civilising influence of the town somewhere near is tribal barbarism. Top Withins, or Wuthering Heights as it is called in the novel, is in the heart of Yorkshire; and Heathcliffe is a character whom you often meet in Yorkshire today. If perfection is possible, or in religious terms - if the Kingdom of Heaven is not just a myth like Arcadia – then everything points to a closer integration as being the way to it. I have already expressed the view that you will never get there in a society which seeks to impose discipline from without. However necessary such discipline is in society as we know it, and I have spent my life helping to maintain the rule of law, the use of force is necessary to implement it, and on occasions extreme force. Any other view underestimates the forces tending towards disorder, and lawlessness. But for such a society, recurrent warfare must be the general rule, in one form or another. Perfection, or the kingdom of heaven, is not a viable political aim. You must seek it elsewhere.
It is not relevant to the main argument, but I ought to mention the suggestion put forward by Sir Julian Huxley and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that all the brains in the world may ultimately find sufficient union to generate a brain of brains. Just as cells combine to produce creatures, so it is argued as I have argued, people may combine to produce a supra-personality, which will manifest itself as a brain of brains, or mind of minds. Certainly minds do influence each other to produce a climate of opinion, and the climate of opinion reacts upon the minds to mould many of the opinions that they hold. But it is going very much further to say that this climate of opinion will ultimately come alive, and indeed come alive as a supra-person.
Frankly I doubt whether it will ever happen. It has the theoretical objection that if it ever does happen, human personality will cease to be real, because it will inevitably be a function of the supra-personality, and therefore…