The mystery of life has intrigued man’s mind from the beginning, as his earliest ideas and beliefs show. Some men, indeed, have been so fascinated as to make it the focal point of all human experience and to see in it the basic type of reality on which everything else is modelled or to which, at least, it is ordered. There is, of course, one field in which such notions as ‘life’, ‘soul’ and ‘organism’ have a particularly powerful attraction, namely that of political philosophy. The ideal city- state of Plato is based on the conception of society as a great organism, a living universe animated by a single soul. Nor is it by accident that in his political philosophy Hegel was so greatly influenced by Plato’s thought, even if in taking it over he modified it profoundly. And Hegel, in turn, is in this matter the principal source of Marx’s thought.

If in fact we are to grasp Marx’s thought in its original contours before these became ironed out under the successive manipulations of his chief disciples Engels, Lenin and Stalin, we must try to see it in the context of the Hegelian school which was its starting point. The main lines of Marxism were laid down in the philosophic climate of Germany—more exactly Prussia—of the years 1830-1845. Hegel himself had died in 1831, but his thought dominated succeeding thinkers who could do no more than repeat the Master’s philosophy while at the same time struggling vainly against it.

The letter printed, below is a reminder of how sketchy is our knowledge of the English Dominicans during the half-century prior to the foundation of Bornhem in 1658 and the start of the registers of clothing and profession. Englishmen who joined the order joined abroad, and their particulars were recorded in the registers of foreign convents, registers that for the most part are no longer extant. In 1615 these scattered members were formed into an English Congregation, but without a house of its own and without even the most rudimentary archives. Thus any chance reference to a Dominican at this dark period is a find of some importance, and this letter is a fair example of what we may still hope to unearth in some archive in almost any part of western Europe.

All that is known of the writer of this letter is what he tells us himself. He is writing to the master-general, Nicholas Ridolfi. The dispensation he asks for was beyond the powers of the master-general, and a copy of his letter was therefore sent to Propaganda. It is this copy only that has survived. It is here translated from the Latin.

Mr T. S. Eliot has often shown a preoccupation with childhood, and at times this preoccupation has shown itself as a search for a lost Eden. In Burnt Norton the leaves are alive with the laughter of children:

In Little Gidding there are

‘the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

Moreover, as the waves of the sea recall the river-god from The Dry Salvages that ‘was present in the nursery, so the apple- tree, acting as a double symbol, recalls both the expulsion from the garden and the cross that made redemption possible.

This theme has found its repetition in the plays, notably in The Family Reunion, where Harry speaks nostalgically of the hollow tree in which he played ‘Injuns’ and regrets the summerhouse that has been put in its place ‘to please the children’. For the question that confronts Harry is ‘Who am I?’—a question, in some form or other, that all Mr Eliot’s dramatis personae have to answer. In The Confidential Clerk the problem is intensified because there the question or quest of self-identification is closely allied with that of heredity and illegitimacy. In The Cocktail Party the problem is the same, though there the quest is concealed in the question.