A Modern Zoroastrian — Story, Setting & Ideas

Polarity as a Contested Term

Laing’s preface reveals that the central metaphor of his book—polarity—drew immediate criticism. He quotes Huxley’s dismissive remark about the word, then counters by pointing to Huxley’s own later use of the same language in a Review article. This is not mere pedantry; Laing argues that words are “coins to facilitate the interchange of ideas,” and that polarity concisely captures an underlying analogy between physical attraction and repulsion and the moral opposites of virtue and vice, pain and pleasure. He is careful to state that he does not assume identical laws, only a parallel worth exploring. The reader is thus warned that the book will move freely between discussions of molecular motion and discussions of good and evil, held together by a single, deliberately chosen term.

The Limits of Physical Science

Laing draws a firm boundary around what physics can explain. He describes how pressure on different parts of the brain can “annihilate successively voluntary motion, speech, hearing, sight, and finally will, consciousness, reasoning power, and memory.” Yet he insists that physical science cannot explain how molecular motions “can be transformed into, or can create, the phenomena of mind.” This gap, he says, forces inquiry into metaphysics—a region where “the solid earth is giving way under our feet.” His imagery is deliberately unsettling: attempting to fly in a vacuum, or flapping wings in nothing. By framing metaphysics as a necessary but precarious venture, Laing prepares the reader for the speculative arguments that follow, while grounding his skepticism in the hard facts of neurology and physics.

Metaphysical Disarray and Common Sense

Having dismissed the hope that science will solve the mind-body problem, Laing turns to the history of philosophy. He catalogs the contradictions among thinkers: some identify mind and soul, others separate them; some locate the soul in the brain, others in the heart or pineal gland. He cites Descartes’s honest confession that “by natural reason we can make many conjectures about the soul, but no assurance,” and Kant’s vague definition of the noumenon as “an indescribable something, safely located out of space and time.” Laing’s point is that the greatest metaphysicians end up where common sense begins: with irreducible conditions like space, time, and personal identity. He illustrates this with the nursery rhyme “If I be I, as I think I be, I’ve a little dog at home, and he’ll know me,” suggesting that everyday certainty about selfhood is as solid as anything philosophy can provide.

Zoroastrian Dualism as a Working Hypothesis

Laing’s title invokes Zoroastrianism, but the excerpts show he uses it as a framework rather than a doctrine. The dualism of good and evil, light and darkness, mirrors the polarity he applies to science and ethics. He does not claim to reconstruct ancient Persian theology; instead, he treats the Zoroastrian model as a “working hypothesis” for understanding moral and metaphysical oppositions. The book appears to argue that while we cannot prove the existence of the soul or free will, we can assume them for practical purposes—much as Kant allowed. Laing’s tone is that of a rationalist who respects science but refuses to let it dictate the whole of human experience. The reader should expect a sustained argument for keeping science and spirituality in productive tension, not a surrender of one to the other.

Laing writes as a Victorian intellectual caught between the authority of physics and the persistence of metaphysical questions. His method is to gather authorities—Huxley, Descartes, Kant, Berkeley—and set them against each other, always returning to the limits of what can be known. Readers will find a book that argues by analogy and anecdote rather than by systematic proof, and that treats Zoroastrianism less as a religion than as a useful emblem for dualistic thinking. Approach it as a period piece of scientific-philosophical debate, notable for its willingness to name its own uncertainties.

Reading about Laing’s polarity reminds me of evenings in my grandfather’s study, where science and faith felt like two sides of one coin, always arguing but never apart. Something in that tension echoes the quiet longing I found in The Expositor's Bible: The Psalms, Vol. 1 Psalms I.-XXXVIII. — Text and Context, where ancient words made room for both doubt and wonder without rushing either.