"A Judicious Analysis of Carrel’s Teachings"

   "A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country." And, we might add, "if he is ahead of his times." Alexis Carrel, famous experimental surgeon at the Rockefeller Institute and Nobel Prize-winner in 1912, published his popular volume, "Man, the Unknown," more than 30 years ago. In spite of the fact that it was an international bestseller, it did not win the approval of Carrel's colleagues in the scientific world, because his message that man is a spiritual, and not merely a material, being was too advanced a view for those who were still in the nineteenth century's outlook that man was only a physio-chemical mechanism.

   Today, Carrel's friend, Teilhard de Chardin, who was a less rigorous scientist and proclaimed a more extreme message in less lucid language, is read and discussed in the highest intellectual circles. Carrel's book was more widely read, in 1935-39, than any of Teilhard's volumes, but it was acclaimed almost entirely by the popular and unscientific world. On the other hand, Teilhard, appearing in a more propitious age, won converts in those circles where Carrel had been greeted with skepticism.

   Now that the times have caught up, as it were, with Carrel's theories, a re-examination of the man and his teachings is overdue. His ides on scientific method, on psychical research, on religion, on the nature of man and of the cosmos, and on the role of science and the state in social reform to create a world which is at once more scientific, more Christian, and closer to the real complexities of man's nature, are much more welcome to the outlook of 1966 than they were to the materialistic '20s or the distraught '30s.

   There is no better way to begin such a re-evaluation of Carrel than with this little volume, which places him, in all his complexity, in his scientific and social environment. Like Father Durkin's other books, this one combines careful scholarship with clear exposition. In addition it has a quality which is essential to any re-examination of Carrel, a tentative and judicious attitude and a lack of dogmatism, which is precisely the temper with which this extraordinary man should be approached.

—CARROLL QUIGLEY