This concept is so important that I spend the early chapters of my book, Man’s Relationship with God, expounding it. And the whole of the structure of thought contained in my book is built upon it. Yet I doubt if it is wholly true. Take the case of a man whose religious faith takes him to martyrdom; it may be a faith lived out in his daily life, or it may be an intellectual faith to which the mind alone pays lip-service. But if it takes him to martyrdom, who am I to say it was not genuine belief? So unlike Kant, I am prepared to admit and accept that the basis of my theory of consciousness may be flawed, up to a point; but I still think it was immensely worthwhile to construct it, and that there is substantial truth in it. Though not everything in it is true. It is only a first attempt; and others I’m sure will improve upon it.
My synthesis presupposes that if I regarded my experiences as a microcosm of life as a whole, then if I could make sense of what was happening to me, I could in similar measure make sense of life. A view I think expressed in Goethe’s Faust Part II. So if the life of an individual man is bound up with the growth of character and the search for wisdom, or its denial, I conceived it was reasonable to suppose that the history of human society was similarly bound up with the gradual evolution of man’s consciousness. Many people would dispute that the purpose of an individual life was the growth and maturity of character; most philosophers seem to think that the purpose of life is happiness, adding that anyone who discounts happiness is probably lusting after power. But my view is that too great a desire for happiness disables a man from standing up to evil when confronted with it, and shuts his eyes to the disagreeable fact that promotion in one’s chosen profession often depends on an obsequious devotion to it. To put the proposition bluntly: it is no good pursuing happiness if one is drafted into the Army; the best thing then surely is to obey orders and get on with it, which I did and rather enjoyed it. Indeed the Regiment I was posted to was the best human society I have ever belonged to. And since my experience of life is that it is a continuous battle against evil, which raises its head on every conceivable occasion, it seems to me that some of the military virtues are relevant and appropriate in civilian life too. In particular, courage, honour, truthfulness.
Nor is there a consensus of opinion that the golden thread through history is the gradual evolution and maturing of man’s consciousness. Teilhard de Chardin thought so; and it may be that it was from him I learned the idea. But alas H.A.L.Fisher, whose History of Europe I regard as a work of genius, confesses that he can see no thread through history to make sense of it all, no sense of progress leading to a better future. Maybe the ominous threat of Nazi Germany discouraged him, because his work was published just before the Second World War. But his pessimism is sad, because to me the thread seems clear enough.
In contrast to life having a sense of purpose, the scholasticism of the Middle Ages was a journey down a cul-de-sac, which is the exact opposite of evolution. Thomas Aquinas may have saved the Catholic Church by harnessing the rediscovered philosophy of Aristotle; but surely his answers were foregone conclusions, once you accepted his attitude of mind, the medieval theological frame of mind and the unspoken assumptions on which it was based. Dante disagreed with Aquinas, and I unhesitatingly side with Dante. And I regard Aquinas’s arguments as being for those who like to hear what they like to hear, rather than as an intellectual adventure. But more fundamentally, scholasticism was burst apart firstly by the Renaissance and the Reformation, that is by the demand for freedom in secular and religious thought, and secondly almost wholly destroyed by science with its demand that theory be firmly rooted in experience. Ironically Aquinas championed Aristotle, who championed reliance on experience; but there was no enthusiasm to discover new science, and Aristotle in turn became a sacred text, which helped to convict Galileo. But in any event it was inconceivable that mankind should be content to live in such a mental strait-jacket for long; and the problem was that the scholastics could not, or would not, retreat. John Hus was given safe conduct, betrayed and burned. The Reformation was met by the Counter-