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'Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed?'-Jeremiah'Existentialism'today refers to faddism, decadentism, morbidity, the'philosophy of the graveyard'; to words like fear, dread, anxiety, anguish, suffering, aloneness, death; to novelists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Dostoievski, Camus, Kafka; to philosophers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel, Jaspers, and Sartre-and because it refers to, and is concerned with, all of these ideas and persons, existentialism has lost any clearer meaning it may have originally possessed. Because it has so many definitions, it can no longer be defined. As Sartre writes:'Most people who use the word existentialism would be em­ barrased if they had to explain it, since, now that the word is all the rage, even the work of a musician or painter is being called existentialist. A gossip columnist... signs himself The Exis­ tentialist, so that by this time the word has been so stretched and has taken on so broad a meaning, that it no longer means anything at all.'2 This state of definitional confusion is not an accidental or negligible matter. An attempt will be made in this introduction to account for the confustion and to show why any definition of existentialism in­ volves us in a tangle. First, however, it is necessary to state in a tenta­ tive and very general manner what points of view are here intended when reference is made to existentialism.

Twelve years after his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin published his Descent of Man. If the first book brought the gases of philosophi­ cal controversy to fever heat, the second exploded them in fiery roars. The issue was the nature, the condition, and the destiny of genus humanum. According to the prevailing Genteel Tradition mankind was a congregation of embodied immortal souls, each with its fixed identity, rights and duties, living together with its immortal neigh­ bors under conditions imposed by'the laws of nature and of nature's God.'Obedience or disobedience of these laws destined all to eternal bliss or eternal damnation. What had come to be called'evolution'was assimilated to the Tradition in diverse interpretations such as John Fiske's, Henry Drummond's and Charles Pierce's. Their common ten­ dency was to establish'evolution'as somehow the method whereby divine providence ordains the conditions under which man accom­ plishes his destiny. The most productive competitor of the Genteel Tradition went by various names, with positivism, materialism and naturalism the most telling. Its success as competitor was not due to its theological or metaphysical import. Its success flowed from its mode of observing how effects or results, those undesired as well as those desired, got produced. Unified and generalized, these observations were taken for notations of causal sequences always and everywhere the same, thus for laws of'nature'to whose workings'the providence of God'added nothing productive and could be and was dispensed with.