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

[Opening remarks missing]

...in the whole mental process, gentlemen, through which any human being is called to live. We have today to bring together the beginning and the end of the mental life. The middle section is unseen and invisible from the beginning as well as from the end. In this college, nobody ever mentions it. In this college, everything ends with reasonable doubt, calculated risk, your own philosophy. That is, the modern American businessman is stuck -- and his philosophy -- in {middle age} this side of the real zenith of life. And that's why he's so very uninteresting. And that's why the pe- -- themselves say with the psychologist that they never get beyond the 12th year.

The serious people, gentlemen, in this country of course know better, but they usually are religious people. And they don't talk so much. They don't write in the New Republic or in the Atlantic or in Harper's. The people who write in these strange magazines of human misunderstanding, they always think that the last word in life is analysis, and that you have analyzed a thing, then you know it.

So today we have to discover, gentlemen, in how far this is not true and in how far it is true. May I say at once, gentlemen: to analyze something means to kill it. And since we must kill in order to live, since there is no life without death, I'm all for the analysis, as long as you know that to analyze means to kill, because obviously we kill in order to live and to make live. Therefore we analyze so that new life may spring up. But you analyze in order to go -- gloat over your victims.

Every lecture -- yesterday again I had talked about greatness. Mr. Pusey at Harvard has discovered this, at this moment, too; he says, "Education is for greatness." Well, who understands this? You don't, because everything you understand, you say, "It's merely that. It is nothing but this. All there is to it is this. Don't you see? Then it's not more than this." You say, "Water? That's just H2O."

It isn't. That's air, isn't? What is water?

(H2O.)

Wie?

(I'm not really sure. H2O.)

Well, I just wanted to find out if you knew. So, you do.

Well, gentlemen, the -- the -- this attitude, "it is nothing but," is the attitude at the fifth phase of your mental life, of analysis. We have called this phase "doubt." It is the moment after play when you are forced to relinquish an attachment, some taboo, something holy of which you were a part -- your own home, for example, or your own country, like this boy who's now founding a United Nations Party. What's his name?

({John Davis. Davis.})

Ja. So he tries to -- to slay the Goliath of nationalism. The Goliath is whom he doubts. He analyzes nationalism and he found it wanting, so Mr. Davis kills the nation, as we all have to do at a certain time in life, gentlemen. Certainly the nation is not the highest. In Europe, you were however killed if you said so. You were not allowed to say, "The nation is not the highest -- nationalism," obviously.

I still remember when the wa- -- First World War broke out, gentlemen. I finished my lectures to my students. Then -- it's a long time ago, 40 years. I was very young. And it was July 25th, 1914. And I said to my students, "We all have to go to war, now." I was a soldier then six years following. This was my last lecture. I said to them, "Remember that there are things big- -- bigger than the state and the nation. If you do this, it is possible for us to come out of this war rightly." This I am very proud of, gentlemen. It wasn't so easy to say this before such a war. It is very easy always to say it, especially when you lose the war, afterwards. But you have to say it all the time. There is nothing that the human being cannot doubt which is this side of your creator. So you doubt everything.

However, as you know, the cheapest thing is to doubt the existence of God and to believe in your bank account. This is what most modern people do. They believe in their bank account, but they -- or in the currency and vote Republican for this reason, but they do not believe in God. They doubt it in bull sessions. You can doubt everything except that you doubt. And to doubt is a divine power, and therefore you all believe in God while you are doubting, because you are able to doubt. That is, you are able to kill. Now anybody who can take life is a master and lord of life -- as we say of God that He is the Lord of life. But gentlemen, when we say that God giveth and taketh, we always understand that He only taketh in order to give.

Anybody who doubts is obliged to bring life back. You can doubt everything if you allow it then to rise from the dead again. But this is the condition, gentlemen: you can analyze the illness of your -- of your wife, or of yourself, if you then allow the doctor to cure you. If you however have a diagnosis that there's

an incurable illness with your brother, or sister, or your mother, or your father, and you say, "Well, it's no use spending any money on her. Let's have her die quickly," you -- you see, you abuse analysis. Isn't that clear? You diagnose the illness, which is analysis, and you find it is incurable. And so you let the patient die immediately. Is this right? That would be trying your -- bringing your killing experience of the mind into practical, you see, focus, and embodying it by your act. But you all know very well this is impossible. The doubt is not allowed, you see, to take life. If the doctor says, "It is incurable, this life cannot go on," he doubts, you see, the worthwhileness of any action. Does this acquit him from trying?

Now you -- they have a typic- -- problem which you of course in your -- in your own doubts always escape, gentlemen. Please see clearly that any mental process of yours in your bedchamber entails always similar decisions. When you say you do- -- doubt that the capitalistic system is working -- and you may very well doubt it -- then you begin to kill it, because if the doubt is reasonable, you will withdraw your support from it. Obviously, gentlemen, you cannot say "no" to anything without withholding some stream of life from its existence. It's impossible to say "no" to a part of the world without killing it, or without contributing to its death.

Gentlemen, this is very serious what I'm telling you at this moment. You and your age have no other way of rediscovering the Creed, of rediscovering the great facts of religion, except through doubting. You must see the deity which is at work in you, or the devil, when you say, "This is nothing to me. I don't care." Anybody who says, "I don't care" is a murderer, because obviously the things of this life can only live by our care. And anybody who says, "I don't care," dismisses suffering, and -- whether it's the suffering of a violet, or it's the suffering of a neighbor.

Anything wants -- gentlemen, the things, while you are children live with you in exactly the same way as you do. And what do you believe while you are 12? You are -- believe -- allowed to believe, and you have a right to believe that you are gradually led to your destination, to your destiny. Any child has this happy feeling that it's growing in the right direction. Isn't that true? That is, that it has a tomorrow which it have -- has to fulfill. You don't know this. You are living so statically in space that you never think that for 15 years, you already have believed that you know where you -- knew where you were going because you were sent. You were sent by people who loved you. They were sent out into the future. And if this wasn't true, you couldn't live now. You would have to hang yourself, because the first 20 years of your life would be wasted.

Others have made you go into the world in the right direction. That's educa-

tion. That's listening. That's reading. That's playing. And that is learning, that you have been sent. Isn't that true? You are all the product of mission. "Mission" means to send. There is no child, gentlemen, of which the parents and teachers are not the missionaries. You only think of missions in foreign countries. The ghetto race has to be -- or the black -- the Mau-Mau people have to be converted. No, gentlemen: every child has to be converted. That is, it has to be turned into its own right direction. And that's conversion. That's why children are baptized -- before they understand, because it means that the grown-ups get together and say, "This child has to be turned in the right direction." That's baptism. Nothing else, you see. And then, when it wakes up at -- usually at -- officially at confirmation, you wake up when you are on your deathbed, you can recognize that you have been sent, that at -- at your christening, the other people took you and threw you into the stream of life. That's why there's water, because the wa- -- immersion means that the child is going to swim. The first Chris- -- Christ, as you know, was depicted as a fish lustily in the water, swimming, because He had His direction, and we receive it from Him.

If you don't receive direction, you get this juvenile delinquency, which has doubled in the last 10 years, as you may have seen in the papers, because these children have no direction. We have instead -- instead of christening today, juvenile delinquency. That's our civilization, because you don't understand anymore that the mission which we applied to the Japanese or to the Fiji Insel- -- islanders first has to apply to your own children. You don't give your child -- your children now today a send-off. You let them do what they please.

Now, I have already tried to show you, gentlemen, that in the first four commandments, this mission has to work itself into your person. And now comes this very great moment, the 5th commandment at which you should be, but which unfortunately in most colleges is not really taken sacredly: the moment of doubt, the moment in which you have to discover the aberrations, the deviations in the direction that has come to you from your parents and forefathers, and you have to correct it yourself. And for this you have to make a study, an investigation of the directions implied in their cause of action. Gentlemen, to doubt is impossible if you do not take the following terms very seriously: the terms "process," "course," "path," "way of life." Will you take down these terms? Because they are the terms applicable to thinking, to the mind. The mind is always on the road. But you think, as armchair philosophers, that it isn't, that it's something in the brain working here -- tick, tock -- here and there, regardless of time.

Any mental process, gentlemen, is your own life lived towards its destiny. Any physical process is your own life lived from its birth. That is, we think, gentlemen, because we must reach a certain goal. That's why all thinking looks backward from this goal. All thinking is based on the fact that you must die. And all

living is based on the fact that you have been born. Physically you live, gentlemen, from beginning to end. Mentally you live from end to beginning. If you don't understand this, you don't know why you doubt. You doubt in order to become master of your own life, to become your own direction under con- -- get your own direction under control, because in the first four phases of life, up to this moment, where you are sitting here, gentlemen, life of the intellect has come to you. You never had any one of your own. The cleverer you are, the more intelligent -- the less it has been your own life.

Gentlemen, the smart-alec who takes advantage of other people, is nothing but an exploiter of the direction and the advantages given to him by others. He has not yet reached any insight for what purpose he thinks. The successful people in your term of the word are the people who are totally de- -- dependent on the civilization, on the environment, and exploit it. They are quite unable to get out of the rut of the direction which they have only too well misunderstood.

These people you seem very often to me to admire. Gentlemen, admire those people who have changed the direction of humanity. And don't admire the people who have overdone the wrong directions by exploiting the open roads; the paved avenues; the trite, common ways of life. Do you really mean to admire -- to say that at -- the age of 20 you have to admire the Rockefellers who have taken advantage of other people's gullibility? Is this to be admired? That is -- they have exploited a path which had a certain width and they have made it too wide, finally.

This happens. All of us do this. We are all so lazy. Gentlemen, the trodden path is of course trodden by every one of us, because we are lazy. But it is nothing admirable, gentlemen. Gravity is not admirable. The -- to think in terms of common sense is cheap. And it happens. And nobody can be helped, but you haven't to talk about it. It happens, anyway.

These things, gentlemen, which have to be mentioned are the things by which you become one of the few people who control their own thinking. There are very few. Most of you just repeat either The Dartmouth or the edit- -- column of Walter Lippmann or somebody- -- some other commentator, when you talk politics. When you talk football, you repeat Red Smith, or somebody like that. And most of you never say one original thing in their whole life. To think is not as cheap as you think, to say something which is sound, because that's just -- you repeat somebody else's sound idea. It is very difficult to think for yourself, gentlemen. Much more difficult than you think. What you call "thinking" is repeating what somebody else has thought at the proper opportunity.

When do you appropriate then a thought, and make the -- make it your own?

When you have to state it after you have doubted it. When you are forced to say, "Let's try what happens when I say `no' to this." And when you have to come back to it and say, "No. I found it was true." Before, it isn't your fault at all. Now, most of you, gentlemen, mistake intrepidity, the -- the simplicity, na‹vet‚, however you call it, with thinking. But it is only your thought after you have tried to be without that thought. Then it becomes indispensable to you. And how do you know that it is indispensable, you see? After you have tried to dispense with it. Before, it isn't your thought at all. Before, it's either a dream, if it is -- has no -- not a -- you see, a pipe dream, or it is somebody else's thought, which you have just snatched up, which is bad, gentlemen. But don't call -- say that you think it. What you do is you repeat it. You say it. You quote it. You recite it, which is perfectly all right, gentlemen, as long as you know that you are in the learning stage.

But I find in this country that people who have snatched up by reading certain things, or they have listened to certain people -- lectures, et cetera -- or they have learned certain things, say it's their own thought. That isn't true. I won't bow -- I have no respect as long as these people steal other people's ideas. And I find that most people in this country are thieves, mental thieves.

I'll give you a story to this. No, { }, one moment. Let me just finish the argument.

I -- I had a boy. He's now a professor at Columbia. And he {starred} at this college for a while. But when he was a student he really was na‹ve. And I gave him one of my papers to read. It's quite a paper. It's quite famous now in Europe. But at that time, he didn't know this, because it was mimeographed. So he thought he was very clever. He came to me and you see the combination of -- of good and bad is very -- stunning in this case.

You know what he said? He said, "I have a father who never went to college. And he has sent me and my brothers to college, and I want to comp- -- reward him for this good deed. I love my father. So I thought, you give me this pamphlet. I think it's a wonderful pamphlet." This was my pamphlet. "And we -- I'll bring it home. And he publishes it under his name, and then I'm sure the university in my -- home town," he was New York, "will certainly allow him to register at the college. And he can now then study without having the -- otherwise the equipment, the qualifications. Don't you think it's a wonderful idea?"

Now, that's by and large your relation to intellectual property. He didn't see you -- how -- how incredible the whole story was, you see, that he thought his father should publish this -- what I had written, just so that he might then become a college student. Can you see the -- the strange story?

As you know -- I think it was down to 1875 or '76 -- some of you may know better -- that in this country everything had -- was -- could be pirated, that there was no copyright. This country has lived on stealing mental property. It was just natural. Stealing is perhaps natural. Perhaps it is very strange to have property protected, you see. The -- socialists say {it isn't}, don't they? They say there is no property.

Gentlemen, intellectual property is not owned by anybody, but you have to give it the name of the person who coined it. You -- that's the -- the strange thing which is not understood in this country. People in this country, you know, when they quote 10 words, they have to ask permission now after the strict copyright from the author. That doesn't exist in any other country that you have to read in a preface: "I thank Mrs. Kipling for being allowed to quote: `Lest we forget.'"

This is -- you see, atrocious. But the piracy, the stealing of a mi- -- mental property in this country has been so atrocious that this is the reaction. That now, if you want to quote 12 words -- 12 lines from the author, you have to get special permission. Now gentlemen, in Europe, you can quote as much as you like, without ever asking anybody's permission, but you have to give him the honor of having said it, for having said it, you see. That's all that's needed.

The life of the spirit, gentlemen, is absolutely free for all those who recognize the authors of this -- any saying, who treat each other personally, as persons. Gentlemen, the great privilege which a student has is that he can read Plato, and he can read John Quincy Adams, and he can read Cardinal Newman under one condition: that he understand that by giving them the honor which is due to them, he becomes an honorable person himself. It is your only way, gentlemen, of becoming persons, not by wearing foreign feathers and saying, "I think. This is my philosophy." You have none. But by saying, "How wonderful. This is what Plato said." In this very moment, you own personality begins to grow. You don't know this.

You actually -- I find this time and again. I am here 20 years now, gentlemen. Believe me, it is true that people think their stature is increased by their plagiarizing. You know what plagiarizing is -- just omitting the name of the other. Gentlemen, I assure you -- that's why you all look so small, in mental stature. Anybody who gets -- gets stature, who admits that he has been introduced to the society of the greatest of the great. And how is he introduced? By acknowledging what they are, and -- what are they? What they have said. A man is what he has said, or what he has written, or what he has stuck his neck out for. Isn't that true? And this is -- shows that you move in good company, that you s- -- quote them. But you don't prove it by -- your smartness by stealing their property. Then everybody knows where you belong, into Sing-Sing.

And that's where { } here in this country a very smart-alec family of people who write articles and always -- open any of the magazines. How do they talk about the German generals? Ha! These generals. How do they talk about French fashions? Ha! These fashions. I always hear this attempt to be superior. Ha! We know all about it. Oh, Europe! Or here, a colleague of mine in this country once was asked what he thought of -- about Goethe, the greatest German thinker. And he said, "Goethe? Can tell you everything about him in 10 minutes."

Do you think that impresses anyone as important? He thought he was superior to Goethe. He only thought -- since Goethe needed 82 years to express himself, a man who says he can do it in 10 minutes, you see, only shows the absolute shoddiness of his nature. He is a shabby creature, and he certainly doesn't belong into the mental realm at all, because -- the mental life is nothing for 10 minutes. It isn't. It's good for quiz games and senators.

Was a wonderful misprint in the paper. There's a very fine senator in the United States Senate, Mr. Hendrickson, who makes this juvenile delinquency study. And he made a five-month study now about the state of affairs, and came out very pessimistically. But the Herald Tribune typically misprinted the thing under the headline, "Five-Minute Research," instead of "Five-Month Research." Five-minute research, that's what they would like to do. Well, a man who -- you see, "Five-Minute Research," what a newspaper it must be!

This is quite serious, gentlemen, because you all are afraid of really mixing with the great. And that's why you always talk in their absence glibly, you know all about them. Othello? Know all about them -- all about him. As I said, this college professor actually has said this: "Goethe? Can tell you everything about him in 10 minutes."

Now don't you think that in this moment he has tried to live on theft? Because you have to join these people in their own way of life before you can convey to anybody the seriousness or sacredness of their lives. So the minimum which you { } would have to say, "Sir, are you prepared to meet Mr. Goethe? I don't think so. We shall postpone it until you are a little wiser." That would be the correct introduction to such a quest, you see.

Well, the same, you see, if you go to the Mellon gallery in Washington, I always would -- wanted to introduce some arrangement there, a swimming pool or showers, or something and -- so that people from -- who come in from the street could first bathe and throw off their own impurities before they look at these nudes, because you can't look at nudes, gentlemen, when you just come in from the street and haven't cleansed your own imagination a little bit. You have to prepare yourself before you can meet these -- great art. But we -- we plunge

these poor people, you see, in the front of these -- of these museum pieces, you see, right away. That cannot work. Formerly these pictures were in a cathedral, and you prayed before you entered it. And you kneeled down. Or you went to private people into their gallery, you see. And again, you were in tuxedo, in evening dress, and you were prepared to meet something extraordinary, something festive. But today you go to a museum, 10 museums per diem in a foreign city. And -- and you are dead, and exhausted, and sweating. And do you think you can look at these pictures with any appreciation? It's impossible, because why, gentlemen? Because your superiority complex -- most people in this country have not an inferiority complex, they have a superiority -- superiority complex with regard to the in- -- intellect -- is that you think after something has been thought, and after a thinker has lived, it is easier for you to steal it, to inherit it. It's no reason to believe that. The accident that Goethe died in 1832 does not point to the -- your -- your power to inherit him within {five minutes}. I don't see the connection. But you believe, since he is dead you are alive, that you can do with him what you like, as you please.

I've written an important book five years ago -- only five years ago, it will take another 20 years before it's really known. I talk -- taught -- told a student this the other day and he said, "Oh, but if I read this, it's five years old." What has this to do with his existence that I wrote it five years ago? But that's what you think, because you -- you see, you live by an intellectual climate, in which people bribe you to buy their books for money. And these things, you see, aren't the only books written. I can say that I have never written a book for money. I have written 40 books. I have -- I have written books because I had to write this. And that's the only excuse for writing a book.

But you don't know this, gentlemen. When a book is there, you think it's something on the market. And if it sells, then it's a good book. That's a -- proof that it is not a good book, you see. Any book that sells immediately can be not a -- cannot be important. That's already a popularizer, somebody for every- -- something for everybody. That's always the last analysis, as we shall see, the last {instance}.

Well, to come back to my problem, gentlemen. Doubt is painful, and by doubt, we are trying to establish our right to have a voice of our own in thinking. But when you doubt, you must all the more say who doubted. That is, you must not have some ideas stripped from their origin, from their root, from their climate. You must know Plato said this. And if -- when you say, "No, it isn't right," then you must know that you are contradicting Plato.

You however, gentlemen, live in a climate in which you say, "There is no God," and you don't know how great the people were who said this. When

Nietzsche said there was no God, it was in order to resuscitate God. When you say, "There is no God," it's -- has no meaning, because it is just a word without its author. A word without its author is worthless, because the Bible already said, "There is no God, says the fool," you see. "Says the fool."

The great story about the Chief Justice of England -- the later Chief Justice of England in the beginning of the 19th century. A printer was accused of atheism in his books. And the -- the -- the lord -- the Chief Justice -- the Chief Justice was at that time not already judge. He defended him. And he also was the editor of the Edinburgh Review. And he was very witty. And he told the judge that he would prove that the Bible was an atheistic book, also. And the judge was of course taken aback.

And he said, "Yes, you honor. I'm going to prove it. Give me a Bible."

So they brought a Bible. He opened it and he said, "There is no God." He read from the Bible. Everybody paled, and then he went on. "... says the fool."

Any word, gentlemen, taken out of context is not worth discussing and not worth doubting. That's what you do all the time to the most important statements of humanity, gentlemen. Freedom, immortality, the soul, God -- gentlemen, President Eisenhower, the New Deal -- you always take it out of context. How can you talk about New Dealism today or Fair Dealism unless you remember that there were 11 million people unemployed in the United States in 1932, and that it didn't matter at all what you did, as long as you gave people back their courage, and gave the bankers back their self-confidence, everything was okay? Who has saved the capitalistic system in this country? The Democratic Party, and nobody else, because certainly the bankers of this country -- I came to this country in this panic. They had abdicated. They no longer believed in their rights. The Republicans -- the -- were not able to -- as you know to stem the tide of despair that flooded this country. Now, I don't think that we haven't a different situation today. But if you connect the New Deal with the real situation of America, you will see that the hatred against Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt today and yesterday comes from these people who cannot forgive him that he had courage in the -- und belief in the capitalistic system when they had lost it.

You know, I have seen this in Germany. Who were the people who made way for Hitler? The people who could not forgive themselves in 1918 that they had lost their faith in their emperor, in their king, in their monarch, in their princes. The good people, the rich people, the nobility, the army, the government people -- at the end of the war, they all knew that it was finished. And the {emperor} and the princes had to go then. And it couldn't be any longer -- king in Bavaria, or a king in Guttenberg, or Saxony, or in Prussia. So they -- as you know, the

emperor fled to Holland -- this much you may have heard. And I can testify to the fact -- I was an officer at that time -- that on November 9th, 1918, two days before the Armistice, all Germany was united in the ad- -- recognition that we had lost the war and that the princes were finished.

Now that was the case with the New Deal in 1933 in this country, that the Republicans didn't know what to do. And so Mr. Roosevelt, as you know, began the -- government with the famous saying, "We have nothing to fear but fear." I wish Mr. Eisenhower would tell this Mr. McCarthy today again: that we have nothing to fear -- except fear. That's what we {have} to hear at this moment, too. It's always the same, you see. Anybody who can -- stem the fear of any generation is their ruler. Here, rule is set against fear. Otherwise you wouldn't need any rule.

So, gentlemen, the New Deal of 1933 and the deal as of this moment have exactly the same purpose. At that time, we had to cure the people from the fear of the bankers and their -- and ignorance, and today we have to cure -- save the country from the arrogance and the fear of the unions. And it is the same. The government has to go by- -- has to -- has to try to straddle the issue then of the Republican group, and now of the over-Democratic group. Then of the right, and now of the left. It's not very different.

How can you know this? How can you doubt out of context, you see? You are not doubting anything. You are just submerged in slogans. Put the { } -- the New Deal back in context, and you can understand that today it doesn't work, because -- today that isn't the problem. Today all the banks are high up. They have never prospered so well. Why should they be afraid? The system is working wonderfully. Well, which system is it? Certainly not capitalism. The -- the system under which the banks have made these fabulous profits in the last five years obviously is a very mixed system. I don't know how to call it. But it certainly isn't capitalism. And it certainly isn't socialism. And it certainly isn't Communism. It's a brand-new system that has never existed before on earth, with subsidies for farmers, you see, and tariffs of unions, and so on and so forth. It's a very complex system. And it's probably the wildest thing we have done not to label it, you see. So nobody quite knows what it is.

But it has nothing to do with the situation of 1933. You cannot think, gentlemen, because you cannot put your doubts in confrontation with the real thinker who thought that which you doubt. Will you see this? That's why my whole harrangue about quotation is nothing about morality, you see. It makes you -- if you don't do this, you see, you can't think. You have to see the thought which upsets you, in life-size. So if you think, for example, that your father shouldn't be an authority, and your mother shouldn't -- shouldn't quarrel with you about

your girl, well -- you have to see motherhood then in its full width and breadth in order to decide whether her interference is legitimate or not. It isn't the sentence that she says, "I do -- disagree with this girl," you see. That's a mood. She can say this today or tomorrow. But you have to see the whole picture. When does she says it? What does you know of you -- she know of you, you see?

I could tell you of my own life. I had to admit when my parents said I was -- I was engaged, they didn't believe me because I said -- they said, "You have been engaged too often. So we don't believe it any more." They were quite right. I was right, too. I knew it was a different. But they didn't know. I can't blame them.

So it is very important that you understand always, gentlemen, even at this moment of your doubting in the bull session, you must understand, for example, why people did {tear} from God. It's no use discussing the existence of God. Do you think God is your private property? Or anybody's private property? Isn't it -- an -- attempt to reconcile the fact that the same man must live and must die, that you must negate life and -- and give life? You must kill to eat meat? And you raise a bull -- an oxen? Isn't that a contradiction? You drink milk, you see, and you kill the cow. That is, any moment, life -- man must decide what is allowed to live and what is allowed to die. That's so contradictory that people unit- -- unite in order to speak of God as the -- as that which can do -- who can do the contradictory. At every right moment -- at every moment, this is different, what we have to do. Since we in our little minds cannot understand, you see, that it should be right at one moment to live, and at the other moment to die, we appeal to that which all can experience, the power to speak at this moment one way and at the next moment in the other with pro- -- perfect honesty, and with necessity.

God is the unity of our contradictions. And you cannot live with any man unless you and I -- he can agree that you are free to contradict what you said yesterday, and to do it peacefully and honorably. He cannot insult you for this, you see. But if you would rely on your own mind, it would have to. So you -- aren't faithful to your own principles. Nobody can be faithful to himself, you see. And that's why { }, who is greater than you and I. Can you have faith in yourself? I cannot, Sir. I have been too often disappointed in myself. I hope you don't have too much faith in yourself. You -- you may try it at this moment, and may say, "Let me try how much I can do by faith in myself." Then you have to say, "I don't need a god. I have faith in myself." Called "self-reliance," this religion, you see. It always lasts until the next bankruptcy.

Yes. Exactly. A nation or a man will always try hard until he goes bankrupt. Barnum -- you know, of Barnum and Bailey, went bankrupt four times. In the meantime, he always had tremendous faith in himself. But it always ended so that the other people couldn't have any faith in him anymore. And were -- had it

not been for the grace of God, he would have ended in prison after the first bankruptcy, because as you know, 20 years before Barnum failed, there was still a law that you went to jail, once you went bankrupt, and failed other people in their faith in you.

No, gentlemen. Doubt is a wonderful thing, because it is the way in which you can measure up to real people. If you reduce your doubt to those doubts where you wrangle -- wrestle with the angel as Jacob did, who -- wrestled with God, you become yourself as powerful as a hero who has donned -- who -- the mantle of his adversary. Gentlemen, he who doubts really, becomes as big as the man whose thoughts he doubts. But you do not doubt a man, a living soul, who represents a thought. You try, you see, not to doubt the New Deal in the person of Mr. Roosevelt in 1933, but you throw out this as {cyclish} socialism, the TVA. That's not doubting anything. It's not understanding anything, you see, because it was a tremendous piece of courage -- encouragement for which we have -- had the -- these years. To live four years in courage instead of fear in 1933 to 1937, is that { }? And the New Deal has given all the bankers of this country this great new arrogance which they now show.

Be- -- why don't we do -- know this? Everybody, by the way, knows it, gentlemen. And I tell you, in life -- in your own life, in politics, the lying about what we really doubt leads always to disaster. Hitler is the fruit of the people in Germany who didn't admit that they all agreed in 1918 with the leaving of the princes. Mr. McCarthy is the product of all the people now who will not admit that in 1933, they all agreed with Mr. Roosevelt. Everybody. All the chambers of commerce. All the national manufacturers. Everybody. But now they must not admit it, so they get of course a bugbear. They get -- for their shadowboxing, they have to pay a price. So they spread fear instead of courage. You see it, how strange at this moment, we have two waves. We have the reasonable continuation of the New Deal with Mr. Eisenhower, and you have the frantic effort of the -- of the way to discredit everything that has gone before to such an extent, you see, that they -- make everybody fear.

It's very simple. Why? Because they will break their doubt into pieces. They will not face up to the responsible action of 1933. But they have -- they fight something in the abstract. Something as you do. Gentlemen, to doubt is a human act. It is not just a mental cerebration.

This I am going to prove to you now so that you can't deny it in the second half. Let's have a break here.

[tape interruption]

...of this course, to bring together the beginning and the end.

Ah, there it is. Thank you very much.

I already have given you these middle -- names for this middle course. And I told you that you begin to become somebody in your own right by doubt. And then I had put on two other commands for the mental life: protest and {wait}. In each case, it seems, gentlemen, that you are alone. Doubt, as you -- your whole mental processes have this unhappy fictitious character with you that you think; and that you are alone with your thought. Nothing is farrer from the truth, gentlemen. It -- only he can doubt who no longer is a child. And who is no longer a child? He who has split by sex, who has become a man or a woman, who is matured. We are mature when we become one-half of the full man, and we doubt when we come two men in one. Doubting, gentlemen, is the corollary of falling in love, or needing love, because we are half-and-half in love. We are only one-half of the total. And we are two when we doubt.

So while we are not yet loved, we must represent the future dualism inside ourselves. We become two in order to be ready to get married, or to attach ourselves to a great cause. This is very strange, gentlemen, that it should be overlooked. You will always find that the rationalist is also the sensualist. A man who only believes in his own mind, the clever people, the individualists, or how we ever call them, also the idealists -- that is, the people who think nothing is higher than their own thought, and the importance of thinking -- are always the people who are perfectly helpless with regard to sex. They must accept woman's love, and that's -- anybody loves them, although they may be contempters of mankind. I see always the nihilists, the so-called modern nihilists, or the existentialists are the people who depend more than anybody else on the miracle that somebody, despite their poor teeth and their -- how do you call it? Its halosis, or how do you call this?

(Halitosis.)

What?

(Halitosis.)

Yes. That somebody kisses them and sleeps with them. Very strange. Mr. Sartre cannot explain that somebody goes to bed with him, because it's against his own philosophy. It's a miracle, because from his own philosophy, he -- you can only do the opposite. And we absolutely loathe humanity.

Now the more radical your philosophy, the more radical your doubt, the more

you say, "Nothing is valid" -- the more the same person always needs somebody who says, "But you are valid. You have great valor. You have great value. I love you." The hunger, gentlemen, of the very person who condemns everybody else and everything else for being told that he is worth of admiration and love, and becoming a bestseller, and being appointed as professor at Harvard College, and getting the Pulitzer Prize is immeas- -- immense. You will always find, gentlemen, that the people who mentally say "no" to everything expect that everybody says "yes" to them.

To doubt means, gentlemen, to re-arrange your "yes" and "no." It doesn't { }. Your "yes" and "nos." Absolute doubt of the outer world means absolute approval of yourself. A man who says "no" to everything else needs the "yes," otherwise his detestation of the world outside makes no sense, because who am I to know that I have the power to deny? For this I have to build up myself to a certain strength, you see. I have to say, "My cogitation is the only affirmation that stands the test of time." Like Mr. Descartes, the great starter of all this business of the fifth commandment, who said, "I cogitate, therefore I exist. Therefore I can think that nothing else exists." This is what he did. You have heard of Cartesius, and we put his name then above this command.

Take down his dates. We come back to this man, it will sta- -- stand you in good stead. He lived from 13- -- 1599 to 1650. He died at the moment when Crom- -- Cromwell beheaded the king of England and when this colony be- -- here, the colony here began to flourish; 1650 he died. And he is the man who has bestowed on the Americans this strange idea that "doubt" means to doubt the world, and never doubt yourself. Obviously gentlemen, the other, opposite philosophy is just as possible: to doubt nothing except yourself. That is, to be plunged in despair.

You have, in a very limited, narrow circle on -- only the last 300 years, come to the conclusion that "doubt" always means to doubt some scientific law or dogma. You think doubting always is scientific. Gentlemen, before 1650, before Mr. Descartes -- or Cartesius, as he called himself with the Latin name -- people despaired of themselves. They said they were great sinners. And therefore they couldn't get any insight into the workings of the world. It's just as logical, and just as much an exaggeration. Doubt is an attempt, you see, to re-arrange your "yesses" and "nos." And it is perfectly arbitrary where you put your "yes" or "no," theoretically. The time may come, you see, for every one of us, when we despair of ourselves, and the time may come where we despair of the human race, or we despair at least of the American people, or we despair of the Republican Party, or we despair of the Democratic Party, or we despair of the Progressive Party. And today, everybody despairs of the Communist Party.

But -- 20 years ago, they didn't, as you know. Here, every student at Dartmouth was pink. I have been attacked violently in The Dartmouth as a warmonger and what-not, by all the students who were, at that time, fellow-travelers. Only a fortnight ago, I had to save another of these men from -- destruction, because his past bobbed up, and I was in a good position to help him, because he had attacked me at that time as a reactionary, and a fascist, and what-not. So I -- since I came out in his favor, it pulled some -- had some weight, you see, because I was not -- at least not suspect of just trying to rescue my own collar.

But the interesting thing is that 20 years ago, our -- your "yes" would have been on the other shoe. Don't think you are -- there is any merit in your attitude today. It's just as much -- accidental -- what you think at this moment in politics as what these boys at that time saw in politics. It has no value whatsoever what you think at this moment. And it had no value what they thought, and had to go to war, just the same, four weeks later. And in the same sense, you have to uphold the -- the great strides of the last 20 years, whether you like it or not, you see. It doesn't depend on your will at all. We are in -- { } in the consequences of the last 20 years.

So whether you dislike them or not doesn't make any difference. And it didn't make any difference 20 years ago whether these boys said, "No. There must be no other war." They'd just had it. They were just stupid, because -- not because they had no idea of politics, but because they didn't know whence these ideas came. They thought you -- they were dogmatic about this. Their "yes" was their "yes," and their "no" was their "no" in completely an untested way. And by and large, that's the case with -- today here. It is always the case.

It shouldn't be the case with you, gentlemen. To doubt means to admit that we must re-distribute our affections; we must defect dead love; and we must attach ourselves to new love. And the faith of doubting is to get ready for the attack, for the proposition we have to make to the world. For a proposal, be it to a girl, be it to a monastery, be it to a religion, be it to a political party, be it to your profession, doesn't make any difference. You cannot really become grounded and have weight of your own, instead of just being a zero behind another man's number, unless you have decided to put your weight, small as it may be, you see, voluntarily on something for which you are free to choose. And this freedom of choice can only come after dark nights of despair.

Will you put it down, gentlemen? Despair of oneself and doubt of things is the same thing. At one time, you doubt the object; at one time, you doubt the subject. As long as you think that all doubt is scientific, you cannot do- -- even doubt. You think that to doubt means to doubt the existence of things outside of you. Gentlemen, that isn't the full doubt. Doubt is compre- -- more comprehen-

sive. You can doubt yourself. That leads to despair of courage. You can doubt the world. That leads to routine, re-affirmation of the old routines of doing things, or of the discovery of new ways. Formerly, before Christoph Columbus doubted that the seaway to India was the only way around the Cape, you see, you had to go around the Cape. Afterwards, you could sail through the Magellan Strait -- Straits, which Mr. Magellan did already in 1519, as you know, 20 years after the discovery of America.

So gentlemen, doubt is free to tackle the world of things, or the world of man. And the highest doubt, of course, is the doubt about the existence of that power which has made the world and us one. The doubt of God is the highest doubt, because it is comprehe- -- comprehensive. It comprehends your doubt of the seaway to India, and your doubt of your own capacity of discovering the seaway to India. Your doubt of keeping peace with your neighbor, the doubt of the good will of the other fellow to keep peace with you. Your doubt of what depends whe- -- on -- decides whether you will have persecution mania, or whether you'll -- will have a good society. You see, the doubt of God must precede your cooperation with any other human being.

There are three cases of doubt, gentlemen, each time you ask the question: am I loved? can I love? can I make somebody else love me? They are three different questions. Gentlemen, partly we have been loved before we love. You are -- have been loved long before you fell in love with somebody and told this girl she'll love you. That's a new thing. There are three ways in which love hits you. You are loved long before you deserve it. Otherwise you weren't here. You love, that's your private property and pleasure. It's very painful, as you know. As a matter of fact it's very, you see -- I'll tell you a story in a minute on the --. And the third is, you try to make other people love you. And that's the most desperate proposition. It isn't the same as loving yourself, as you well know.

There are then three relations of doubt, gentlemen, because we doubt before any one of these three questions is settled. When it is settled, the doubt ceases. You have at this moment to doubt whether your -- parents loved you really by sending you to Dartmouth College. That may have just been a convenience. It may have been a prejudice. I don't know why you are here. It may be accidental. Or perhaps it has been the great pride, and love, and ambition of your parents to send you here. And in this case, you have every reason to be very grateful to them. But perhaps you have to report back, "My dear parents. I -- it's too terrible. You thought this was an excellent place, and it isn't." That's doubt, you see, about their intel- -- the intelligence of their love. You have to find out at the end of your four years, that you have to find out this at the end of the four years -- it will depend on you -- what your answer is. Have you been loved, rightly, you are free to doubt it. Have you -- are you in love? You mostly conceal this to

yourself, that you are desperately out to love, and that you are very lonely when you can't love. And the third thing -- have you the power, the courting power of courtship to make somebody else love you? And that isn't again -- not just a woman, gentlemen. If a man has an ambition, wants to get rich, he must make other people pay for it. Otherwise you can't get rich. Or you want to write a book, and become a writer or become a teacher. Obviously, somebody has to love you, who at this moment doesn't even know of your existence. Or you want to be a popular doctor. Well, how do you do it, you see? By your attitude, you force these people to come to you, which is making other people love you.

Again, in this country, that mustn't be mentioned. People always think as though their thought rules the world. It doesn't, gentlemen. It always is mediated through this very great filter: can you make other people accept your terms? Which means, can you make them love you, you see?

Nobody ever mentions these things. Very funny. But gentlemen, the doubt has no other purpose but to settle these great issues: have you been loved? are you in love? Are you going to make other people love you? As soon as a person is basking in all three certainties, he always stops to think -- to love -- to think. "Think" is always the substitute of -- for unfulfilled lov- -- loving. A person who is completely bathing within the certainty that he is loved, or she is loved, you see, that he is in love, and that he has the power to make other people love, has no reason to doubt. And the -- what you call "thinking," which is usually just doubting something, and arguing about something, you see, splitting -- hairsplitting about something, that goes out of the window. The lover is wise, he's poetic, he's decisive, he's illuminated, he's inspired. But he doesn't doubt.

So this whole mental phase of scientific doubt, that's good for the people who have no power to love in some or the other capacity. The mathematician, the physicist, who have cut all their relations to the living universe and treat it as dead, they are the poor people whom we have delegated to stay in doubt all the rest of their lives. They are in hell. They love it, of course. It's the essence of the devil, you see, that he doesn't even know that he is in hell.

That's not laughable. They are deprived of something, the people who have to think that the universe is dead. {Of course}, it's ridiculous. It isn't dead. They prove it themselves; they are quite alive. But they have a theory that the whole universe is just consisting of dead electrons, including themselves. Then they write books about it. And we shall love them for writing these books. And they do. They are loved. We give them the Nobel Prize.

Very queer world, gentlemen. The doubters are -- the constant doubters, the permanent doubters are extremists, just as the saints, or just as the teachers, or

the rulers. A doubter who's nothing but a doubter, gentlemen, is just as extreme as a tyrant, who's nothing but a tyrant. Richard III compares to a man who is saying that professionally he's doubting.

In order to show you how such a logician looks at the world, I'll give you a little anecdote. I have a -- had a colleague. I started my career with him on the same day. And while he -- he was preparing himself for this career as a professor of law -- he still is, by the way -- in Germany, he visited a friend of mine who was, at that time a philosopher -- quite a celebrated philosopher. Well, the philosopher was intelligent, he gave up his professorship as -- of a philosopher. He's now quite a famous missionary. But the logician became a lawyer, packing logical nuts to the end of his days. And one day he came to the philosopher and said, "Now look. I have -- I have thought about the emotions. There are only two types of emotion, isn't that true, Professor?"

And the other man said, "Well, looks a little simple. Are there really only two types of -- what do you mean?"

"Well," he said, "Well, I only see there are two types of emotion: the agreeable and the disagreeable."

Well, my -- the philosopher, who was quite a clever man, said, "How about love? Where do you put that?"

And the logician, of course, who had no idea what love is like, said, "Well, the agreeable { }."

So you can see from this story that he never was in love, because love is certainly the compound of agreeable and disagreeable feelings. Goes from diarrhea to inspiration.

It's a fever, but it certainly is not an agreeable emotion. Anybody who says it's agreeable doesn't know what it is. He certainly has never been in love. Slavery is nothing agreeable. Aren't you enslaved when you are in love? For example. That's not the whole story; you are also divine. It is certainly is the compound, the mix. It is the power to have emotions. That's what love is. And therefore, it is nondescript. It goes in all directions. Has the light any special color? You can break the light into all the colors of the spectrum, but light isn't any -- is neither red nor blue. In the same way, love is the sum of all emo- -- the emotions. Therefore, it is utterly ridiculous, as the doubter tries to do, to pin down that which makes him doubt, you see, and put it on one side of his { } argue -- argument. Utterly ridiculous. Logicians always do this { }. And you must get -- beyond that state. You must look through the -- the doubter.

That what makes him doubt is his great desire to be loved, because the question of doubt is something utterly artificial, split of mind and body. Obviously, we can't stand this. No normal person is split in mind and body, except temporarily. You have to split -- in order to come back to your unity -- for a while. Doubt is always intermediary. Analysis is intermediary. It is a permissible, temporary suspension of your unity. That's what doubt is. For a time, you attempt to propose to yourself the old Adam, and the next man inside yourself. To doubt then, gentlemen, is never done by two contemporaries inside yourself. The man who speaks on one side is your old man, who holds the proposition because it has already been inside of you before, you see. And the next man in you puts the other question; or he gives the opposite answer.

Therefore, gentlemen, in doubting, you should give up the idea as though these two people who talk to each other inside your consciousness, you see, are of the same age. In fact, you are trying to grow from one age into the next when you doubt. And you try, if you are fertile in your doubt, to get the two positions of the former man in you and the next man inside you. Once you discover this, you are {saved, you see}. But it's very hard for you. It's against your grain. But I want to offer you this -- to you as a saving grace, when you are really desperate. When your doubt is really -- hits you hard, then you must know that this is nothing but life itself appearing to you from its two aspects of life lived and life to come. And both have to find their lawyer inside of you, their advocate.

As long as you know it, there is -- then you can doubt anything. There is no devil in you { }. You only get lost and fall into the hands of the devil when you think that there are no two tenses, two times of your thought, that this is a logical game where one thing is right, and the other thing is wrong. This is never the case in human life, you see. Something is right formerly, and something has to be right tomorrow. That's your real question. And so you must not be the judge of things.

But a morality, gentlemen, which was right for you as a child is not right for you as a man. When you are responsible for somebody else, you have to act differently than when somebody is responsible for you. Isn't that a different situation? Morality itself changes, because you are in a different relation to other people. Your responsibility changes. Obviously, gentlemen, when you doubt, you take over for thinking. Before you doubt, you simply -- continue. You are an annex to those people -- who -- live. Most of you are annexes to the society to which you belong. Inasfar as you begin to doubt, you feel that somebody must make a beginning, as before we doubt, we are the end of an old civilization, gentlemen. When we doubt, we try to be the beginners of the next civilization. That's why all these people who talk to you about the decay of civilization are such children. In any one moment, your civilizations decays in as far as you are

the last. And at every one moment, through your doubt, civilization begins again in so -- as far as you are living { } .

You see, what these people do not know, and what you can learn by doubting is that in humanity the end precedes the beginning. The end precedes the beginning. In nature, the beginning precedes the end. That's why I told you birth precedes death in nature. But death precedes beginning life in {thinking}. Anybody who begins to doubt puts the death of other people's thoughts, or other people's lives, in front of him and says, "I must survive this on my own. There's nobody now to tell me what to do. I have to find out myself. My father is gone. My mother is going to die very soon. Where am I?" Or { } all { } newspapers. That can't be true what they say, because they pick every day something different, you see. I haven't found out { }. At this very moment, civilization rises again from the ashes.

All this talk about decay of the West comes from people who have not the brains to see that in every man's life, in his -- the middle part of it, civilization starts all over again. They -- I told you -- let the whole process of thought end with doubt, with analysis, if this were the end, you see. Then of course, civilization is doomed, because analysis is always the last idea. But it isn't. It is an intermediary step, to decide where to put your "yesses," where to affirm, where to say, "No, I take this up again. I say this is now my own thought. Now I no longer believe that there is a God, because my parents made me pray, because I have discovered Him myself." You are so afraid because -- you won't pass through this terrible trouble where you say, "No, the God of my parents? That's childish. I can't believe this." Say this, gentlemen. At the very moment, you will discover that of course, you have to bury the child -- God of your childhood. He is a god of -- for children. He isn't a true God of your grown-up age. He can survive it, gentlemen. The question is only if you can survive. And most of you don't want to survive. You just want to hang onto this great pride and arrogance of a 19year-old mind who says, "I can doubt." But that's only half of the doubting process, gentlemen.

(What about something like the Roman Catholic Church? You just can't grow up and say, "Well, I doubt it. I put aside the God of my parents," if you've been brought up in that religion.)

May I tell you a story, {gentlemen}? I had a friend who was a bishop -- a Catholic -- a Roman Catholic bishop. He said to me, "Never believe a man before he's 30. He has the right to change before that age. It is terrible to man -- pin a man down to anything he says before he's 30."

Now, isn't this amena- -- perfectly in -- in tune with what I say? He wants a

man to change his mind before he's 30. That's good Catholic doctrine. Later, once you have made a vow, you have made a vow.

The same man who can doubt must also come to the conclusion that now is the time for doubting and end it. But in this country, you see it with -- with the divorce, and you see it with everything. Everything is over after a short time, because people never -- you see, if you never eat enough, you must go on eating all the time. If you once have eaten enough, you can go on and play, or forget eating. And food will not be the main concern. The same is true of doubting. If you have really doubted -- really, radically, you see, to the point of despair, the moment comes where it will lead a new {chapter} in. It is not a sport which you take up every morning.

But in this country it has become what I tell you, gentlemen. Let us stop today at this formula, you see. What is called "doubt" at this moment in this country is only one-th- -- -half of doubt. It is only the beginning of doubt, but never the conclusion of doubt. And you think it is manly to doubt everything in a halfbaked manner, just to -- so, what do you all say? You're all in { } to say, "What can no -- cannot know anything." That's what most of you will assert. Well, you can't be sure. Can't be sure of anything.

Well, {there} -- one thing you can be sure, when you hear a man talk like that, that he's no good. A man who says, "I don't know," put him in Filene's Basement for 20 cents, you see.