease of the -- Henry Adams' and your own mind. Gentlemen, Henry Adams had 60,000 -- 19 thous- -- hundred years going before. When we

take 1600, he had 300 years forward-looking. You said 70 still remaining, but this means that if you begin a second -- wie?

(Seventeen { }.)

Seventeen. Oh, yes. Quite. Well, but this comes, you see, if you divide his history, you can really put the incision in -- into 1600, and 17 is the last part of the 300, from 16- -- beginning with 1600.

({ } from the 12th century.)

Oh no, not the break. The break is in 1600. 1200 is the perfection of the 90,000 years.

(Then turns around and goes the other way.)

Exactly. So, that's only -- as you said 17, but I think it's just a quibbling of words. But whether it's 17 or 300 it would be short in any case. But I think it's only fair for him -- to him to give him the 300, you see. You will see that it makes a little difference. I want to point out that Mr. Henry Adams is very, very much wiser still than the modern evolutionists or -- or -- he has, as you know, 600 -- in fact he has 1 billion years for the universe. You don't have to say this formula for the length of the universe, with the -- which really is a billion -- a billion years.

Well, that's the past. And as their future, they have the Third World War, ask Mr. Oppenheimer. That is, whenever -- let's { } {has taken} tomorrow, it {hasn't} taken a few years, and they have no future. And they have all the past. Gentlemen, museum thinking, physics thinking has only the past. It has no relation to the future. You only know the future if the destiny of man is at your heart. Anybody who knows of the solidarity of the human race by any one act -- by feeding a little baby, or by freeing a prisoner, or by eloping with a girl knows more about the future, because he incorporates the future. What is the future, gentlemen? {Infinite}! The future is just as long as the past. There is not a word of truth in all these figures about the past. They must appear that long to a man who begins to sit -- to think with one-fifth of his brain, and his heart, and his mind. I can think that out, too. But it -- what does it mean? No proof {to this}.

Any man who is free about time, who -- to whom his parents are just as alive as his grandchildren, has absolutely no preference for the future or the past. I have no such preference. What has to come to life -- if it's 5,000 years old, it has to come to life today, a Negro plastic, or -- or the -- the -- the discipline of a -- of a primitive tribe. We need a -- this discipline. Let's have it, you see. Initiation, or dancing or something. What does -- I do I care how old it is? It's no question for

my judgment, because I feel it's part of the destiny of man which began to be ful- -- filled. Then let's have it. Let's save it, you see. It has to come to life again.

Gentlemen, we learn from Henry Adams that you cannot live as long as the future and the past are not identical twins to you in your decision. Any man who knows anything of catastrophe, of destiny, knows something about those things that have to be lived eternally. If you know the destiny of man, you know that civil rights must exist in any generation, that they cannot be simply dismissed today because of -- for pragmatic reasons. If you know that there is a destiny at stake, what do you care about Communism and capitalism? Man is obviously bigger than any one of the two. That's not important. You're more important. The solidarity of the human race is much more important than any of these side issues, of one generation, of one century. And the whole course, I hope, I have tried to build up on the assumption, gentlemen, that although you live consciously in opposition to the previous generation and in frustration by the next generation, you only have a full life whenever you are able to deny this distinction. Whenever your father, and your son, and you yourself live in one center in a glow of decision in which there is no such distinction between past and future, that is -- has always in all times been called the "religious attitude." And it has always started with a victory over death. And it has always started with the frank facing the problem of one generation dying and other coming to life. Death is at the center, you see, of the problem. And that's why anybody who never mentions death is not fit for the kingdom of Heaven.

Thank you.