I shrugged. "The hell with it! If we had understood science and if we had believed in freedom we would have been willing, the minute the problem appeared, to fight for both--because they're one. We would not have permitted any bleak tyranny to interfere with the world-wide course of knowledge and the existence of our freedom." "You're asking a good deal." "I ask nothing. I merely point out that the fear of holocaust has been made permanent by our fearful failure to act. Freedom throttled will be difficult to revive. The habit of intellectual tyranny is already seeping into the pores of a world destined to be more panicky each year until either freedom of knowledge is restored or the far more likely chaos ensues. After chaos will come the regimentation, by opportunists, of a world that will have lost its grip on liberty. We bought a little time at the cost of all the values our ancestors piled up for us in the ages. It is a cheapskate civilization." The Reverend Socker Melton suddenly chuckled. He had, in the midst of at least mild anxiety, hit on some straw, some philosophical prop. "Don't take it so hard! You sound as if you felt responsible for all the woes of man!" "Don't you?" "Good Lord! Certainly not!" "You are a man, though." "Just one man." "Just one. But if you had access to instinct, you might realize that each one, to the degree he is aware, is all men." "A cold, distant, impersonal idea, I must say!" "The hell it is! The idea I'm putting forward involves being and acting what instinct orders in us--and the constant sense of that process. It relates me to every man--to every king and statesman and politician and movie queen and carpenter and garbage man--to every creature that walks and flies and swims and crawls--and to the sea, the setting sun, the stars. I see them all and I find in them the response that rises from being related to them. I consider them in my cortex--but my God consists also in _feeling_ them. I do not stumble about in schisms and dichotomies. An infinite number of aspects of life which seem antithetical to most people seem merely two manifestations of one awareness to me. You're the kind of fellow, reverend, I bet, who goes around saying, like Will Rogers, that you never met a man you didn't like. I can buy that--and still know, besides, I never met a man I did like altogether, including me. I can say, there was never a moment when I altogether liked myself, or disliked. Warm sentiments pervade my coldest thoughts. Heaven and hell are here in this one room.