The title of this difficult but exciting book points to what is really secondary in it: its dramatic exposition of the extent to which communication among the various cultures and disciplines has become difficult or impossible. Its primary concern is with the meaning of experience and the relation between spirit and matter, a concern that is worked out, appropriately enough, in a situation that resembles a weekend retreat.

Superficially considered, the plan of Worlds Apart is simple enough. The narrator, "a solicitor with philological interests" who has been bothered by the lack of communication among specialists, persuades seven men to gather at his home for a series of discussions in which no holds are to be barred. The men are a professor of historical theology and ethics, a rocket research engineer, a physicist, a retired schoolmaster, a biologist, a psychiatrist and a linguistic philosopher. From Friday night till Sunday afternoon, with time out only for meals and sleeping, these men talk about the problem of knowledge and certitude, the nature of the universe and its relation to language and the human mind, the assumptions, expectations, limitations and inconsistencies of science, and the meaning and destiny of man.

The encyclopedic range of the discourse is skillfully managed to give the impression of spontaneous conversation. "I suppose there hasn't been much order or system in our symposium," the schoolmaster remarks towards the end. The jacket helps this illusion along with the statement that since the book is philosophical speculation, not a doctrinaire presentation in which one point of view is the "winner," the reader may decide to take his stand with any one of the speakers.

Indeed, the reader may so decide, but if he chooses to stand with the wrong speaker he may end up angry with Mr. Barfield, who is a good deal less disinterested than the blurb writer. For all its casual surface, the dialogue has an ordered narrative structure that depends on the conflict of good guys and bad guys. The psychiatrist (a Freudian), the biologist, the physicist, the theology professor (a pronounced traditionalist), the brash and naive young rocket engineer and the linguistic philosopher are bad guys. However, the story is not a melodrama: the bad guys differ in their degrees of badness; most of them have their redeeming moments and engaging qualities; each is allowed to speak his piece, often brilliantly.

The true hero of the story is the schoolmaster, Sanderson, whose good right arm is the narrator, a dualist who favors Mircea Eliade and symbolic ways of knowing. Sanderson's progress in the story is ironic: he has been invited only after considerable hesitation and he seems at first to be out of his depth, but by Sunday morning he has taken command and keeps it to the end. He is an exponent of Rudolph Steiner, an Austrian philosopher-scientist who claimed that his "Spiritual Science" was grounded on Goethe and Aquinas (I imagine most Thomists would fail to see the connection).

The worst of the bad guys is Dunn, the linguistic philosopher. Of all the speakers he says least and is inclined to point out that what others say is neither true nor false but meaningless. He is humorless, bored a good deal of the time, and the only one who is certain that he does not want to repeat the experience. He represents the logical positivism that to one degree or another has infected everyone but Sanderson. One of the aims of the book is to make clear the extent to which he has no way of knowing that in his efforts to refine language he has put himself in a cage. Thus at one point Sanderson says: "If Dunn is right, or if he is in any way representative, it is already becoming impossible, for many, even to conceive of any alternate way of thinking."

I am too much in awe of Mr. Barfield's command of his several worlds to wish to give the impression that he has simply rigged his dialogue in favor of Sanderson, or that it is correct to assume that Barfield accepts Steiner as completely as Sanderson does. Nevertheless, it is clear from "The Rediscovery of Meaning," the essay Mr. Barfield wrote for The Saturday Evening Post 's "Adventures of the Mind" series, that Sanderson and Barfield are a congenial pair. In the essay the hero is Emerson, not Steiner, but it is an Emerson who would have reacted to Dunn very much as Sanderson does.

Worlds Apart comes with a recommendation from T.S. Eliot, who calls the book "An excursion into seas of thought which are very far from ordinary routes of intellectual shipping." I suspect that Mr. Barfield's Dunn would have found this remark both meaningless and needlessly gaudy. It may be a bit gaudy but as a statement about the book it is nevertheless quite accurate.