I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide, and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather, that there should always be a few writers pre- occupied in penetrating to the core o f the matter, in trying to arrive a t the t r u t h and set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast o r defeated when nothing appears to ensue,

-T. S .ELIOT

 Socrates and his disciples admired this world, but they did not particularly covet it, or wish to live long in it,. o r expect to improve it; what they cared f u r was an idea or a good which they found expressed in it, something outside it a n d timeless, in which the contemplative intellect might be literally absorbed.

 -SANTAYANA 5   

Table of Contents

A Note t o the Reader

Albert Jay Nock

Reform

Education

Nature and Truth

Economics

War

Politics and Politicians

The State

Liberty

Religion and Philosophy

The Genial Mr. Nock

Works of Albert J ay Nock  

Appendix  

A Note to the Reader

 I first assembled these quotations from the works of Albert Jay Nock about eight years ago. They were slightly revised a couple of years later and many copies have gone out to members of The Nockian Society and other admirers of AJN. Now on this centenary of Nock's birth it seems appropriate to help keep his memory green with a special publication. There was talk of a new collection of essays or a new edition of his The Theory of Education in the United States, but commercial publishers heat us to the punch. Such is the growing popularity of Albert Jay Nock Consequently, The Nockian Society decided, much to my pleasure, to mark the centenary with this attractively bound edition of the Nock anthology.

It might be remarked here that The Nockian Society is aware that Nock never sought disciples and that any following of "little Nocks" echoing his every word as holy writ would have been to him "a terrible thing to think upon." The important thing, he said, is not who is right but what is right. His was a disinterested love of truth. We can honor him, then, not by trying to sell his ideas, but by emulating him in the pursuit of excellence for its own sake.

The Nockian Society has, too, remembered Nock's distaste for most organizations so it has "no officers, no dues, and no meetings." That you may catch the flavor of the Society, here is the message that went out in the first bulletin.  

Patrons:

 Francis Rabelais            No Officers

 Artemus Ward               No Dues

 H. L. Mencken              No Meetings  

Three admirers of the late Albert Jay Nock met for lunch early in 1963-a doctor, a businessman, and a clergyman. Individually, each had found his own way to AJN, and felt an 9 affinity for Nock's ideas as well as Nock's no pushy approach to the idea business. A common interest in AJN had brought these three together in the first place; here, as in other in- stances, Nock proved to be a touchstone. Men who respond to Nock tend to hit it off pretty well together. This is a sufficient reason for The Nockian Society.

We are not out to save the world. Neither is our aim to idolize a man or endorse every idea embraced by AJN. Nock had a way of setting ideas in motion and then keeping out of their way. The Society keeps out of its members' way, as it pursues a policy of salutary neglect.

The most tangible thing about this Society is its mailing list Those whose names are writ therein receive an occasional memorandum containing priceless information available no- where else. The Hon. Sect'y is eager to add your name to this collection and will dispatch a free packet of Nockian literature to you at the first sign of interest.  

* * *  

Nock avoided publicity as doggedly as most men seek it. The maxim of Epicurus, "Live unknown," was one he adhered to faithfully-compulsively, some might say. Van Wyck Brooks tells us that in The Freeman days "no one knew even where he lived, and a pleasantry in the office was that one could reach him by placing a letter under a certain rock in Central Park ."

In his memoirs, Nock affirmed that "whatever a man may do or say, the most significant thing about him is what he thinks; and significant also is how he came to think it, why he continued to think it ,or if he did not continue, what the influences were which caused him to change his mind." One may understand Nock by the simple expedient of reading his books for he was as outspoken in the expression of his beliefs as he was reticent about his private life. What Nock says of Thoreau is, then, true of himself. "One may know him intimately and profitably through his works-there is no other way-but what one may know o r riot know about him is of no importance." So one may penetrate Albert Jay Nock only by carefully reading his books. Gustave Thibon expresses this idea so well: "Met-e physical proximity without moral intimacy, is the s u r e s t way to miss t h e secret beauty of a soul, to brush b y without seeing it. . . ." It is not close at hand that greatness is to be seen, b u t from within; vicinity without intimacy sets u p the densest and most impassable of barriers.  

* * *  

 Albert Jay Nock was a clarifying thinker He never presented his ideas as being brand new, fresh off the press but, on the contrary as being in most cases fairly well-established, if, indeed, nut ancient. It w a s his forte to give the known a new twist, to offer a new slant on things which usually conflicted with the stereotyped thinking of his contemporaries. AJN was, too, a radical thinker, if b y radical we mean getting to the root of it matter and not being satisfied with superficial explanations. His desire, in every instance, was to find "the reason of the thing" to "get wisdom, get understanding."

As a social critic, Albert Jay Nock stands head and shoulders above most. Much of what passes for social criticism must b e taken in small doses, or one will come away depressed arid generally in a mood to chuck it all. The reader may agree to everything the critics say, one hundred per cent, b u the is nevertheless left in a despondent mood or so with t he greatest critics who are aware "that for life to be fruitful ,life must be felt as a joy; that it is by the bond of joy, not of happiness or pleasure, not of duty or responsibility. that the called a n d chosen spirits are kept together in this world."

The great critics help "the t r u t h along without encumbering it with themselves." Hence they are not subject to the shortcomings of so many writers who have something of importance t o say, but usually spoil it by the injection of their own personalities. The  

 . . . most searching criticism is made by indirection, by the turn of some phrase that at first strikes one as quite insignificant, or at least quite irrelevant to any critical purpose; yet when this phrase once enters the mind, it becomes pervasive, and one finds presently that it h as coloured all one's cast of thought-and this is an effect which only criticism of the very highest o r d e r can produce.  

The true critic's remarks are made, so to speak, en passant. His primary purpose, in other words, is not to offer criticism, this being only a sort of by-product. Nock, like all great critics, was a fine artist and as such he was able to create a mood without mentioning it. His chief concern was creation for he held with Goethe that the critic should be primarily concerned with the processes that build up, and not with those that tear down. "The final purpose of the arts is to give joy." Just so, and it matters not how little joy may be current in the society for,

the true critic has his resources of joy within himself, and the motion of his joy is self-sprung. There may be ever so little hope of the human race, but that is the moralist's affair, not the critic's. The true critic takes no account of optimism or pessimism: they are both quite outside his purview: his affair is one only of joyful appraisal, assessments, and representation.  

And again as to the primary purpose of art:  

When Hesiod defined the function of poetry as that of giving "a release from sorrows and a truce from cares," lie intimated the final purpose of all great art as that of elevating and sustaining the human spirit through the communication of joy, of felicity; that is to say, of the most simple, powerful, arid highly refined emotion that the human spirit is capable of experiencing. This, no doubt, does not exhaust its beneficence; no doubt it works for good in other ways as well; hut this is its great and final purpose. It is not to give entertainment or diversion or pleasure, not even to give happiness, but to give  

Of all other men in American letters periapts Nock might be most aptly Compared with Henry David Thoreau Nock, like Thoreau was a discriminating man who was concerned with the quality of life lived and he learned early with Tlioreau that a man is rich in proportion to the number of things lie can afford to do without. What Richard Groff writes of Tlioreau applies equally to Nock: joy.  

            In this emphasis on inner transformation rather than on outward activity, Thoreau echoes the words of Lao Tse, who taught, "The way to do is to be." Insofar as it is the kind of persons we are which is at the heart of our problems, then obviously we must begin by changing our- selves. This attitude is at sharp variance with that of those reformers and agitators with plans for reorganizing the old institutions of society or instituting new ones in order to improve the condition of man.  

Nock would have nothing to do with the collectivism of his day. As was said of Kierkegaard, AJN "stationed himself to defend the individual against any philosophical, political, or religious teaching that tended to slack off this consciousness of the individual's essential responsibility and integrity." Neither was Nock tempted by the activism of his fellow "intellectuals" who for more than fifty years have been guilty of treason because they have willingly deserted the cause of truth and, in Russell Kirk's words, gone "a-whoring after strange gods, whose blandishments both the traditions of their culture and the discipline of their profession should enable them to resist." The disinterested love of truth has been replaced by a lust for power and prestige; no longer guardians of the truth, they have gone to the service of the states which "would use the scholar and debase him." Nock was one of  the few intellectuals to retain his integrity and avoid what , Julien Benda called The Treason of the Clerks. By clerks Benda meant "all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of nonmaterial advantages, and hence in a certain manner say: 'My kingdom is not of this world.' "

The job Nock loved best, though it brought him neither fame nor fortune, was being a spokesman for the remnant. If we belong in the remnant, lie wrote, we will  

proceed on our way, first with the more obscure and extremely difficult work of clearing and illuminating our own minds, and second, with what occasional help we may offer to others whose faith, like our own, is set more on the regenerative power of thought than on the uncertain achievements of premature action. Such persons have the power to see things as they are, to survey them and one's own relations to them with objective disinterested- ness, and to apply one's consciousness to them simply and directly letting it take its own way over them unchartered by prepossession, unchanneled by prejudice, and above all uncontrolled by routine and formula. Those who have this power are everywhere; everywhere they are not so much resisting as quietly eluding and disregarding all social pressure which tends to mechanize their processes of observation and thought. [The remnant is] an order of persons-for order is the proper word, rather than class or group, since they are found quite unassociated in any formal way, living singly or nearly so, and more or less as aliens, in all classes of our society. . . .  

It is not unlikely that future historians may see Albert Jay Nock as a prophet in the great tradition of Isaiah and Jeremiah, though his habits and vocabulary were not those of the ordinary clergyman, he calls one to the life of the "spirit"- the "inner life"-and away from an existence concerned primarily with things. Susan Stebbing writes of what I refer to, her term being "spiritual excellences" which are  

intellectual and moral capacities lacking which the life of human beings would be nasty and brutish; length of days could not redeem it. The excellence I call spiritual includes love for human beings, delight in creative activities of all kinds, respect for truth, satisfaction for learning to know what is true about this world (including ourselves), loyalty to other human beings, generosity of thought and sympathy with those who suffer, hatred of cruelty and other evils, devotion to duty and steadfastness in seeking one's ideals, delight in the beauty of nature and art-in short, the love and pursuit of what is worth- while for its own sake. In this pursuit the individual does in fact have at times to suffer pain and to surrender what it would be good for him to have were it not for the in- compatible needs of others, needs which he recognizes as claims upon himself. This is another spiritual excellence. These excellences are to be found in this world; no heaven is needed t o experience them.  

Nock was more concerned with being and becoming than with doing and getting. His was an aristocratic spirit which "is not a matter of birth, or occupation, or education. It is an attitude of mind carried into daily action, that is to say, a religion. [The aristocratic spirit] is the disinterested, passionate love of excellence. . . ."

In one of his letters, AJN remarks that "Rabelais was one of the world's great libertarians-he has been a stay and a support to my spirit for thirty years, and I could not possibly have got through without him." His Introduction to The Wurks o f Rabelais might also serve to explain why his own books, especially The memoirs, are worth reading.  

It must be laid down once and for all, that the chief purpose of reading a classic like Rabelais is to prop and stay the spirit, especially in its moments of weakness and enervation, against the stress of life, to elevate it above the reach of commonplace annoyances and degradations, and to purge it of despondency and cynicism. He is to be read as Homer, Sophocles, the English Bible, are to be read. . . , The current aspect of our planet, and the performances upon it, are not always encouraging, and one therefore turns with unspeakable gratitude to those who themselves have been able to contemplate them with equanimity, and are able to help others to do so. In their writing one sees how the main preoccupations, ambitions, and interests of mankind appear when regarded "in the view of eternity," and one is insensibly led to make that view one's own. Thus Rabelais is one of the half-dozen writers whose spirit in a conspicuous way pervades and refreshes one's being, tempers, steadies, and sweetens it, so that one lays the book aside, conscious of a new will to live up to the best of one's capacity, and a clearer apprehension of what that best may be.  

* * *  

Some thanks are in order: to the Hon. Sect'y of The Nockian Society whose light touch on the Society bulletins is a delight: to Marion Norrell, the lovely indentured servant who is the real secretary of the Society; to Leonard E. Read (Publisher of The Freeman) and the staff of the Foundation for Economic Education (especially Eleanor Orsini) for their assistance in a good cause; to Jacques Barzun who found time in a busy schedule to write us a provocative Preface; and, finally, to my wife, Laura, who came o u t of retirement (and almost ceased cooking meals) to design the cover that graces this slim volume.

I hope very much that readers will be pleased to make the acquaintance of Albert Jay Nock, a man so well described by that colossal Dutchman, Hendrik Willem Van Loon, as being "endowed with profound knowledge, blessed with immense possibilities for the enjoyment of life, and possessed of a rare genius for the handling of words."  

ROBERT M. THORNTON

Fort Mitchell , Kentucky

1970

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Albert Jay Nock

A Note by Jacques Harzun  

The imaginary fanatic of the French Revolution who never said, apropos of Lavoisier, that "the Republic has no need of savants" enunciated a great truth. It applies, of course, not to any factual reality, but to the emotions of democratic re- publics.

The oldest and mightiest of s u c h republics, the United States , has adhered to the principle with almost painful fidelity. It has resolutely disregarded its great artists, scientists, and critics, proceeding in its salutary neglect from a correct reasoning that they were a free gift from Providence , not a necessity with a place clearly marked out in the present.

That is why we keep "discovering" those free gifts-Melville, Jonathan Edwards, Henry Adams, Willard Gibbs, Henry James, John Jay Chapman, Albert Jay Nock. As the old man said who kept hiding macaroons among his heaped up papers, "it is such a pleasure LO come upon them unexpectedly." And perhaps these artists, critics, men of science are all the better for being aged in the wood. Hut surely we are not the better for having missed their contemporary effect. For example, Nock's book on education in the United States could have saved us endless mistakes had we heeded it during the past half century. Again, why were we so limited in imagination (though ever boastful of "creativity") that we could not separate Nock's literal advice about government from the fruitful implications of his libertarianism for manners and the intellectual life? No harm is done if we read his Jefferson as a biography and his Rabelais studies as travel books and com- pare them with other biographies and studies. Hut it is harm done to ourselves not to discover in those works an ideal of the complete man and of the moral life. Must we always be moved 17 only by unreadable books in treatise form, which profess t o “tell all” with the aid of quotations and references-that is, others’ thoughts pickled in disinfectant scholarship?

Never mind the answer just now. Here is a small book full of Nock’s thoughts, as fresh as they were when first minted.  

Reform  

It is not all of Nock, and the effect is leas than the sum from which they came. But it is a man thinking, which the republic needs more than it thinks-ambiguity intended. It makes me wonder afresh a t the curious point of view of t h e reformer who wants us all to be alike or assumes that we are all alike. One wonders where he could have spent his clays.

SELECTED LETTERS, 62

Il faut cultiver notre jardin. With these words Voltaire ends his treatise called Candide, which in its few pages assays more solid worth, move informed common sense, than the entire hulk of nineteenth-century hedonist literature can show. To my mind, those few concluding words sum up the whole social responsibility of m a n T h e only thing that the psychically- human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit In a word, ages of experience testify that the only way society can be improved is by the individual. its method which Jesus apparently regarded as the only one whereby the Kingdom of Heaven can be established as a going concern; that is, the method of each one doing his very best to improve one.                                                                                          

MEMOIRS, 307

Thus the notorious failure of reforming and revolutionary movements in the long run may a s a rule be found due to their incorrigible superficiality.

 THE STATE, 133

My notion is that it is not so important a t the moment LO try to make people take up with this, that, or the other view, as it is to establish the questions that must be considered before any competent view can be formulated. These questions are sunk now in a n immense depth of ignorance, and until they are brought u p and a t least clearly presented, I don't believe the moralist has any chance at all.

SELECTED LETTERS, 115

 The sound Pantagruelist knows how and when to treat grave subjects lightly in order to establish a clearer sense of their relative importance and a proportionate respect for their seriousness, never misappraising the one, or misapplying the oilier; the attainment of this knowledge is indeed perhaps the prime object and intention of the Pantagruelian philosophy.

MEDITATIONS, 10-1 1

The wise social philosophers were those who merely hung up their ideas and left them hanging, for men to look at or to pass by, as they chose. Jesus and Socrates did not even trouble to write theirs out, and Marcus Aurelius wrote his only in crabbed memoranda for his own use, never thinking anyone else would see them. They have come down to us by sheer accident.

JOURNAL, 30

 Nothing can be done about the liquor problem, the farm problem, problems of public ownership, and the other social problems that afflict us. I say, nothing can be done; that is, nothing except the one thing that will never be acknowledged as necessary, the self-imposed discipline of a whole people in acquiring a brand-new ethos. We have hopefully been trying to live by mechanics alone, the mechanics of pedagogy, of politics, of industry and commerce; and when we find it can- not be done and that we are making a mess of it, instead of experiencing a change of heart, we bend our wits to devise a change in mechanics, and then another change, and then another. . . . (The) clear insistent testimony that a nation’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that it porsesseth; that it is the spirit and manners of a people, and not the bewildering multiplicity of its social mechanisms, that determines the quality of its civilization.

Journeyman, 124-7

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Education

The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest and fullest continuous record available to us, of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity; every department, I think, except one-music. The record covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years of the human minds operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, politics, medicine, theology, geography, everything Hence the mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disciplined mind but an experienced mind; a mind that instinctively views any con- temporary phenomenon from the vantage point of an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty experience of the human spirit’s operations. , . . These studies, then, in a word, were regarded as formative because they are maturing, because they powerfully inculcate the views of life and the demands on life that are appropriate to maturity and that are indeed the specific marks, the outward and visible signs, of the inward and spiritual grace of maturity. And now we are in a position to observe that the establishment of these views and the direction of these demands is what is traditionally meant, and what we citizens of the republic of letters now mean, by the word education; and the constant aim at inculcation of these views and demands is what we know under the name of the Great Tradition of our republic.

EDUCATION, 62-3

How can there be any great men among us until the right relation between formative knowledge and instrumental knowledge becomes implicit in the actual practice and technique of education?

RIGHT THING, 1I4

 Education contemplates another kind of product; what is it? One of the main elements in it, Ishould say, is the power of disinterested reflection. One unmistakable mark of an educated man is his ability to take a detached, impersonal and competent view of something that deeply engages his affections, one way or the other-something that he likes very much. The study of history has really no other purpose than to help put this mark on a man. If one does not study it with this end in view, there is no use studying it at all.

JOURNEYMAN, 45

As a state-controlled enterprise maintained by taxation, virtually a part of the civil service (like organised Christianity in England and in certain European countries) the system [of compulsory popular education] had become an association de propaganda fide for the extreme of a hidebound nationalism and of a superstitious servile reverence for a sacrosanct State. In another view one saw it functioning as a sort of Sanhedrin, a leveling agency, prescribing uniform modes of thought, belief, conduct, social deportment, diet, recreation, hygiene; and as an inquisitional body for the enforcement of these prescriptions, for nosing out heresies and irregularities and sup- pressing them. In still another view one saw it functioning as a trade-unionist body, intent on maintaining and augmenting a set of vested interests; and one noticed that in this capacity it occasionally took shape as an extremely well-disciplined and powerful political pressure-group.

MEMOIRS, 263-4

 It is one of my oddest experiences that I have never been able to find anyone who would tell me what the net social value of a compulsory universal literacy actually conies to when the balance of advantage and disadvantage is drawn, or wherein that value consists. The few Socratic questions which on occasion I have put to persons presumably able to tell me have always gone by the board. These persons seemed to think, like Protagoras on the teaching of virtue, that the thing was so self-evident and simple that Ishould know all about it without being told; but in the hardness of my head or heart I still do not find it so. Universal literacy helps business by extending the reach of advertising and increasing its force; and also in other ways. Beyond that Isee nothing on the credit side. On the debit side, it enables scoundrels to beset, dishevel, and debauch such intelligence as is in the power of the vast majority of mankind to exercise. There can be no doubt of this, for the evidence of it is daily spread wide before us on all sides. More than this, it makes many articulate who should not be so, and otherwise would not be so. It enables mediocrity and submediocrity to run rampant, to the detriment of both intelligence and taste. In a word, it puts into a people's hands an instrument which very few can use, but which everyone supposes himself fully able to use; and the mischief thus wrought is very great. My observations leave me no chance of doubt about the side on which the balance of social advantage lies, hut I do not by any means insist that it does lie there.

MEMOIRS, 48-9

 Not until much later, when I laid seen something of mass- education and observed its results, did I perceive how great this advantage is. With Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other, the student gets the best out of Hopkins and gets as much of it as h e can absorb: the law of diminishing returns does not touch him. Add twenty students, and neither he nor the twenty gets the same thing; add two hundred, and it is luck if anybody gets anything remotely like the same thing. All Souls College , Oxford , planned better than it knew when it limited the number of its undergraduates to four; four is exactly the right number for any college which is really intent on getting results. Socrates chatting with a single protagonist meant one thing, and well did he know it. Socrates lecturing t o a class of fifty would mean something woefully different, so he organized no class and did no lecturing. , Jerusalem was a university town, and in a university every day is field day for the law of diminishing returns. Jesus stayed away from Jerusalem and talked with fishermen here and there, who seem to have pretty well got what he was driving at: some better than others, apparently, but all on the whole pretty well. And so we have it that unorganised Christianity was one thing, while organised Christianity has consistently been another.

 MEMOIRS, 51

Education, in a word, leads a person on to ask a great deal more from life than life, as at present organized, is willing to give him; and it begets dissatisfaction with the rewards that life holds out. Training tends to satisfy him with very moderate and simple returns. A good income, a home and family, the usual r u n of comforts and conveniences, diversions addressed only to the competitive or sporting spirit or else to raw sensation-training not only makes directly for getting these, but also for an inert and comfortable contentment with them. Well, these are all that our present society has to offer, so it is undeniably the best thing all round to keep people satisfied with them, which training does, and not to inject a subversive influence, like education, into this easy complacency. Politicians understand this-it is their business to understand it -- and hence they hold up "a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage" as a satisfying social ideal. But the mischief of education is its exorbitance. The educated lad may like stewed chicken and motorcars as well as anybody, but his education had bred a liking for other things too, things that the society around him does not care for and will not countenance. It has bred tastes which society resents as culpably luxurious, and will not connive at gratifying. Paraphrasing the old saying, education sends him out to shift for himself with a champagne appetite amidst a gin-guzzling society.

FREE SPEECH, 216

 Nature and Truth  

When the men of science have said all their say about the human mind and heart, how far they are from accounting for all their phenomena, or from answering the simple, vital questions that one asks them! What is the power by which a certain number and order of air vibrations is translated into processes of great emotional significance? If anyone can answer that question believe me, he is just the man I want to see.

SELECTED Letters, 22-3

But unfortunately Nature racks little of the nobleness prompting any human enterprise. Perhaps it is rather a hard thing to say, but the truth is that Nature seems much more solicitous about her reputation for order than she is about keeping up her character for morals. Apparently no pressure of noble and unselfish moral earnestness will cozen the sharp old lady into countenancing a breach of order. Hence any enterprise, however nobly and disinterestedly conceived, will fail if it he not also organized intelligently.

FREE SPEECH, 172

Truth is a cruel flirt, and must be treated accordingly. Court her abjectly, and she will turn her back; feign indifference, and she will throw herself at you with a coaxing submission. Try to force an acquaintance-try to make her put on her company manners for a general public-and she will revolt them like an ugly termagant: let her take her own way and her own time, and she will show all her fascinations to every- one who has eyes to see them.

SNORING, 67-8

I saw reports lately of an astonishing thing that took place in England . A committee of high-grade scientifickers watched a young Indian walk twice through a trench filled with fire. They examined his feet immediately afterward and found not a blister or an abrasion of any indication that would normally appear. This has given rise to a great deal of comment, most of it frankly puzzled. Garvin, in The Observer, says, the most that can be made of it is that apparently mind sometimes works upon matter through channels which we have not yet explored. For my own part, I like to take it as backing up a belief I have long had, that God is a being of very delicate, refined, and delightful humour. I can imagine that when we have got all our little certitudes down to a fine point, and have prescribed our limitations upon human capacities, and have measured the range of all operations of human faculties, God does something like this in a playful kindly way, just to show us where we get off. I have noticed that such incidents have a way of turning up about every fifteen or twenty years, at intervals just about long enough for human conceit and self-assurance to get their growth. We lay it down absolutely, for in. stance, that mind cannot possibly operate upon matter in this, that, or the other way. We are sure of it; nothing can be more certain. Then God digs up an East Indian from somewhere or other, puts him through his paces, and says, “There, I think that will probably hold those nincompoops for a while.”

 Journal Forgotten, 136-7 25

Maintaining the order of nature appears to me quite as respectable a miracle as an isolated, momentary, a n d relatively very insignificant interruption of that order would be. Gravitation, always varying directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance, holds the stars in their courses to the farthest reaches of the universe; and here, on a third-rate planet moving in a tenth-rate solar system, it also enabled me this morning to find my shoes exactly where I left them when I took them off last night.

MEMOIRS, 287

Not long ago I read of a fine exhibition of intellectual integrity by a physicist lecturing on magnetic attraction. He told his students that he could describe the phenomena, put them in order, state the problem they present, and perhaps carry it a step or two backward, but as for the final "reason of the thing," the best lie could say was that the magnet pulls on the steel because God wants it to.

MEMOIRS, 288

 The egregious intellectual dishonesty of the English and Americans comes out strongly in their shirking of the names o f things and actions. We got used to "mandates" instead of the gross word "possessions," and "reparations" instead of "indemnity" in the war. Now we accept the dole by calling it "unemployment relief." Shortly we shall have to find some acceptable synonym for inflation, I dare say.

Journal , 125-6

Lord, how the world is given to worshiping words! Eschew the coarse word slavery, and you can get glad acceptance for a condition of actual slavery. A man is a slave when his labour products are appropriated, and his activities are governed by some agency other than himself; that is the essence of slavery. Refrain from using the word Bolshevism, or Fascism, Hitler- ism, Marxism, Communism, and you have no troubles getting acceptance for the principle that underlies them all alike- the principle that the State is everything, and the individual nothing.

JOURNAL, 280