NOTES AND COMMENTS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 41, 28 November 1938, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE. “Tlie German philosopher Hegel said a great many interesting and important things. One .of the truest of them was this: ‘We all say that we must study history, but the only thing that the study of history shows is that man has learned nothing from the study of history,’ ” said Dr. Nicholas Butler, president of Columbia University, speaking in London. “Man persists in repeating over and over again the old mistakes and blunders, and he cherishes the hope that in some mysterious fashion the natural working of great forces in the past is going, under his observation and in his presence, to be entirely altered for the benefit of himself and his contemporaries. Our inability to learn from history and to make the nolicies of to-day and to-mor-row the result of a knowledge of human experience in like fields in the past that is one of the most important ills with which this generation is faced. We must find some way -to cure it.’’

FISHERMEN’S MYSTICISM. There is something about a bridge. It does not matter, writes Mr John Moore in the “Listener,” whether it spans a great and shining and mysterious river or just a muddy little trickle where the only shining things are treacle tins and the only mysteries are shapes in sacks which may be dead cats or worse than dead cats. In either case, on the great span or on the little stone arch, you will be sure to pause for a little or a long time, and lean on the parapet and look into the water; everybody does. Of course, if you are a fisherman it is quite natural. Fishermen arc mystics and they have a way of catching fish in their imagination. They see a swirling eddy or a deep willow-bung bay and tbov immediately people it with monsters which are at least the seeond-rousins of Leviathan. They imagine to their hand a rod, a line, a fly. Swish, out goes the cast; plop, splash, up comes the fish; for imaginary fish never refuse to rise. And so Leviathan’s relative is hooked and played and netted and knocked on the head and in less than no time he is stowed away in the imaginary bag. 1 think this is probably the most satisfactory way of fishing. The fish is never lost, your creel is never empty, in vour dreams.