The Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul.

Toppling icons is Arianna Huffington's specialty. After lopping off feminism in The Female Woman and cutting Picasso down to size in Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, the celebrated Mrs. Huffington once again goes with great gusto where angels might fear to tread: into the very heart of the greatest of human mysteries, the mystery of the soul.

What's left after the secular gods of sex and art have been cast down from their artificial pre-eminence? God, of course, Mrs. Huffington tells us. He's been waiting for us all along. Waiting for us to recognize that art, science, sex, politics, and philosophy are all threads leading us to His and our home: the realm of the divine.

One's experience of God is uniquely personal, therefore extraordinarily difficult to communicate. In consequence, great mystics tend to speak in paradoxes, more ordinary mortals in cliches. Unsurprisingly perhaps, given the scope of the book's ambition, Mrs. Huffington proves herself in this regard a mere mortal.

We stand, she tells us, at a unique moment:

In the whole of human history there have never been so many avenues to inner consciousness being explored, nor anything remotely approaching the proportion of people seeking such avenues for themselves ... everything from explorations into the great religious traditions, to Rolfing, rebirthing, and past-life regressions. I have personally sampled a substantial variety of what is available - including fire-walking.

And she has emerged from the fire with Good News: "The more I delved into the esoteric, the mystical depths of religious scripture, whether the Kabbalah, Lao-Tzu, or the Gospel of Saint John the Beloved, the more inescapable became the conclusion that the truth is one and glorious in its simplicity: |The Kingdom of God is within.'"

In Mrs. Huffington's view, a thousand points of light are about to blossom into a hundred million, as we enter a new millennium - as altruism replaces narcissism, and spirituality supplants materialism, all courtesy of what she calls the Fourth Instinct. What is the Fourth Instinct? It is "a genetically based, physical instinct that has a metaphysical purpose ... Genesis is unfolding in the evolutionary epic, and the Fourth Instinct is the driving force."

This is a strange and unsatisfying formulation which the author never explores. Why, for example, call man's desire for "meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and truth" an "instinct"? Why drape, like a fervent Victorian, the religious impulse in the language of Darwinian biology? " Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,' says God in Genesis. And let man evolve first unconsciously, then consciously, into his God-like nature, says evolution." Thus saith Mrs. Huffington.

Actually, evolution doesn't say much at all. But Mrs. Huffington seems to take intellectual comfort in construing the spiritual impulse as a biological one, an idea that suggests that men strive for God as reliably and immutably as bees make honey. But while all living animals lust for food and sex, only men lust for God. Those of us who consider religion the realm of freedom par excellence will find her choice of rhetorical strategies unusual to say the least.

The Fourth Instinct is an odd book, part introspection, part exhortation - an honest attempt by a gifted writer to find in her own spiritual journey the universal quest for God. Its chief charm is also its greatest flaw: the book is infused with millenarianism of the distinctively American, upbeat, rosy-cheeked, every-day-in-every-way-we-are-getting-better-and-better sort. The resulting combination of American optimism, pro-family concern, and spiritual questing amounts to practically a new genre: inspirational literature for New Age conservative pantheists: "It is the premise of this book that we are facing such a door in time - an opening for great possibilities of new being, for a breakthrough in our evolution. For the first time, something as vast and epic as the destiny of mankind depends on something thing as personal and intimate as the way each one of us chooses to live, think, and behave."

For many readers, such claims for the uniqueness of this generation in history over all others will seem overblown, hard to digest, and perhaps just another symptom of the Seventies narcissism

Mrs. Huffington explicitly rejects - although the interest in things spiritual she demonstrates and the questions she raises are highly salutary in this age in which religion tends to be viewed by intellectual elites as a kind of poison in the body politic.

For Mrs. Huffington, all religious truths point to the same truth: "There is, however, a fundamental difference between today and other historic times of spiritual renewal. Ours does not revolve around any one concept of God or require that we believe in any one set of dogmas, any one doctrine, any one recipe for redemption." Well maybe. But then again, maybe not. Perhaps God - and Mrs. Huffington never seems to have faced this frightening possibility - actually cares how we envision Him, worship Him, and regulate our lives in His service. Perhaps in religion, as in everything else, it's possible to get it wrong.