The Human Evasion

Celia Green

Contents

Foreword by R H Ward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Chapter 1—Sanity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Chapter 2—The Characteristics of Sanity . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Chapter 3—The Genesis of Sanity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Chapter 4—The Society of the Sane . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Chapter 5—How To Write Sane Books . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Chapter 6—The Sane Person Talks of Existence . . . . . . . 37
Chapter 7—The Sane Person Talks of God . . . . . . . . . . 45
Chapter 8—The Religion of Evasion . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Chapter 9—The Philosophy of Evasion . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Chapter 10—The Science of Evasion . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Chapter 11—The Alternative to Sanity: What Would It Be Like? 71
Chapter 12—Christ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Chapter 13—Nietzsche . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Chapter 14—Why The World Will Remain Sane . . . . . . . 91
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
An Open Letter to Young People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

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 Foreword
One way of seeing reality is to see the appearances we usually take
for it inside-out, back-to-front or looking-glass fashion. This is very
difficult to do, considering how habituated we are to those appearances.
It is also very difficult to be witty about vital and essential matters,
though that is one of the best hopes we have of seeing them objectively,
which is about the only hope we have of seeing them at all. Miss Green
has achieved the looking-glass vision and the wit. Many, therefore, will
call her too clever by half, forgetting that one of the things she is saying
is that we are not half clever enough, for the very reason that we lack
her witty vision because we wear the blinkers of our belief in
appearances. So anyone who reads this book (as opposed to merely
reading its words) must be prepared to be profoundly disturbed, upset
and in fact looking-glassed himself; which will be greatly to his
advantage, if he can stand it. Few books, long or short, are great ones;
this book is short and among those few. One day, perhaps, it will
become part of holy writ: a gospel according to Celia Green. Which
kind of ’insane’ statement belongs to the book’s own kind of truth.
—R. H. Ward

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 Chapter 1: Sanity
On the face of it, there is something rather strange about human
psychology.
Human beings live in a state of mind called “sanity” on a small planet
in space. They are not quite sure whether the space around them is
infinite or not (either way it is unthinkable). If they think about time,
they find it inconceivable that it had a beginning. It is also inconceivable
that it did not have a beginning. Thoughts of this kind are not disturbing
to “sanity,” which is obviously a remarkable phenomenon and deserving
more recognition.
Now sanity possesses a constellation of defining characteristics
which are at first sight unrelated. In this it resembles other, more widely
accepted, psychological syndromes. A person with an anal fixation, for
example, is likely to be obsessional, obstinate, miserly, punctilious, and
interested in small bright objects. A sane person believes firmly in the
uselessness of thinking about what he does not understand, and is
pathologically interested in other people. These two symptoms, at first
sight independent, are actually inextricably related. In fact they are
merely different aspects of that peculiar reaction to reality which we
shall call the human evasion.
As I shall be using the word “reality” again I should make it plain at
once that I use it to mean “everything that exists.” This is, of course, a
highly idiosyncratic use of the word. I am aware that it is commonly
used by sane people to mean “everything that human beings understand
about,” or even “human beings.” This illustrates the interesting habit, on
the part of the sane, of investing any potentially dangerous word with a
strong anthropocentric meaning. Let us therefore consider the use of
“reality” a little longer.
It is first necessary to consider what might be meant by the word
“reality” if it were usually used to mean “everything that exists.” It
would have to include all processes and events in the Universe, and all
relationships underlying them, regardless of whether or not these things
were perceptible or even conceivable by the human mind. It would also

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include the fact that anything exists at all—i.e. that there is something
and not nothing. And it would include the reason for the fact that
anything exists at all, although it is most improbable that this reason is
conceivable, or that “reason” is a particularly good name for it.
In fact it is quite obvious that to most people “reality” does not mean
anything like this.
Particular attention should be drawn to the phrase “running away
from reality” in which “reality” is almost always synonymous with
“human beings and their affairs.” For example: “It isn’t right to spend
so much time with those stuffy old astronomy books. It’s running away
from reality. You ought to be getting out and meeting people.” (An
interest in any aspect of reality requiring concentrated attention in
solitude is considered a particularly dangerous symptom.) This usage
leads to the interesting result that if anyone does take any interest in
reality he is almost certain to be told that he is running away from it.
Although so far we have given only one illustration, some impression
may already begin to emerge of the way in which the sane mind has
allocated to all crucial words meanings which make it virtually
impossible to state, let alone to defend, any position other than that of
sanity.
In fact by now this is the chief means employed by sanity to defend
itself from any possible attack. Formerly it found it necessary to claim a
certain interest in “reality” in the sense of “that which exists.” There
were religions, and systems of metaphysics, you may remember, which
professed a certain interest in the creation of the world, and the purpose
of life, and the destiny of the individual.
Now no such disguises are necessary.
I am reminded of a book called Flatland in which an imaginary two-
dimensional world is described. Towards the end of the book a non-
dimensional being is encountered—a point in space. The observers
listen to what it is saying (but of course, since they are of higher
dimensionality than its own, the point being cannot observe them in any
way). What it is saying to itself, in a scarcely audible tinkling voice, is
something like this: “I am alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. I

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am that which is and I am all in all to myself. There is nothing other
than me, I am everything and all of everything is all of me and all of me
is all of everything…”
The human race has taken to producing similar noises. Perhaps we
would not be surprised at the sociologists murmuring to themselves
from time to time, “in society we live and move and have our being,” as
they scurry from communal centre to therapeutic group, but these days
everyone is at it.
The philosophers have discarded metaphysics and have a tinkling
song of their own which says, “In the beginning was the word and the
word is mine and the word was made by me.” This is rather a strong
position in its way, because if you try to criticize it they will point out
that you can only do so in words, and they have already annexed all the
words there are on behalf of humanity. (And the meaning of the words
is the meaning humanity gave them, and they shall have no meaning
beside it.)
The theologians are finding theology rather an embarrassment, and
one can only suspect they would be happier without it. Their tradition
does make it a little more difficult for them to put God in his proper
place, but all things considered, they’re keeping up with the times pretty
well. Sartre said “Hell is other people”; the up-to-date theologian says
“God is other people.”
It might have been thought that the “existentialists” would make
some sort of a stand for the transcendent, but it hasn’t been serious. In
fact many people have found that a liberal use of existentialist language,
loosely applied, has been extremely helpful in stimulating an
obsessional interest in human society. (This interest is variously known
as “commitment,” “involvement,” and “the life of encounter.”)
The questions which remain are these. Are people, in fact, matters of
ultimate concern to other people? And still more, can they be sources of
“ultimate solution” to them? If they are not, what psychological force is
at work to ensure that these questions are so seldom asked? Why, if you
ask a question about man and the universe, are you given an answer
about “man in society”?

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 Chapter 2: The Characteristics of Sanity
Sanity may be described as the conscientious denial of reality. That is
to say, the facts of the situation (apart from a few which are judged to be
harmless) have no emotional impact to a sane mind.
For example, it is a salient feature of our position that we are in a
state of total uncertainty. Possibly the universe started with a “big
bang” a few æons ago, or perhaps something even more incredible
happened. In any case, there is no reason known to us why everything
should not stop existing at any moment. I realize that to my sane readers
I shall appear to be making an empty academic point. That is precisely
what is so remarkable about sanity.
The sane person prides himself on his ability to be unaffected by
important facts, and interested in unimportant ones. He refers to this as
having a sense of perspective, or keeping things “in proportion.”
Consider the wife of the Bishop of Woolwich. She says, “I have
sometimes been asked recently: ‘What effect has Honest to God and all
the reaction to it had on your children?’”1
That is to say, what effect has it had on her children that their father
has written a book about the nature of reality which has attracted a great
deal of attention. Have they become interested in their father’s
importance as a possible influence on the course of history? Have they
started to take themselves seriously and determined to influence their
generation? Or have they begun to take a precocious interest in
theology, whether agreeing or disagreeing with their father? The
Bishop’s wife assures us that none of these unpleasant things have
happened. What effect, then, has it had? “The simple answer is—
practically none at all,” she says. “Life goes on much as it did before.”
The vital questions continue to be “Do you have to go out tonight?”,
“What can I wear for the party?”, and “What’s for supper?”
This ability to keep things “in perspective,” or upside down, is
beautifully exemplified by certain remarks made by the aging Freud.

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 Seventy years have taught me to accept life with a cheerful
humility….
Perhaps the gods are kind to us in making life more
disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less
intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry…. I do not rebel
against the universal order…. (Asked whether it meant nothing
to him that his name should live) Nothing whatsoever…. I am
far more interested in this blossom than in anything that may
happen to me after I am dead…. I am not a pessimist, I permit no
philosophic reflections to spoil my enjoyment of the simple
things of life.2
To appreciate the full force of these remarks one must realize that
Freud had already had five operations for cancer of the jaw, and was in
more or less continuous pain. (It may be held that when Freud looked at
a blossom and found it more interesting than pain and death and fame,
this was because he was overcome by the astonishing fact that the
blossom existed at all. But if this were so, I think he would scarcely
refer to it as one of the “simple” things of life.)
He was not entirely immune from reminders of his finite condition, as
is shown by other statements which he made at various times.
… there is deep inside a pessimistic conviction that the end of
my life is near. That feeds on the torments from my scar which
never cease.3
When you at a youthful 54 cannot avoid often thinking of
death you cannot be astonished that at the age of 80 1⁄2 I fret
whether I shall reach the age of my father and brother or further
still into my mother’s age, tormented on the one hand by the
conflict between the wish for rest and the dread of fresh
suffering that further life brings and on the other hand
anticipation of the pain of separation from everything to which I
am still attached.4 The radium has once more begun to eat in,
with pain and toxic effects, and my world is again what it was
before—a little island of pain floating on a sea of indifference.5

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 However, in spite of all this he didn’t lose interest in trivia, and in the
eyes of any sane person this establishes his claim to possess great
“emotional stability.”
Seeing things in perspective usually means that you stand at a certain
distance away from the objects of observation. The “perspective” in
which a sane person lives depends on avoiding this manoeuvre. You
have to hold a flower very close to your eyes if it is to blot out the sky.
The sane person holds his life in front of his face like someone with
short sight reading a newspaper with rather small print. It follows that
he cannot have emotions about the universe, because he cannot see that
it is there.
This is a salient feature of sanity—it does not include emotions about
the universe. Some sane readers may object: “Once I was excited about
anti-particles for several hours.” or “I tried out solipsism for three whole
days.”
So, if it is insisted upon, we may qualify this statement as follows:
Sanity may occasionally allow transitory emotions about the universe or
reality, but it does not allow them to exercise any perceptible influence
as motives in the life of the individual. At this stage in our argument we
must regard it as an open question whether this is an accidental by-
product of sanity, or whether it is the deliberate but unstated objective at
which all sane psychology is aimed.
I must explain what I mean by an emotion about the universe—since
this is an unfamiliar and bizarre phenomenon—so let me give an
example. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the founder of linguistic philosophy,
which has made so great a contribution to intellectual sanity in this
century, was himself not quite so sane as he would have liked. Indeed, it
may be argued that linguistic philosophy was itself the product of his
strenuous attempts to remain sane enough. A case of an irritated oyster
producing a pearl—the sane may reply—which does not detract from
the value of the pearl. Possibly.
But it is undeniable that Wittgenstein did occasionally have emotions
about the universe. So his biographer records: “I believe that a certain
feeling of amazement that anything should exist at all, was sometimes

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experienced by Wittgenstein…. Whether this feeling has anything to do
with religion is not clear to me.”6
Notice in passing the fastidiousness with which his biographer
hastens to disclaim any exact comprehension of this feeling. (“I believe
the lower classes eat fish and chips from newspaper. Whether this
practice has anything to do with nutrition is not clear to me.”)
What more can be said of the sane person? He is ubiquitous, and so
his characteristics are invisible. There is nothing to compare him with.
But let us consider the picture given in a jolly little booklet called “A
positive approach to Mental Health.”7 (The cover is adorned with a
picture of a happy fakir sitting beside an abandoned bed of nails.)
“How does the person who is enjoying good mental health think and
act?” the booklet asks, and proceeds to inform us, among other things,
that “He gets satisfaction from simple, every-day pleasures.” Freud, you
see, certainly qualified.
“He has emotions,” the booklet also informs us, “like anyone else.”
However, they are “in proportion” and he is not “crushed” by them. I
think by now we have established what is meant by keeping things “in
proportion”—i.e. you have most of your emotions about unimportant
things. The booklet does not state this explicitly, but it certainly does
not state anything to the contrary. It might, for example, be said that
“the mature man is not unduly interested in matters of purely local
significance, such as the state of affairs on this particular planet,
because he realizes that they are of little ultimate significance.” You
will observe how outlandish that sounds.
The booklet becomes a little lightheaded when it comes to the matter
of the mentally healthy person’s interest in facts. “He’s open-minded
about new experiences and new ideas.” A more accurate statement
might be: “A mentally healthy person has made a value judgement in
advance that no idea or experience can be qualitatively more important
than those he already understands. He is able to rely on his defense
mechanisms and can listen with a bland expression to people with
unpleasant ideas.”
How does the mentally healthy person feel about his limitations? “He

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feels able to deal with most situations that come his way…. He tries for
goals he thinks he can achieve through his own abilities; he doesn’t
want the moon on a silver platter.” That is to say, he has so arranged his
life that he doesn’t try to do anything that doesn’t seem pretty easy. “If
he can’t change something he doesn’t like, he adjusts to it.” “He knows
he has shortcomings and can accept them without getting upset.” That
is, he has ways of pretending he does not mind about anything he cannot
alter easily.
And how does he feel about other people? Here a slightly threatening
note of reciprocity appears. “He is tolerant of others shortcomings just
as he is of his own. He doesn’t expect others to be perfect, either.” “He
expects to like and trust other people and assumes that they will like
him…. He doesn’t try to push other people around and doesn’t expect to
be pushed around himself.” Let us just imagine what might have been
said instead—I know it will sound like the wildest fantasy. “He regrets
his own shortcomings and is always willing to admire people with
greater virtues and capacities than his own. He wishes to help other
people, particularly those with higher aims and a more intense sense of
purpose than he has himself. He does not expect to be liked in return for
his help.”
We have established that the mentally healthy person isn’t going to
let his life, with all its content of simple pleasures, be pushed around by
anyone.
This, if you give it a moment’s thought, ensures that all his
relationships must be characterized by mutual purposelessness. If you
once admit a purpose to the situation, it may make differential demands
on different people.
Nevertheless, the sane person “is capable of loving other people and
thinking about their interests and well-being. He has friendships that are
satisfying and lasting. He can identify himself with a group, feel that he
is part of it, and has a sense of responsibility to his neighbours and
fellow men.”
Notice that a friendship should be satisfying—i.e. it is an end in
itself, and not a means to an end. It should also be “lasting.” Obviously

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if the friendship depended on community of purpose, it might be
outgrown.
So it is plain that people constitute a rather large part of the mentally
healthy person’s world, but that all associations of persons have to be
characterized by a mutual sacrifice of purposiveness.
I am reminded of the porcupines of Schopenhauer. They wanted to
huddle together to keep one another warm, but found that their spines
pricked one another. If they kept too far apart, they became cold again.
So they established a distance at which they could keep one another
warm without actually making contact with one another’s spines. “This
distance was henceforward known as decency and good manners.”
The attitude of the mentally healthy person towards other people
might be stated as follows: “He expects to derive warmth from his prox-
imity to other people. He does not expect to derive anything else, and is
willing to let other people derive warmth from him so long as they, too,
abandon their prickly claims to possess needs of any other kind.”
Before we leave this little booklet, let us consider that brilliant
expression “mental health.” It is, of course, a social euphemism of the
same genre as “rodent operative” and “cleansing official.” It saves sane
people from embarrassment by permitting them to say that their
confined and extraordinary relatives are not mad but “mentally ill” or
even “mentally unwell.” It implies that the human mind grows naturally
and by biological necessity into the image and likeness of the Human
Evasion, as the human body grows to a certain specified kind of shape.
It implies that any deviation from the Human Evasion is the same kind
of thing as a tumour or a running sore. It sanctifies the statistical norm.
“Mental disease,” the booklet says, “doesn’t indicate lack of brain
power but rather a malfunctioning of the brain and emotions. The
individual just doesn’t respond to various situations the way a normal
person would” (my italics).
What can we add to this picture of the sane? One sane opinion. “… if
I could spend the course of everlasting time in a paradise of varied
loveliness, I do not fancy my felicity would be greatly impaired if the
last secret of the universe were withheld from me.”8

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 This opinion was held by a Gifford Lecturer in the 1930s. His
lectures were entitled “The Human Situation,” and they are a marvel of
sanity from beginning to end. But they are outdated in one respect. We
do not talk any more about “the human situation.” The phrase implies
that humans can be seen in relation to something other than humans.
What we talk about now is sociology. Everyone is very proud of this
fact. It is the quintessence of sanity.

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 Chapter 3: The Genesis of Sanity
It is fashionable to locate the origins of psychological attitudes very
early in life. The taste for doing so is not, perhaps, entirely unmotivated.
It is obviously fairly agreeable to regard one’s psychology as the
result of conditioning rather than of choice. It is relaxing; one has
nothing to blame oneself for; one cannot be expected to change. It is, of
course, possible that the infant mind is capable of significant emotional
decisions, but this possibility is never discussed.
However, a perfectly satisfactory beginning may indeed be postulated
for sanity, and this does not interfere at all with standard theories of
psycho-analysis. Psycho-analysis deals with that part of a person’s
psychology which has become fixated on other people; so it may well
describe what happens to the child in so far as that child becomes sane.
It is well known that the younger people are, the less sane they are
likely to be. This has lead to the heavily-loaded social usage of the term
maturity. It is an unquestionable pro-word. Roughly speaking, the
mature person is characterized by willingness to accept substitutes,
compromises, and delays, particularly if these are caused by the
structure of society.
Young people are usually immature, that is to say, they wish their
lives to contain excitement and purpose. It is recognized (at least
subconsciously) by sane people that the latter is much the more
dangerous of the two, so the young who cannot at once be made mature
are steered into the pursuit of purposeless excitement. This is actually
not very exciting, and is well on the way to an acceptable kind of sanity,
as it leads to the idea of “excitement” being degraded to that of
“pleasure.”
Adolescents are known to think about metaphysics more than most
people; thus thinking about metaphysics becomes associated with the
negative concept “immaturity.” If someone thinks about metaphysical
problems at a later age, they are said to show signs of “delayed
adolescence.”
Now let us go back to the very beginning of the “maturation” process.

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It is to be presumed that a baby which is being born experiences
helplessness as helplessness. That is to say, it experiences the painful
and incomprehensible process without any of those reflections which
are such a miraculous source of comfort to the sane—such as “It will
soon be over,” or “After all, it happens to everybody,” or “It shouldn’t
be allowed. It’s their fault.”
The infant may be presumed to find its condition intolerable—
because it is out of control of it. At this point of its life, what it minds
about is that it cannot control reality, not that it cannot control people.
Now so long as one is finite—i.e. one’s knowledge and powers are
limited—situations may always arise which one cannot control. But it is
very hard for an adult human to feel any emotion about his limitations
vis-à-vis impersonal reality. What emotion arises in you when you think
that you would be quite unable to lift Mount Everest? On the other hand,
it is probably quite easy to feel some emotion at the thought that so-and-
so is an inch taller than you are, or can always beat you at badminton.
You may also (though less probably) still be able to feel a pang of
jealousy or regret that you are not Nijinsky or Shakespeare or Einstein.
Obviously a process of psychological development takes place which
ensures (so far as possible) that the limitations of the individual will be
experienced only in comparisons with other people. Now it is obvious
that the emotion which accompanies the original experience of
helplessness is very strong. If you can recall any experience of impotent
fury or horror in early childhood you may get some idea of this. This
gives some clue to the strength of the human evasion. If people are to
take the force of all this displaced emotion, it is scarcely surprising that
they should be the object of such exclusive attention.
At first very young children are not immune from a feeling of
helplessness per se. But it may be presumed that the part of their
environment which is most readily manipulable is soon seen to be other
people. The younger the child, the truer this is. Its own physical and
mental grasp of the situation is greatly exceeded by that of adult humans
—particularly its mother—who can affect the situation in its favour if
they feel inclined to do so.

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 It is very painful to try to do something and to fail. The retrospective
attempt to reject the combination of trying and failure is well known in
social life. “I didn’t really care about the game today.” “Actually I was
thinking that even if I was elected it was time I resigned to spend more
time on my other interests.” Therefore, by the time it has reached
adulthood, the sane person has evolved ways of relinquishing the
attempt in favour of some compensatory aim, in any situation in which
it does not feel almost certain to succeed. For example, as a mature
adult, you cannot even try (with any emotional involvement in the act of
trying) to jump over a house. By the same taken, you cannot try to make
a door open by willpower alone, or try to arrive home quickly without
traversing the intervening space and navigating such obstacles as stairs,
walls, gates, etc., in the approved fashion. Your immediate sensation if
you attempted to try, would be an overwhelming sense of impossibility.
It is (philosophically or factually speaking) the case that no future
event can be demonstrated to be impossible. If something has happened
once, this may be said to show it is possible. If it has never happened
this does not show that it can never do so. But as has pointed out,
reflections of this kind, although true, have no emotional impact to a
sane person.
As already mentioned, you may still (in rare circumstances) be able
to try to achieve exceptional things in some socially recognized and
strictly limited field. I.e. you may still be able to try and equal Nijinsky,
Shakespeare, etc.
But it is far more likely that you have acquired some compensatory
attitude towards any such symbols of outstandingness. It can give a very
pleasant sense of gentle superiority to discuss Beethoven’s deafness,
and Shakespeare’s Oedipus Complex, and Nietzsche’s lack of success
with women, in a more or less informed manner. Thus MacNeile Dixon:
So with the famous monarchs of the mind. They terrify you
with their authority…. How royal is their gesture, how
incomparable their technique!
There is, however, no need for alarm. Pluck up your heart,
approach a little nearer, and what do you find; that they have

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 human wishes and weaknesses like yourself. You may discover
that Kant smoked, played billiards and had a fancy for candied
fruit. The discovery at once renders him less awe-inspiring.9
This kind of approach is not only useful for eliminating a sense of
inferiority, it also makes it much easier to ignore anything Kant,
Nietzsche, Hume, etc., may have said about reality.
Now although the ambitions of the adult are already restricted to
narrowly defined types of social recognition, even this form of
aspiration is a strictly unstable structure in sane psychology—i.e. if it is
displaced slightly from its equilibrium it will tend to fall further away
from that position, and not return to it. On the other hand, compensation
is a stable psychological position in sane psychology.
The replacement of aspiration by compensation is perhaps most
clearly seen among college students. They frequently arrive at
university with immature desires for greatness and an exceptionally
significant way of life.
Not infrequently, also, this leads to emotional conflicts and
disappointments of one kind and another. They adjust to their problems
with startling rapidity. The solution which occurs to nearly all of them,
and is suggested to them by psychological advisers, etc., if it does not
occur to them spontaneously, is to accept their limitations. The accept-
ance of limitations is accompanied by a marked increase in the valuation
placed on other people.
“I used to be quite self-sufficient and thought I wanted to be nothing
but an intellectual. I lived for my work, and of course maths/classics/
anything you like is the nearest thing there is to heaven. But it would be
selfish to live like that. I see now you’ve got to take an interest in life—I
mean, you have to live with other people. It’s difficult to get on with
people. Social problems are difficult. The other is easy. It’s running
away from reality.”
What is usually omitted from this exposition by the patient is that
between the period at which classics (or whatever it may have been) was
“nearly heaven” and the period at which human relationships became
the central thing in life, there was usually a stage at which classics was

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no longer particularly easy.
It is a simple law of human psychology, therefore, that as soon as
conflict arises, it will be eliminated by some compensatory manœuvre in
which other people are the central pivot. The process of becoming
thoroughly sane depends on repeated manœuvres of this kind.
This process may be presumed to have started in earliest infancy,
when it was much more rewarding to aim at responses from one’s
mother than at controlling the environment directly. Here began the
child’s lifelong efforts to limit its trying to regions in which it could
succeed. This process, of necessity, remained imperfect in early life, as
moderate (though never disproportionate) efforts to learn things must be
sanctioned in the young.
These efforts are almost at once heavily conditioned by social
acceptability, though this is not yet the exclusive criterion. It is possible
to find people who remember, as children, having tried (or attempted to
try) to walk away from the stairs into the air instead of going on down
them one by one. But even then they found it impossible to try very
hard.
Why is it so painful to fail in something you have tried to do? In the
case of the young child it is evidently because it reminds it of its limited
powers, which suggests the possibility of permanent finiteness.
It is bad enough to be finite at present; it is intolerable to believe that
one will always be so. If one tries and fails it proves that one’s trying is
insufficient. Better therefore to believe that one doesn’t want to try—at
least at present.
This view of the matter is not so far removed from that of orthodox
psycho-analysis, which does, after a fashion, recognize the child’s
desire for omnipotence. Psycho-analysis is, however, most concerned
with what happens once human persons, such as the child’s father, have
become partial symbols of omnipotence. There is also a tendency to
describe the child as having a muddle-headed belief in its own
omnipotence. This is, of course, less justifiable than a desire for
omnipotence. Sane people cannot distinguish very easily between
different attitudes of this kind.

21
 Of course in the child and adolescent there are still remains of the
belief that one will, at some judiciously selected time in the future,
attempt altogether more ambitious things. In true adulthood this idea has
disappeared (or becomes transformed into some such form as “it would
make all the difference if people were only decent to me and gave me
my rights”).
Thus the sane, adult person wants (or tries to want) to have what it
can have and to do what it can do, and exercises a good deal of
ingenuity in attempts to want not to have what it cannot get.
One or two points must be made in parentheses. The sane person will
not, of course, admit that the prospect of being permanently finite is
intolerable.
Even if he looks so miserable that he cannot with any conviction
claim to be happy himself, he will utter constant affirmations that “most
people are perfectly all right and quite happy as they are.” “Why should
I mind about being finite? Suppose I enjoy it like this?”
This does not make our hypothesis about the development of the
human evasion any less probable. Our argument is that a sane person’s
life has been spent in an increasingly successful attempt not to find
finiteness intolerable. Thus if he makes assertions of this kind, he is
telling us only that he has succeeded.
After all, it is accepted in psycho-analysis that one of the objects of a
psychological reaction to an unacceptable fact is, eventually, to conceal
the true origin and purpose of this reaction.

The sane adult will, of course, object that what happens when one
comes up against one’s limitations is not that one is reminded of the
possibility of permanent finiteness. It is certain that the limits of one’s
capabilities are defined by what one can and cannot achieve.
The very young child reacts emotionally as if it believed that
limitation is only potential; it does not yet identify itself with its
limitations. In this its emotions are in accordance with the most abstract
philosophy; whatever may be achieved in certain circumstances on one
occasion or even on a great many occasions, it may still be the case that

22
something quite different may be achieved on a future occasion. In the
most abstract sense, this might simply happen in the way that everything
might stop existing at any moment or start existing according to
different laws. This, I know, is the sort of consideration that has no
force at all to a sane adult. But even within the normal world-view, it
cannot be claimed that very much is known about the psychological
factors that restrict or permit achievement, and the possibility cannot be
ruled out that if someone adopted a different kind of psychological
attitude from any they had had before, they might find their abilities
radically changed.
Initially, then, the child is merely horrified at the prospect that a
single failure may contain some implication of permanent restriction;
some barrier set forever between him and the possibility of
omnipotence. It is a matter of social conditioning that he increasingly
learns that he is regarded by others as defined by his failures, so that any
single one comes to have the force of a permanent measurement of what
he unchangeably is.
This process is accompanied by a continuous shifting of the idea of
failure away from absolute failure (i.e. failure to fulfil one’s own will)
toward “failure by comparison with other people.” To the mature adult
only the latter is of any interest.
The child is trained, then, to react to failure not only by regarding his
limitations as final, but by substituting something more readily
obtainable for what he originally wanted. The substitution is usually
eased by a shift of emphasis from what the individual himself wants, to
what other people want from him. It may be the substitution of a
different ambition from the first one, on the grounds that it will be just
as useful to society, or it may be the substitution of social approval per
se for any ambition at all.
Consider some well-known gambits. “Never mind, darling. Even if
you fail your exams, you know we’ll still love you.” If the person
concerned is actually worried about the exams, there is an obvious
motivation for attempting to find this comforting. “Well, we know you
did your best, and that’s what counts.” The latter is particularly subtle,

23
since it combines the idea of finality of failure with the offer of social
approval. What it is really saying is: “Provided you accept that you
couldn’t possibly have done better, and you really are worse than all the
other boys, you may have our affection as a good boy who tries.”
Now the child may well have an obscure feeling that in some way he
wasn’t feeling right about the thing; or that somehow everything felt
wrong at school in some indefinable way that made it quite certain that
he couldn’t do that kind of thing there. But his mind must be distracted
from any attempt to work out how one does make oneself feel right to
do things. (If he does start reflecting on the effect of circumstances upon
him he will most likely be told he is “making excuses.”)
The denial of psychological reality is very important to sanity. It
cannot afford to admit the existence of a psychology of achievement,
still less to understand it. However, one of the few pieces of psychology
that is understood by sanity is how to make young humans with
aspirations feel discredited and absurd. Any aspiration bears an
uncomfortable resemblance to a desire not to be finite at all. Inspiration
is of little interest to modern psychology; it is about as unfashionable as
witchcraft. If the subconscious mind is considered at all, it is considered
solely as a repository of associations of ideas about parts of the body
and members of one’s family.
Of course there is a kind of non-aspiring psychology of success
which is understood by sanity. It is roughly as follows: the most stable,
least excitable, most normal, people will tend to be most consistently
successful.
Even if this seems to be supported by observation, it must be borne in
mind that these are the conditions for success (of a moderate kind) in a
society composed of sane people.

24
 Chapter 4: The Society of the Sane
Society begins to appear much less unreasonable when one realizes
its true function. It is there to help everyone to keep their minds off
reality. This follows automatically from the fact that it is an association
of sane people, and it has already been shown that sanity arises from the
continual insertion of “other people” into any space into which a
metaphysical problem might intrude.
It is therefore quite irrelevant to criticize society as though it were
there for some other purpose—to keep everyone alive and well-fed in an
efficient manner, say. Some degree of inefficiency is essential to create
interesting opportunities for emotional reaction. (Of course, criticizing
society, though irrelevant, is undeniably of value as an emotional
distraction for sane people.)
Incidentally, it should be noticed that “keeping everyone alive and
well-fed” is the highest social aim which the sane mind can accept
without reservation or discomfort. This is because everyone is capable
of eating—and so are animals and plants—so this qualifies
magnificently as a “real” piece of “real life.” There are other reasons in
its favour as well, of course, such as the fact that well-fed people do not
usually become more single-minded, purposeful, or interested in
metaphysics.
It has been seen that the object of a sane upbringing is increasingly to
direct all emotion towards objects which involve other people. Now
basically the situation of being finite is an infinitely frustrating one,
which would be expected to arouse sensations of desperation and
aggression—as indeed it may sometimes be seen to do in very young
children. I am aware that I must be careful, in using the word
aggression, to state that I do not mean aggression directed towards
people. What I mean is an impersonal drive directed against reality—it
is difficult to give examples but it may be presumed that geniuses who
are at all worthy of the name preserve a small degree of this.
However, since all emotion must be directed towards people, it is
obvious that the only form of aggression which a sane person can

25
understand is aggression against people, which is probably better
described as sadism or cruelty.
Now it is obvious that the open expression of cruelty towards other
people would have a destructive effect upon society, apart from being
unprofitable to the human evasion in other ways. So the usual way in
which aggression is displaced onto other people is in the form of a
desire that they should be limited. This, after all, is very logical. If the
true source of your anger is that you are limited yourself, and you wish
to displace this anger onto some other person, what could be more
natural than that you should wish them to be limited as well.
This desire is usually expressed in the form of a desire for social
justice, in one form or another. (“In this life you have to learn that you
can’t have it all your own way.” “Well he can’t expect to be treated as
an exception for ever.” “It’s time he learnt to accept his limitations.”
“Don’t you think you should try to think more what other people want?
We all have to do things we don’t like.” “Why should they have all the
advantages.”)
This means that society is not only the chief source of compensation
to a sane person, but his chief instrument of revenge against other
people. It is useless to point out that there is no need to revenge himself
upon them. If he were ever to admit that they were not responsible for
his finite predicament, he would have to direct his hatred against the
finite predicament itself, and this would be frustrating. It is this
frustration that the human evasion exists to evade.
Any attempt to do something involves the possibility of failure and
may remind you of reality. For this reason the sane society discriminates
against purposeful action in favour of pleasure-seeking action. The only
purposes readily recognized as legitimate by the sane mind are those
necessitated by the pursuit of pleasure. E.g. pleasure seeking cannot
efficiently be carried on unless the individual is kept alive and mod-
erately healthy. Therefore his physical needs are regarded as important
and ambulances are provided with noisy bells. There is no corre-
sponding necessity that he should fill, say, his intellectual potentialities.
In fact the attempt to do so is likely to appear unduly purposeful.

26
 It is obvious in any number of ways that a sense of purpose repels
rather than attracts assistance. You have only to consider the immediate
sympathy that would be aroused in a sane mind by the complaint of
some child that it was being driven to work at things far too difficult for
its capacities, compared with the distrust and reserve with which it
would view complaints by the child that it was not being allowed to
work hard enough.
To the sane mind, even aggression against people is infinitely better
than aggression against infinity. And it is the chief defect of sane society
that it is boring. It is so boring that even sane people notice it. And so,
from time to time, there is a war. This is intended to divert people’s
minds before they become so bored that they take to some impersonal
kind of aggressive activity—such as research, or asceticism, or
inspiration, or something discreditable of that kind.
In wartime, rather more purposeful activity than usual is permissible.
Even sane people relax their normal beliefs that nothing matters very
much, and some time next week is soon enough for anything. This is
regarded as justified because the war is always about something
connected with other people, and may be regarded as an assertion of the
belief that the thing that matters most is politics.
And yet it might seem that war was going rather far. It does contain a
very considerable risk of contact with reality. It is difficult to pretend
that people never die, or that they only die in soothing situations with
up-to-date medical care and loving relatives to keep their minds
occupied with family news. War is full of reminders that things happen,
and that space and time are real, and that before the bomb blows up is
not the same as after, and that there are risks and uncertainty.
How then can a sane society run the risks of allowing its population
to have experiences of this kind, even occasionally? I think if you ask
this question it is simply because you do not appreciate the robustness
of sanity. If you shut people up in a prison camp, and torture them for a
few years, they will not come out saying: “I am a finite animal in
existence and it is beyond endurance. How can I go on living in a body
that can be tormented in these ways? I demand that human society stops

27
all it is doing and starts attacking finiteness in every conceivable
way….”
Instead, they will come out saying: “It is terrible that other people
should let wars happen, in which it is possible to be so degraded and
reminded of one’s limitations. It shouldn’t happen; it is contrary to
human rights; we are appalled at the evil in the heart of man.
Meanwhile we demand reparation from society—employment, and
housing, and disablement allowances…”

Society, they say, exists to safeguard the rights of the individual. If

this is so, the primary right of a human being is evidently to live
unrealistically.
It has been pointed out that by the time a person is fully mature he
will not, in normal circumstances, be made aware of his finiteness
except in comparisons with other people.
It is not possible to ensure this absolutely. But it is possible to limit
the loopholes to those of physical accident, illness and death. Human
beings regard it as a sacred duty to be particularly untruthful about these
things—particularly to the afflicted person and to any young person who
may be around. For example, the following account of the death of
Madame Curie may well seem rather touching to a sane person.
Then began the harrowing struggle which goes by the name of
“an easy death”—in which the body which refuses to perish
asserts itself in wild determination. Eve at her mother’s side was
engaged in another struggle; in the brain of Mme Curie, still
very lucid, the great idea of death had not penetrated. The
miracle must be preserved, to save Marie from an immense pain
that could not be appeased by resignation. Above all, the
physical suffering had to be attenuated; the body reassured at the
same time as the soul. No difficult treatments, no tardy blood
transfusions, impressive and useless. No family reunion hastily
called at the bedside of a woman who, seeing her relatives
assembled, would be suddenly struck to the heart with an

28
 atrocious certainty.
I shall always cherish the names of those who helped my
mother in those days of horror. Dr. Toben, director of the
sanatorium, and Dr. Pierre Lowsy brought Marie all their
knowledge. The life of the sanatorium seemed suspended,
stricken with immobility by the dreadful fact: Mme Curie was
about to die. The house was all respect, silence and fervor. The
two doctors alternated in Marie’s room. They supported and
solaced her. They also took care of Eve, helped her to struggle
and to tell lies, and, even without her asking them, they
promised to lull Marie’s last sufferings by soporifics and
injections.
On the morning of July third, for the last time Mme Curie
could read the thermometer held in her shaking hand and
distinguish the fall in fever which always precedes the end. She
smiled with joy. And as Eve assured her that this was the sign of
her cure, and that she was going to be well now, she said,
looking at the open window, turning hopefully towards the sun
and the motionless mountains: “It wasn’t the medicines that
made me better. It was the pure air, the altitude…”10
It may be remarked that although the vulnerability of the human body
makes it possible even for a fully-matured human being to be reminded
of his limitations, no power on earth can remind him of the
transcendent, in any shape or form. His reactions to pain, danger and
death are limited to fear, depression, anxiety and commonsense. They
do not include liberation, elation, or an interest in infinity. That is to say,
the impact of reality has been rendered entirely negative.

In order effectively to distract people from reality, society has to

provide them with pseudo-purposes, guaranteed purposeless. (Or,
alternatively, with pseudo-frustrations, guaranteed permanent.) There
are two main kinds of pseudo-purpose or -frustration; they are known as
“earning a living” and “bringing up a family.” They both provide a

29
person with a cast-iron alibi for not doing anything he wants with his
life. (He does not, of course, want to be free to do what he wants, so this
is all right.)
Sane people regard an apparently purposeful activity as disinfected
by numbers—i.e. if a sufficiently large number of people is involved,
they feel sure that the outcome will be harmless to sanity, no matter how
frenzied the labours may seem to be. The most large-scale examples are
war and politics.
Into these activities, people allow themselves to enter with almost
single-minded devotion.
Both war and politics have played a particularly helpful part in
retarding the march of progress. In fact, the history of the human race is
only comprehensible as the record of a species trying not to gain control
of its environment.

30
 Chapter 5: How to Write Sane Books
It will be convenient to have a name for that part of reality which is
not emotionally regarded as “real” by the sane person. We shall call it
the Outside.
The Outside consists of everything that appears inconceivable to the
human mind. In fact everything is inconceivable to the human mind (if
only because it exists) but not many people notice this.
In religious and philosophical writings it is often difficult to eliminate
all reference to the Outside. There are a number of ways of dealing with
this problem. One of the most successful is to generate a distinctive kind
of ambiguity about the meanings of crucial words.
Consider the following passage in which the words “being” and
“existence” are used. “The term ‘being’ in this context does not
designate existence in time and space…. (It) means the whole of human
reality, the structure, the meaning and the aim of existence.”11
It is tolerably clear that at least when Tillich first uses the word
“existence” he means by it what I also mean when I use the word. It
seems that what we both mean by “existing” is “being there.”
However, Tillich then explicitly repudiates this sense and goes on to
define the word “being” in a second sense. The term “being” means the
whole of human reality, Tillich says. The meaning of this phrase is not
obvious.
Perhaps Tillich means the sum total of the mental content of all
humans—illusions and all? What humans think is real? Or that part of
reality which is accessible to the human mind?
The last seems to be the best we can do. So let us suppose that
“human reality” does mean that part of the mental content—actual or
potential—of humans which is actually in accordance with what exists.
“Human reality” is then placed in apposition with “the structure, the
meaning and the aim of existence.” What is to be understood by this?
The “aim of existence” seems at first sight to be clear, unless
“existence” has made an unannounced change of meaning since it was
first used. It would seem that this phrase must mean “the purpose for

31
which everything exists.”
But this is difficult, because “the aim of existence” is in apposition
with “human reality” which certainly does not include the purpose of
existence.
This leads us to a distinct suspicion that when Tillich talks of “the
structure, meaning and aim of existence” he does not mean “existence”
at all, but “human life” instead. If he does mean this, there seems no
reason why he should say so—except that it would rob what he is saying
of a status it does not possess. And if he does mean this, we have arrived
at the following definition of the word “being”—“whatever happens to
be realistic in the mental content of humans; the structure, the meaning
and the aim of human life.”
In fact, we may suggest this paraphrase of what Tillich is saying:
“When we talk of ‘being’ we do not mean the Outside. We mean the
Inside.”
This example illustrates a standard procedure for appearing to take
the Outside into consideration without actually doing so. The rules for
this kind of writing are very simple and roughly as follows.
There are a number of words and phrases which may mean something
about existence or something about humans. For example: “existence,”
“depth,” “ground of being,” “ultimate concern,” “meaning,” etc.
Whenever what you really mean is “human relationships” or “day-to-
day living” you should replace it by some existential-sounding
combination, such as “the depth of being.” It is a good idea to use
compound phrases (“the depth of historical existence,” “the ultimate
ground of meaning”) as a considerable degree of obscurity can be
created by summating the uncertainty of a number of uncertain terms.
It is usual to define these terms as little as possible. But if you wish to
appear to do so, it is best to use a series of phrases in apposition (as in
the example just considered: “the whole of human reality, the structure,
the meaning and the aim of existence”). This gives a very good effect of
struggling to define something difficult with precision while actually
generating ambiguity (on the principle of summation of uncertainty
already mentioned). The device of apposition itself introduces an

32
additional modicum of doubt, since if you appose two such phrases as
“the depth of meaning” and “the inmost structure of reality” no one will
be sure whether the two phrases are ways of saying the same thing, or
whether they are intended to complement one another.
Other verbal devices may be used for placing together in the closest
possible proximity “human” words and “Outside” words. Words like
“ultimate” and “reality” should be used in phrases like “human reality”
and “ultimate concern,” and the word “meaning” should be softened
into “meaning and coherence.” (The word “meaning” might be regarded
as informationally sufficient; however, the addition of “coherence”
contributes a useful implicit suggestion that “meaning” must hang
together in a way that is recognizable and rather agreeable to humans.)
To illustrate these instructions, consider the typical phrase “life and
existence.” Now the word “existence” may mean “human life,” but if it
does it is adding nothing to the meaning of the phrase. So this phrase
would seem to mean “human living and the fact that things are there”—
which seems a strange combination to discuss in the same breath.
Another example of the way in which abstract words such as
“transcendent,” “meaning,” “existence” should be combined with
human words such as “life” and “confidence”:
High religions are … distinguished by the extent of the unity
and coherence of life which they seek to encompass and the
sense of a transcendent source of meaning by which alone
confidence in the meaningfulness of life and existence can be
maintained.12
May I suggest a paraphrase, which I think does not reduce the
informational content. “High religions are distinguished by making the
whole of human life feel meaningful to the human being.” As human
life already feels meaningful to sane human beings, this would appear to
let anything or nothing qualify as a “high religion.”
It is true that my paraphrase reduces Niebuhr’s meaning if he is using
the word “transcendent” in a transcendent sense. If so, what he is saying
becomes more complex, but questionable. Assuming “transcendent” to

33
mean “possessing a validity which cannot be affected by any
consideration whatever,” or perhaps “directly related to the reason for
existence,” it is difficult to see why a “transcendent source of meaning”
should be expected to maintain anyone’s “confidence in the
meaningfulness of life.” For this to be true, we should have to accept the
psychological supposition that people can only confidently accept
transcendent meanings as meaningful. What is more, we should also
have to accept that a transcendent source of meaning would have the
characteristic of making a human being confident about the meaning of
his life. It is an interesting sidelight on human psychology that it should
be so often assumed that a transcendent purpose must be one that “gives
a meaning to life.” In fact, anyone sufficiently unusual to think
occasionally about transcendence finds that it makes his life feel
intolerably meaningless. (This is why people do not go on doing it.)
If we assume that Niebuhr is using the word “transcendent” in one of
the senses defined above, the most obvious characteristic of a
transcendent meaning would seem to be that it invalidates all
subordinate meanings. This, after all, is what “transcendent” means—
that which invalidates, but cannot itself be invalidated. So if Niebuhr is
really using the word “transcendent” to mean that which transcends,
what he is saying becomes: “High religions are distinguished by making
the whole of life meaningful by reference to something which makes the
whole of life meaningless, which is the only way in which it is possible
to maintain confidence that life is meaningful.”
As this is patently absurd, I assume that he is not in fact using the
word “transcendent” in a transcendent sense. It is much more likely that
when he talks of a “transcendent source of meaning” he means
“anything which is capable of making the whole of human life seem
meaningful to a large number of people.”
I leave the reader to appreciate the following without further
explanation:
God made the world, and is never absent from it. So, within
the mind of modern secularism there are feelings after the
meaningfulness of human existence, recognition of supreme

34
obligations in human relations, gropings after an undefined
“otherness.”13
The name of this infinite and inexhaustible ground of history
is God. That is what the word means, and it is that to which the
words Kingdom of God and Divine Providence point. And if
these words do not have much meaning for you, translate them,
and speak of the depth of history, of the ground and aim of our
social life, and of what you take seriously without reservation in
your moral and political activities. Perhaps you should call this
depth hope, simply hope.14

35
36
 Chapter 6: The Sane Person Talks of Existence
When the sane person talks about life he sometimes mentions the
Outside, but here a splendid confusion can be created from the simple
fact that other people are, in a certain sense, outside relative to the
individual. And so it is possible to find passages like the following:
And what, too, would our reactions to (ESP) tell us about
ourselves? That we feel safer living in splendid isolation, a huis
clos? Or that we are prepared to face the possibility of being
members of one another in a world which, as mathematicians
already know, is first and foremost one of relationships, and
which now, as a great mathematician, Hermann Weyl, has
dramatically put it, is being made by modern science itself “to
appear more and more as an open one… pointing beyond
itself.”15
This, incidentally, provides a particularly ostentatious example of the
use which is constantly made by sane people of words with two possible
meanings.
Here the word “relationship” is used to assimilate the two concepts
“human relationship” and “mathematical relationship.” A little
analytical thought should convince the reader that a person may be
interested in human relationships without the slightest attraction
towards mathematical ones, and vice versa.
A distinction may be made, though it is a difficult one for a sane mind
to grasp, between the idea of a world “pointing beyond itself” to
mathematical abstractions, and one “pointing beyond itself” to human
mutuality and cohesion.
This passage also illustrates the habit of talking about human
relationships as terrifying, difficult, dangerous, and the like.
Conversely, any outlook not constantly preoccupied with human
interactions is implied—though never described—to be excessively
conducive of feelings of safety, ease and comfort.
There is no particular reason why these implications should

37
correspond with the psychological facts. As we have already mentioned,
“sanity” shows many of the characteristics of recognized psychological
syndromes. All psychological syndromes are ways of defending the
individual from intolerable stress, and can only achieve this objective
by concealing their true purpose. So one does not expect a high degree
of objectivity in the statements of—say—a paranoid about his
condition. In fact, one expects a characteristic kind of inversion on
certain crucial points. (Pride replacing guilt, superiority concealing
inferiority, and so on.)
Now if “sanity” is a device for protecting the individual from the
impact of facts, in the same way that paranoia is a device for protecting
the individual from feelings of humiliation, it is obviously under the
same kind of necessity to conceal its true terms of reference.
So it is scarcely surprising that sane people should have an unfounded
belief that they are adopting a difficult and strenuous attitude.
But what are the psychological facts? Is it actually the case that when
people adopt a less anthropocentric outlook they find themselves
overwhelmed by sensations of ease and self-aggrandizement? We
cannot expect to find very much evidence either way, because people do
not often adopt such an outlook, but such evidence as there is suggests
that they actually feel alone and defenseless, not to say frightened.
In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering
how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so
unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life.
My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a
perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you
may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations
of my own state of mind.16
I shall never forget that night of December in which the veil
that concealed from me my own incredulity was torn. I hear
again my steps in that narrow naked chamber where long after
the hour of sleep had come I had the habit of walking up and
down. I see again that moon, half-veiled by clouds, which now
and again illuminated the frigid window-panes. The hours of the

38
 night flowed on and I did not note their passage. Anxiously I
followed my thoughts, as from layer to layer they descended
towards the foundation of my consciousness, and scattering one
by one all the illusions which until then had screened its
windings from my view, made them every moment more clearly
visible. Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked
sailor clings to the fragments of his vessel; vainly, frightened at
the unknown void in which I was about to float, I turned with
them towards my childhood, my family, my country, all that was
dear and sacred to me: the inflexible current of my thought was
too strong—parents, family, memory, beliefs, it forced me to let
go of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate and
more severe as it drew near its term, and did not stop until the
end was reached. I knew then that in the depth of my mind
nothing was left that stood erect.
The moment was a frightful one; and when towards morning I
threw myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier
life, so smiling and so full, go out like a fire, and before me
another life opened, somber and unpeopled, where in future I
must live alone, alone with my fatal thought which had exiled
me thither, and which I was tempted to curse. The days which
followed this discovery were the saddest of my life.17

It is true that when people talk about life they do sometimes admit
that being finite is rather awful. Sometimes they cannot even manage to
say this without mentioning “other people” in every sentence. The
following passage from Erich Fromm is interesting because it illustrates
several kinds of question-begging simultaneously.
There is another element … which makes the need to
“belong” so compelling: the fact of subjective self-
consciousness … its existence confronts man with a problem
which is essentially human: by being aware of himself as
distinct from nature and other people, by being aware—even

39
 very dimly—of death, sickness, ageing, he necessarily feels his
insignificance and smallness in comparison with the universe
and all others who are not “he.”
Unless he belonged somewhere, unless his life had some
meaning and direction, he would feel like a particle of dust and
be overwhelmed by his individual insignificance … he would be
filled with doubt, and this doubt eventually would paralyse his
ability to act—that is, to live.18
The first thing to notice is that Fromm implies (even before he has
stated the problem) that what a person needs is “to belong.” When he
does state the problem he states two problems at once as if they were the
same. (To feel insignificant and small in comparison with the universe is
actually different from feeling those things in comparison with other
people.) Fromm calls this problem (or problems) “essentially human”—
a reassuring description. He continues by implying that it is right and
proper for a person to feel that he does “belong,” and that his life does
have “meaning and direction.” This will prevent him from feeling like a
particle of dust: if he did, he would be paralysed. This last is, of course,
an unverified assumption.
There is no evidence that people who feel like particles of dust
relative to the universe become paralysed and inactive, although it is a
fact of clinical psychology that people who feel worthless relative to
other people often spend a good deal of time in bed.

Virtually all categories of modern thinkers unite in chanting “There is

no Outside.” The existentialists, alone, say “There is an Outside.” On
account of their sane upbringing they feel that this is a difficult thing to
say and they say it with a kind of metaphysical stutter, inventing new
words profusely in their desperation to make themselves understood. Of
course in a sense they are right in supposing that it is difficult; no sane
person is likely to understand it. But the difficulty is emotional, not
philosophical.
(Incidentally, how well the human evasion has arranged matters when

40
anyone who would say “There is an Outside” is driven to express
himself at enormous length, in all but unreadable books.)
Existentialists admit that there are certain states of consciousness in
which ideas about death, existence, isolation, responsibility, urgency
and so forth may have some emotional significance. But these are rare
and transitory.
The weakness of the existentialists’ case is that they do not
distinguish sufficiently between a philosophical attitude and a
psychological one. A sane person may be made to admit, as a
philosophical point, that everything is fundamentally uncertain, but this
will not give it any power as a motive force in his life. Even a person
who wished to realize the fact of uncertainty would find it difficult to
perceive it with any vividness, or to eliminate other emotional attitudes
which he saw to be incompatible with it.
Having accepted that one may, at certain times, become startlingly
aware of certain things, the existentialist argument usually goes on to
talk of “authentic” and “inauthentic” being. If what is meant by
“inauthentic being” is living without awareness of these things, then
obviously everyone is very inauthentic indeed. “Authentic being” would
mean to live in constant awareness of these things, with all the
modifications that would entail. But this is a problem in psychology; it
must be asked what forces are at work to prevent this awareness,
whether it is possible to defeat them, and how. It is particularly useless
to give prescriptions for “authentic being” by involvement or
commitment in the world. If we realize that we are talking about states
of consciousness, it becomes clear that the procedure being
recommended is this: “If you should chance to have a flash of awareness
of things of which you are not usually aware, you will realize that your
life is full of things which seem meaningless to you so long as you are in
this state of awareness. What are you to do to overcome your sense of
meaninglessness?” There is a simple answer. “The awareness will pass.
You can forget it easily and go on living as before. But since you want
to convince yourself that you are doing something about this flash of
awareness you have had, you are recommended to return to your former

41
way of life, but more thoroughly and deliberately than before. Commit
yourself to doing just the kind of thing which makes further flashes of
awareness unlikely.”
Here, of course, we are encountering one of those linguistic swerves
away from the point so characteristic of the evasive mind. “Authentic
being” may be used to refer to a state of dishonesty towards the facts of
existence, or to a state of dishonesty towards other people. It is even
true that the two things may be to some extent interconnected, since a
person suffering from the human evasion is clearly not able to be honest
towards anyone, if only because he is constantly trying to force them to
shield him from reality, including the reality of his own perceptions and
desires.
It should come as no surprise that existentialist writers are unable to
distinguish clearly between “mauvaise foi” towards existence and
“mauvaise foi” towards people.
And so this kind of thing is written:
Dasein, everyday life, is destructible, and we should not even
desire its indefinite continuation. But Existenz, authentic
selfhood, can be entered into now and its meaning is
imperishable. Only by facing death realistically do we become
formed, decisive, resolute, and reconciled to finitude. The threat
of missing true selfhood is worse than the unavoidable fact of
physical disintegration. And the reality of the latter makes me
alert to the former. It is because I am going to die as a biological
organism that I may miss true self-hood. Because I do not have
forever, the question hangs over every moment: “Are you living,
feeling, realizing, choosing yourself or some feeble caricature of
what you could be?” One who has lived for ends-in-themselves
and who has entered into existential communication with others
knows that what is important in his life and in the life of his
friend cannot be annihilated by death.19
What can be said of the statement that we can enter “authentic”
selfhood “now”? Existential flashes are not easily had to order. It is not

42
even easy, by trying, to realize vividly the fact that you are going to die.
Even more dubious is the assertion that once you have entered this
state “its meaning is imperishable.” Can this mean “you will be able to
remain in constant awareness of the unknowability of existence,” or
even “once you have been fully aware of existence your psychology will
never be the same again”? Such psychological evidence we have would
seem to indicate that existential awareness is usually momentary, and its
permanent effects on a sane person are nil.
Our existentialist now tells us that “only by facing death realistically
do we become … reconciled to finitude.” To be aware of one’s
finiteness is one thing; to be reconciled to it is quite another. Nearly
everyone seems to manage to be reconciled without being aware; I
should have thought it probable that anyone who was fully aware of it
would find it intolerable.

43
44
 Chapter 7: The Sane Person Talks of God
The human race has always been unable to distinguish clearly
between metaphysics and morality. Thus the word “God” can be used to
mean “origin of existence” or it can be used to mean “intelligent being
interested in the social behaviour of humans.” These two concepts are
not, however, the same, and any relationship between them would have
to be carefully established.
In the same way, “religion” could mean two different things. It might
mean something like “a person’s attitude to the Outside in general, and
the fact of existence in particular.” As it happens, it does not mean this,
and no one expects it to. It is actually used to mean “a person’s attitude
towards social interactions with other people, with some reference to a
supposed intelligent being who is interested in these interactions.” The
last clause is dispensable. Most people would have little hesitation in
accepting as “religious” someone who showed the required behaviour
patterns, whether he said he believed in a God or not.
It is usually impossible to make sense of passages in which the word
God appears at all often. Consider, for example, this description by
Erich Fromm of an up-to-date, sensible kind of religious person.
The truly religious person, if he follows the essence of the
monotheistic idea, does not pray for anything, does not expect
anything from God; he does not love God as a child loves his
father or his mother; he has acquired the humility of sensing his
limitations, to the degree of knowing that he knows nothing
about God. God becomes for him a symbol in which man, at an
earlier stage of his evolution, has expressed the totality of that
which man is striving for, the realm of the spiritual world, of
love, truth and justice. He … considers all of his life only
valuable inasmuch as it gives him the chance to arrive at an ever
fuller unfolding of his human powers—as the only reality that
matters, as the only object of “ultimate concern”; and
eventually, he does not speak about God—nor even mention his

45
 name. To love God, if he were going to use this word, would
mean, then to long for the attainment of the full capacity to love,
for the realization of that which “God” stands for in oneself.20
Let us see what becomes of this passage if it is rewritten with the
term “God” understood to mean “reason for existence” throughout.
“The truly religious person, if he accepts the idea of a single
overriding cause which originated all that exists, does not expect this
cause to be directly related to what goes on in his own life, and does not
expect it to do anything for him. He does not ask it for anything and
does not expect to enter into a security-giving personal relationship with
it. He realizes that he is a finite being, and that the reason for existence
is inconceivable to him. He realizes that he is one of a certain race of
animals which has evolved on a certain planet of a certain star in a
certain galaxy, and that as they evolved these animals formulate certain
ideals at which to aim. The reason for existence becomes to him a
symbol for the security and consistency which his race of animals would
like to have. He considers his life only valuable inasmuch as he
considers it valuable. He regards what interests him as the only reality
that matters, and the only object of any importance to the overriding
cause which originated all that exists. Eventually he does not ask any
questions about the reason for existence—nor even refer to it in passing.
To desire the knowledge of the reason for existence would mean to him,
then, to long for the attainment of the full capacity to have an intense
interest in the welfare of other members of his species. This is the
realization of that part of one’s psychology for which the words ’reason
for existence’ stand.”
Modern thinkers are at last feeling free to divorce the ideas of “God”
and “religion” from any direct connection with the fact that things exist.
Some go further. Not only has “God” nothing in particular to do with
the origin of existence, but also it has nothing whatever to do with
anything human beings do not understand about—that is, it has nothing
to do with the Outside.
Fromm’s treatment of the idea of God depends on never defining it. A
further advance has been made by the Bishop of Woolwich, who

46
admittedly does not define it either, but says explicitly that it isn’t there.
What is of interest about the Bishop of Woolwich is not that he is
supposed to be a Christian (which is a matter of definition), but that he
is human. One might say that he is very human. He speaks for his time;
not only for the Christianity of his time but for human psychology as it
stands facing the unknown—or rather, with its back to it.
I do not mean to be unduly condemnatory of human beings for
standing in this position. It is the done thing. In fact, it has always been
the done thing, although formerly some pains were taken to disguise the
fact. When people talked about “God” they used to pretend that what
they said had something to do with questions about the meaning of
existence and the purpose of life.
The splendid discovery made by the Bishop of Woolwich is that the
human race is completely uninterested in such questions, but now it is
all right to say so. Man has “come of age.”
It is not very easy to understand what the Bishop of Woolwich is
saying, but it is easier if you start by ascribing a zero value to the term
“God.” What I mean is that you need to leave a sort of blank hole in
every sentence in which the word “God” appears. It is never defined,
and so it is semantically redundant.
However, though he does not say who or what God is, the Bishop
wants most earnestly to assert that God is not Out There.
But the signs are that we are reaching the point at which the
whole conception of a God “out there” … is itself becoming
more of a hindrance than a help … Suppose belief in God does
not, indeed cannot, mean being persuaded of the “existence” of
some entity, even a supreme entity, which might or might not be
there, like life on Mars? … Suppose that all such atheism does is
to destroy an idol, and that we can and must go on without a God
“out there” at all?21
What can we make of these statements? Something (unspecified) is
not Out There. Does this mean nothing is Out There? Or nothing of any
significance is Out There? A little reflection convinces the questing

47
mind that what the Bishop really means is “There is no Out There.”
To make this a little more grammatical, let us rephrase it as “There is
no Outside.” As we have mentioned, we define the Outside as “that
which falls outside the comprehension of the human race.” Now
whatever else God might be supposed to be, one would imagine that he,
she or it was unquestionably Outside.
But the Bishop has two reasons for supposing that God is not
Outside.
One of them is that the Inside is getting bigger. We are better at
science than we used to be, and our expectation of life is increasing. We
can make aeroplanes and control malaria. We do not know what
everything is existing for, but neither do we care.
God is an “x” in the equation whom we cannot get on without,
a cause, controller or designer whom we are bound to posit or
allow room for—this hypothesis seems to men today more and
more superfluous.22
Note, incidentally, a nice piece of sane writing. If you talk of “God”
impersonally as “a cause” it is difficult to reject the hypothesis that
“there is always room for a cause we do not know about.” If, however,
you talk of God as a “designer,” you are obviously bringing in all those
anthropomorphic associations which make the idea of God ludicrous.
This is where apposition is so useful.
But the Bishop’s main reason for supposing that God is not Outside is
that we are none of us interested in an Outside, and we are interested in
other people.
The world is not asking “How can I find a gracious God?” It
is asking “How can I find a gracious neighbour?”23
So if “God” is to be of any interest, it must mean something about
human relationships. (Just what about human relationships it could
mean is never clear. The Bishop’s only elucidation takes the form of
periodically intoning such words as “depth” and “ultimacy.”)
Of course, the Bishop is not alone in all this. He quotes extensively

48
from Tillich, for example.
When Tillich speaks of God in “depth,” he is not speaking of
another Being at all. He is speaking of “the infinite and
inexhaustible depth and ground of all being,” of our ultimate
concern, of what we take seriously without reservation.24
(I leave the reader to work out how many of the techniques described
in “How to Write Sane Books” are used in those two sentences.)
Tillich maintains that God is the “ultimate concern” of every man. I
think all modern theologians would agree. However, the question is
whether you take “God” as defining “man’s ultimate concern,” or take
“man’s ultimate concern” as defining “God.” Naturally, in this
democratic age, the latter procedure is usually followed. (There is only
one of God whereas there are a number of human beings; it would
obviously be undemocratic to take God as a standard.) I am happy to see
the old opposition between God and man has all but vanished from
modern theology. There is now the most extraordinary sympathy, not to
say identity, of outlook.
We must—even if it seems “dangerous”—affirm that the
glory of God and the glory of man, although different, actually
coincide. There is no other glory of God (this is a free decision
of his will) than that which comes about in man’s existence. And
there is no other glory of man than that which he may and can
have in glorifying God. Likewise God’s beatitude coincides with
man’s happiness. Man’s happiness is to make God’s beatitude
appear in his life, and God’s beatitude consists in giving himself
to man in the form of human happiness.25
So far we have only considered the modern kind of theologian, who
does not believe in God. This should not be taken to imply that the
human evasion has only just started to operate in this area.
Even when people believed in God you may remember that there was
a certain difficulty in driving any metaphysical argument with them
beyond a certain point. They would suddenly round on you, with or

49
without a sweet smile, and say, “Ah, but the important thing is that God
is a person.” This effectively prevented any further discussion of his
possible existence or attributes, particularly as the concepts “person”
and “personality” appeared to defy analysis.
It is, of course, entirely compatible with the human evasion that it
should suddenly interpose the “personal” and the reason for existence—
by whatever name it calls it. It is no less compatible with it that the
people who disbelieve in God should do so on the grounds that he was a
personal God. “It is evident,” they say, “that when people believed in
God they were thinking of something like a human being with whom
one could have emotional interactions. This is Freudian. It is obvious
that there is no Outside because when people thought there was, they
treated it like a person. I am well-adjusted and do not need a God to
have emotional interactions with. I can have them with other people.
Consequently there is no Outside.”

50
 Chapter 8: The Religion of Evasion
The basic tenet of sane theology is that the chief barrier between man
and God is constituted by pride—that is, self-sufficiency and ambition,
which prevent him from recognizing his true place in the scheme of
things. And we are enjoined to be humble—that is, to accept our place
in the scheme of things and adopt an attitude of unassuming
trustfulness.
This is remarkably like the standard prescription for preserving the
human evasion, especially as it is usually accompanied by exhortations
to take a particularly thorough interest in our fellow humans.
Now it might actually be true that a man was prevented from
perceiving very much of reality (or from perceiving anything very
interesting about it) by his satisfaction with himself as he is.
But if we tried to say anything about this in ordinary language the
most extraordinary results would ensue. We should have to say, for
example, that the essence of humility was to recognize one’s desire to
be God.
This follows from the fact that if you define “pride” as “what makes
people feel they can manage all right as they are,” “anti-pride” or
“humility” should be “what makes people aware that being as they are is
unsatisfactory.”
The idea of anyone desiring to be God is very shocking to a sane
mind which, with its usual facility for confusing the issue, makes no
distinction between “desiring to be God” and “imagining oneself
already to be God.” Now what would actually happen to someone who
desired to be God is not that he would be overwhelmed by sensations of
satisfied megalomania, but that he would find being finite intolerable.
We know, of course, that sanity is designed to make finiteness
comfortable, so it is not in the least surprising that the religion of
evasion should contain this kind of thing:
It is possible for individuals to be saved from this sinful
pretension, not by achieving an absolute perspective on life, but

51
 by their recognition of their inability to do so….
The recognition of creatureliness and finiteness … may
become the basis of man’s reconciliation to God through his
resignation to his finite condition.26
So the thing to do is to accept your finiteness. Notice, as usual, that
“to accept” means “not to fight against; to settle down within.” It does
not mean (as it might) “to observe the presence of.” I may accept that
there is a rattlesnake in the corner without necessarily approving of the
fact.
Now although all evasively religious people are clear that finiteness
is to be treated in a spirit of peaceful coexistence, they do not like
talking about it more than is strictly necessary.
They find the ideas of “sin,” “guilt,” “morality,” and so on far
preferable to ideas about “creation,” “existence,” or “non-existence,”
and the idea of “helplessness to improve” preferable to the idea of
“helplessness.” Some idea of the way these substitutions are made may
be gained from the following account of Wittgenstein’s attitude to the
notions of “God” and “immortality.”
… Wittgenstein did once say that he thought he could
understand the conception of God, in so far as it is involved in
one’s awareness of one’s own sin and guilt. He added that he
could not understand the conception of a Creator. I think that
the ideas of Divine judgement, forgiveness, and redemption had
some intelligibility for him, as being related in his mind to
feelings of disgust with himself, an intense desire for purity, and
a sense of the helplessness of human beings to make themselves
better. But the notion of a being making the world had no
intelligibility for him at all.
Wittgenstein once suggested that a way in which the notion of
immortality can acquire a meaning is through one’s feeling that
one has duties from which one cannot be released, even by
death. Wittgenstein himself possessed a stern sense of duty.27
The substitution of “guilt” for “sense of finiteness” is immediate in

52
most writers. So Tillich can say that the “power of nothingness” is
experienced in the “anxiety of guilt.”28
Unlike most writers, Tillich does recognize a sense of finiteness per
se as a separate object of discourse, but plainly gives “guilt” the greater
psychological importance. For example, he doubts whether the Stoics
could have reached “utter desperation” because, though they could
experience the despair of “fate and death,” their philosophy did not
recognize that of “personal guilt.”29
This is in spite of the fact that he describes the awareness of finiteness
in the following terms:
It is impossible for a finite being to stand naked anxiety for
more than a flash of time. People who have experienced these
moments, as for instance some mystics in their visions of the
“night of the soul,” or Luther under the despair of demonic
assaults, or Nietzsche—Zarathustra in the experience of the
“great disgust,” have told of the unimaginable horror of it…. or
facing the God who is really God means facing also the absolute
threat of non-being. The “naked absolute” (to use a phrase of
Luther’s) produces “naked anxiety”; for it is the extinction of
every finite self-affirmation….30
In fact, the recognition of “naked anxiety” would render guilt an
untenable emotion.
Guilt in social situations arises from the assumption that you know at
least some of the rules, and know the extent of your supposed
obligations to keep them, and know also the extent of your power to do
so (or at least the extent to which your inability to keep them will be
misunderstood).
Perhaps there are cosmic rules (rules for what, rules about what?) and
perhaps you have broken them all. Perhaps you broke them all by being
born in the first place. Maybe the universe will blow up tomorrow on
account of all the rules you have broken, but there is no point in
pretending that even then you will know what the rules were.
Whoever you are, you are in an unknown situation which, rather

53
incredibly, exists. You do not know what your past has been (though
you do seem to have a certain supply of memory images). You do not
know the significance of what you did in the past, and you do not know
whether you could have done otherwise.
You do not know how many relevant factors there may be which you
did not know, and still do not.
But this is not what evasive religion is about. Let us return to Tillich.
He has an intellectual lucidity which not even the mannerisms of sane
writing can conceal, and he is not unaware of “the astonishing pre-
rational fact that there is something and not nothing.”31
But as we have already observed, he says firmly:
It is impossible for a finite being to stand naked anxiety for
more than a flash of time.32
This is at once evidence that Tillich knows there is an Outside, and
proof that he is nonetheless sane. He is sure that no one can perceive the
fact that there is an Outside for more than a flash of time.
He does not say how many people he thinks have tried to experience
this perception for longer. He does not say if he has tried himself. But he
is sure that it cannot be done.
Human beings like to accept their limitations, and this one in
particular.
Here is another example of Tillich’s writing:
The state of our whole life is estrangement from others and
ourselves, because we are estranged from the Ground of our
being, because we are estranged from the origin and aim of our
life. And we do not know where we have come from, or where
we are going.33
The fact that “we do not know where we have come from, or where
we are going” is stated in the second sentence, which begins with an
“And.” The first sentence is a statement of a very composite kind.
Characteristically, it refers both to existence (using the ambiguous word
“being”) and to “others” in the same breath. Even more character-

54
istically, it makes the statement about existence or “being” after the one
about “others.”
This is the complete sequence of ideas in the passage (observe the
order of priorities): we are estranged from certain “others” and from
ourselves; because of this we observe that we are estranged from the
Ground of our being; incidentally (in a second sentence starting with
“And”) we notice that we don’t know anything.
Needless to say, all modern theologians are much more interested in
our estrangement from other people than in the fact that we don’t know
anything.
The object of religion would seem to be to overcome the
estrangement by the “life of community.” Belonging is all. In view of
this, they do not wish to demand any particular beliefs from people who
wish to belong. A community of Christians means a community of
persons who call themselves Christians, and a person who wishes to
belong to such a community is a Christian. It is presumptuous to look
for any special qualities in such a community; this is to forget our
complete dependence on the Word of God (in Jesus Christ). God
declared that He would create a spiritual community and we cannot
question this decree. The great point is that its distinguishing attributes
are spiritual—i.e. imperceptible.
Linguisticism, you see, is very useful once more. When it is used in
theology it is usually associated with “the Word of God.”
In general, the meaning of any part of the Word of God is spiritual,
i.e. meaningless. We should not seek to attach any meaning, historical,
metaphysical, or psychological, to the statement “Jesus Christ was the
Son of God,” but simply accept it as a valuable part of the Word of God.
This process is known as “demythologizing.”
I hope this brief analysis may help those who find modern theology
hard to understand. But perhaps it is not very hard for sane people.

55
56
 Chapter 9: The Philosophy of Evasion
Philosophy used to be about metaphysics, though it always suffered
from the usual human tendency to discuss politics or morality in the
same breath—or at least, in the next chapter.
When philosophy dealt with metaphysics it revealed certain facts
about the human situation, which can all be summarized in the
statement that it is impossible to be certain of anything.
However, as a direct consequence of the human evasion, it was very
difficult for philosophers to think for too long at a time about total
uncertainty, so that various partial aspects of it were stated by different
people, and they very often combined their thoughts about uncertainty
with a good deal of their favourite kind of evasiveness. This is why their
books were so much longer than necessary—but this is true of almost all
books by sane people.
Descartes, for example, began by placing everything in doubt.
I will suppose, then, not that there is a supremely good God,
the source of truth; but that there is an evil spirit, who is
supremely powerful and intelligent, and does his utmost to
deceive me. I will suppose that sky, air, earth, colours, shapes,
sounds and all external objects are mere delusive dreams, by
means of which he lays snares for my credulity. I will consider
myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, no
senses, but just having a false belief that I have all these things. I
will remain firmly fixed in this meditation, and resolutely take
care that, so far as in me lies, even if it is not in my power to
know some truth, I may not assent to falsehood nor let myself be
imposed upon by that deceiver, however powerful and
intelligent he may be.34
I will reject … whatever admits of the least doubt, just as if I
had found it was wholly false; and I will go on until I know
something for certain—if it is only this, that there is nothing
certain.35

57
 Descartes proceeds from this to the famous “cogito ergo sum”: even
if all his thoughts are erroneous, something must exist to think them.
And here commences the evasiveness of Descartes: in fact, he is not
really entitled to say, “I think, therefore I exist,” but only “I think,
therefore something exists.” Nonetheless, this is the highest point
reached by his philosophy.
After this he first reinstates his own psychology:
What then am I? A conscious being (res cogitans). What is
that? A being that doubts, understands, asserts, denies, is
willing, is unwilling; further, that has sense and imagination.
There are a good many properties—if only they belong to me.
But how can they fail to? Am I not the very person who is
“doubting” almost everything; who “understands” something
and “asserts” this one thing to be true, and “denies” other things;
who “is willing” to know more, and “is unwilling” to be
deceived; who “imagines” many things, even involuntarily, and
perceives many things coming as it were from the “senses”?
Even if I am all the while asleep; even if my creator does all he
can to deceive me; how can any of these things be less of a fact
than my existence? Is any of these something distinct from my
consciousness (cogitatione)? Can any of them be called a
separate thing from myself? It is so clear that it is I who doubt,
understand, will, that I cannot think how to explain it more
clearly.36
Having reinstated his own ideas, Descartes decides that they include
an idea of an infinite and perfect God. Descartes might be deceived in
believing two and three to make five if a sufficiently powerful God
chose to deceive him, but God must exist because Descartes has an idea
of God, and such a God could not be a deceiver. So Descartes may now
proceed with trustful confidence to reinstate “the whole field of
corporeal nature that is the subject-matter of pure mathematics.”37
Before the modern atheist mocks this line (or rather convolution) of
argument too uninhibitedly, he should recall that it is Descartes’s only

58
way of avoiding the conclusion that there is no certainty except total
uncertainty.
If you are trying to ward off uncertainty, you can believe in the
infinite reliability of God, or of common sense, or of New Society—it
makes little difference. (Of the three, an infinite and perfect God would
probably be the most elasticizing to the imagination. But I realize that
that is no recommendation from a sane point of view.)
Incidentally, it is perhaps interesting to note that while “establishing”
the existence of God, Descartes shows a typically sane desire to accept
his limitations. Considering how recently he has recovered from an
attack of total uncertainty, his confidence in the permanence of his
position is remarkable:
But perhaps I am something greater than I myself understand.
Perhaps all the perfections I attribute to God are somehow in me
potentially, though they do not emerge yet and are not yet
brought into actuality. For I experience already a gradual
increase of my knowledge; I do not see what is to prevent its
being thus increased more and more indefinitely; nor why, when
my knowledge has thus grown, I may not use it to acquire all the
other perfections of God; nor, finally, why the potentiality of
such perfections, if it exists in me already, is not enough to
produce the idea of them.
All these things are impossible. First, it is true that my
knowledge gradually increases, and I have many potentialities
as yet unactualised; but this is alien to the idea of God, which
implies absolutely no potentiality; for the mere fact of gradual
growth is a sure sign of imperfection.
Again, even if my knowledge always grows more and more,
yet I see that it will never be actually infinite; for it will never
reach a point where it is not capable of still further increase.38
Then again, consider Hume. He saw clearly enough that “all our
reasonings concerning causes and effects are derived from nothing but
custom.”39 And as for the continued existence of objects when out of

59
sight, he said: “… this conclusion beyond the impressions of our senses
can be founded only on the connection of cause and effect; nor can we
otherwise have any security that the object is not changed upon us.”40
More critical than Descartes of the origins of his ideas, Hume saw no
way in which philosophy could save him from scepticism, and
undisguisedly fell back on human nature to do so.
I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy
myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed
with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of
every member and faculty. Most fortunately it happens, that
since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature
herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this
philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this
bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my
senses, which obliterates all these chimeras. I dine, I play a
game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my
friends; and when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I would
return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained,
and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them
any further.41
However, frightened and muddled though the sceptical philosophers
may have been, once some aspect of the total uncertainty had been
plainly stated, it could never subsequently be refuted and it became a
permanent piece of philosophy.
One of the aspects of uncertainty that became firmly embedded in
philosophy was that there were no absolutes.
What was originally stated was that there was no way of finding out if
there were any absolutes. Everything could only be assessed by
reference to a specific standard, and the only available standards were
finite ones.
The human race, in its anthropocentric way, took a particular interest
in the conclusion that there was no moral absolute. There was no way of
saying what was “good” or “evil” except by referring to the only stand-

60
ards available—which were the opinions of human beings about what
constituted a desirable life. These were obviously very subjective.
The human race eagerly responded to this finding by rejecting all
former sets of opinions about the desirable life and developing a new
one. The new one stated that heroic and extremist ideals were always
based on foolish beliefs and prejudices, so that the thing to do was to
seek pleasure, comfort, and security in a moderate and unheroic way.
Moreover, this finding gave rise to a feeling that it had now been
proved that absolutes did not exist—there were no standards other than
human ones.
This last is an interesting conclusion, if you remember that the
original statement was to the effect that whatever might be absolute,
human standards certainly were not.
This interesting conclusion, that human standards constituted the
only absolute, was reached emotionally before it could be formulated
intellectually. No one was in serious doubt of it, but professional
philosophers found it difficult to state explicitly. Statements about
certainty such as the assertion that solipsism was possible remained
obstinately irrefutable.
This did not prevent philosophers from engaging in strange attempts
to assess the “probability” of sceptical statements. In this they showed
an unawareness of what I can only call “logical priority” that is typically
sane.
Once you have admitted you may be dreaming, what value can you
attach to your reflections on the likelihood that you are dreaming? Yet
comparative statements are made; it is more likely that we are deceived
about this; less likely that we are deceived about that.
My own tentative view is that tactual perception … justifies
us in being practically certain that there are foreign bodies and
that they do interact with our own bodies. It seems to me just
conceivable, though extremely unlikely, that I might have had
the kinds of experience which I describe as “seeing” or
“hearing” foreign bodies even if there had been no foreign
bodies or if they had never emitted light-waves or sound-waves

61
 to my body.
But I find it almost impossible to believe I could ever have
had the kind of experience I describe as “pushing” or “pulling”
or “struggling with” foreign bodies unless there had been
foreign bodies and they had quite often interacted dynamically
with my own body through contact.42
It was then that linguistic philosophy arrived, the true philosophy of
evasion. It stated that it was under no necessity to refute statements
about total uncertainty, because it did not accept them as possible
statements. (“Scepticism is not irrefutable, but palpably senseless, if it
would doubt where a question cannot be asked.”43) It declared that the
only way of deciding what was an acceptable statement was by
reference to human standards.
For example, when you use the word “uncertainty” you mean that
you are not certain about something that may or may not happen. You
have learnt to use this word in connection with a number of finite
situations, such as whether or not it will rain tomorrow. The word is not
usually used to mean “the uncertainty whether anything will go on
existing” or “the uncertainty whether anything is existing now.” It is
illegitimate to use the word “uncertainty” to refer to these kinds of
uncertainty, and it is therefore impossible to formulate any statements
whatever about them.
When philosophers use a word—“knowledge,” “being,”
“object,” “I,” “proposition,” “name”—and try to grasp the
essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word
ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its
original home? What we do is to bring words back from their
metaphysical to their everyday use.44
In this simple way all discourse about the infinite and inconceivable
is eliminated, for it is evident that all human words have actually been
developed by finite beings to deal with things they are able to conceive.
There is now no need to think about “reality” except in the sense of
“what all right-thinking humans are in verbal agreement about.” So

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Malcolm, discussing the idea that a person may realize he is dreaming
while he is having the dream, comments: “Surely there is something
dubious in the assumption that there can be a true judgement that cannot
be communicated to others.”45
What clues do we have to the human evasion in the psychology of
Wittgenstein? At the end of the Tractatus (an earlier work), a series of
ambiguous utterances:
Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.46
There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the
mystical.47
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who
understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he
has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so
to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world
rightly.48 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be
silent.49
And in the Philosophical Investigations, on which his fame chiefly
rests, a number of utterances in which it is not difficult to see an
anguished desire for anæsthesia:
For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete
clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems
should completely disappear.
The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of
stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives
philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions
which bring itself in question.—
Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the
series of examples can be broken off.—Problems are solved
(difficulties eliminated), not a single problem.
There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed
methods, like different therapies.50
The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment

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 of an illness.51
… what is hidden … is of no interest to us.52
Let us conclude this chapter by putting philosophy in its place in the
sane perspective.
Philosophical questions have no intrinsic importance. Some
questions are important for particular men because of the way in
which the questions perplex them and deflect or obstruct them in
going on with some other activity to which they are purposefully
committed in life.53

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 Chapter 10: The Science of Evasion
The basic tenet of modern science is “Thou shalt not think.”
Nietzsche once observed: “If there were God, how could I bear to be
no God? Consequently there is no God.” This is not logical. Modern
science, which otherwise has no noticeable affinity with Nietzsche, uses
arguments of a similar kind. “If the universe had a beginning, we did not
observe it.”
“Consequently it had no beginning.” (I do not know if any scientist
has said this yet. If not, I offer it freely to modern science as my own
humble contribution.) “If electrons are different from one another, we
cannot observe it. Consequently electrons are identical.” “If there is a
reason why this event happens rather than that, we cannot observe it.
Consequently there is no reason.”
Arguments against thinking are presented with every appearance of
intellectual sophistication. They are difficult to understand, but this
makes them seem the more profound.
The prevailing spirit of science owes much to linguistic philosophy.
A generation which understands that thinking is identical with talking
finds it easy to accept that discovery is identical with making
measurements.
The human evasion is seen at its best in theoretical physics. In doing
physics it is difficult not to notice that some things are inconceivable. So
physicists lay down special laws for not-thinking. Just as linguistic
philosophy counsels us not to ask what a word means, but how we use
it, so modern theoretical physics tells us not to think what a concept
means, but only how we measure it. We might be tempted to ask what
things like charge and mass were.
In a sense, the situation is similar to being asked to spell a
word. If we were asked to spell the word cat, we would, of
course, say c-a-t. If pressed for a further explanation, we could
only state that the letters c, a, t, were part of the alphabet and
represent sounds. To explain the letter a, for example, we would

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 have to make the appropriate sound. There is no other way of
conveying meaning. In a similar way, the concepts of charge and
mass are part of the alphabet of physics. To become acquainted
with charge, we need to experiment with it.54
It is pointed out that when you use concepts derived from everyday
experience they are not wholly appropriate to describing events on the
subatomic level. Therefore you must be particularly careful not to think
when you use these concepts.
We must be careful not to jump to the conclusion that because
an elementary particle has a spin, we must think of it as turning
about an axis in itself, and that therefore it must have a finite
radius, since a point turning about itself is a meaningless idea.
Such a conclusion would be an unwarrantable extrapolation of
our macroscopic ideas. Instead, we must simply accept the fact
that certain experiments can be explained only on the
assumption of elementary particles having spin and magnetic
moment.55
Our approach must be operational. We define concepts by referring to
the manipulation of them in experiments; we only ask questions which
can be answered by performing experiments. A slight snag here is that
you might eventually think of a different kind of experiment if you were
worried enough about lack of information. This is not, however, a snag
to a sane person. Sane people, including physicists, have no undue
interest in reality and finding out about the universe is to be regarded as
a rather unfortunate by-product of a certain kind of human activity. It is
important to realize that physics is something people do.
Physics is … based on training and practice and on human
behaviour that has evolved with the growth of experience in
doing physics.56
Physicists have great humility, as the sane understand the word. They
accept, not that there is infinitely more to be discovered, but that they
can never discover more.

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 This acceptance is based on their belief in something called the
Uncertainty Principle. The Uncertainty Principle does not, of course,
express the uncertainty that must always prevail about what the next
theory in physics will be like. It describes a limitation in the knowledge
of the human race which, it is confidently asserted, can never be
surmounted. Young physicists find it difficult to see why it never could
be, and it is an important stage in their intellectual maturation when they
can.
The Uncertainty Principle arises from the fact that commonsense
concepts do not apply very well to subatomic particles. You can say
they are something like waves, or something like particles, but you
cannot use both of your ill-fitting notions at once. (Still less may you try
to have an idea of a single extraordinary entity that is exactly like a
subatomic particle. Whether or not you succeeded, this would be likely
to give you feelings about inconceivability, and it is very important to
avoid such feelings in physics.) So physicists have evolved a
complicated and blurry way of using the concepts the human race
already has. This is known as the Quantum Theory. The fact that it is
blurry is expressed in the Uncertainty Principle, which states that so
long as you use these concepts in this way the result will be blurry.
The human race does not know what other concepts it could use, and
certainly has no intention of thinking about it. It therefore elevates the
statement about the blurriness of reality to the status of a metaphysical
absolute.
(Yes, I know the human race doesn’t usually like metaphysical
absolutes, but this one is different.)
There is a kind of earnest astonishment made popular by linguistic
philosophers. (“This man says he thinks without words. What can we
possibly infer about the past life of a man who makes such a
statement?”) This has been taken over by the theoretical physicists for
use on anyone who suggests that there might be a theory completely
different from Quantum Theory, even perhaps using different concepts.
“What precisely is the concept we are asked to entertain…? What
picture is being painted for us…? What exactly will microphysics be

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like…? What is the physicist being asked to do…?”57 asks Norwood
Russell Hanson, boggling hard.
So we all accept that reality is blurry and that the laws of nature are
statistical. (Not—“our descriptions of nature are statistical,” you
notice.) This brings us to statistics. Emotionally, if not indeed
intellectually, statistics is no longer felt to provide description, but
explanation. It is not difficult to see why it should be so appealing. It is,
as you might say, democratic (in every sense). It depends on counting,
which is fair and equitable (why should one electron be singled out for
special attention?)—and then again, counting is a thing nearly everyone
can do.
There used to be a philosophical error known as “reification,” which
was what happened when people forgot that abstract nouns were not
things, and imagined Truth sitting in state in a scarlet robe, for example.
This is a very, very unfashionable kind of mistake to make today
(because sometimes when people did it, it was a sign that they were
taking the Outside too seriously).
So no one has noticed the reification of statistical concepts that goes
on, and physicists talk of a thing being “caused by chance” as if
“chance” sat there pushing the right proportion of electrons to the left. If
an electron chooses to turn left, this is either caused by something,
which may or may not be known to the human race at present, or it is
caused by nothing, which is shockingly inconceivable. In neither case is
it caused by a cosy little homebody figure called “Chance.”
To do theoretical physics properly requires a very special kind of
thinking.
Suppose that you find that all particles of a certain kind, when placed
in a given situation, behave in one of two ways. Half of them do one
thing and half do the other. First, you do not allow yourself to think that
the particles might not be identical, or that there might be some
unknown influence, which causes half of them to do one thing, and half
to do the other. You must say “I can make a statistical prediction. The
laws of nature are statistical” with no sense of being puzzled or
astonished, and without falling into a state of radical scepticism about

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the concept of “cause.”
To perform this kind of mental manœuvre to perfection requires years
of training and great intellectual maturity. (Einstein always found it
rather difficult. He expressed his inability in the curious, subjective
statement: God does not play dice.)
The next manœuvre to be described is comparatively easy. It is a
technique for ironing infinity out of the universe. The technique depends
on the fact that people cannot visualize a fourth dimension. So you say
to them: “The universe is infinite in a sense—you can go wherever you
like and never come to an edge. But it is also finite in a sense—if you go
on long enough you will come back to the same point.” People feel that
this is a difficult kind of thing which they should pretend to understand.
It also makes them feel happy, because it is a way of saying “The
universe is an Inside without an Outside.”
If this description of the universe is expressed with fewer dimensions
it becomes clear what is really being said. The surface of a sphere is
unbounded in that you can travel all over it without coming to an edge;
it is also finite in that it has a certain definite area. But—(since we can
visualize things in three dimensions, as we cannot in four)—it is clear
that the sphere does have an Outside.
Or consider this exposition of a method for muddling yourself about
infinity:
To construct a hypothetical three-dimensional world which is
finite and unbounded, we will assume that our bug lives with a
whole family of bugs in a space which has no physical
boundaries or barriers. If we further assume that the bugs are
very massive, then none of the bugs will be able to leave the
group because the gravitational attraction of the group as a
whole on each bug will prevent it. Furthermore, since the
gravitational attraction is so strong, light rays will not be able to
leave the mass of bugs either.
Thus, even if a bug looks off in the direction of space beyond
the group, his line of sight will curve back towards the group,
always producing “bugs in his eyes,” and he will never be able

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 to see beyond the group.
“Straight ahead” for each bug always will mean towards the
centre of the group. The bugs will not be conscious of any
physical barrier, though; as far as they know, they will live in a
world which is unbounded. Their world is finite, since the size of
the group as a whole is finite and the group constitutes their
world.58
Obviously the emotional force of this passage depends on the ease
with which the sane mind can accept that “they cannot see beyond the
group” is a statement precisely equivalent to “there is nothing beyond
the group.”
Modern scientists have learnt their function; to make reality sound so
dull that no one will be tempted to think about it. Stephen Toulmin
gently chides Jeans and Eddington for popularizing science in a
disturbing, thought-provoking way.
… Jeans, for instance, relied on finding a happy analogy
which would by itself bring home to his readers the chief
features of the General Theory of Relativity. And how did he
invite them to think of the Universe? As the three-dimensional
surface of a four-dimensional balloon. The poor layman, who
has been brought up to use the word “surface” for two-
dimensional things alone, now found himself instructed to
visualise what for him was a self-contradiction, so it was no
wonder if he agreed to Jeans’ calling the Universe a mysterious
one.59
Whatever else the universe may be, every sane person knows it isn’t
that.

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 Chapter 11: The Alternative to Sanity: What
Would It Be Like?
Let us now pause to consider what the alternative to sanity might be.
Recognized forms of mental illness do not provide an alternative;
they are plainly best regarded as subdivisions of sanity. They have the
same unawareness of reality, and the same intense focus on personal
reactions.
The average paranoid, for example, is obsessionally interested in
rights and wrongs and status and justification. These concepts are all
very meaningful to the sane.
It is true that the small selection of facts which are permitted
consideration by the paranoid mind differ a little from the selection
made by the average sane person. But it is doubtful whether the
distortion introduced by the suppression from consciousness of all the
facts which might indicate that one is not Napoleon is actually any
greater than the suppression from consciousness of all the facts that
might make one dissatisfied to be merely human.
If we suppose that sanity is itself a careful avoidance of some other
psychological orientation, dimly or subconsciously perceived, we may
be able to make some kind of a picture of the not-sane by inverting the
characteristics of sanity.
Obviously the first defining characteristic of the not-sane would be
that they would be more interested in reality, or the universe, than in
other people. Newton might, at first sight, appear to qualify. But it is
clear that he did not approve of his interest in reality. He “grutched the
time” spent on theoretical physics “unless it be perhaps at idle hours
sometimes for a diversion.”60 As Master of the Mint, he showed great
initiative, intelligence and determination in hounding a forger to his
death. So he is not likely to exhibit the personality-structure of the not-
sane. (Though obviously he had his not-sane moments, as when he
worked obsessionally at the Principia for eighteen months.)
There is a general supposition among the sane that sanity is a
particularly altruistic state, and that any deviation from it would be
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marked by callousness, cruelty and vindictiveness.
This supposition need not be taken at face value. When paranoids and
manic-depressives claim to have nothing but kindly attitudes to all
mankind, this is interpreted as a cover for their repressed hostility.
Statements about their own motivation made by sane people should be
regarded with a similar open-mindedness. It is always useful to try the
technique of substituting opposites throughout—e.g. “Sanity is a
particularly sadistic state, and any deviation from it would be marked by
sensitivity, kindness and generosity.”
In so far as the sane person has chosen to focus his attention on other
people, rather than on reality, we may expect that he will desire to limit
them as painfully as he himself is limited. This fundamental hatred of
others (and particularly of the aspirations of others) might possibly be
resolved by recognizing one’s drive to the infinite as something to do
with infinity. But the sane person cannot do this; in fact, the repressive
force is so strong that he can scarcely admit the idea of infinity to
consciousness at all.
But it does not at all follow that this is what would actually be felt by
someone who was primarily interested in himself and the universe. It
may fairly confidently be asserted that he would see nothing interesting
in being cruel to people. Having accepted his won aspirations, he would
probably be unusually tolerant of the aspirations of others. (In the same
way that, according to Freudian psychology, the person who does not
reject his own id-impulses will have a tolerant attitude towards them
when they appear in his offspring.) Finally, we may guess that the not-
sane person would find the repetitiveness of most human interactions
rather dull.
Sane people are bad at psychology. This is not surprising because in
order to keep yourself and everyone else in a state of unrealism, you
have to have certain techniques for not noticing things. (Psycho-analysts
would no doubt claim to be good at understanding psychology. But it is
noteworthy that sane systems of psycho-analysis are exclusively about
people’s reactions to other people.) We may suppose that a not-sane
person might not have quite the same reasons for denying himself

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psychological insight. He would therefore probably be good at
psychology (but not in any way that sane people would appreciate—
they would think him unrealistic because of his interest in reality).
The characteristics which the sane person dislikes most are urgency,
singlemindedness, unconditionality, and self-sufficiency. I almost used
the word “independence,” but this might have been misleading. In a
sane world this does not mean “doing what you yourself want,
regardless of other people.” It usually means “showing your
independence of other people by doing something other than what they
want.” Incidentally, the desire to demonstrate “independence” is
particularly aroused in the sane person by anyone showing signs of
urgency, singlemindedness, unconditionality or self-sufficiency.
“Independence” is best demonstrated by opposing the purposes of the
urgent one. This is a useful safety valve in the sane society, and in itself
goes far to ensure that it will indeed be a self-regulating mechanism for
preventing the fulfilment of its members. (It is most important that it
should be this, in order that everyone should feel frustrated by people
and not by the universe.)
I have mentioned some unfamiliar attitudes; let me try to describe
how they might arise (even if, in practice, they never do).
A person with a sense of urgency might feel that because everything
was uncertain, but his death highly probable, it was desirable to do
anything he considered important with the minimum of delay. Single-
mindedness and unconditionality might well follow.
A person might arrive at a position of self-sufficiency by a little
reflection on his complete aloneness in the presence of the enigma of
existence. He cannot be sure if anyone else exists; even if they do, there
is every reason to suppose that they possess no information relevant to
the problem.
The question is whether anyone has ever been, in any serious way,
not sane.
I have examined the history of the human race with care. Kant gives
the impression that he liked the inconceivable, but his books are too
long; Einstein was interested in the universe, but bad at psychology;

73
H.G. Wells saw that research consisted of taking risks, but declined into
sociology.
My best candidates, therefore, are Nietzsche and Christ. It may be
objected that their ideas cannot possibly be of interest, since one went
mad and the other was crucified. However, I think we should not hold
this against them.
They may have felt a trifle isolated.

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 Chapter 12: Christ
Sane human beings are not interested in reality. This is clearly shown
by the attitudes of both Christians and sceptics towards the origins of
Christianity. Both factions are primarily concerned to attribute “human”
emotions to its founder—nice modest fair-minded ones or nasty
perverted abnormal ones according to taste. Neither side pauses to
consider whether the available documents are remotely adequate to
support their interpretations.
Now in fact the historical evidence is of such a kind that the question
may reasonably be asked whether Jesus lived at all. None of the gospels
can be dated much earlier than A.D. 57, and probably all the four
synoptic gospels were written around the latter half of the first century
A.D. There is every reason to suppose that the tradition had already
been subject to many influences, some identifiable, some debatable.
There is no reason to suppose that the writers of the Gospels were any
more interested in facts than most sane people are. In fact the internal
evidence clearly suggests that they had no inhibitions about modifying
their text when they wished to make it support a particular point.
It is difficult to base any conclusions whatever on documents of this
kind.
It is certainly impossible to see how they can be made to support
statements of the kind sometimes made by Christians—that they derive
from the Gospels an overwhelming sense of the personality of Christ.
Or, indeed, a statement such as this made by an intellectual Christian in
a University environment:
The discrepancy between the depth and sanity and (let me
add) shrewdness of His moral teaching and the rampant
megalomania which must lie behind His theological teaching
unless He is indeed God, has never been satisfactorily got
over.61
In fact, there is very little “moral teaching” in the Gospels, and what
there is is not shrewd. It simply makes unreasonable demands, of the

75
utmost generality, of a kind that any purveyor of mental health would
recommend his patients to disregard.
As for the theological teaching of Jesus, we do not know what it was.
There is quite insufficient evidence for supposing that he claimed to be
God, though we know that Christians from the fourth century onwards
liked to make this claim on his behalf.
Probably more credit should be given to St. Paul. He was clearly a
sane person—aware of the need to make a good impression on the
neighbours. It may well be that the true reason for the survival of
Christianity lies in his having adapted it into a form admirably
compatible with sane psychology. Much confusion has been created by
reading the Epistles of Paul as if they shed light on the interpretation of
the Gospels.
Consider the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God. This is supposed to
have been central to the thought of Jesus. In fact, by all accounts, he had
a positive obsession about it. Christians claim that it shows him to have
been a warm, family-centred man and no cold metaphysician. Non-
Christians claim that it shows him to have a father-fixation, combined
with homosexual tendencies which he sought to gratify by his dubious
relationship with his disciples.
Now, on grounds of textual criticism, it can be shown that there is
little evidence that Christ himself had any particular interest in the
Father concept—even as a symbol—still less in the Father-Son
combination which is so important to later claims of the divinity of
Christ. Although Jesus is credited with using the term Father frequently
in Matthew and John, this is not the case in Mark, the earliest of the
Gospels.
In Mark, God is only spoken of as Father in the absolute
sense, without qualification, in two passages, both of which are
believed to be either editorial interpolations or editorially
modified…. Moreover, the expression my Father is never found
in Mark, and your Father is found only in xi. 25–26.62

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 In fact, it is virtually impossible to reach any firm conclusions about
what Jesus understood by “God.” Attempts have been made to
reconstruct his idea of God from the Jewish tradition of the time, but
there is no knowing what influence this actually had on his thought.
Modern man may like to believe himself the child of his environment,
and his ideas the inevitable consequence of sociological influence.
However, a few people have been known to think, and we cannot be
sure that Jesus was not one of them. (The fact that the religion
originated by him became widely accepted is not, of course, evidence
for this supposition, but against it. If, that is, he did in any sense
originate the religion which became accepted.)
If he was, he would probably have been capable of using the current
terminology and sayings of his time in a sense of his own. There is no
need to suppose him moronically unintelligent. The use of parables
would seem to imply that he understood the use of metaphor.
We are not, I think, justified in concluding anything about the
attitudes or opinions of Jesus from the areas of omission in the Gospels.
Obviously we have only a handful of his sayings. The tradition had had
plenty of time, before A.D. 57, to select those sayings which were
reasonably compatible with the developing tradition of the Church, and
to suppress the rest. The fact that we have only metaphor rather than
description or definition to help us decide what he meant by “God” or
“The Kingdom of Heaven” may not mean that he was a simple,
emotional person who never defined his terms. It may only mean that his
metaphors were all of his thought that could survive the transition into
the world-view of the early Church.
Having said what cannot be inferred from the existing records, we
may settle down to speculation.
There is an interesting possibility that Christ was not only not
paranoid, but that he was not sane at all, and that the expression “the
Kingdom of Heaven” refers to a state of mind not likely to be had by
sane people. Let us discuss some of his utterances in the light of this
possibility.

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 Matthew 13: 45–46
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man,
seeking goodly pearls; who, when he had found one pearl of
great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.
Mark 8: 36–37
What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world,
and loose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange
for his soul?
To suggest that one single thing could be worth more than everything
else put together is, I feel sure, an immature attitude.
Matthew 7: 13–14
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is
the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go
in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way,
which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
This is scarcely democratic and I do not see what a modern Christian
can make of it. But it is a realistic assessment of the number of people
likely to take up single-mindedness at all seriously.
Matthew 22: 37–38
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all
thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the
first and great commandment.
Matthew 7: 7
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock,
and it shall be opened unto you.
Sane people are obviously not likely to qualify for anything on these
terms.
They cannot want anything very much, or try to get anything very
hard. They accept the first compensation that comes their way.

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 Luke 6: 24–26
But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your
consolation.
Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you
that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.
Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so
did their fathers to the false prophets.
Does this really sound as though he was in favour of the jolly, well-
compensated man-in-society?
Matthew 19: 21–23
Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that
thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in
heaven: and come and follow me.
But when the young man heard that saying, he went away
sorrowful: for he had great possessions.
Then Jesus said unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That
a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.
A rather more interesting reading becomes possible if it is supposed
that “riches” means “compensations.”
Matthew 6: 31–33
Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or,
What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For
after all these things do the Gentiles seek;) for your heavenly
Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye
first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these
things shall be added unto you.
Modern Christians hold that the thing to do is “obviously” to feed
everybody in the world, and until we have done that, we needn’t ask
what anyone is to do with their life, anyway. The question is whether
Christ would have agreed.

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 Luke 18: 16–17
But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little
children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the
kingdom of God.
Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the
kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.
It has been suggested that what Christ found attractive about children
was what sane people like about them—their uncritical trust in the
superior wisdom of adults, their plasticity, submissiveness,
suggestibility, and vulnerability. However, children have other
characteristics besides these.
They are excitable and like excitement. They are in a hurry; it seems
to them that to do a thing now may be altogether different from doing it
tomorrow.
They are easily bored. They ask questions. They want to grow up to
be the first Emperor of Space.
In short, they seek intensity of experience. They do not have much
experience of life and they may seek it clumsily. As they grow older and
saner they learn not to seek it at all.
Matthew 12:25
Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation;
and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.
Modern enlightenment suggests that Christ was talking about the
integration of the personality. The modern idea of integrating the
personality is to accept all the bits of yourself on their own terms—
enjoy all your pleasures without imposing upon them any rigid
formalism. But this may not have been exactly what Christ had in mind.
For one thing, modern people regard integration as a function of
maturity—but Christ seemed to think children in some way eligible.

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 Matthew 6: 22–23
The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be
single, the whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be
evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the
light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
This makes it tolerably clear that if he was talking about the
integration of the personality, it was a single-minded sort of integration.
Matthew 6: 24
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one,
and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise
the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
It has been suggested that “mammon” means crude, ambitious,
materialistic commercialism. Perhaps it just means “society,” or even
“other people.”
Matthew 15: 9
But in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the
commandments of men.
John 5: 44
How can ye believe, which receive honour from one of
another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only?
Would Jesus really have liked the idea that Christianity meant social
conformity and lots of welfare work?
Matthew 10: 35
For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and
the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against
her mother-in-law.
Not-sane people need not expect sane people to see eye to eye with
them.

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 Luke 8: 19–21
Then came to him his mother and his brethren, and could not
come at him for the press. And it was told him by certain which
said, Thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to see
thee. And he answered and said unto them, My mother and my
brethren are these which hear the word of God, and do it.
Undemocratic.
Matthew 9: 16–17
No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for
that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the
rent is made worse.
Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles
break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they
put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.
Perhaps this means “You cannot be sane and not-sane at the same
time.” But even supposing a sane person had a moment’s excitement,
would he not try to weld it into his ordinary world-view—to “integrate”
it, as he would say?
John 12: 25
He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life
in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.
Luke 12: 25–26
And which of you with taking thought can add to his stature
one cubit? If ye then be not able to do that thing which is least,
why take ye thought for the rest?
Does this sound like settling down happily within your finiteness?
Luke 1: 37
For with God nothing shall be impossible.
This could be a statement about the total uncertainty. For its
philosophical status, see Chapter 9.

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 John 10: 34
Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye
are gods?
A most unpopular piece of Christianity. Sane people do not want to
be gods; they want to be ordinary-members-of-society-like-anybody-
else.
Mark 11: 25
For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this
mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and
shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things
which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he
saith.
No sane person doubts the impossibility of moving mountains by
will-power.
Philosophically, however, it cannot be shown to be impossible.
Matthew 13: 35
I will utter things which have been kept secret from the
foundation of the world.
This may sound megalomaniac. But there is no great difficulty in
keeping secrets from sane people. The incredibility of the fact of
existence retains the status of a closely-guarded secret in spite of its
accessibility to inspection.
Mark 13: 35–37
Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the
house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or
in the morning: Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.
And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.
Whatever this may mean, it certainly demands a psychological
attitude which is improbable in the sane. Live as though you expected
the unexpected? As though something might happen?

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 However, if Christ was trying to talk people out of their adherence to
sanity, he made one fatal mistake. He said “Love your neighbour as
yourself.” No one who understands the human evasion could fail to
realize that any statement which could be interpreted as an exhortation
to pay attention to other people, even if among a great many injunctions
to single-mindedness and unconditional desire, would be the only one
remembered.
In fact, everyone does love their neighbour as themselves. They
desire that he shall accept the second-best as they have done; that he,
too, shall be made to realize his limitations and “come to terms with
himself.”
The other aspect of Christ’s thought that has seized upon the popular
imagination is, of course, the use of the Father-symbol. If Christ was not
sane, he may have meant something peculiar by “Father,” and not
necessarily something very human. He may even have meant something
like “the Outside” or “the origin of existence.”

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 Chapter 13: Nietzsche
It is interesting to consider the case of Nietzsche in relation to that of
Christ. In both cases, the human race has supposed that the central
feature of their thought was an injunction to human interaction. In the
case of Christ, they thought they were being enjoined to get on nicely
with their friends and relations. In the case of Nietzsche they thought
they were being enjoined to wear jackboots and torture the slaves before
breakfast.
In actual fact, it is tolerably clear that both of them were extremely
interested in something quite other than human beings. (Nietzsche, for
example, observed: “I love thee, O Eternity.”)
Both of them glimpsed the possibility of some kind of psychological
development which was distinctly not-sane. Nietzsche called this
possibility “the Superman.”
It does not pay to read the works of Nietzsche in their entirety, unless
you wish to confuse yourself. The most distinctive expression of
Nietzsche’s thought is contained in Thus Spake Zarathustra, and in the
first few pages of it at that. Nietzsche sometimes confused his
psychological ideas with social or political ones, particularly in books
other than Zarathustra.
(This kind of mistake is easily made by a person who has been
brought up in a sane world.)
The idea of the Superman has nothing to do with politics. Nietzsche
may have thought it had, at least on occasion, but if so he was mistaken.
However, Nietzsche did not always make this mistake.
Where the State ceaseth, there beginneth that man which is
not superfluous: there beginneth the song of the necessary man,
the single, irreplaceable melody.
Where the State ceaseth—I pray you look there, my brethren!
Do you not see it, the rainbow, the bridge to the Superman?63
Nietzsche may sometimes have thought he was liking the German
aristocracy of his time and disliking the German bourgeoisie. In fact it is

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much simpler to suppose that he was disliking sanity. The “Last Man” is
recognizable as a sane person in a good state of mental health.
Alas! the day cometh when man shall no longer shoot the
arrow of his desire beyond man, when his bowstring shall have
forgotten its use! I say unto you: a man must have chaos yet
within him to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto
you: ye have chaos yet within you. Alas! the day cometh when
man shall give birth to no more stars. Alas! the day cometh of
that most contemptible man which can no longer contemn
himself.
Behold! I show you the Last Man.
What is love? What is creation? What is desire? What is a
star? asketh the Last Man, and he blinketh! …
Man still loveth his neighbour and rubbeth himself against
him; for one must have warmth …
A little poison now and then: for that causeth pleasant
dreams. And much poison at the last for an easy death.
They still work, for work is a pastime…. But they take heed,
lest the pastime harm them …
They have little lust for the day and little lusts for the night:
but they have regard for the health.
We have discovered happiness, say the Last Men, and they
blink.64
There are a few things in the thought of Nietzsche which appeal to
sane people. Perhaps he over-reacted against the orthodox religion of
his time and this may have made him sound more like an ordinary
hedonist than he was. “Do not be misled by otherworldliness!” says
Nietzsche, and the modern reader, who is not in the slightest danger of
being, says approvingly, “Ah, yes. There is no Outside. I do understand
that.” “Man must create his own values!” says Nietzsche. “But of
course,” says the reader, “What other values could there be?”
Nietzsche, like Christ, used symbols freely. The human race is not
good at psychology, and does not understand symbols. When,

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Nietzsche, for example, refers to “dancing” one must realize that to him
it probably meant primarily a quality of intellectual activity. Similarly
“wine” is most likely to refer to the intoxication of inspiration.
Nietzsche was certainly opposed to half-heartedness and repression;
but exhortations to full-bloodedness do not necessarily imply an
approval of physical pleasure. (Perhaps, sometimes, he thought they did,
but if so he was mistaken.) It is much simpler to suppose that what he
was primarily intending to convey was a total integration of the
personality. There is nothing in the first few pages of Zarathustra to
suggest that the Superman would be a hedonist (or a sadist).
What is the greatest thing ye can experience? It is the hour of
great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness is
loathsome to you, and your reason and your virtue likewise.
The hour in which ye say: What is my happiness worth! It is
poverty and uncleanness and despicable ease. Yet my happiness
should justify Being itself!
The hour in which ye say: What is my reason worth! Desireth
it knowledge as the lion his prey? It is poverty and uncleanness,
and despicable ease.
The hour in which ye say: What is my virtue worth! Not yet
hath it roused me to fury. How I weary of my good and mine
evil! It is all naught but poverty and uncleanness and despicable
ease! …
Man is a rope stretched betwixt beast and Superman—a rope
over an abyss.
Perilous is the crossing, perilous the way, perilous the
backward look, perilous all trembling and halting by the way.
Man is great in that he is a bridge and not a goal: man can be
loved in that he is a transition and a perishing.
I love them which live not save as under-goers, for they are
the over-goers.
I love them which greatly scorn for they also greatly adore;
they are arrows of longing for the farther shore.
I love them which seek no reason beyond the stars wherefore

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 they should perish, wherefore they should be sacrificed, but
which sacrifice themselves to the earth that the earth hereafter
may be the Superman’s.
I love him which liveth that he may know, and which seeketh
knowledge that hereafter the Superman may live: for thus he
willeth his own down-going.
I love him which worketh and deviseth to build an house for
the Superman, to prepare for him earth, beast and plant; for thus
he willeth his own down-going.
I love him which loveth his virtue: for virtue is the will to
down-going, and an arrow of longing.
I love him which reserveth no share of spirit for himself, but
willeth to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus in spirit he
crosseth the bridge.
I love him which maketh of his virtue his inclination and his
destiny: for thus for his virtue’s sake he willeth either to live on
or to cease to live.
I love him which desireth not too many virtues. One virtue is
more virtue than two, because it is so much the more a knot on
which destiny hangs.
I love him whose soul lavisheth himself, that neither requireth
nor returneth thanks: for he giveth ever and keepeth naught for
himself …I love all them which are as heavy rain-drops falling
one by one from the dark cloud that lowereth over mankind:
they herald the coming of the lightning, and they perish as
heralds.
Behold, I am an herald of the lightning and an heavy rain-
drop from the clouds: but that lightning is named Superman.65
Nietzsche himself did not claim to be the Superman, so there is no
point in objecting that the idea is invalid because Nietzsche had
headaches, nor indeed because he went mad.
Never yet has there been a Superman. I have seen both naked
—the greatest man and the least.

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 They are still far too like one another. Verily, even the
greatest found I—all too human!66
It is sometimes claimed that Nietzsche went mad (a) because he had
syphilis, and (b) because he thought too much. It should be pointed out
that you cannot hold both of these views simultaneously—or at least, if
you like the humorous implications of the syphilis idea, you cannot at
the same time say, “It only proves the human mind can’t stand the strain
of such extraordinary ideas.”
There is another argument about Nietzsche’s madness (and I repeat,
you cannot very well hold all of these attractive ideas at once). It is that
a precipitating factor was the lack of recognition from which he
suffered. “If only,” the argument runs, “he had realized that his books
were just on the verge of being appreciated—it would have made all the
difference. He would have liked this social compensation very much
and become quite well-adjusted.” One thing wrong with this argument is
that he already had quite a high degree of social recognition.
It seems to be doubtful whether appreciation was exactly what he
wanted, anyway. It seems to me probable that he wanted people to be
interested in not-sanity, and perhaps underestimated the universal hold
which sanity has on the human mind.
A light hath dawned on me. I need companions—living ones,
not dead companions and corpses which I may carry with me
where I will.
But I need living companions which follow me because they
desire to follow themselves—and to go to that place whither I
wish to go.67
A thousand goals have there been heretofore, for there have
been a thousand peoples. But the yoke upon the thousand necks
is lacking, the one goal is lacking. Mankind hath as yet no goal.
But tell me, I pray, my brethren: if a goal be lacking to
mankind, is not mankind itself lacking?68
There is one final stumbling-block in the thought of Nietzsche. This
is “eternal recurrence.” This is no doubt very difficult if you insist on

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taking it as a metaphysical dogma. But if one is permitted to ask, “What
was the psychological significance of this idea? What gave it its
emotional impact to Nietzsche?” one may see an answer in Joyful
Wisdom.
What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness
some day or night, and said to thee: “This life, as thou livest it at
present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also
innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every
pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the
unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again,
and all in the same series and sequence—and similarly this
spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this
moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will
ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!”
—Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and
curse the demon that so spake? Or hast thou once experienced a
tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him:
“Thou art a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!” If
that thought acquired power over thee as thou art, it would
transform thee, and perhaps crush thee; the question with regard
to all and everything: “Dost thou want this once more, and also
for innumerable times?” would lie as the heaviest burden upon
thy activity! Or, how wouldst thou have to become favourably
inclined to thyself and to life, so as to long for nothing more
ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?69
Here it is plain that the idea is connected with the existential
perception that the events of your life really exist. To normal
psychology, this is a rather dull statement. But it may not have appeared
dull to Nietzsche, and he may have used the idea of eternal recurrence to
express the emotional force which it had to him.

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 Chapter 14: Why the World Will Remain Sane
I met a man in a place that was something like a subterranean tube
tunnel and something like a deserted railway waiting-room in the
middle of the night.
It was impossible to see whether there was an outlet concealed
anywhere behind the labyrinths of tiles and painted walls, but a biting
wind blew from somewhere. There were a few other people sitting
huddled up or pacing up and down. They looked too frozen to say much.
“Look here,” I said to the man. “Why do you go on staying here?”
“Oh, it’s not bad,” he said, blowing on his fingers. “We keep very
warm really. You get more used to it as you get older. Young people
have crazy ideas about trying to find an exit, but they settle down.” (He
nodded knowingly at some of the huddled shapes.)
“But, my dear fellow,” I said, “you aren’t warm at all. You’re grey in
the face and one of your fingers is so frost-bitten it’s about to drop off.”
“Oh well, in a sense, that may be true,” he said, a little
uncomfortably. “But most people are all right and adjust to things.
Maybe I find it a little more difficult than most but that’s just something
to do with my upbringing which has affected my metabolism. It’s my
physiology, you see. Nothing is actually wrong with the place as such.”
“But the faces … when you can see them through the wrappings—can
you say you know a happy person?”
“Yes, I can. There’s my daughter. She’s eighteen months old. She
says ‘I’m happy’ all the time. It was the first thing we taught her to say.”
“You wouldn’t be interested in finding an exit, then?”
“Well, obviously it would be escapism, wouldn’t it? The very word
‘exit’ implies that…. I can’t believe we’re here just to give up and get
out. It’s up to us to assert the warmth and richness of the here and now.”
(Here the wind blew a little harder.)
“It might be warm outside,” I said. “Things might be happening
there.”
“Oh well, it’s up to you to prove that if you want me to be interested.
Why should I give up what I’ve got here?”

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 “What have you got, then?”
“Interests. There are lots of things to do here. Like counting the
cracks in the walls and stamping one’s feet. Good for you, that is.
Circulation.”
“There might be even more interesting things somewhere else.”
“Oh well, I don’t know that, do I? Much more likely it wouldn’t
nearly be so healthy and interesting.”
“But even if someone did know a way out of here, he could only
prove to you that the other place was better if you’d come and leave
your interests to find out.”
“Exactly. That’s what I said.”
“Does anyone ever look for a way out?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly what you mean by looking. There are a
few chaps called scientists who measure up bits of the walls sometimes,
but it’s more and more a specialist job and they reckon a few yards of
wall is all one man can take on. Not that there would be any point in
trying to study the whole wall at once. It can’t be done. Nobody tries.”
“You could make a battering-ram,” I said reflectively. “With a few of
these benches. Then you could try ramming the walls to see if they gave
way. If everyone joined in …”
“Yes, I thought you’d suggest something like that,” he said, bitterly.
“People have other things to do besides helping you in your pet
schemes, you know. You can try to persuade them, of course. It’s a free
country.
Personally, I don’t care so long as I enjoy myself.”
As he did so, a clergyman emerged from a whistling tunnel at my
side. (Or perhaps he was a psychiatrist—or, indeed, a sociologist.)
“Did I hear you mention that old idea about getting out of here?” he
said, with a visible shiver. “Symbolism, you know. We’ve
demythologized all that now. They used to think there was something
outside this place—a literal outside, if you can imagine it! Of course it’s
quite valid as symbolism. This is the outside, here and now, if you live it
to the full….”
“It’s cold,” I said.

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 “Think of others,” he said reprovingly. “It’s really impressive the
way modern psycho-analysis has confirmed the insights of the New
Testament. Where two or three are gathered together, you know. It is an
indisputable fact that groups of people, huddled as closely as possible,
do feel much warmer. This is the basis of Group Therapy. It is also
known as the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“Where do you suppose the wind comes from?” I asked him.
“I’m not at all sure that I would agree that there is a wind. It’s really
only perverse and neurotic people who remark on it. And very young
people, of course. But if there is, then I’m sure it’s value depends
entirely on us—it is for us to make it into a meaningful part of the full
life by refusing to notice it.”
“The full life?” I said, and added, at the risk of seeming rude, “Full of
what?”
“Of communication,” he said patiently. “Of I=Thou relationships. Of
dependent interdependence.”
“Communication!” I said. “These people are so frozen they wouldn’t
be able to say more than a few words to anybody.”
“That’s a very narrow view, I think,” he said seriously. “It’s imposing
a utilitarian standard of reference on the variety and freedom of human
relationships. One must care about people as they are.”
“But surely,” I said, “if one cared about these people, one couldn’t be
content to see them huddled up in this dreadful place….”
But he looked most displeased, and murmured something into his
muffler—it sounded like “Arrogance.”
“Well, anyway,” I said, “surely you can’t reject the possibility that
this is all a dream?”
“Metaphysics,” he said, coldly. “Very nasty. Denial of life. People
might lose interest in counting the cracks and spend their time trying to
wake up instead.”
“Look,” I said suddenly. “I’m afraid I can’t stay here. I have a very
strong feeling that this is a dream and I’m about to wake up.”
“The methods of linguistic analysis have very valuable applications
to religion. Chiefly they enable us to see the futility of making

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meaningless statements about the transcendent (which is of course a
completely meaningless word). You cannot properly speak of waking
‘up.’ When I say something is going ‘up’ I mean that it is directed
towards a position which is located above its starting point. It is
meaningless to speak in this way about waking, because it would be a
confusion of categories to suppose that ‘waking’ is located above
‘sleeping.’ Consequently…”
But at this point, with a certain sense of relief, I awoke.

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 References
1. John A.T. Robinson, The New Reformation, S.C.M. Paperback,
1965, p.123.
2. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. III, The
Hogarth Press, 1957. p.133.
3. Ibid., Vol. III, pp.70–71.
4. Ibid., Vol. III, p.226.
5. Ibid., Vol. III, p.258.
6. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Oxford University
Press Paperback, 1958, p.70.
7. Richard Christner, Published by the National Association for
Mental Health, 1965.
8. MacNeile Dixon, The Human Situation, Edward Arnold and Co.,
1937, p.14.
9. Ibid., p.16.
10. Eve Curie, Madame Curie, Garden City Publishing Co. Inc.,
1900, pp397–398.
11. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I, p.17.
12. R. Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, Meridian
Books, 1956, p.17.
13. Archbishop of Canterbury, Sunday Times, December 20, 1964.
14. Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, Penguin Books,
1949, p.65.
15. Rosalind Heywood, The Infinite Hive , Chatto and Windus,
1964, p.224.
16. Quoted in William James, The Varieties of Religious
Experience, Random House, 1902, p.158.
17. Th. Jouffroy, quoted in William James, Varieties of Religious
Experience, Random House, 1902, p.173.
18. Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1942, pp.16–17.
19. David E. Roberts (on Karl Jaspers), Existentialism and Religious
Belief, Oxford University Press, New York, 1957, p.248.

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 20. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, Allen and Unwin Paperback,
1957, p.54.
21. John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God, S. C. M. Paperback, 1963,
pp.15–17.
22. John A. T. Robinson, The New Reformation, S.C.M. Paperback,
1965, p.108.
23. Ibid., p.33.
24. John A.T. Robinson, Honest to God, S.C.M. Paperback, 1963,
p.46.
25. Karl Barth, The Faith of the Church, Collins Fontana Books,
1958, p.13.
26. R. Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, Meridian
Books Paperback, 1956, p.85.
27. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Oxford University
Press Paperback, 1958, pp.70–71.
28. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, Collins Fontana Paperback,
1952, p.46.
29. Ibid., pp.27–28.
30. Ibid., p.47.
31. Ibid., p.48.
32. Ibid., p.47.
33. Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, Penguin Books,
1949, p.161.
34. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, edited by E. Anscombe and
P. T. Geach, Nelson, 1954, p.65.
35. Ibid., p.66.
36. Ibid., p.70.
37. Ibid., p.108.
38. Ibid., pp.86–87.
39. British Empirical Philosophers, edited by A.J. Ayer and R.
Winch, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952, p.445.
40. Ibid., pp.357–8.
41. Ibid., pp.496–7.

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42. C.D. Broad, Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953, p.34.
43. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922, para. 6.51.
44. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell
and Mott, para. 116.
45. Norman Malcolm, Dreaming, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959,
p.9.
46. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922, para. 6.44.
47. Ibid., para. 6.522.
48. Ibid., para. 6.54.
49. Ibid., para. 7.
50. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell
and Mott, 1958, para. 133.
51. Ibid., para. 255.
52. Ibid., para.126.
53. W.H. Watson, Understanding Physics Today, Cambridge
University Press, 1963, p.15.
54. Reuben Benumof, Concepts in Physics, Prentice-Hall, 1965, p.6.
55. L.R.B. Elton, Introductory Nuclear Theory, Sir ISaac Pitman
and Sons, Ltd, 1959, p.4.
56. W.H. Watson, Understanding Physics Today, Cambridge
University Press, 1963, p.xi.
57. N.R. Hanson, The Concept of the Positron, Cambridge
University Press, 1963, pp.30–31.
58. James A. Coleman, Relativity for the Layman, Penguin Books,
1961, p.108.
59. Stephen Toulmin, The Philosophy of Science, Hutchinson and
Co., 1960, p.12.
60. Letter to Robert Hooke, 1679.
61. C.S. Lewis, Miracles, Collins Fontana Paperback, 1947, p.113.
62. Charles Guignebert, Jesus, University Books, 1956, p.360.

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 63. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by A. Tille,
J.M. Dent and Sons, 1960, p.43.
64. Ibid., p.9.
65. Ibid., pp.6–8.
66. Ibid., p.83.
67. Ibid., p.13.
68. Ibid., p.51.
69. F. Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.,
1964, pp.270–1.

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 An Open Letter to Young People
To be a genius has never been too easy, granted the tendency of the
human race to like frustrating them. It is no easier in this century than
any other time.
In fact, it is rather more difficult, as in this century it is believed that
an unrecognised genius is impossible.
However, I have in Oxford a place in which it is possible to carry on
the struggle for survival, and I am looking for people to join me. There
are at present too few of us, and this makes the struggle for survival
even more difficult.
I cannot give a brief summary of my ideas; they are original, and that
means they are difficult to communicate. However, I have written a
book, The Human Evasion, which while containing a rather small
fraction of what I think, does give an introductory impression of my
outlook. If you find this too uncongenial, I think you should not bother
to get in touch with me to find out any more.
If, on the other hand, having read the book, you do want to know
anything more about what I think, and to see whether you would like to
join us, there is no alternative to coming to Oxford for a time.
Please write to me, in the first instance, care of the publishers of this
book.

CELIA GREEN
Institute for Psychophysical Research
118 Banbury Road
Oxford, England

Don’t bother writing unless you’ve read every IPR book you can find.
Casual requests for information probably won’t be answered.
—Mitch < http://www.thehub.com.au/%7Emitch/ >

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