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The late Dr. Gregory Zilboorg—he died in 1959—was a remarkable
man. Born in Kiev, he studied medicine and psychiatry, and became secretary to the Minister of Labor in Kerensky's short-lived Social Democratic Government. After the Bolsheviks took control, he fled to the United States at the age of twenty-nine, repeated the last two years of his medical education at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and thereafter practiced in New York City as a very successful psychiatrist until his death. Born of orthodox Jewish parents, he became a Quaker soon after his arrival in these United States, and, in 1954, he joined the Catholic Church. All his life he was, like his co-religionist Spinoza, a 'God-intoxicated man'. In his later years he worked closely with Catholic priests, especially with the Dominican Father Noël Mailloux, who heads a Pontifical institution in Canada ministering to those religious priests, monks, and nuns in need of psychiatric care.
This posthumous volume of essays, edited and with an introduction by Margaret Stone Zilboorg, reflects not only Zilboorg's abiding interest, but the deepening of his religious convictions.
Now the 'great sanity of the inductive method in the sciences' is, as Dr. Barry Ulanov has pointed out, that while it makes 'philosophical differences unimportant for the duration of an experiment, it ultimately makes possible contributions to philosophy of the greatest value'. Since it does this on evidence, it can, therefore, reverse itself in the light of fresh evidence, as it has done in our time 'in the destruction of many of the most firmly established laws of classical physics'. For example, the laws of universal determinism as generally assumed by scientists since the seventeenth century have been proved inaccurate on the scale of macroscopic phenomena. It would seem that Dr. Zilboorg's own rubicon was the fact that Freud never dealt with the soul, but did postulate the psychic apparatus as a biopsychological unit. 'T