Note 6 — JOCASTA

Deity to the collective-realist is reality as symbolic oneness; to the individual-realist, reality as rationalistic oneness. To the former therefore personality is an instrument for conceiving emotionally the mass character of this oneness; to the latter, an instrument for corroborating intellectually the individualistic character of this oneness. (Intellectual democracy as opposed to intellectual anarchy.) Mr. Lewis says: ‘We have a god-like experience in that only’ (personality). The collective-realist would say: ‘We have a god-like experience in that only’ (personality). The only difference between these two expressions is political. ‘Evidences of a oneness seem everywhere apparent,’ Mr. Lewis says. ‘But we need, for practical purposes, the illusion of a plurality.’ The ‘practical purposes’ are, presumably, the necessity of protecting this democratic oneness from the democratic mass: ‘plurality’ here means the plurality of the few. It is comprehensible, then, that Catholic thought should, by its scholasticism, appeal to Mr. Lewis—the political wisdom of an institution that keeps a small body of well-paid intelligentsia to administer Godhood to the not so individualistic, the not so well-paid worshipping mass. And Mr. Lewis is here at one with his rather more scholastic colleague in individualism, Mr. Eliot, who with his French co-littérateurs phrases the conflict between symbolic oneness and rationalistic oneness, or symbolic personality and rationalistic personality, more elegantly as the conflict between intuition and intelligence (between the feeling whole and the thinking whole, in Mr. Lewis’s language). Individuality to the individualist is thus an intellectual fiction, as to the collective-realist it is the oneness which is the fiction (‘Human individuality is best regarded as a kind of artificial Godhood’—Mr. Lewis. And again: ‘We at least must pretend not to notice each other’s presence, God and ourselves to be alone.’)—the difference here being merely the difference between a sentimentalized Tory absolute and a sentimentalized Communist absolute.