To The Australian Doug Hurst, a sceptic evidently of the worth of both philosophy and metaphysics (15/2), does not believe that the black cat of ultimate truth really exists, so that both sets of intellectual activities are worthless. He may jest, but the flaw in his approach is that the black cat does exist and that there is overwhelming evidence of it in all the great cultures of the world, our own Western civilization being one. It is no laughing matter, however. The obvious decadence and corruption of Western societies has come about precisely because their leaderships have over-valued logical reasoning at the expense of our higher faculties of intuition, inspiration and what Saint Thomas Aquinas called "higher reason". Australia needs a profound reorientation of its modes of understanding and the Ramsay Centre should be encouraged to adopt a less old-fashioned and neo-Enlightenment syllabus.
Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic