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

(Student introduction: Philosophy 58, March 4, 1954)

I have been asked a question about faith the other day. Who was -- they asked the question? I asked him to bring it up now. Is he not here? What was the question?

(I don't think I can remember.)

Well, obviously it's not very important then to ask. But you know, I thought it was an important question. You see how little a man owns one -- his own spirit. You see, at that moment, you had some inspiration, but you expired.

I want to -- before going back to the tribe, I want to bring in two things. One is the question of faith and hope. As I told you, it's the most difficult for you to understand. And the other one is the relation to history. You are very impatient. Anybody who has no -- not faith is impatient. History gives you endless time. Gentlemen, you should at -- not rush now and say, "Now I want to have the whole history in this course." If you really had understanding of what history can do to you, you would say, "Go on." Any good narrator is asked to procrastinate and to make the story longer. If I only would win you over to this great experience, gentlemen, that a story can never be long enough. That's its essence. Has anybody been in 9? You remember the epical, as the way of life in which we try to make it longer? That's why all words of the past in many languages are reduplicated, to express this longing for being longer. Memory, instead of "mory," you see, "memory" is the duplication of the root of m-r. And does anybody know Latin? Well, you may then remember memini, you see, from {reminiscere}, and pepuli, from pellere, that is the formation of the -- of the past tense in the ancient languages is very clever. They simply -- reduplication. Because we express the past by saying it is longer. We express the future by saying it is a second -- a split-second. Because the future comes in by one act of decision. And the past stretches out endlessly. Now gentlemen, if you can feel that in the whole -- past the story is exactly your own life story, then you begin to get that benefit from history on which I am going to read you now a strange quotation.

It's strange, because you -- we certainly do not turn for authority to a Muslim of the year 1000. In the midst of the Dark Ages, as you like to call these times -- those time -- days, which were very bright indeed, an old Muslim, {Al-Masoudi}, born in Baghdad and lived in Spain -- living in Spain, wrote this on history:

"History captures the ear of the wise and of the ignorant of

this. The simple and the intelligent are enchanted by its reports, and ask for them. History brings together all classes of themes. Its superiority over any other type of knowledge is evident. And all the minds concede their supremacy -- its supremacy ..."

... except American minds. You believe that physics is superior to history. Gentlemen, physics is dust, dealing with dirt. It's the most indifferent thing. History: it makes us into human beings. We'll come to this, I mean.

"... with reason. The wise say that the -- most secure friend is a book of history. It offers you at the same time the beginning and the end, little and much. It unites the foreign -- the far- distant one and that which is right around us. It joins the past to the present. It combines the most diverse forms and the most distinct species. It is the dead who speaks to you in the name of the dead, and it is accessible to you in the language of the living. It is a person that -- it is intimate with that -- intimate friend which gets gay when you are gay, and which sleeps with your dreams, and which only tells you that which you taste -- like to taste."

This was the relation of all people, you see, to history. You are spoiled because you read historical novels instead. All the King's Men, and Gone With the Wind. Gentlemen, you ruin your taste for history by these books. They are scandalous. And yet you are such rhinoceroses to read books which are made for money, written for money, as the author even is impertinent enough to tell you -- that is the limit. I have never understood how a man can sell a copy of a book of which he is boasting that it is a best-seller. Because he tells you that he did it for money. How can anything be good -- of the spirit -- what is done for money? It must corrupt you. It must lie to you, because it wants to flatter you. You want -- you are made to buy it now. Of course, everything goes. If you are meant to buy it, you know what they play on Broadway. All the silly stuff for which you are willing to pay money. You are willing to pay money when you see a -- a girl d‚collet‚, so they have the girl d‚collet‚. Et cetera, et cetera. But that you should not feel, gentlemen, that anything in -- of the printed word which brings in money is thereby condemned. It's worthless. Later on, Shakespeare today may make money in the theater, but not in his own day. Most of his plays couldn't even be played in the theaters, as you know. He didn't -- he was -- seven years dead when the Folio appeared. All his Quartos were printed without any copyright. He didn't get a -- get a cent for it. That's why he's the greatest poet of his age.

Your idea that poetry, writing, history, anything worthwhile in knowledge is something that can pay, condemns you, you see. That's why in this country there is no spiritual life, because you have degraded the spiritual life to a paying

proposition. So what you get is what pays. That's not -- nothing worthwhile. That's the shabby situation of the modern literature in this country. There is no literature, because it is commercialized. But you, gentlemen, in this college, in this time of your life -- you should develop a strong sense of the incorruptible. You should never buy anything because it is a best-seller, because thereby it stands condemned. Does Homer make money? Five thousand years or 3,000 years after he wrote his poem, we now, you see -- other people make the money. That's always the proof of {genius}, when somebody else makes the money.

I mean, you know this in the family. What is -- what is important? Their volunteering. What's it mat- -- true in marriage? When you make a sacrifice for the person you love. And you don't think that's the same in -- with genius? That must be given for nothing, freely. And you have a church in which the people get 15 percent from the undertaker -- the ministers -- and you have a literature in which people -- the author boasts that he can make people buy all his stuff.

And that's accordingly what you -- and gentlemen, every historical novel you should be ashamed of touching. Because this man says that he abuses history for his commercial purposes. It's bad enough that the romanticists, like Walter Scott, transfigured history, you see, and they discovered the historical novel as you see. But there was an excuse, he really was in love. By the way, Mr. Scott, as you know, wanted also to get very, very rich, so he lost it all in the process. And that's the limit, even of Walter Scott's novels. But you read genuine history { } history. You don't read real history. There are great historical books, in every language, in every literature, about every period. But when you read Mr. Parkman's Oregon Trail, you know that's an historical book. Or Prescott. That's -- or Bancroft. These are real people who -- stuck their neck out, and wanted to achieve something, wanted to restore the memory of the human race.

So out go these fiction stories. Anybody, gentlemen, who in this time and age reads fiction and -- then says he's reading, gentlemen, I tell him he's drugging himself. It's a drug, these books which you read. Has nothing to do with food. It should come under the -- how do you call it, the law -- the bill -- the food?

[unintelligible]

Yes. They should write on the outside, you see, "90 percent chaff and 10 percent drug."

This is the importance, gentlemen, of this course, that you develop a taste for the really stunning truth. The truth is much more -- obviously much more imaginative, much more interesting than every -- anything these ladies can -- can write on the obscenities of the ages.

This is the question, then, gentlemen. Faith in history: what does it to you? And why is faith in history, in the truth of the historian necessary to develop our own faith? There is a relation, I think, between the illness of your faith and the lack of your writing -- reading either the Bible or any historical book and instead of having these cheap, historical trash pieces. They cannot give you faith, you see. They are written to flatter your hopes. They are projecting your hope for some obscene off-color story or your hope for getting something tricky, or something detective-like, or some mystery story into history. They don't -- exalt your faith, because they flatter your hopes. What then is faith? It is something very simple, gentlemen, but you don't know it. It's something in your -- our physical construction. The difference between hope, faith, and love is localized in different organs of our body. And I'm going to speak on this for a few minutes, before going on with the story itself, because I think you should know that this is nothing abstract, as you are accustomed to think, but is something very -- material.

The spirit is material, gentlemen. It is that which connects you and me with the dead and with the future generations. And that's just as material as -- that we are here connected by the same amount of air we can inhale and take out of this room. Aren't we together physically? You wouldn't deny this. This is the material form of existence. That's why history has to be told to convince you people that I believe that I'm physically united with the people of the past. I'm breathing the same spirit still which they breathed. How is this done? Gentlemen, when you hope, you fix your eyes -- either the externals or the internals -- on something. If you -- go into a river and you swim, you want to see where you -- try to come out. Or when you go on a road, you wish to have some signpost; that makes you feel hopeful. You can't miss it. Hope is always the result of our being able to see something. To see something. Therefore hope is given us by sight. Ideas are such inner sights. Always hope is our pinning our hopes on something to be seen. Very soon, we'll see the light of the city, so we come out of the woods. That's hope.

Gentlemen, faith is located not in the eye. Faith is located as you -- everyone knows when you ask what happens to you when you have no faith, in quite another organ. What happens when you have no faith? What do you feel? What's now the prevalent notion of the American psyche, in psychoanalysis, and psychology? What does everybody feel?

[unintelligible]

Wie?

[unintelligible]

Nausea? No. Why do you go to the psychoanalyst? Because you feel here, what?

[unintelligible]

Anguish. Anguish. Anguish. Gentlemen, when you have nothing to see, you have -- you have no hope. You have fear. Fear is always that a certain object is objectionable. That is, hope and fear are related, and they both are related to what we think we see, or what we fear to see. But faith is connected with anxiety. So we live in the age of anxiety. Didn't Mr. Auden say that? Well, he could also have said we live in the age of faithlessness. "Anxiety," and "anxious" and "anguish" comes from "narrow." The throat cannot expand. We don't get air. Anybody who feels anguish cannot breathe. He cannot breathe. He who has fear closes his eyes, because he is afraid. But he who has anguish cannot breathe. He has no spirit. Faith makes the throat -- what? Very simple, very physical. Nothing philosophical, gentlemen. Nothing abstract, nor religious. Christianity is a very material belief in the incarnation of the spirit. And the spirit incarnates in you and me when you can take a deep breath. When you are -- have anguish, you can't. You're so tight, as you know, that you have to -- the first thing you have to say to a faithless person: "relax," because he can't breathe.

So let's put in here "fear" and "anxiety." That's the question of the throat. If you go down into the system, you come to the heart. Obviously you get love and hate. The heart loves or hates.

For all these movements, from heart, throat, and eye, or the senses and the pulmonary system, and the { } -- aspirational system, you receive -- we receive our directive forces from our desires: from our stomach, from our kidneys, and from our genital system. And that's a very profound secret; the harmony between the upper parts and the lower parts of our body. And you can -- also say, gentlemen, that when any one -- faith, hope, and love -- of the upper parts are in harmony with the dictates of hunger, of love, and of thirst, that in those three cases -- this is perhaps not everything, but the passions tell us -- there is an equilibrium -- an equilibrium between our being in need of food, or needing of thirst, or needing of sexual satisfaction, and our willingness to offer the necessary price for this -- for the peace of the race. It has been said, gentlemen, that love is desire and sacrifice in equilibrium. Perhaps you take this down. It's a very important statement by a great Italian. Love is always desire and sacrifice in equilibrium. That's why I do not believe in platonic love. That's nonsense. Love is always desire. And platonic love says, "I don't desire." That's why I don't believe in platonism. Anybody who loves -- if he is a full-blooded animal, he wants -- he desires, but he also is willing, you see, to compensate by sacrifice. Otherwise he's a brute. If you only try to love with your lower part, you can't love. That's just

desire. That's not very interesting. That's the Kinsey Report. And that is not -- only half of the story. It is the lower part. It must be there. For heaven's sake. It's very encouraging to hear from Mr. Kinsey how -- how potent we all are. But that's an endowment. You see, it's nothing of the execution.

The same is true about our faith and anguish, gentlemen. Faith is inspiration and expiration in equilibrium. Whereas mere anxiety is expiration. You expire from fear, from cowardice, from depression, from melancholia. You won't breathe anymore.

What we call "inspired," gentlemen, is always a victory of inspiration over expiration. And what the word suffers today from is the idea that, with regard to the life of the whole race, the spirit is always one of "exhale." Look at all these books -- Spengler and Toynbee -- and what you -- are made to admire today as having something to do with history. Gentlemen, they just spit out the vomit, the history of the past. They are all on the dunghill, the dungheap, the histories of the past: 23 civilizations, or six or seven. I don't know why -- why they have such numbers -- it makes no difference, they're all dead. Of course, they aren't dead. But the people who have written them up, have written them down. That is, they have expired -- made them expire. They are have no l„nger -- no longer made them breathe, what we -- what I told Collins here last time, you see, that he said "merely." "Merely" is expiration. And admiration is inspiration. Whenever you can admire something, you see, it makes you take a deep breath. And whenever you say "Hmph! Hmph! I don't care. The {end}," you allow it to die.

We all at every moment, gentlemen, kill and call into life. Have you ever thought how strange it is that we say, "Something is called into life -- called back into life"? We call it back into life, because to use our throat means to form something, a deep breath by which this is again within the wind, within the waves of the air that shake the rafters of the theater, or fill the lines of the editorials, or the pulpits, and the echoes, and the resounding walls of a church. Do you -- know how Christ is kept alive? By the foolishness of preaching. Do you think He lives on Mars, or on Mercury, or on Venus? You know He doesn't. You know very well that He does not live except on -- in the mouth of His followers. That's how He lives. And that's why He has been resuscitated from the dead. Because we have, and we should resuscitate Him all the time, and as much as you do, you are in the universal history of the human race. And in no other. You can kill Him. Christ is killed not by the Jews once, but by all of you every day, because you don't carry -- you make Him the name above all names. Do you? I've never heard you say that, except in some organized church service. If you would say it to someone else in your life at a -- dangerous moment, you would bring Him to life. Who -- who of you can say that? You go to these dead church services, where it's just repetition, but if you would bring Him into play where it

matters, you could cure men from anguish. It never dawns on you that you should. That's why all the atheists today are better Christians than the Christians. Because you have { } Him somewhere where it doesn't -- doesn't -- He doesn't make your throat {large}. If He doesn't do this, gentlemen, He is not alive. I accuse you all that you repeat dead words to -- to protest that Christus -- Christ has risen. He has not risen with you, as long as you haven't once dilated your throat in such a way that He could come through with it, as an act of faith. Before He -- there is no experience of faith in you. All your ancestors knew this. You couldn't join a church in New England or in America, if you didn't give proof of such -- such experience, as you know. That people called "to get religion." Today "to get religion" means to pay the taxes for the church.

Because you have commercialized the Church just as much as you have -- commercialized history. And that's always the same thing, gentlemen. People who lead -- read church fiction -- fiction they must read The Robe instead of praying to God. And these scandalous books, -- The Apostle, by -- what's the man's name? -- and all this stuff which you read. The Robe is just the greatest accusation against a living congregation -- I know of. It's a fiction, but poor fiction, instead of an act of faith. You know The Robe? Who has read it? Repent! Such {sick stuff}.

It's the only way people can sell you religion today. That's why The Robe is written. It's sugar-coating. It has nothing to do with the -- with the problem that Christ is alive today and waits for the universal history of mankind to come true.

So gentlemen, the heart, the throat, and the eye in our own existence are very real. But they can be made subservient to something that is not concerned with the short life of 70 years. These same organs, why shouldn't they be made subservient to the tree of life, and its life? The heart, gentlemen, is a branch of the one great tree of life. Your heart is given you here into this body as a -- how would you call it? A scion? Or I don't know -- a part of the whole tree of life. You cannot come to life unless you have a heart. And this heart isn't yours. This heart is simply a branch office of the big tree of life. If you look into the embryonic history of how you are born, the heart is a branch of the great tree of life. Very carnal, very much in the flesh. But yet not yours. Not yours. The heart tells you -- that's why you have the tremor of the heart when the connection of your heart with the rest of the universe is not in order.

So the same is true about throat -- the throat, gentlemen, the throat is that pump which allows you to take air. Well, isn't the air common to all? The fishes, and the birds, and the animals, and man? And do you really think that your pump is only there to feed you? No. It's installed in you, yes, like the heart, but only so that you produce the necessary transmission of these floods of air, of

spirit from generation to generation.

That is, gentlemen, every one of us carries a much heavier load than he -- cares to admit. The eye is not given you for what you see. The throat is not given you for what you breathe. The heart is not give you for what you like. But obviously, these three organs, because we are human beings, are given us to be -- to serve to the fulfillment of the existence of the race. We are all, gentlemen, specimens, and not individuals. If you analyze the word "specimen," it means "representative of the species." You are representing the whole species at this very moment. That is, your life expectation expands from the first human being to the last. Every one of you carries life everlasting inside himself. And in order to prove it, the Church came along and said -- and the Buddhist monks came along, and the Aztec, and said, "You don't have to propagate physically by the lower organs only, have children. The spirit connects you just as much with the very first moment of creation, and the very last moment of history," you see. That's a great act of faith of the -- of the Christian spirit to say, "The spirit can also -- finally make people marry and beget children, but you have thought that you only reach posterity when you have children, of the flesh." That's not true.

By breathing, by loving, and by hoping, we comprehend all times.

Now, gentlemen, therefore, history makes -- gives you the great pleasure to become a cell of the great man. History combats that which you think is very spirited, and which is the greatest, I think, evil in thought which has befallen this country, to call man a microcosmos. Man is not a microcosmos. That's utter nonsense. { }. But you are a microanthropos. And the only real man is the macroanthropos, the whole human race. Humanity certainly is more real than you and I. The partner of the creator is the creature man. And that comprises you and me and ev- -- all the generations of all times.

And the whole problem of history, gentlemen, is to make you understand that the whole race has a life story. And when I tell you a story about the tribes it doesn't make sense if you think somebody else experienced it. You must come to experience the story as though you would have done the same at that moment. That's history. History makes us feel that we would have done this, or we would have wished we could have done it in their place. Or we would say to them, you talk of a devil, "No, I would not have done this, in this moment." This is a story. And it is not history, gentlemen, that -- the difference between a story and a history. History is only that of which you can realize and experience that it was your problem at the time, and that obviously you were present when this happened. When the first tribesmen buried their dead, you must feel that this was a question -- is a question put to you. Would you have done it? Would you have entered this whole march of history? Well, every isolationist in America is

asked this today. Do you stick to the dead of the two world wars, or don't you? Do you bury your dead? If you do, you cannot go isolationist, you see. If you don't bury the dead, but say they -- they just died in a corner, you go on from there as though nothing had happened. That's what the people did after the first world war. They did not bury their dead. That is, they didn't stay -- stand by their achievements. Isn't that true?

So perhaps you see now, gentlemen, this very act of a funeral, of the first day of creation, is your question today with regard to the two world wars. And obviously there's a great inclination on your part not to bury your dead, as I told you about these two -- chaplains who didn't bury their dead. Called themselves ministers of the Gospel. They were neither ministers, nor did they know what the Gospel was. They were paid chaplains by the United States Army. For ice cream and soda.

So in every one minute, gentlemen, history asks this question: would you have done the same? Or why wouldn't you? And therefore you become one man through all times. There is no history unless you believe that all men are one. Instead you believe, however, in this cheap "brotherhood of man." I recommend to you to believe in the father- and sonhood of men. Because in the experience of father and son being one, you can experience that ancestors and great-grandchildren are one. Every one of us has an instinctive inclination to speak of the founding fathers. Because if you say honorably, "The founding fathers did this and this" in the Constitution, at that very moment you bring together your little generation and the other generation and make them into one. By founding fathers, you bow to them as their son, as their heir, as their promoter, as their continuator, you see. As their successor. And they become your predecessors. And that's history. If you can't call George Washington your founding father, you haven't yet been able to understand history. When Mr. Charles Beard wrote the debunking history of America, he tried to abolish American history. Because he said we have a better history than the American history. The American history is just a capitalistic hoax. Have you seen the book? Who has read Charles Beard? Very strange man, he is. I think it's all Mrs. Beard. I think she resented the term "founding fathers." Most American women do.

And so if you want to beat down the women of America, flatter them by writing a book on the founding mothers.

Now I'm quite serious. That's why this whole problem I think is very practical. Let's go back now to our ancestral spirits, gentlemen. I've tried to tell you two different things to enlighten the problem of the spirit of old. The ancients, who -- for the first time spoke of spirit, never mind -- meant anything more intricate than breathing together. To have spirit means to breathe together with other

people. It is something absolutely physical, material. But it is, of course, something bigger than you and I left alone, you see. When you are inspired, or when the spirit moves you, then the dead are present, and the future generations are present. And your throat is moving as a pump for bringing air into the chambers of life of this great tree of life, which certainly has many seasons, and which must have its sap pulsating in the generation of ours, which is our spring, and the next generation, when another spring must re-live in the same tree. And since we are only seasonable creatures, the problem that our pumpwork must expedite the sap through the whole tree is nothing extraordinary. Every branch on every tree does exactly this. It feeds itself. But it also keeps the whole tree alive, doesn't it? And even if -- when one of these branches dies, the whole tree -- the tree sends out the next branch, and the next branch. But while these branches, which we can see are there, they must serve the whole tree. They must send -- receive sunshine and rain for the whole tree, not just for themselves.

It's all so simple, gentlemen. But you live in such an abstract world, and the terrible thing is that you think you are realistic. You are the most unrealistic, misinformed, and malformed people, completely corrupt by your own science. This is all incredibly stupid and incredibly unobservant of the real facts of life. Isn't it a real fact of life which bothers you now for the last nine years already that you have a sex, that you have -- genitals, that you have great passions, that your reason never is any good for anything, because you always do things for another reason than for reason? Isn't this true that therefore the whole problem is how to make this -- mighty and powerful body of yours subservient to tasks that are worth of these tremendous potencies? Well, all the tasks of the human race are such. That's why you get married finally, so that this potency of yours may be made subservient to the procreation of the race. And that's why we have meals together so that this great hunger of ours and thirst of ours may serve to enliven the community. That's why it is more moral to eat together than to eat alone. When I have to eat in the coffee shop, I always eat by myself, but that's an act of defiance against Dartmouth College. And I'm very wicked when I do that.

It's immoral to eat alone. Because all these great acts, gentlemen, of our body are given us to create a greater body. In the family, everybody admits it. Very strange. But in politics you don't. And in history you don't. Well, what's politics and what's history, except the enlarged family of yours?

So let's have a break here and then go back to the tribe.

[tape interruption]

The attempt of the tribe is to re-present the past. If you know what representative government is, you would understand perhaps that to re-present is a tre-

mendous undertaking. We have representative government, allegedly, but as you know you treat your representatives today more or less as mail carriers. You -- they can't count the letters that come from home. That, of course, is not representative government. But that is just mob rule. Because re-presentative government would say, "This man in Washington now knows better. I send him there to make me present -- it's in my stead, because I can't be there." The form in which the ancients wanted to make the spirit of the dead dominate the living was the mask. The word "person" means somebody who speaks through a mask. Personare means to personate, to make a sound through some foreign face, through some strange face. And as you know we had this week Carnival, and Ash Wednesday was yesterday. And that on Carnival, you wear these masks, because it is originally the day of the dead. The day in which the dead come to life. And that was -- is now a joke in Christianity, but of course at one time it was terribly serious. It was the time at which you danced under the inspiration of the medicine man. And what is a medicine man in the tribe, gentlemen? The man who wears the mask. The man who wears the mask of the ancestor. Therefore, every tribe had to have at least one mask, just as it had totem poles. The mask is the impersonation of the founder of the tribe, of the first in whose name everything has to {happen} and it gives you the experience, gentlemen, in -- as a tribesman, that you are spoken to.

Now you are such philosophers, such rationalists, that you really think that the life of the spirit begins with "Me" saying something. But "Poor Me" is very differently organized. You only live because somebody speaks to you. If nobody would call you by your name, you would be panicky. You rely on the fact that when I step on your toe, I say, "Excuse me, Sir," or "Excuse me, Friend." That is, that I call you -- speak to you. If you think for one moment that you were quite sure that nobody ever would speak to you, you would probably commit suicide or go crazy. To be spoken to is much more important than to speak yourself, as you know, Mr. {Davidson}. Why is that so, gentlemen? Because by being spoken to, we get direction. By our speaking ourselves, we get no direction whatsoever. You can't speak yourself into any direction. The great thing about the medicine man is that he, even after seven generations, can redirect the living generation into the proper paths. The narrow paths of antiquity. That is the -- the ambition of the medicine man, that the next generation will get direction from him. As you well -- you have all read the descriptions of the medicine man, and you now understand the difference between a chieftain and the medicine man. The chieftain is at this moment the guide and leader of the living group. He's purely physical. That is, you can see him in the flesh. The medicine man has to bring on the tribe the great blessing that somebody of the past speaks to him -- speaks to them, I should say, you see, including the chief. That these poor people remain under the direction of this greater spirit. That's why you always {hear these} people speak of "the great spirit."

Gentlemen, the whole story of the great spirit in American folklore is a great hoax. These people all had spirits, and when they came in touch with the missionaries of the white race in this country, the white -- the missionary, of course, wanted to persuade them that they always had believed in God and something like it, and so the whole abbreviated talk about the Great Spirit came into usage. I don't think it's older than 1700 that any great Indian spoke of the Great Spirit. That's not original in this country. It's all nonsense. But that is -- are the 18th century Christians in this country. Just as little as the Indians had horses. And yet all your boys think that wild Western stories must give the Indian man horses. But -- as you well know, the Spaniards and the -- and the -- Englishmen brought the first horses into this country. There just was -- were no horses and that's why it's this great ambition at this moment of the -- of the, as you know, paleontologists, to prove that America had the older horse than the rest of the world. Of course, it hadn't. It's one of these patriotic hoaxes. You can read it every few years. Some other bi- -- zoologist gets up the notion that the American had horses. It's a wonderful story. It's like the Greenland hoax, you see: of course, America must have been discovered before it was discovered. And the similar way with the Great Spirit.

Gentlemen, the story is great enough. The greatness of the spiritual life of the tribe lies in this: that the living were not left without orientation, as you are, your poor -- you poor nonentities. You are left without direction, but they were not, because the story was told. It wasn't fiction. It was a real story. And it was told through the mask that provided for them the certainty that the dead were living to the quick. As you know, gentlemen, the Creed of our -- of the Christian tradition contains these strange words, that He will come back to judge the living and the -- dead and the quick, the quick and the dead. The living, that is, and the dead.

We'll see, gentlemen, why Christianity has these two fronts against the empires, and against the tribesman. And let me throw out to make the whole thing more pointed, at this moment. In the tribe, the dead men speak to the living and give them direction. In an empire, the living men speak to the dead and give them direction. It's very strange. And in Christianity, which has risen above the two superstitions, the -- Christ speaks to the living and the dead. That is, nothing past is already final in its righteousness, and nothing living is. But in the old -- ancient order, it's different, gentlemen. In the tribe, the dead are always right. The living are always wrong. Or in danger of going wrong. They have always to be coerced. They always have to be kept in the narrow path. And therefore, gentlemen, the fiction, the -- really the fiction at that time -- in this respect, the legal fiction is that everything new has to follow precedent. The modern judges in America are that part of the modern order which is tribal, because they go by precedent. And you can't -- one branch of life has to go by precedent in order

that we have life at all. To live by precedent is today the legal fiction, isn't it? And the same legal fiction is in a greater score embodied in the medicine man who makes sure that the dead man speaks to the living.

Gentlemen, this is terribly important, because there is one task before your generation: to limit the power of corporations. Now corporations are masks. Take that down: corporations, legal persons are masks. They are legal fictions. They don't exist, unless some living people give them their living blood, their lifeblood. You have no General Motors without Mr. Wilson. Today it seems that we only have Wilsons, because we have General Motors, and that's why he is in the Cabinet. But it is the other way around, too. That is, the relation of the real life of the -- of living people, gentlemen, and the existence of corporations, is the great problem of America. It's much more important than the problem of capitalism or socialism. Obviously the problem today is not between any such branch like socialism or Communism on the one-hand side and free enterprise on the other. But the whole problem is, is there still a free entrepreneur, or are there only corporations? That is, are there physical people in this country, or are these big institutions, these abstractions? That's the real question, gentlemen. And it is the question before the whole world.

If you read Mr. Priestley, who wrote this wonderful story, the -- So Green Is My Valley -- do you know him? Charming man, this Englishman. He wrote once a wonderful essay in which he said, "I'm now asked to choose between America and Russia. I don't see why I should choose. There's nothing for me on either side. They both live by corporations. And I just wish to live myself, in my green valley." There are no people in the United States, he said, and there are no people in Russia -- who are allowed to exist. It's all corporations. It's all five-year plan, or it's General Motors, or General Electric. All so big. You know, our bread isn't bread, it's General Mills. Well, it is. And why? Because it's so general, there's no bread in the bread. Anything the corporation makes has lost its vitality. That's literally true.

Take anything. If you bake it on such a big scale, it loses its vitality because, gentlemen, take this down: vitality and frailty go together. The more frail something is, the more life -- alive it is. A vitamin, a violet, a baby are the most lively things, and thereby they are the most easily crushed. A man of war, or a tank, are very hard to crush, and they have no life. And they make their inmates stupid. And very little alive. That's so strange.

Gentlemen, the degree of vitality and the degree of frailty go together. And the degree of immunity, of invulnerability, is in inverse ratio to the aliveness of anything. Life is life only because it is delicate. And the fear of man, his hopelessness, his faithlessness, drives him on to make himself strong and stronger,

and in making himself stronger, he loses his life. Power corrupts. Because the -- life is life only as long as it is delicate. The corporations are attempts to what? To escape mortality. The curse of the tribe is that it will not say that the ancestor died, that's {it}. And that's wrong. That's the great lie of the tribe. He has died. You must see the equilibrium. The achievement of history is based on an attempt to keep the spirit alive. And the first tribesmen go to the extent to say, "Nothing has died," you see. They have this -- they overdo it. They project the -- the life of the ancestor so much into the present and the future that they, so to speak, say, "Hear, you can hear him speak." And the medicine man is the enthusiastic representative of this man who actually has died. So the masks every -- you and I know it between ourselves, you see, that they are unreal. Yet they are there. And you see, since nothing that has ever been created must -- may ever disappear. We do still bury people, and we still wear masks. And it isn't so easy. At this moment, we cannot finish the whole story, but you must know that mankind is wrestling all the time with the right degree to be given to representation. We need the Fuller Brush representative in our house. But how much? You know when he comes in, he tells the woman, you see, "Will you buy some brushes?" She says, "No, but I would like somebody to play the piano." He sits down and plays the piano. That's big { }. He represents everything she wants. If -- he does it sufficiently, she will buy also what she doesn't want.

That is, gentlemen, by masks, we do impress people. We do. And you -- we -- you must begin to fathom, gentlemen, that we cannot at random found corporations. It depends on the degree of our vitality. You and I can feed our spirit into the mask. The medicine man in a tribe is very often a really enthusiastic man who does revive the spirit of the ancestor when he wears his mask. You know these people smoke endlessly. They drink. They get intoxicated. But on the whole, when you read descriptions of the medicine man in the tribes, you will see that this a very wholesome influence. That they really do, you see, keep the people in the straight line of tradition. And that if the medicine man went, something terrible would happen to the tribe. They would lose direction. They would lose direction. So we learn here for the first time, gentlemen, that much is forgiven people who do some -- who save life. The great book by Selma Lagerl”f, the Swedish writer, is -- it's a novel called the -- The Miracle of the Antichrist. It plays -- it's laid out in Sicily. And there the miraculous Jesus bambino, the baby in the church, the -- that does miracles is stolen. And the socialist agitator puts in his own edition of the miraculous Jesus. And it, of course, the new bambino does the trick, too, and the miracles continue to happen. And finally the socialists, the atheistic agitator is found out. That's why she calls the book, The Miracles of the Antichrist.

Well, this book has made much -- much in my life. I once converted a faithless Jew to believe in the living God by this book, because it ends on this note: It said,

"Nobody can redeem men from their sufferings, but he shall be forgiven much who again encourages them to carry their load, to carry their burden." And this is what the medicine man does. A tremendous encouragement to carry their burden, and what I try to do at this moment, gentlemen, is to prevent you from being romantic about the tribesmen, and also from being snobbish. They are admirable, and yet they're wrong. Can you see the double -- the double? They had no other way than their primitive way, of keeping a direction unless they did not undergo this tremendous pressure from the first generation all the time. This is tremendous story, but I think I would -- equally easy to look down on these people and say they were ridiculous and barbarians, and it is equally wrong to exalt them and say they were right. But in their place, they found the one point of attack, you see. By representing an absent time to the living, they made these people much greater than they otherwise could have ever become. They really added to their stature. Can you see this? Because you all know that all the tribesmen became under the impact of the -- impersonation of the ancestor -- what do they -- did they become? Hopeful and fearless. Faithful and without anguish. You all know that the tribesmen at the martyr -- how do you call it, the post to which he is tied? His post of martyrdom, of torment by his enemies? -- would go on singing the songs of his own tribe, with utter fearlessness and without any anxiety. And he proved his lack of anxiety by singing, because you cannot thing -- sing when your voice is extinguished in anguish.

And you never, I think, appreciate sufficiently the tradition that the prisoner of war had to sing while he is tormented. Because you do not appreciate the problem of the spirit that comes out of your throat. You only know of hope and fear. And you -- say faith is the invention of the clergyman. Gentlemen, the prisoner who sings in the moment of agony, this prisoner has overcome, you see, through faith his physical individual anguish. Because what does he sing? The honor of his tribe. The survival of the -- not of the fittest, gentlemen, you see, but he is the fit one who makes the tribe survive his own pain. That's the story of mankind. Ridiculous: survival of the fittest. Who is the fittest? He who makes life survive himself. It's the other way around. All these slogans, gentlemen, dismiss them! They are all done without any real self-knowledge of the people who make -- throw out these slogans. Darwin, I mean, sick man. Had migraine all the time because he didn't get married in time. He never loved. He never had any faith in anything, so he throws out such a suggestion, "survival of the fittest." Gentlemen, man's problem is: how do I make myself fit enough so that the race can survive? That's the man's -- only problem. And by singing, he does. The prisoner who sings at the stake convinces the enemy that his tribe is unbeatable. Impresses these people, you see. Because if the voice of the ancestor, impersonated by the medicine man, elicits this echo of the war song in the prisoner of war, then the spirit of this tribe is invincible.

And gentlemen, may I say that it is? That these tribes are still with us after 6,000 years, 7,000 years proves that they are invincible. We, the white man, finally have crushed them, but not before.

So if anything, we haven't proven our worth with white man's Western civilization certainly, in these few hundred years since the discovery of America. But these people have. They have survived 7 hundred -- thousand years by filling everybody -- now, mark this well -- the living echoing the sound of the dead. The war song of the tribesman is an answer, a reply to the inspiration coming to him from his ancestral spirit. They could not sing it under their own steam. It is a reaction, a response, a responsory, you may even call it, you see. The tribesmen, gentlemen, form the choir. The spirit of the ancestor forms the single speaker. In the tribe, the only "I," is ego, is the ancestor. All the tribesmen are answering these.

You go to India and the rest of the world, there's no such notion that man can be -- living man can identify himself with ego. They all -- as you know in Hinduism call themselves "thous." "These { } -- thou" is the great saying of the Hindu, you see, because everybody knows that as far as he is in the flesh, he is "Poor Me," to be addressed by somebody else. "Poor Me" is the accusative, for anybody who knows a foreign language. That is, it is not "I." In the tribe or in the family, gentlemen, nobody is "ego," except the dead.

The -- egos speak with authority, as the only authority is vested in the people who have preceded us. And we have to go by precedent. Therefore we never say, "I did it." But we always say, "I'm sorry, we have to do this, because it is already ruled by precedent." Therefore nobody in the tribe who is alive is an "I." The only person who says "I," the medicine man, wears a mask. So take this down, gentlemen: persons in the tribe, the person is an impersonator of somebody dead, of some body dead, of some dead body. Some, who only lends his living body to the spirit of the dead somebody. The word "somebody" -- "somebody" is a very profound word, you see. The living medicine man embodies somebody who has died and therefore is pure spirit. And you little cats, or -- and dogs all think you are persons, because you are born. Gentlemen, this way you are not persons. You are highly impersonal, I assure you. To be a person always means to speak in the name of at least two generations. Nobody -- you are a -- as a doctor, you speak in the name of the whole medical profession. Of course, we'll say, you are a personality. But gentlemen, you are not persons if you do not identify yourself with something right, and if you do not stand up against something wrong. And we know already right is that which has come down to us as a straight way and wrong is that which is crooked, a deviation from the old way. Right and wrong, gentlemen, are ways from the past into the future. You don't know this. You think it's just something in a course of ethics, logically disputed. It's all nonsense.

It is simply something which has reached us in the straight way and we can go against it, or we can continue it. That's how we become a person. When a man says, "I want to do right," he identifies himself with a thing that has reached him from the past, with a way of life. {Once} you enter upon this way and say, "Yes, I affirm it," you become a person. Nobody can a person -- be a person just because he is a living tadpole. That's what you are.

This is terrible. Everything in this country has been wasted. The sacred word "person" has been bestowed on every brat, without any obligation to continue the life of the race. But the word "person," gentlemen, is only available to those who want to do right, and who will fight wrong, because in this very moment, they enter upon a beaten path of life which they have to continue. Can you begin to see this problem? Gentlemen, ethics is nothing for the merely living generation, because it means that we hand over and continue that which man has found out to have -- we have to do. A person is always pluri-aged, if I may introduce this term. Pluri-aged, more -- of more than one age, of more than one generation. "Pluri-generation" would be too complicated. Let us use this poor term, "pluri-aged," because we need something to fight the philistines. And the philistines tell you that man, by looking at his own -- navel, decides what is right and wrong. Nonsense! You wouldn't know anything. We have -- must have heard what is right before we can decide whether we can go on with it or have to change it. You want to alter a law, you first must understand the law.

So in the word "person" we still have inherited from the tribe the being vested with masks, any judge with his -- any sermonizer, any minister with his garment -- in England, the wig of the judge -- in the priest, with his -- with his -- in the Catholic Church, with his Roman dress, because he wears just the same dress as a Roman would in 300 A.D., that's after all you call the clerical garb, you see. It's very secular dress. The pope still wears the dress of the Caesars, of the senator of Rome. Today. Because they are their masks. They try to speak from former generations, and to keep us in line with these former generations. That's why every person of dignity wants to wear something that's a little older than the present fashion. That's why you crown the -- Queen Elizabeth, you see. For her crown is older, so when she speaks, she doesn't speak, you see, with the authority of the living, but with the authority from the dead.

And take this down, gentlemen: the crown is an attempt to break out from the fic- -- the wrong fiction of the mask, as though the dead man was still in any way present. In the crown, the face of the living, he's allowed to shine. That's a very great beauty between crown and mask, you see. We'll come to that point very soon. To be crowned means to keep this connection with the past, but to lift the -- the mask from the face, you see, and to say, "We will not exaggerate, we will not overdo it." These are very great stories. I can't go into details of all these slow

clarifications. The first idea is: the dead speak, and the living listen. The dead speak, the -- living listen. You must -- cannot realize any tribal organization if you do not understand that the living generation in the tribe is meant to obey. That's their honor. You see, the living is meant to obey. The dead speak.

Thank you.