{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to read to you some sentences which reflect this concern of the country's tradition and society with the issue of war and peace. A strange story. When John Adams and Jefferson died on the same day--July 4th, 1826, 50 years after the Declaration of Independence, on the very same day--Daniel Webster was asked to commemorate, and he had the greatness of Thucydides by making John Adams give the speech on July 4th, 1776, of which we have no records. So he made it all up, you may say, himself. But just as the famous oration of Pericles given to the Athenians in 429 is immortal, so I think Daniel Webster's speech is not an invention. But he actually does bring to life what was on the mind of the colossus of independence, Jo- -- John Adams, the second president of the United States. And so I think, although it is not in the sources the idea which -- Webster makes -- puts into the mouth of John Adams, deserves your attention.

He says:

"Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote on independence."

Then he goes on. I shall not read the whole -- very eloquent speech. Then he says:

"For myself, having 12 months ago in this place moved you that George Washington be appointed commander of the forces, raised -- or to be raised for defense of American liberty, may my right hand forget her cunning or my 12 teeth to the roof of my mouth if I hesitate or waver in the support I gave him."--George Washington, that is--"The war then must go on."

And before, he said:

"Do we intend to violate that most solemn obligation ever entered into by men, that plighting before God of our sacred honor to Washington, when putting him forth to incur the dangers of war, as well as the political hazards of the time -- times, we promise to adhere to him in every extremity with our fortunes or -- and our lives. I know there is not a man here"--in this Co- -- Continental Congress--"who would not rather see a general conflagration sweep over the land or an earthquake sink it, than one jot or tittle, or that plighted faith hurled to the ground."

My point had been, as you know, that the society of any body politic is held together by the unity by experience at war and the experience of peace, and

that where you ever have lived in a -- nearly at war, your fruits--as in a case of the frontier war, or the Whiskey Rebellion, or what have you, in a -- at the frontier, perhaps--that's mere war. No peace even considered between the red Indians, for example, and the white man at times. And where you have only peace, as most of you try to live it now, you have no -- only a mythical existence. It is, I think, no accident that people talk so much about mythology today, because we, the modern man, with his car and his drugstore, is deeply sunk in mythology. Because "myth" means not to know when, and not to know where. Not to know which is -- are your fathers, and not to know what are your children, and to be somewhere in an empty time, and an empty space, just in your own time. Now you have no own time. That doesn't exist. You have only the time between your father's generation and the next generation.

And so I feel that the quotation from Webster, although it is his own doing, brings home to you this very strange fact that Washington came first, and the Continental Congress found itself pledged to the commander-in-chief and his army, and so they had to go forward with the establishment of the independent order of the 13 colonies for the future. You can't go to war without having already in your loins, you see, the power to create something beyond the war. And perhaps this brings home to you this fact that in reality, of course, war and peace seem to be divided -- divisible. You hear of ind- -- peace is indivisible, war is indivisible. The main point of my whole plea with you is that any s- -- nation, any society can only live as long as it is -- cannot divide its wars from its peaces, and its peaces from its wars.

And here the claim of Webster, put into the mouth of Adams, is that with the pledge to Washington, with asking him to take over the defense of all the 13 colonies, the independent United States are already established. And what is following now, the Declaration of Independence, is a consequence of an act that has already gone on a year earlier. And so that we declare what already has happened. And since you are very often of the -- of the mythological opinion that the Declaration of Independence is the beginning of everything, that people then were free to do or not to do as they please, I want to warn you, this isn't so. The commitment was in making George Washington commander-in-chief of a colonial army. And this, I think therefore, is the historical right of Webster in his -- in his creation.

The second point I would leave with you, because I think it is a thing on which I want you to write a paper, is that the same Daniel Webster, in his famous reply to Haynes -- you have heard of this, from 1830, "Daniel Webster's Reply to Haynes." It's not like {Hanes} Hall, but you have the "y." Who is Mr. {Hanes}, by the way, in whose house we live? Does anybody know? I would like to know it. Can anybody instruct me? No? Perhaps the bursar. Do you know, Page?

(A great constitutional theorist, {Charles Grover Hanes}, who wrote American constitutional law and on natural law, a very -- very --).

Oh. I know, I know. I didn't know we had the honor here of representing his name in this hall. Thank you.

(He was a professor here { }.)

Sure. The -- Reply to Haynes. And I want you to write a paper and hand it in to me on April 15th or 16th, in which you go over his remarks on the western frontier and the so-called internal improvements, beginning with the Cumberland Road, and with education, and the -- right of the public lands, because it brings out the point I tried to make here, that from the beginning, there was more than the -- the central government, and -- an army, and the 13 colonies. There was always a third party. And I tried to tell you that we again have this enormous display of military might outside the 49 states of the Union, and that I thought it was dodging the issue by giving statehood to Alaska instead of giving some status to our allies. And that is unsettled. As it was, it remained unsettled in 1783. I reminded you of Vermont, and then of the Northwestern Ordinance. And so it has been after every war that a mighty territory remained, you see, to be disposed of by a common policy of the people meeting in Washington under the auspices of Uncle Sam. And so I'll just read you some sentences from this Reply to Haynes:

"What interest," asks this gentleman from South Carolina, "has South Carolina in a canal in Ohio?"

"Sir, this very question is full of significance. It develops a gentleman's whole political system. Its answer expounds mine."

"Here we differ. I look upon a road over the Allegheny, a canal around the falls of the Ohio, or a canal, or railroad from the Atlantic to the western waters, as being an object large and extensive enough to be fairly said to be for the common benefit. The gentleman thinks otherwise, and this is the key to open his construction of the powers of the government. He may well ask, `What interest has South Carolina in a canal in Ohio?' On his system, it is true. She has no interest. On this -- that system, Ohio and Carolina are different governments and different countries, connected here, it is true, by some slight and ill-defined bond of union, but in all main respects, separate, diverse. On that system, Carolina has no more interest in a canal in Ohio than in Mexico. The gentleman, therefore, only follows out his own principles."

"Sir, we narrow-minded people of New England do not reason thus. Our notion of things is entirely different. We look upon the states not as separated, but as united."

"Sir, if a railroad or a canal beginning in South Carolina, and ending in South Carolina appear to me to be of a national importance, and national magnitude believing, as I do, that the power of government extends through the encouragement of works of that description, if I were to stand up here and ask, `What interest has Massachusetts in a railroad in South Carolina?' I should not be willing to face my constituents."

This, I think, is then a permanent or perpetual problem in the Constitution of this country, that it has always outrun after a war its soil problems, and that the war has been so overwhelming in opening new territorial horizons, you see, that it took half a generation before the people even began to discuss openly what should be done after -- with the results of the war, so to speak. This has been true, if you think of the Philippines, which in 1898 were gotten -- when were they -- did they get their independence? When did the Phili- -- Philippines got their --?

('46.)

Wie?

('46.)

Ja. And of course, they are still our wards, and they are not independent in the sense that we can simply say that we are disinterested in their survival. If Mr. Mao would la- -- try to land in the Philippines, I wonder what I -- we would be honor-bound to -- you see, to do.

So the question of the Pacific, of course, is an unsolved problem. The question of our air bases is -- are unsolved problems. And we ended up by saying that the transformation of foreign aid into mutual aid brings out this question, because where there is mutuality, the thing begins, you see, to be made -- and form a part of our own existence, of our own constitution. You can't speak of "mutual," you see, without en- -- getting us engaged and involved into something unpredictable.

I want you to write a paper on the applicability of Mr. Webster's principles in 1783 and today. And if anybody wants to enlarge on this for other situations--after the end of any war, 1845 or 1898--he's very welcomed to do this. Especially also 1919, because I want you to penetrate the concrete issue of Daniel Webster's reply to Haynes, and to see that he has put his finger on something that goes far beyond his time. And I think one of the -- uses of such a course as this would be that you learn to move from one such concrete case to other equally important cases, and discuss their analogy, and their dissimilarity. I have no thesis to sell here. You can say as -- what you please about your own -- or -- and

have your own opinion about the matter. But I want you to start from Daniel Webster's Reply to Haynes, which you find in most editions of famous orators, famous speeches of the United States. There are a number of such collections. I have not found a special collection of Mr. Webster's own speeches only. So you will have to look in the library for some collections, you see, of famous spe- -- there are any number of such collections of famous -- American orators, international, too. This volume, which I have here, I give you the -- give you the title, for example. The World's Best Orations, from the Earliest Periods to the Present Time came out in St. Louis and Chicago in 1899, so it's very old. It's alphabetically organized so Mr. Webster comes at the end, 10th volume. But I think you will find many editions of this speech which, as you know, made him the leader of the -- of the Whigs in the Congress and established his reputation for another 20 years.

I have been on purpose very outspoken in telling you that the continuity between war and peace has not been solved so far in the history of the United States. But that isn't to say that there is only a negative aspect of this lack of solution, this lack of keeping the war before, as in peacetime, and vice versa. It means that the United States, from the very beginning, were a part of a wider world. And I think that this period, from 1800 to 1950, has seen a struggle to develop the United States as a separate entity, and that in the end, we can say, "Fortunately, it has failed to do so." The United States to this day have been shot into infinite space, as the people said at the days -- or in the days of the Louisiana Purchase, "into infinite space." And there is no reason for you or me to believe that the United States will ever develop this kind of Chinese Wall, which the nationalism of the peoples in Europe have tried to establish around themselves before World War I.

In 1913, we had a situation in which all these states in Europe thought themselves, at random, free to go to war or not to go to war, you see, which is the expression of a dream of sovereignty. And a certain gentleman in America had written his book on the state--in 1889, I think--on this very topic. He said, "It's impossible that all these sovereign states can stand alone, everyone by himself, dreaming up a separate and individual national existence. Something is bound to break." And because he was the only man in the educate- -- among the educated peoples in the law, in constitutional law, in the philosophy of political science, who had foreseen it, he quite rightly became president of the United States and founded the League of Nations. That's Woodrow Wilson. It is his immortal merit that he's the only man in prewar days in the legal and political science profession who said, "This is intolerable, the way in which all the other countries of the world, except the United States, you see, had established around them a mental ivory tower" or a mental sovereignty, a philosophy of "You can do as you please." "Might goes before right." You can express it in -- in a little too simple terms. But

it is much more that the Church -- the Christian Church, philosophy, the science had become an endowment of the national soil, so to speak. That if you spoke German, you had to be German-minded, and if you were an Englishman, you had to be English-minded. All the things you believe now of Europe still, that because a man is an Italian, he has to be a Roman Catholic. We spoke about this before, this illusion that the soil makes the mind and the soul of man. And -- at the very moment when this poison is reaching into America, as of today, when you also are told that you are just Californians, or Americans, the world has of course outwitted you and we are shot into infinite space again, with the help of the Sputnik, and with the help of the Atlas, and with the help of those things that remind you that we are not alone in America, you see, but that this little continent of ours is a part of the globe.

And so I think that at this moment, there is a great cultural lag in your consciousness, because you think that finally America has arrived at being a nation. And, so to speak, lagging behind Europe by 40 years, the nations of Europe destroyed themselves in 1914 by thinking so--and now the Americans--and as an afterthought, say of themselves, for example, that there is an American philosophy. I myself should know--I've been a professor of philosophy, ironically enough. And I didn't go to the meeting of this philosophy association after they had a -- as their topic one year, five years ago, the topic, "American philosophy." And I said, "That's the end of the world" that has come upon us. If philosophy, which has always been the wisdom of this world as a whole, if Plato and Aristotle now are abused to write an American philosophy, just because we believe that we won the war, which as you see can -- now is very doubtful, then I'm through with this kind of philosophy. That's just nationalization, you see, and has nothing to do with the truth anymore. This is not philosophy. That's just vaingloriousness, vanity. And you find this all the time. "American philosophy." As though this was permissible. "American religion." I -- gave you a book, you see, not the Religion in America. No! American Religion! Now, of course, nobody can have a religion if it's an American religion. Then he has no religion, because then he has made an idol, America, into his god. If there is a God, obviously God created mankind. And He didn't create the Americans first. Despite the committee.

So gentlemen, and ladies. The situation is very funny. In reality, as you see from Mr. MacMillan's trip to -- to Russia at this moment, and from our missiles, and from our satellites around the moon and the sun, we are far beyond any possibility of forgetting that the United States are a very small part of the globe indeed. They are not even South America, as Mr. Nixon had to experience. And -- it's a very small country. And it's one-tenth of the globe. And the globe is there upon us, mightily. And now to -- that the educated people in this country at this moment try to form an American society, with an American philosophy,

and an American religion is just too bad. Because their workers, who are outpricing themselves out of the world market, for example, they have to starve if they -- if they don't stay within the world economy, for example.

And -- so it is as -- used to be with the Loyalists, in 1776, it is the educated people at this moment who form the -- the cultural lag. The real situation, after 40 years of world tension is obviously that we are within global disorder, which has to be turned into a global order, and that every thought has to be given to this. And the private occupation of the professors, and the journalists, and the novelists in this country still is to go on with the 49th and the 50th state of the Union. That is, to dream up a self-secluded -- you see, a seclusion of this country within its formerly very potent shores and frontiers. You were, of course, protected by the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean so long; but obviously, just this very protection on which all this isolationism was based, just this has disappeared. And you only have to look at the Pole -- at the North Pole and at the Antarctic to know that the -- in the next war, Canada will be the Belgium of the First World War, or would be the Belgium of the First World War. That is, the whole thing would go, you see, from north to south, and it would never go from east to west.

Europe is -- if you want to be saved, gen- --- ladies and gentlemen, settle in Europe. The Russians are not going to destroy Europe. If they -- if they should attack at all, they obviously will come to Detroit. Well, it's not to laugh. I mean, it's quite serious that the geography has undergone a complete reversal, you see, and what has been the east-west, you see, view of mankind for the last 400 years, now is given up and abandoned, and reverted into a north-south view of -- of our problems of life.

I only mean to say that you may understand why I'm pressing home this fact, because I think this has been the problem of the United States from its founders' days, that its real existence was larger than its organization. And this is why I asked you to write this analogous -- analogous paper on Mr. -- the Reply to Haynes, because it was exactly the same problem at that time for the East, you see, what had to be done to the country beyond the Alleghenies.

And I think that is quite encouraging. It has been with us all the time. And against this background, that in this middle age, from 1776 to 18- -- 1945, or as of today, the -- the United States have never been able to catch up with its own manifest destiny, that there was always already the next geographical expanse looming on the horizon. We can now turn to the attempts of the people of this country to replace this lack of solution of their problems by older forms of unity, and by regional forms of unity, and--as we shall see today--by industrial, economic problems of cooperation.

So let's leave here at this moment the relation of war and peace. And let us only sum up what this relation means. And then I'll go back and show you the problem of the religious body, which prevailed as the solution of the American situation down to the Declaration of Independence. And then let us go on to the industrial problem, which more often today is called the social problem, but which is not inclusive enough.

So we have 1620 from the Pilgrim fathers to 1776 a religious body. I'll come to this right away. We have from 1776 on, an attempt to call -- speak of a secular state, and a secular nation. And today we speak of prosperity and of full employment, and thereby say that the society which we form in these United States is based on production, on consumption. And that's a different story altogether.

What's the difference between war and peace? Gentlemen, it's something very similar--pardon me, the ladies of course at this moment are very important. In war, the sexes separate, and in peace, they are together. This looks very simple, but it isn't. It is -- cuts very deep. In war, the sexes separate. The soldiers go to the front. And therefore war is a hardship. But a man is more of a man in war, and a woman is more of a woman in war, because they are comple- -- so to speak, called forth to do their utmost.

And so war and peace treat the sexes, the -- our togetherness, our relationships differently. All -- the same is true across the generations. The young men go to war. The old men, the senators, stay behind. There is also a division between old and young, those who can bear arms, and those who cannot bear arms. And the simplest -- the simplest condensation of this war-and-peace situation has been given by the famous { } Spartan poet, Tyrtaeus. He has the choir of the Spartans singing three -- in three choirs, you see, divided in three choirs. The old -- the adult, grownups, and the young, the children. And the first sing, "We have done great deeds"; the adults sing, "We are doing great deeds"; and the young said, "We'll do greater deeds." That is, the -- in wartime, the generations -- secede, so to speak, and everybody is thrown into his -- his niche, into his special groove. Young -- the -- before the military age; then the people of military age, between 20 and 45 or 50; and then the old. And they all are needed. One for the recruiting and the reserve, the middle for the defense, and the third for the counseling, and for keeping together the unity of the war front and the home front.

This to you looks very foreign. It's very strange. Fifteen years ago, it was just this situation of this country. But to you, it seems quite unnecessary to remind you of this, because you have the feeling it never happens to you. I think you are wrong, because it is eternal, this di- -- separation, this division of the

three generations and of the two sexes, in war and peace.

Now if you come to the other two possibilities of articulating the social order--that's religion, or the Church, and its many forms, it's innumerable denominational varieties--in the Church, we try to form one body, the body of Christ, or one people, the chosen people. There are only these two forms, I think, Jews and Christians -- and imitations of this in the religious order. Every one speaks of the body of Christ in the singular. The ecumenic movement today, the Catholic Church, the chosen people, whatever you take, it is always a singular. In war -- in peace, you always have two forms, two states of aggregate of the body politic. You have war, you see, soldiers; and civilians. You can see that. You have the division between women and men, and the unity between women and men. In peace, they are together; in war, they are separated.

Now the Church -- is an attempt to prevail through the states of war and peace, and to retain the ultimate unity of the human fabric, you see, regardless whether we shoulder a musket, or we plow the field, or we sew a -- a carpet or a piece of linen. That is, the body of -- in religion is an attempt to be stronger than all the divisions of society. And it has been in this country then, into the 19th century and to this day, has been a -- been made a strong attempt to inculcate this unity of the human society as one body, so that it might triumph beyond the divisions in war and peace--and of course beyond the divisions of race, color, creed, and whatever -- what have you, one body.

In the social order of our industrial society, the thing is again very different. We -- develop constantly new industries, new fields of human action. And not one of these modern employments and jobs can claim your final allegiance, because not one -- no oil company, no silver mine, no aircraft factory, no orangegrove farmer can grant you full-time employment forever. May have to shut down, you see. People may stop eating oranges. This is -- I shouldn't say this in this country. But as you may know, there was a great danger that this might happen, because only a year ago, the spraying of the oranges, you see, stopped here, because the people in Europe no longer wanted to buy the sprayed orange peels, because many cases of poisoning happened, because people use the orange peels for jam over there, you see, and ran into great trouble. So now we have reestablished international friendly relations about Sunkist by forbidding the spraying of these oranges, which -- at least those which are exported.

Only to show you how frail, how fragile all our industrial relations are. The society of which you usually think--when you speak of social reforms, of social policies, of a social worker, of a slum clearing, of all the things that you connect with the social order today at first sight--you must add one word to all these arrangements, and all these fellow- -- cooperative fellowships, and all these

cooperations, that they are all of a transient nature. They are transient. And they are all in the plural. There are innumerable forms of this way of collaboration. And they are forming constantly every day new; and every day some of them perish.

So the social order of the 20th century is not that of an eternal, religious body. And it is not that what -- of an historical body that goes alternatingly to war under a president, you see, or a supreme commander, and then returns into peace. It's something quite different. It's a jellyfish that constantly tries to get ironclad. It's a constant change between dreadnought and jellyfish. And this goes literally, so far as you know, that we literally entered the last war still with dreadnoughts, and that now -- they are all given up. Even the English, who invented the dreadnought, no longer care for them at all. We have a few air carriers, and that's -- the rest is destroyers and small ships of all descriptions. And God save this country unless we build very, very, very, very quickly more Nautiluses. We'll be absolutely driven from the seas.

The -- the Russians have nearly a thousand submarines which can circle the globe, and we have one.

So the disappearance of all forms of collaboration and their reappearance in different shape is the essence of this industrial order which produces things. The order of production and consumption is mutable. The order of religion is immutable--or should be immutable, if it is one--because it means that man is the same through all the ages and has one destiny to fulfill. And the order of war and peace is in between. It is at least twofold, because it unfolds itself one -- in one direction towards war, and in the other direction towards peace. It's constantly changing between these two attitudes.

Now I think that's -- explains to you why I had to wait so long to tell you what I consider the -- being the social history of the United States from 1800 to 1950, because not one -- I told you at the beginning -- there's not one word that has been so bandied around and so mistreated as the word "social." Everybody does something with this little word, what he pleases. And you never get the eel by the tail. I think that if you look into your real nature, dressed and undressed, from the bathtub to the cemetery, you will discover that there are only these three possibilities of looking at the human order, the social order as we call it. One is that we are all images of our creator, and therefore, must form in some way one body politic. But since we do not, we call this body in anticipation, and that's the Church, or the chosen people. All the Jews and Christians anticipate--and mark you well--they anticipate -- they should anticipate the future state of unity between all men who care -- who reflect the faith of their creator. They don't. As you know, the terrible thing about the churches and reli-

gions at this moment is that they allow themselves to be treated as memorials of the past. As soon as the Jews do not expect the Messiah, they have ceased to be Jews. And as soon as Christians do not expect the last Judgment Day, they have ceased to be Christians. And -- yes?

(Isn't there a greater satisfaction in being just a man and not { }?)

Well, try to get out of it. You see, man as a near-natural thing is an animal. It is only your relation to the future, what you expect from the future, which makes what you so nicely call "a man." And the expectation of the future you can only have in a brotherhood of the whole race, because otherwise it would lead to World War III. That is, any man, as long as he speaks, thinks, and acts peacefully, must strive for a common order, in which you not only as yourself are included, but all men. Now by definition, you can say, to you a Moslem, or a Negro is not a man. That's up to you, Sir. Then you have, you see, a -- a certain kind of unity of the human race, which is limited.

(No, I don't. I don't. But { }.)

You cannot have -- be a man by yourself. That's impossible.

(Not by myself. But by the very nature of { } --.)

I don't know of any nature of it, Sir. God hasn't made us -- nature is seen outside. You and I, you see, we are listeners to a world which forces us to be -- you -- we are a creature. Now a creature is the opposite from a nature, you see. You think of nature -- of course you are a Rousseau boy. But I'm not. And I think history -- no historical man is, because in history, we are made tomorrow. Sir, what is to be written on your tombstone, you do not know. You are quite an unnatural being at this moment. You are waiting to fulfill yourself, and when you die, probably some of us will know who you were. But you don't know who you are. You don't -- I don't know who I am at this moment. I'm expecting the solution and the revelation. This is your -- you see, you are so naturalistic, you are so -- all scientifically dead, killed, by vitamins and { }, that you really think you are the sum of the parts of your bodies. You aren't, Sir. And you are not certainly anything that moves in your mind. But you are destiny. You live another several years, I don't know. You could die tomorrow, you can die 50 years. But it's all still in the future, who you are going to be. You can be a curse to the human race, and you can be a blessing.

({ } to you, Sir.)

What? { } say, it's very unpleasant. We can never rely on our nature. It

is no excuse that you say you have a nature so that you must kill. { } Then you have to give, just to -- just to cross out { }. Pull out your eye { }. You have no nature, Sir. This is our whole { }. Of course, I know. In history, there are only creatures to be.

(I -- I can't forget the continual emphasis on -- on our destiny. Sir, I don't believe in God. To me, religion is a -- a tremendous hampering { }. You may consider this --.)

Oh Sir. You are perfectly free to use all these terms as you please. You can't get out of this simple situation that I do not recognize at all that you know who you are. Because none of us does. And I -- if you would only come with me into tomorrow, we -- we can drop all these theological niceties. I don't care for the term "religion." The fact that the destiny of man is in the future, and--you can see this only too clearly: there has been a common destiny, or we become murderers and killers of each other, this is a simple fact of reality. It has nothing to do with -- with your or my wish of -- with any creed, Sir, to which you have to subscribe. But it is only the obstacle by which you will not admit this, is that you think you can sit here and define who you are. This you cannot do.

(I -- I really don't know if I pretend to be able to, only that I feel that our concept of the future differs. { } remarkably in that my future is, although influenced by the past, not determined by it.)

Oh, you deny this. Nobody can. Work with the past. Take all you have and melt it down, and do something { } -- a melting pot is based on the idea that there are traditions, that they are something given. But to hell with us if we don't make more out of it, or something different. Ja, but I mean, in -- in -- the -- the past becomes here in -- in this light of the future. And if we understand that all -- already John Adams, by invoking George Washington, you see, and Webster, by invoking the -- the rights of the frontiersmen, that they already saw the United States placed in a wider context than you would see if you only read the documents of 1775. By looking backward, we certainly are always more intelligent.

(My position is this, as you -- you say: Today, though we cannot determine what we are, we have nothing to say. You say, come tomorrow, and you'll tell me; tomorrow { }.)

Oh, no, but my dear man. Why are you in college? Because you think it's a better preparation for tomorrow than if you didn't. So you act only under the spell and the pressure of tomorrow. You never act under the pressure of the past if you are a healthy young man. But forget the past, and -- or you say, "It isn't

enough of a past," or "I have to transform what I have experienced before. It's not -- {this is} too narrow. I go to Mexico. I go as a construction man in the summer, because it isn't enough." You know all about the future. You have a cle- -- very clear vision of how full and how much more you should be than you are at this moment. Everybody has.

(Meanwhile, I'm saying though that I cannot know -- I cannot know myself today, and I will forego answering or dealing with the question by saying tomorrow or the future will help me find out what I am.)

You never will, because we only know each other, you see. A man may know his wife with whom -- the wife -- and the wife may know her husband. But the husband is not going to know himself, because that would he -- be quite an unlovable creature. And -- and a woman is not to know herself. And if you are ever -- have ever been in love, you know very well that this whole idea of "know yourself" is ridiculous.

(All I want to say is this: perhaps --.)

It's stifling; it's even soul-killing.

(We've made a full circle, you see. We come with you, and we walked into the future of the mind. Better -- then we're in the future. We walk there, we come to the same conclusion we're now about to come now, { }, that we will not be able to know ourselves.)

The self -- in this sense of self. The community, you see, supports us. In the -- within the community, the light is reflecting on us. Of course, we know each other. This -- I have never said that we know nothing. I'm not a member of the Know-Nothing Party.

(But where we stand now is in a very deep sense of fatalism.)

What of?

(Of -- of fatalism.)

Of fatalism?

(We're so very limited. Witness the approach of talking only about knowing more clearly about -- not about ourselves, but about the rest of mankind, before we --.)

Let me tell you a little anecdote. There was a -- wait a minute. There was a very famous Jewish philosopher, Hermann Cohen in -- Europe, in Germany. And a man in -- in Pal- -- in Israel, in Jerusalem has now written up his life. And he sent me this pamphlet. And it's very interesting. When Cohen was -- was 75, he walked -- took a walk with the -- one of his disciples, his younger friends, and asked him -- who was a very great mind in his own right -- asked him, "How long do you think the Messiahs will -- we'll have to wait for the Messiahs?" And this was in 1918. And this friend of mine with whom he walked--and I knew the story already--said, "Well, I don't know. Perhaps 70 years, perhaps 100."

And Cohen sighed, and said, "Oh, let -- make it 30. Make it 30. Then I may perhaps be able to see its -- the coming."

Now this impatience with the future, you see, is the contribution of every religious spirit, that you cannot wait. When George Fox founded the denomination of the Friends -- Society of the Friends, he said that all the other people waited for the coming -- second coming of Christ. But he wanted to act as though it already had happened. And all the Pentecostal sects, to whom all the decent people in this country now run, the uneducated, because they are deserted by the educated classes in this country in the most shameless fashion in their religious needs -- all these Pentecostal sects, the Jehovah Witnesses, they expect the coming. They do it ridiculously. They do it barbarously, you may say. But they are living souls. And you are not, because you think you can define yourselves in terms of science and the past. And that's so terrible, that again the educated people desert the good people of this earth. You are responsible for the future, together with them. And no philosophy of despair will -- will -- will lift you above -- over this abyss. You have fallen this side of the grave. You are already dead.

(What criterion do we create if we don't -- not have some notion of what we ourselves are? How do we go about this { } --?)

Well, Sir. Go to your minister, or your rabbi, or to your pope, or to go -- wherever you care to go. He'll tell you. This is not my business here. I'm only alluding to the fact that every one of us acts under an anticipation of the future. You act under the anticipation of a scientific future, which is repetitive, which just puts together combinations of genes, or whatever it is, and you tr- -- then treat yourself as a piece of raw flesh. And I think that mankind has proven by even admitting science that it goes places, that in every generation something utterly new has happened so far. This is our difference. That I have faith in the future, and you have only the faith of repetition. You believe that the past is your law. And nothing in history would have ever happened if this was so.