[565] two things and give to the essential description the term "conformity" and the distorted description the term "conformism^a." Now if this is the case, then we have in England, against the tremendous development of liberal individuality in France and Germany and the smaller countries around, we have in Great Britain a development of traditions which do not necessarily produce conformism in terms of intentional subjection to conventional rules, but in terms of growth which is automatic and has not necessarily the character of an external subjection. This seems to me a very important distinction. This, for instance, accounts for the following little story I experienced a few years ago in England: I had to give to a group of students and professors a lecture on existentialism^b, and I developed the main ideas about the human predicament, which we find in philosophers like Heidegger^c and theologians like Kierkegaard^d and artists and painters like Picasso^e, and novelists like Kafka^f.

Now then, I wanted a discussion. There was first a great silence, and then I was asked, "Do you think that this fits the English life at all?" Now I could of course answer in terms of pointing to people like Eliot^g and Greene^h and Audenⁱ and others, who are supposed to be British by birth or choice, and a few other things like this, and then I asked: Isn't there in the younger generation, in the YOUNGEST generation, even on places like Oxford and Cambridge, where the logical positivistic tradition is now prevailing, a new tendency toward asking relevant questions, namely questions relevant to human existence, even in philosophy? And there was hesitation, but there was the feeling that perhaps a change is going on. The same experience, ten years earlier, was