In this book, I point out first that from my own experience the agonizing decisions of life render the theories of mathematical physicists and of evolutionary biologists irrelevant, when it comes actually to making a decision. For however correct their theories, and almost certainly they are correct, these theories are impotent to help make responsible and honourable decisions. They are as impotent to help as are the dogmas of conventional religious belief. And just consider the nightmare that would ensue, if those, who suggest that the concepts of responsibility and honour are illusions, were to obtain political power.
Secondly I translate the agony of decision-making from private to public life, starting with the Greek dramatists, and culminating with Jesus, who believed rightly or wrongly that he had to make the supreme sacrifice in order to save the world.
Thirdly I show, by virtue of a theory of consciousness, which I created or discovered, how human thought and human decision making are always seamed with error and misunderstanding; with the result that we all have to live by faith, the religious and the irreligious alike! To be precise my theory gives an insight into Jung’s clinical experience, which he freely admitted he did not have, when he admitted in Psychological Types that a theory of thought was a “seven sealed book”*. My theory turns over the first pages. “Luck is inseparable from War”, said Major-General Carl von Clausewitz, “and you need to plan so as to take advantage of good-luck if it comes your way, and plan so as not to be thrown off balance by bad-luck. Even acts of faith should be intelligent acts of faith”. And what a wretched life it would be without adventure or the taking of risk; if one were the slave of Health and Safety, or of Political Correctness!
Lastly, having considered some of the surrounding circumstances of Jesus’ life, as they are supposed to have been, I consider the thoughts going through the mind of anyone who, like him, believed he had a vocation to save the world in a spiritual sense. Essentially what I do is assume that the truth of science, and the truth of war, have equal validity to the truth of religion, and then see what is left of the religion that Jesus Christ inaugurated. Quite a lot is left actually; all its main features are preserved.
Things can always get worse; particularly if the Rule of Law is allowed to collapse. Yet mathematical physicists and evolutionary biologists seem incapable of suggesting how you run Society so as to prevent this happening, or even to suggest a motive for trying to prevent this happening. Most of them say the world is mechanical, and it is futile even to think of influencing its progress. Yet the Rule of Law, which I have spent my life helping to administer, is designed to protect the weak from the strong, to reverse Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest, to reverse the Natural Order of things, which science describes and sometimes extols. And most of us think the Rule of Law is one of the most precious ideas ever devised by Man to raise us out of tribal barbarism.
Those who doubt this are always welcome to the experience of War – which however horrible has at least two redeeming features. It winnows terribly reality from illusion; and it reminds us with brutal and cogent persuasiveness that morale or spirit is supreme. It does not need Napoleon Bonaparte to remind us that the moral is to the physical as three to one; every soldier knows it. That is so, even if mathematic physicists and evolutionary biologists refuse to accept what every soldier, from private to general, knows very well.
So this is a spiritual world from start to finish. And those who deny the freedom of the will, and the spirit of man to exercise it, do little more than mutilate their own minds. The job of science is to provide a mechanical description of the Universe, that approximates to our experience of it. But that does not mean it is an adequate description; because this is a spiritual world from start to finish.
*see page 88 of the 1971 Edition.