I propose to discuss in general terms some recent neurological and neurophysiological views upon perception—which seem threatened with obscurity by the introduction of epistemological factors into what purport to be physiological accounts of this complex process. One or two writers have chosen, unfortunately, I submit, to resuscitate Locke’s famous doctrine of primary and secondary qualities in perception, which doctrine we owe in the first instance to Galileo.

By the term ‘perception,’ I refer to sensory perception in all its modes, not limiting myself to visual perception, since some confusion has arisen in the past by such restriction.

Before I proceed, I should define my operative term, ‘perception.’ Except in the case of infants, lights and colours and sounds do not enter consciousness without some significance and without some measure of interpretation. For example, auditory reception pure and simple is rare. Sounds come into the focus of attention as spatialized, and identified as to their source and significance. This perception has physiological and psychological elements and affective accompaniments, and is in effect a product of experience, as Rheinhold has recently reminded us. The same holds true for other sensory modalities. Simple sense reception is what Whitehead calls ‘sense awareness.’ When this is enriched by these accompaniments, when in fact it involves thought and feeling, it is better spoken of as ‘sense perception.’ Simple sense awareness or reception is the fleeting endowment of the infant, rarely to be repeated in later life, save in circumstances unprecedented for the individual.

Within a very short time of entering the practice of medicine most Catholic doctors realize that by far the biggest single issue facing them in the arena of moral and professional responsibility is contraception. What may still be for us a controversial issue is a settled matter for our non-Catholic colleagues and almost a universal practice for our patients. As a community, Catholics have the tendency to protect themselves from disagreeable facts either by denying their existence or entertaining the most naive notions about them. This is an outlook which hitherto has spelled disaster in our handling of this problem.

We can begin a useful reassessment by examining the size of this problem. One of the studies of the Royal Commission on Population in 1949 was devoted to the subject of family limitation. They took a representative sample of married women, covering all parts of the country and the years of marriage from 1900 to 1947. The following facts emerge. Before 1910, the percentage of women who used birth control was 15%; in the thirties it had risen to a figure of 66%. I would go further than this and suggest for practical purposes we have to accept to-day the fact that almost all childbearing couples at some time resort to some form of birth control. The only reasons for its exclusion in marital life appear to be religious opposition, sheer ignorance and, rarely, aesthetic considerations. It is a practice accepted as sensible and practical, and to entertain an alternative demands in itself an explanation and evidence of sanity from the person who proposes such a contrary view.

This is the study of an anomaly, an inquiry into a paradox. It is an examination of how and why the apparently unexceptionable tenets and standards of one very distinguished literary critic can so often lead him to the most erroneous conclusions.

Yvor Winters is an American, a man who has had a formative influence on a number of young poets in the United States but who, until very recently, was almost unknown in this country save for a few of his stylish and fastidious poems which had appeared in anthologies of American verse. He is a great teacher, a teacher who has been honoured in a fine poem by Thom Gunn who has studied with him; he is also a self-appointed arbiter of taste who is spoken of by his devotees with an almost hushed reverence and awe.

Let us first examine Winters’s credentials, his beliefs. In one very real sense, he is a Schoolman, a scholastic who rates human reason higher than every other faculty or function; but he is a Schoolman who pays homage to no Church, a man who gives allegiance to no established system but who creates his own fearlessly and sometimes defiandy. Winters is not afraid to be either didactic or dogmatic. Indeed, what first strikes the reader of his essays is, above all, the enormous assurance of the writer; there is no timidity, no demurring. The judgments are never tentative, the appraisals never ambiguous. And Winters is as confident and precise in his generalities as when he applies those generalities to particular poems or poets.

Last year’s Conference for the discussion of Ecumenical Questions was held at Gazzada near Milan from September 19 to 23. Over seventy representatives were present, among them many names well known in ecumenical work, including two English priests, a Dominican and a Jesuit. The general theme of the Conference was ‘differences compatible with Catholic unity.’ It met under the presidency of Cardinal Bea, and Mgr J. G. Willibrandts was in the chair. The discussions and conclusions of this Conference are not at present for publication, but it may be said that there was much scope at it for the frank expression of opinion, and the chief point that emerged was that under the unity of the Church’s de fide teaching there is room for differing points of view and complementary traditions in both theological thinking and liturgical practice, not only as between East and West but also within the Latin rite itself. Cardinal Montini, Archbishop of Milan, visited the Conference, and Cardinal Alpink was also present at it.

Following up our promise, given in the Ecumenical Survey in the January number, we print here a communication from an Anglo-Catholic deeply interested in work for unity between her own members within the Church of England; and especially between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals.

A letter addressed to Abbé Couturier of Lyons, and printed by his executor, makes clear that the resolve of one Anglican religious community to engage in conversations with their evangelical brethren was a by-product of his eirenic visit to that community in 1937.

In speaking of the present state of Africa it will be necessary to limit oneself severely by designating the areas about which information is fairly reliable. In the case of the present writer, these areas are the Sudan, the Belgian Congo, the Rhodesias, East and South Africa.

All these are, at the time of writing, territories which present a bewildering picture. One exception within the general framework is Tanganyika, where the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), under the leadership of Mr Julius Nyerere, has achieved at least the appearance of stability and gives some promise of steady development. In Tanganyika there is something, or perhaps one should say someone, to work for, as Mr Nyerere is ‘the necessary man.’ His prestige, integrity and ability combine to give him a unique position in to-day’s Africa, and he provides a rallying-point for the one hundred and forty African tribes of his country and a head of government whom Europeans and Asians can support with a fairly clear conscience. The indications are, on the other hand, that he alone stands between Tanganyika and chaos. There is no one to replace him should any untoward event remove him from the scene.

The Sudan is also overtly peaceful, but this is far more illusory, since the Muslim Military Government is pursuing a policy of ruthless suppression. Many of the former M.Ps. are in prison, including at least one priest, and these prisoners are the representatives of the Southern Sudan, a territory entirely different in race,

By way of respite from their indefatigable re-fighting of the battles of 1939-45 (I take it that by about 1971 we shall be getting down to ‘I Was Rommel’s Batman’s Uncle,’ No. 368 in the series Now It Can Be Told, And Just You Try And Stop Us Telling It) the editors of the Sunday Times occasionally suborn some eminent personage to act as guide to the British middle classes in a brief tour round quite another battlefield—admittedly a peripheral one and of no strategic importance—that of painting. Sometimes, I suspect, they don’t get quite what they bargained for. Thus Professor Lawrence Gowing, asked to provide some useful tips on sketching for the amateur, offered a ruminative, elliptical, and, to his professional colleagues, fascinating, account of his own profound researches and procedures in the landscape art. Thus Victor Pasmore, of whom it had perhaps been hoped that he would mitigate the austerities of pure abstraction with a little apologetic honey, came up with a difficult, uncompromising and disdainful manifesto with as little of the glad-hander about it as a curled-up hedgehog.

But when Sir Kenneth Clark agreed to contribute a series of articles on important pictures of his own choosing, I think everyone must have been delighted with the result. He could not be faulted on matters of fact by the art-historians, being himself an illustrious elder of their tribe. The generality of painters might dissent in detail from his judgments, but they could not dismiss or deride them, based as they are on scrutiny of the works at least as long and acute as any which they themselves would be capable of, and on a far wider frame of historical and cultural reference.