The Quest for Basic Values

by JAMES CROSWELL PERKINS

WHILE W. T. Stace professes to believe in no religion at all, his high-minded devotion to certain basic values is of the very essence of the religious spirit.

The attempt to read purpose entirely out of the universe raises some acute problems. Just how a wholly meaningless and purposeless universe could produce a person like Professor Stace with his earnest purposes of courage, honesty, and honor is hard to imagine. Man and his values are part and parcel of the universe, and to assume that goodness and kindness are foreign to the character of ultimate reality seems unwarranted. The thinking which divorces the world of nature from the realm of values can be just as wishful as that of the dogmatic religionist. To believe that the world was not created for the gratification of our undisciplined desires does not necessarily mean that the universe is completely indifferent to beauty, goodness, truth, and love.

Stace, like the Marxians and others, caricatures the Christian religion by his emphasis on its cruder and more naïve expressions. Thus, his allusion to the student who said he would commit crimes if he did not believe in heaven and hell, the notion that religion is a kind of crutch, and the remark that “those who talk of a new religion are merely hoping for a new opiate,” disclose a somewhat superficial acquaintance with Christianity. (Should new ventures in philosophy, science, and the arts be dismissed on similar grounds?) Dr. Stace fails to do sufficient justice to the critical, prophetic, and revolutionary functions of the religious consciousness. High religion is not a quest for opiates and sedatives, but rather a disinterested attempt to discover and do the will of God.

The creed which affirms the “ultimate irrationality” of everything is not merely the product of the modern mind. “Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless” is an affirmation that is strikingly reminiscent of the Book of Ecclesiastes.

We are grateful to Dr. Stace for his lucid, cogent, and thought-provoking presentation of a philosophy whose basic principles are well over two thousand years old.