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THE ADULT AND THE CINEMA only a by-product of our industrial civilisation. But the problem needs, so it seems to me, careful consideration and study.
In this respect I speak of the failure of modern psychology. I firmly believe that one can learn more about the ordre du coeur from La Rochefoucauld and Pascal (who was the author of this term) than from the most up-to-date text-book on psychology or ethics. In fact what we need is a content-psychology. It was Dilthey who devoted fifty years of his life to the formulation of such a new psychology. The classical philosophies of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas had formulated the value patterns for their ages. Pascal lived and taught in their tradition. Such content patterns of a psychological and ethico-sociological theory cannot consist in formalised and consequently empty 'relationships'. They must, to a much higher degree, become individualised without losing thereby their scientific accuracy. To give an illustration. Take, for example, the chapter headings of Chapter VI of McDougall's widely read Introduction to Social Psychology: 'Sentiments of three primitive types: love, hate and respect — the genesis of Hate — Parental love as a type of highly complex sentiment — Active Sympathy and its role in the genesis of the sentiment of affection between persons', and compare this classification with one sentence from La Rochefoucauld's Maximes: 'Quand nous sommes las d'aimer, nous sommes bien aises qu'on nous devienne infidele pour nous degager de notre fidelite.'
The difference between these two types of psychology is significant. It is La Rochefoucauld who, in my opinion, is nearer the truth, in spite of the fact that he wrote his Maximes two hundred and fifty years before McDougall published his Introduction. It is easier to understand the moral phenomena by taking into account the French court society of the seventeenth century than by applying the generalising scientificism of Professor McDougall to our own historic situation.
This is a very heretical point of view and I put it forward with all diffidence.
Thus it seems to me that only if we re-discover the unity of psychology and ethics, sociology and philosophy, which was selfevident in the Europe of Athens, Thomas Aquinas and Pascal, we may be able to formulate anew our contemporary value patterns and thus perhaps give guidance to those who, like ourselves, are lost in the present emptiness.
It is with these ideas in mind that I suggest our documents ought to be considered.
s 273 M.S.F.