Brief Notices

BRIEF NO'l'ICES Idea-Men of Today. By V1NcE,NT EDWARD SMITH. Milwaukee: Bruce, 1950. Pp. 434 with index. $5.00. President Hutchins when at Chicago University once enunciated the principle that ideas should be given equal importance with facts. In his context it ,,would seem that he meant that our society was too pragmatic and not sufficiently interested in great ideas. But one might appropriate his statement to point up a significant phenomenon, namely, that the ideas of yesterday have a startling propensity for becoming the facts of today. Since some of the facts of today, such as the existence of the menacing Soviet Empire, are distinctly terrifying, humanity might today be much more serene if these horrendous facts had been previously recognized and choked off in their larval state as ideas. " How many books, lost today in libraries, have brought about ... the revolution which we now see with our eyes," wrote Lacordaire. President Roosevelt had never read Das Kapital,, the book which Karl Marx toiled over in the British Museum while his malnourished family fought off the bill-collectors and Friedrich Engels paid the rent. He did not have to. In the space of a century, the idea of Das Kapital, incubated by Lenin, watered by violence, had become the monstrous fact of Soviet Russia. Goethe's Faust aptly describes this transition in the passage which commences: "It stands written: 'In the beginning was the word! ' . . . " in which Faust goes on to transform that statement to, " In the beginning was the mind," then to " In the beginning was force," and finally to, " In the beginning was the deed! " It is only too plain in our contemporary world how words have begotten ideas, ideas have begotten force, and force has produced monstrous facts. If only for this reason, namely, that ideas produce facts, it 1s timely that Professor Vincent Edward Smith of Notre Dame should have published a book on Idea-Men of Today, that in their ideas, fantastic and unreal though they may often seem, we may anticipate what may well be, unless supplanted by other ideas, the facts of tomorrow. We may gain some inkling with what ruthless force ideas can be transformed into social facts from the words of Pascal: "Never does one do harm so fully and so gaily as when one does it out of conscience." However, it would be wrong to prejttdge such ideas unfavorably, nor does Professor Smith do so in his survey of fifteen contemporary thinkers, including Dewey, Santayana, Whitehead, Russell, Freud, Marx, Bergson, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Heidegger and Jaspers. The treatment of each is preceded by a succinct and interesting biography, followed by an objective exposition of their ideas as contained in their works, and concluded by a 418 BRIEF NOTICES 419 critique addressed from the point of view of contemporary Catholic philosophical thought. It is often reproached to Catholic manuals that in their expositions of philosophical doctrines other than their own the opponents are given short shrift. Their life's work is summarized in a few lines, their error is skewered in a single sentence, and the guillotine is ready for the next victim. This is somewhat shocking to those who consider these men great thinkers and the problems they have suscitated worthy of a lifetime of study. Such an attitude can, perhaps, be justified by St. Thomas' delineation of the twofold office of the wise man: first, to meditate upon and enunciate the truth; secondly, to attack the contrary falsehood (Contra Gentes I, I). The ordinary student is doing well if he can get some positive grasp of the truth, let alone refute contrary errors. However, if he is to be more representative of that truth he must be able to confront contrary opinions. Furthermore, he must give these opinions a fair hearing. We feel that Professor Smith has rendered a signal service by the accomplishment of this somewhat Herculean task, that of bringing the unending maze of contemporary thought within reach of the under-graduate and educated layman, and doing so in a fair and objective way. At the price of enormous industry and patience he has methodically, and, one might say, sympathetically, studied the works of...