Christianity is without doubt the most disputatious of all religions. The Church was bom arguing, and Judaism was the first opponent which it wrestled with, like the infant Hercules, in its cradle. In modem times this venerable controversy has been pushed into the background by the more urgent battle against a rationalism, that in its many different guises has threatened orthodox Judaism no less than Christianity. But the old volcano, though not very active at the moment, is by no means extinct. Thanks to the labours over the last fifty years or more of Dr J. Klausner, an eminent professor of the Hebrew University at Jerusalem, it has been steadily building up pressure which has recently issued in a premonitory puff or rumble. This literary activity did indeed take place more than thirty years ago, and has been through a second and third edition since, but all that happened in modem Hebrew, which rendered it practically unavailable to the Christian reader, and therefore non-explosive as regards the Christian-Jewish controversy. It is only this year that it has appeared in this country in English—well, to be quite frank, in a quaint patois which is recognizable as a variant of the current language. According to a preface by the translator, the rendering of modem Hebrew presents special problems. We can well believe it; but they can scarcely be responsible for such unidiomatic, and at times incorrect, English as Dr Stinespring manages to achieve here. He would have served his author better if, besides submitting his translation to him and another Jewish scholar for correction, he had also taken the trouble to consult some suitable person who has English and not German for his mother tongue. Incidentally, we are curious to know what Hebrew words may lie behind such contraptions as ‘ethico-political’, ‘religio-spiritual’, ‘politico-material’, which creak at us from every other page.

Two books appeared in the course of this year, one by Professor Culler dealing with Newman’s life as a humanist, the other, edited by Fr Bouyer, publishing for the first time many of the autographical memoirs that show forth Newman very much as the delicately conscientious Christian. It would appear to be Professor Culler’s view that these two aspects in Newman’s character were never fully harmonized. In fact, one wonders whether, in the professor’s view, they could be harmonized, at least in the forms they took in Newman’s mind. So unharmonized were they in Newman’s early life, we are led to believe, that their conflict resulted in five crushing illnesses during his youth and early manhood. However, ‘as adolescence passed and as Newman moved into a religious position which was not distrustful of intellect, the conflict gradually resolved itself into the precarious balance which is achieved in the Idea of a University.’ But, though Professor Culler here says that the conflict resolved itself, it is obvious that he does not really believe that such a resolution ever took place. The author of the humanistic discourses in the Idea of a University is, according to Professor Culler, a survival of the vainglorious person who dabbled in un-Christian speculations, but who was suppressed in Newman’s youth from his conscious life, when he turned to religion. The author of the religious discourses in the same book is the other Newman, ‘the docile and submissive creature who emerged’ when the early crisis has passed. We are, then, to believe that the Idea of a University reflects two characters in rebellion against each other, one representing the spirit of humanistic and religious liberalism, the other pietistic and anti-liberal evangelicalism.

Electronic digital computers or ‘brains’ were originally designed, as we saw previously, for use in the computations which occur in business and in scientific research; they carry out at great speed ‘programmes’ of elementary arithmetical and logical instructions which have been precisely formulated in advance. But there are many scientists, from linguists on the one hand to neurologists on the other, who are not confronted with heavy computation but who are keenly interested in other applications of electronic computers. In this article I shall discuss briefly a few of these applications, because although they are of less immediate practical importance they are fascinating in themselves, and in one case at least they have helped in the formation of a new discipline, that of cybernetics, which is helping to break down a little of the excessive specialization which is the curse of modem science.

Machines which play games. The mathematical theory of games which has been developed in recent years can be applied to much more serious matters such as economics and even military strategy. The possibility of similar applications of game-playing machines may help to justify the time and money which have been spent on programming a computer to play such games as noughts-and-crosses, draughts, chess and two-handed whist.