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The problem considered in this thesis is whether or not there is an ethics of belief. The notion that it could be right or wrong to believe something is examined. William James, in The Will To Believe, advocated the right to believe, in certain cases, whatever most tempts one's will. William Kingdon Clifford had earlier argued in The Ethics Of Belief that it is always wrong to believe anything for which the evidence is insufficient. I have argued that belief is not an action that can be executed or refrained from at will but is the acceptance of something as being true. As such, it is not possible for us to believe what most appeals to us unless we deem it true. If 'belief’ is used in any other sense than 'deem true', the true-false distinction is vitiated. Since belief is not an action and is therefore not voluntary, the ethics of belief cannot apply to what is believed. The right or wrong of belief applies to the attitude we adopt to a certain proposition or to the manner in which we acquire our beliefs. The distinction is made between belief-cultivation and inquiry. A detailed analysis of The Will To Believe is then undertaken. The claim that religion is a hypothesis which we can verify is questioned. It seems that before one can 'test' the hypothesis, one must believe it already — thus there is really no test at all. The contrasts between science and religion are presented -- explanation being the main concern of the former and consolation that of the latter. The following six claims are called into question: 1) the decision regarding the truth or falsity of religion is forced and momentous, 2) no test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon, 3) there is a striking similarity between the potential religious believer and the scientific investigator, 4) the universe must have a purpose, 5) in religion, faith creates its own verification, 6) to believe in religion requires hope and courage while to doubt or disbelieve indicates fear and cowardice. It is concluded that even if religious belief influences or changes our actions and reactions, this is proof not of the truth of religion but of its utility, which may be helpful or harmful to the individual and to society. My thesis, in short, is that insofar as we attempt to proportion belief to our desires and not to the evidence, we risk losing the true-false distinction altogether. We thus risk loss of communication with others. And effective communication, I submit, is essential to the acquisition and transmission of knowledge — the raison d'etre of philosophy. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

The primary act of nature is the transfer of energy. One thing passes its energy on to other things. This is how life survives. Each thing is receiving energy from other things and transferring its own energy to still other things. Nature is like an unending transitive sentence. If nature is transitive then poetry also must be transitive. For the poet receives energy from certain objects and transfers that energy via the poem over to the reader. The poet must be a conductor of the energy. He must be like a nerve connecting the object to the reader, making sure that all the impulses he receives from the object will be picked up and transmitted to the reader. He wants to give the reader excitement equal to the excitement the object stimulated in him. He does not want to lose any of the original power and spirit of the object in transferring it to the reader. To keep the object alive the poet must enact the object. He must allow the object to transfer its energy, its identity, over to the reader. The poet helps this process by trying to coincide with the object and experience the object from the inside-out. He tries to apprehend the very growth-urge and motivating principle of the object, what causes it to act the way it does. He intuits the shape of the object, what it looks like. He even tries to grasp the object's "intentions" (its tendencies) and desires. Once he has identified with the object then his imagination goes to work. He lets the object act out its desires. He lets it fantasize. He enters a dream with the object where the object is allowed to become whatever it "wants" to become. It grows out of itself. It transforms into various images that seem to be the direct descendants of itself. The imagination allows the object to continually dissolve and re-create itself and thus play out its inherent fate. Through imagination the object performs itself and acts itself out for the reader. And the poet must write at the speed of imagination if he is to conduct all the split-second images that issue from the object. To identify with the object the poet must first get into tension with the object. Every object, whether it be concrete or emotional, has tension. The tension of an object is its force of form. The way its parts are pulled into one another and cohere. Tension, in other words, is tropism. It is the way the object behaves and grows. The poet must identify with the object's tension. He must find the same tension in himself. He must feel the pull and strain of the object in himself. His whole body must be tense with the object. His heart must imitate the rhythm of the object and his throat imitate the squeeze of the object in order to squeeze it into words. If the poet writes a poem about a tree, he does not contemplate what words go with "treeness"; rather he begins imitating the tension of the tree. And imitating the tension of the tree creates a vortex into which the words are naturally pulled. The words that erupt will send forth not especially the look of the tree but the emotional pull of the tree, its tension. The words will be tense with the nerve of the tree itself. This is the act of metaphor, the words leaping immediately from the object to the reader. The poet, then, does not try to embalm the object, but to "enact" it. He does not try to paralyze the object, to photograph it (as a still picture) but to let the object evolve as if it were a movie picture. He wants to dramatize the object, to make it act out its fate. The poet does not want to analyze the object into its separate parts, but feel the cohesion of those parts, their tropism, and follow the tendencies of that tropism into speech and imagery. The poet does not seek to abstract any transcendental "essences" from the object, but rather release the object itself into action, thus liberating any "essences" it may partake. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Julien Gracq, de son vrai nom Louis Poirier, né en 1909 dans le Maine-et-Loire, agrégé d'histoire et professeur dans un lycee parisien, est un ecrivain dont l'oeuvre s'est eche-lonnle depuis 1938 jusqu'a, nos jours. II a publié jusqu'a pré quatre romans: Au Chateau d'Argol (1938), Un Beau Ténébreux (1945), Le Ravage des Syrtes (1951—Prix Goncourt qu'il a d'ailleurs refuse) et Un Balcon en Foret (1958), et une seule piéce de theatre, Le Roi-Plcheur (1948), en dehors de quelques poémes en prose, essais et textes critiques. II est à noter que son unique piéce de théatre est inspi-ree du mythe du Graal. Dans 1'Avant-Propos a. cette piece, il expose les raisons qui l'ont poussé à faire ce choix. II porte un intéret persistant au mythe en général, et en particulier aux mythes médiévaux, dans lesquels il voit des mythes "ouverts", par opposition avec les mythes "fermés" que sont, d'après lui, les mythes grecs. Nous avons remarqué également que le premier roman, Au Chateau d'Argol, est—c'est Gracq lui-meme qui nous le dit—une "version démoniaque" du mythe du Graal, et que les allusions à ce mythe foisonnent dans les trois autres romans. II nous a done paru interessant de rechercher a travers les quatre romans—ou récits—les transpositions apportees au mythe initial, retracant en particulier les modifications qu'ont subissles themes du voyage, du chateau perilleux, de la communaute élective, de l'attente et enfin de la tentation, thèmes préexistant dans le my the médiéval. Au cours de ce travail, nous avons été amenés à étudier la possibility d'une evolution méthodique du mythe parallele a l'évolution du héros, possibilité que nous avons rejetee. Au lieu d'accepter l'idée d'une évolution du mythe a travers l'oeuvre, nous pensons qu'il s'agit plutot de l'étude d'une série de tentatives diverses, ou meme de différentes étapes de la quite. Nous avons aussi repondu a l'objection formulée par J. Baudry, concernant l'absence de Galaad dans ces romans, de laquelle il déduisait le caractere "fermé" du mythe tel que transposé par Gracq, et non plus "ouvert". Là encore, nous sommes arrives a une conclusion differente, c'est-a-dire que l'absence de Galaad de ces oeuvres n'engageait pas le futur et qu'il était toujours possible à Julien Gracq d'apporter au mythe une "fin", en faisant arriver le chevalier érant du Graal dans un roman ultérieur. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

The characters of Genet's drama live in a world which is inadequate to certain basic emotional needs. The shortcomings of this world can be compensated for only in imagination, and so Genet's characters fantasize modes of living and social roles and gestures denied to them in real life. The identities and attitudes they create in fantasy are therefore the opposites of the same factors in life. Thus all the polarities in Genet's drama stem from the basic dichotomy between reality and illusion. The average man tries to keep reality and illusion distinct, but Genet deliberately confounds the two so that the identities he creates are continuously in a state of flux. When these identities become indefinable, contraries coincide. Genet's significant contribution to modern drama is accomplished in his deft exploitation of the interchange-ability of reality and illusion by which he gives theatrical expression to his view of the unity of opposites. This thesis is a study of four of the most closely related sets of polarities in Genet's drama: the central duality of reality and illusion and the three related dualities of life and death, love and hate and anarchy and order. It is demonstrated that while Genet recognizes these conflicting absolutes as unalterable facts of existence, he also shows them as providing the equilibrium necessary in turbulent human relations. The three major plays of Genet - The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens -are analysed from both a dramatic and a theatrical perspective. Although the examination of these plays in chronological order does not reveal any remarkable change in Genet's outlook as a dramatist, we do see a marked progress in his crafsmanship from The Balcony to The Screens. In the course of these three plays he develops and refines the dr&matic and theatrical expression of his fundamental concern with the dialectic of dualities, moving closer to this ultimate resolution of these dualities into a philosophy of nothingness. / Arts, Faculty of / Theatre and Film, Department of / Graduate

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