Ends and Means

Extract

That “to raise up hatred against hatred is to prepare the ruin of political life”; that violence is a boomerang, the attempt at violent repression of an evil merely causing it to spring up elsewhere with renewed virulence; that “Christendom will re- create itself by Christian means, or it will collapse completely”; in a word, that the “problem of means ... it of absolutely central importance’ ‘; and that only the Christian means of patience, unity, love, can do anything to save the world; these are the leading ideas in M. Maritain’s preface to Professor Mendizabel’s Aux Origines d’une Tragedie. They also form, with certain obvious reservations, the leading lines of thought in Mr. Aldous Huxley’s latest, and greatest, book; and one notes them here because of this sometimes startling similarity, extending almost to verbal parallelism.

About the goal of human endeavour, that we ought to be advancing towards an age of liberty, peace, justice and brotherly love, “there is and for long has been a very general agreement. Not so with regard to the roads which lead to that goal.” And if we search for a definition of the ideal we ought all to be becoming, we shall find here too that; if “the enslaved have held up for admiration now this model of a man, now that,” on the other hand, “at all times and in all places, the free have spoken with only one voice.”