About the Author Christopher Caudwell was born- in 1907. His _ -- real name is Christopher St John Sprigg, he wrote __no less than-seven detective stories, five books on aviation; _ and a great number of short stories and poems. And these- were merely his pot-boilers.

For the work he really cared about he reserved the pseudonym of Caudwell-Above this name wrote a serious novel called This My Hand (which in majority’s view, is a failure) and four major works ,namely, illusion and Reality The Crisis in Physics, Studies in A Dying Culture, Further Studies in A Dying Culture.

He was a young man who not only warmed his bands before, but gave great hearty pokes at the fire of life; a young man so interested in everything, from aviation to poetry, to detective stories, to quantum mechanics, Hegel’s philosophy, to love, to psycho-analysis, that he felt that he had simply got to say something about them all.

He was killed in February 1937 when fighting _ with the International Brigade in Spain.

Preface For those who pick up a book by Christopher Caudwell for the first time it is necessary to say that in 1937, when a young man of 29, he met his death in action against General Franco's Moorish troops. It is necessary to state this, because one of the leading themes of these essays is the unity of thinking and doing, the nullity of either in isolation. Caudwell did not stand 'dreaming on the verge of strife,' nor did he plunge into struggle without thought. He was consciously a different species of activity. 'Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it.' And for this young English-man in 1936, as for so many generous hearted men and women all over the globe, the focal point of world change was the war between the Spanish Government and the internationally aided rebels. The philosopher, the lover of knowledge, could not but turn soldier in a struggle in which the forces of enlightenment and of obscurantism were so starkly opposed.

A decade of intensive experience lay, behind Caudwell when he made his fateful decision. Those were years in which the existence of crisis was brought home to all but the most butterfly-minded. On all sides theories were propounded to account for the fact that hungry men and empty factories existed alongside men whose un-satisfied elemental needs those factories and workless men could have supplied. Economics was promoted the queen of sciences, but so many rival factions contended for the throne that the man in the street cursed them all equally heartily, for their words brought neither parsnips nor butter.

Caudwell had certainly an insatiable intellectual curiosity, a consuming Faustian ambition to master all the sciences.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages