Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

246 Notes
2. Others have seen this revision as the mark of a major change in Shaw’s thinking,
away from utilitarian values and toward a more positive attitude to ideals; see,
for example, Wisenthal, Shaw and Ibsen, 36 1 and Turco, Shaw’s Moral Vision, 96. I
regard it as a minor change of view at most since Shaw had explicitly rejected the
utilitarian position in the 1891 edition.
3. The similarity, both in language and concept, to the ideas of William James is
remarkable. James’s famous essay “The Will to Believe” appeared first as a lecture in
1896, five years after Shaw’s letter, but James asserted the functional identity of will
and belief in his Principles of Psychology in 1890. See Kaye’s discussion of the similarities
in the thinking of the two men, Bernard Shaw, 86–100.
4. “The man who cannot see that starvation, overwork, dirt, and disease are as
anti-social as prostitution—that they are the vices and crimes of a nation—is (to put
it as politely as possible) a hopelessly Private Person.” Pref. Mrs. Warren’s Profession
1:255.
“The Socialist is . . .in conflict . . . with the stupidity, the narrowness, in a word the
idiocy (using the word in its precise and original meaning) of all classes.” “The
Illusions of Socialism” 418.
“No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.” “The
Revolutionist’s Handbook” 2:784.
5. I am indebted to Michael Holroyd for the text of the letter in which this phrase
appears. Shaw’s correspondent is identified only as “Dear Sir.” The letter, dated 11
August 1888, is in the Robert H. Taylor Library of Princeton University.
6. Freedom of the will has here the commonsense meaning which I take to be
identical to that of Shaw and other Vitalists. It is not the same as the religious meaning,
which maintains God made man “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,”
which has the effect of dooming man to fall while transferring responsibility for the
fall to the victim. The latter concept entails its own logical difficulties.
7. Compare the preface with the first volume of Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant
1:33: “There are certain questions on which I am, like most Socialists, an extreme
Individualist.”
Chapter 4. A Playwright’s Progress
1. There should be here not a footnote but a simple citation. My discussion of the
aesthetic of the well-made play owes more than I can distinguish from my own
thoughts on the subject to an unpublished manuscript by Daniel C. Gerould. Professor
Gerould is best known for introducing the plays of Witkiewicz to the Englishspeaking
world, but he has written with clarity and insight on multiple facets of
dramatic literature. He gives the well-made play the thoughtful attention it needs
but never receives. Although it has been a term of contempt almost from the time it
was coined, the expression “well-made play” epitomizes a view of the world that has
saturated Western thinking for at least three hundred years and is vibrantly alive
today.
2. In the preface and appendixes to the 1893 edition of the play. This volume is