THE IDEAL SOCIETY

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22243, 6 November 1937, Page 20

THE IDEAL SOCIETY

Christianity, Communism, and the Ideal Society. By James Feibleman. Allen and Unwin. 419 PP(I3/6 net.)

The preface to this book states that the author hopes by means of it to affect the world of affairs. His thesis is that at the root of our troubles is a false philosophy, viz., nominalism, the doctrine that universals are fictions created by the individual mind and that physical particulars alone are real. Mr Feibleman traces this doctrine from its earliest beginnings in Greek thought through its mediaeval manifestations to its modern forms, such as the logical positivism of Bridgman, Wittgenstein, and the Austrian school. Mr Feibleman finds both Christianity and Marxian Communism defective as social gospels. Is there a possible third? Only if we have a standard of truth. This is not possible to a nominalist philosophy but to a valid realism, which, in the author’s view, can be established oh the basis of a Christian Platonism. This last, however, must avoid an error, ascribed to Christianity by Mr Feibleman, that our historic religion “derogates from the actual.” On the other hand, he thinks the Marxist philosophy is unsatisfactory in that it teaches violent revolution, • but sound in that it maintains that society is the individual goal. A third worldorder is demanded by the modern situation, and this order must be capable of embodying the valid elements of Christianity and Marxian Communism. The logical ethics of Charles Pierce, a friend of William James, show how such a social goal is possible. We have to assume that man exists for the sake of society and this latter for the sake of the next higher value, and so on till infinite value is reached. In social theory, this doctrine involves the subordination of the welfare of individual persons to the welfare of humanity. “The welfare of humanity in men must be subordinated to the welfare of a still more inclusive group, until finally the welfare of the most inclusive group is sought by means of mediation through the unlimited community.” If such a community is made the goal of action, we will find a solution of many of our present troubles. So Mr Feibleman’s attempt to influence world affairs ends in what is, in effect, not philosophy nor science, but in an anthroposophy whose “Ultima Thule” is a mystic-ally-conceived society, in whose wide embrace all human individuals are lost, rather than included.