Island

"But whether we shall be able to persuade you people to follow our example, or whether we shall even be able to preserve our tiny oasis of humanity in the midst of your worldwide wilderness of monkeys-that, alas," said Dr. MacPhail, "is another question. One's justified in feeling extremely pessimistic about the current situation. But despair, radical despair-no, I can't see any justification for that."

"Not even when you read history?"

"Not even when I read history."

"I envy you. How do you manage to do it?"

"By remembering what history is-the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma."

He turned again to the album. "Let's get back to the house in the Royal Burgh, back to James and Janet, and the six children whom Calvin's God, in His inscrutable malevolence, had condemned to their tender mercies. 'The rod and reproof bring wisdom; but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.' Indoctrination reinforced by psychological stress and physical torture-the perfect Pavlovian setup. But, unfortunately for organized religion and political dictatorship, human beings are much less reliable as laboratory animals than dogs. On Tom, Mary and Jean the conditioning worked as it was meant to work. Tom became a minister, and Mary married a minister and duly died in childbirth. Jean stayed at home, nursed her mother through a long grim cancer and for the next twenty years was slowly sacrificed to the aging and finally senile and driveling patriarch. So far, so good. But with A

"And to think," Will Farnaby commented, "to think that people complain about modern life having no meaning! Look at what life was like when it did have a meaning. A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time."

"Agreed," said Dr. MacPhail. "But mightn't there be a third possibility? Mightn't there be a tale told by somebody who is neither an imbecile nor a paranoiac?"

"Somebody, for a change, completely sane," said Susila.

"Yes, for a change," Dr. MacPhail repeated. "For a blessed change. And luckily, even under the old dispensation, there were always plenty of people whom even the most diabolic upbringing couldn't ruin. By all the rules of the Freudian and Pavlovian games, my great-grandfather ought to have grown up to be a mental cripple. In fact, he grew up to be a mental athlete. Which only shows," Dr. Robert added parenthetically, "how hopelessly inadequate your two highly touted systems of psychology really are. Freudism and behaviorism-poles apart but in complete agreement when it comes to the facts of the built-in, congenital differences between individuals. How do your pet psychologists deal with these facts? Very simply. They ignore them. They blandly pretend that the facts aren't there. Hence their complete inability to cope with the human situation as it really exists, or even to explain it theoretically. Look at what happened, for, example, in this particular case. Andrew's brothers and sisters were either tamed by their conditioning or destroyed. Andrew was neither destroyed nor tamed. Why? Because the roulette wheel of heredity had stopped turning at a lucky number. He had a more resilient constitution than the others, a different anatomy, different biochemistry and different temperament. His parents did their worst, as they had done with all the rest of their unfortunate brood. Andrew came through with flying colors, almost without a scar."

"In spite of the sin against the Holy Ghost?"

"That, happily, was something he got rid of during his first year of medical studies at Edinburgh. He was only a boy-just over seventeen. (They started young in those days.) In the dissecting room the boy found himself listening to the extravagant obscenities and blasphemies with which his fellow students kept up their spirits among the slowly rotting cadavers. Listening at first with horror, with a sickening fear that God would surely take vengeance. But nothing happened. The blasphemers flourished, the loud-mouthed fornicators escaped with nothing worse than a dose, every now and then, of the clap. Fear gave place in Andrew's mind to a wonderful sense of relief and deliverance. Greatly daring, he began to risk a few ribald jokes of his own. His first utterance of a four-letter word-what a liberation, what a genuinely religious experience! And meanwhile, in his spare time, he read Tom Jones, he read Hume's 'Essay on Miracles,' he read the infidel Gibbon. Putting the French he had learned at school to good account, he read La Mettrie, he read Dr. Caba-nis. Man is a machine, the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. How simple it all was, how luminously obvious! With all the fervor of a convert at a revival meeting, he decided for atheism. In the circumstances it was only to be expected. You can't stomach St. Augustine any more, you can't go on repeating the Athanasian rigmarole. So you pull the plug and send them down the drain. What bliss! But not for very long. Something, you discover, is missing. The experimental baby was flushed out with the theological dirt and soapsuds. But nature abhors a vacuum. Bliss gives place to a chronic discomfort, and now you're afflicted, generation after generation, by a succession of Wesleys, Puseys, Moodys and Billys-Sunday and Graham-all working like beavers to pump the theology back out of the cesspool. They hope, of course, to recover the baby. But they never succeed. All that a revivalist can do is to siphon up a little of the dirty water. Which, in due course, has to be thrown out again. And so on, indefinitely. It's really too boring and, as Dr. Andrew came at last to realize, wholly u