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Phanteur, whole no. 1, January 1946
Page 2
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PONTIFEX by Donn Brazier Before the war, Paul Klingbiel and I founded a society: THE FRONTIER SOCIETY. Expect for a few members close to Paul and myself, I doubt whether many understood just what we have hoped to accomplish. Fandom, I know, certaintly could never have known, because there were so few fans who actually joined and help; suprisingly, it was mostly from fields outside of the inner circle, yes, even the outer circle, that we recruited our members. Sometimes I wonder whether I knew exactly what we wanted, for certain members criticised me for letting our subscription organ, FRONTIER, degenerate into a general fan magazine. Lack of proper material explained some of this, but still there rankles in my mind the thought that I failed to make the magazine what it should have been because I was unaware of the exact nature of our aims. Paul started the whole idea with a collection of notes he had been gathering, and still is, under the title, THINK IT OVER. He has collected an enormous number of quotations which inspires thought, for he has specialized on those things which science admits are still mysteries. It was a short jump from that to realizing that we could combine our efforts, for I was making a somewhat similar collection called COSMIC DUST; and if we two could combine, why couldn't many others with identical interests and note-taking habits? thus, was born the idea for the society. The idea was sound. Why it never succeeded as well as we had hoped is not the purpose of this short article; rather, I want to describe a more basic idea, an urge I think Paul and I were trying to satisfu amd didn't know it. After all, of what interest is a bare collection of notes when looked at from the standpoint of pattern? Of no more basic and enduring interest than a book of Ripley oddities, I believe. Therefore, I present a glue, as it were, to hold these frontier facts into a pattern. Pontifex is the key-word. It means bridge-builder. It is a word, and it is a concept, taken directly from a book by Aldous Huxley; TIME MUST HAVE A STOP. The idea is not really new in non-fiction works, I imagine, but nowhere have I seen it so clearly and concisely presented in this work of fiction by Huxley. Huxley has a character who, for two years, toured all the leading universities of Europe and Asia, getting in touch with the really significant people working in each. Huxley went into no detail of this evidently interesting trip-- the scientists, the experiments, the great theories. The character was trying to enlist these great men into the project, which was the setting up of an international clearing house of ideas, the creation of a general staff of scientific, religious, philosophic synthesis of all thought. This character described himself as only the liasion officer between these various fields of knowledge, the interperter, the bridge building engineer, a pontifex minimus. "Bridging the gap between the phenomona of spiritualism and the phenomena psychology and physics was one of his jobs as pontifex minimus. An uncommonly difficult job, incidently, since nobody had yet formulated a hypothesis in terms of which you could think coherently of the two sets of facts. For the present, best one could do was skip from one to the other -- hoping, meanwhile, that some day one might get a hunch, an illuminating intuition of the greater synthesis. For synthesis there undoubtedly must be, a thought-bridge that would permit the mind to maroh discursively and logically from telepathy to the
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PONTIFEX by Donn Brazier Before the war, Paul Klingbiel and I founded a society: THE FRONTIER SOCIETY. Expect for a few members close to Paul and myself, I doubt whether many understood just what we have hoped to accomplish. Fandom, I know, certaintly could never have known, because there were so few fans who actually joined and help; suprisingly, it was mostly from fields outside of the inner circle, yes, even the outer circle, that we recruited our members. Sometimes I wonder whether I knew exactly what we wanted, for certain members criticised me for letting our subscription organ, FRONTIER, degenerate into a general fan magazine. Lack of proper material explained some of this, but still there rankles in my mind the thought that I failed to make the magazine what it should have been because I was unaware of the exact nature of our aims. Paul started the whole idea with a collection of notes he had been gathering, and still is, under the title, THINK IT OVER. He has collected an enormous number of quotations which inspires thought, for he has specialized on those things which science admits are still mysteries. It was a short jump from that to realizing that we could combine our efforts, for I was making a somewhat similar collection called COSMIC DUST; and if we two could combine, why couldn't many others with identical interests and note-taking habits? thus, was born the idea for the society. The idea was sound. Why it never succeeded as well as we had hoped is not the purpose of this short article; rather, I want to describe a more basic idea, an urge I think Paul and I were trying to satisfu amd didn't know it. After all, of what interest is a bare collection of notes when looked at from the standpoint of pattern? Of no more basic and enduring interest than a book of Ripley oddities, I believe. Therefore, I present a glue, as it were, to hold these frontier facts into a pattern. Pontifex is the key-word. It means bridge-builder. It is a word, and it is a concept, taken directly from a book by Aldous Huxley; TIME MUST HAVE A STOP. The idea is not really new in non-fiction works, I imagine, but nowhere have I seen it so clearly and concisely presented in this work of fiction by Huxley. Huxley has a character who, for two years, toured all the leading universities of Europe and Asia, getting in touch with the really significant people working in each. Huxley went into no detail of this evidently interesting trip-- the scientists, the experiments, the great theories. The character was trying to enlist these great men into the project, which was the setting up of an international clearing house of ideas, the creation of a general staff of scientific, religious, philosophic synthesis of all thought. This character described himself as only the liasion officer between these various fields of knowledge, the interperter, the bridge building engineer, a pontifex minimus. "Bridging the gap between the phenomona of spiritualism and the phenomena psychology and physics was one of his jobs as pontifex minimus. An uncommonly difficult job, incidently, since nobody had yet formulated a hypothesis in terms of which you could think coherently of the two sets of facts. For the present, best one could do was skip from one to the other -- hoping, meanwhile, that some day one might get a hunch, an illuminating intuition of the greater synthesis. For synthesis there undoubtedly must be, a thought-bridge that would permit the mind to maroh discursively and logically from telepathy to the
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