112 Foundations of Democratic Dogma
“Gone, clean gone,” we are told, “is the supposedly neces-
sary rational basis for the whole magnificent scheme of
thought which has dominated the world for over a thousand
years,” that scheme of thought of which we have found
Thomas Mann writing. Science, we are told, has demol-
ished that structure with which our values, our democratic
dogmas of rights and justice, have been bound up. But these
realities, or values by which the construction had life—they
are found to persist.
“The values are there,” we are told. “Even the complete
mechanist cannot escape them . . . he must acknowledge
that the ecstasy of beauty, the overpowering awe that some-
times seizes upon reflection and the rapture of love are facts
that have the utmost value for men.” The values are there.
“We find, moreover, that some values are higher than oth-
ers—there is a scale of values. Some are ends in themselves
and some only means to ends, and the higher among them,
by universal consent, are the values of truth, beauty, love
and goodness.”
Thus, he concludes, “science, in taking stock of the world
is brought up against the existence of values and must ac-
knowledge them. The search for truth for its own sake,
irrespective of apparent value; the realization of the exist-
ence of value as apparent fact; and then the adjustment of
mental knowledge and of the control born of knowledge, to
the value-charged scheme of human thought—that is the
new humanism.” Yes, that is the new humanism with which
so much of modern scientific thought presents us. But I
think it is an amiable illusion which the terrible realities of
the last decades have torn to shreds. With Thomas Mann,
ɪ believe that these values cannot be detached from the theo-
logical and philosophical structure with which they have
been bound up and continue to live.
One cannot but smile at some of the things that are going