MORALS

No human society can endure without agreement on certain fundamentals, e.g., why man is in the world, what is his purpose here and how he should try to fulfill it. In the 20th Century, this agreement is weak and fuzzy. Scientists have contributed to the moral confusion.

To define the moral problem and to speculate on a solution was the purpose of M.I.T.'s panel on "Science, Materialism and the Human Spirit." Gentle Jacques Maritain, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, was not confused about his convictions on the subject. Twentieth Century Man, he said, is becoming "unable to believe anything but facts & figures and sense-data." Maritain found the basis for a moral order in a process of reason about the essences of God, man and things. He blamed not science itself for the 20th Century's moral crisis, but two factors bearing on the use to which men put science: 1) peoples' "mythmaking suggestibility," their "natural lust" for facile explanations; and 2) "greed and will to power, and the temptation to which the kind of omnipotence meted out by science . . . gives rise in the human race."

Maritain drew a sharp line between science, concerned with exploring the material world, and philosophy, or "wisdom" and the reasoned conviction, dating back to Plato, that the foundations of morality are fixed and immutable.

Said he: "The question faced by the world is quite simple: Will men be able to submit the use of science and the power of technique to wisdom?"

Sharply opposed to Maritain were Harvard's crusty Nobel Prizewinning physicist Percy Bridgman and tall, good-humored Walter Stace, Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton. Bridgman presented the materialistic scientist's view mat the scientific method is enough to guide man, and that problems which could not be dealt with scientifically should be ignored.

Stace, who in September's Atlantic Monthly had announced his discovery that God does not exist, that there is "in the universe outside man no spirituality, no regard for values, no friend in the sky," accurately described the consequences which the ascendance of science and the decline of philosophy had had in the world. More & more people, said Stace, have come to believe that morality is merely relative, with one man's view of right & wrong considered as valid as another's. The consequent lack of agreement on moral standards has created impossible conditions for society. Stace's own, wooly-minded attempt at a solution: a new kind of morality found in the "psychological laws" of human behavior.

In the conflict between the Maritains on the one hand, the Staces and Bridg-mans on the other, a decision was still distant. But there could be no doubt that the Maritain position, which was widely derided as the century began, had once more gained a growing following among troubled men searching for truth.

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