Stephen McKenna

One more serious word . . . my conscience won't allow me to pass as a Plotinian: I loved the work . . . but I was never convinced by the philosophy or the ethic of it: I'm a secularist agnostic: I don't know anything about the Soul or the Divine or Immortality or anything of that order, and I do believe in this life: I hate those who hate the world: had I children I'd try to lead them to love beauty, nobility, even what I vaguely call Spirituality; but I'd want them to get and give all the good of the world, and the honourable or not dishonourable pleasure of it-of course I'd want them to think and work out what is the real pleasure, what is the false, deceptive-but to them, to themselves, not by any law of Moses or Plotinus or Daddy Stephen MacKenna. Plotinus and all the Mystics and Gospels of all the creeds are to my mind valuable as corrective, as poetry, as suggestion, as windows opening on to vistas of the possible: as law, as dogma, wicked.