NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 60, Issue 209, 12 June 1940, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE FRIENDLY DARK. The greatest psychological asset that any human being can have is, I think, that (peculiar and indefinable, but X hope familiar, sense of confidence in his environment, of trust in the whole queer, big, incomprehensible world into which he has mysteriously come and from which he will as mysteriously depart, said Dr. - Henry Yellowlees, in the Morison lectures to the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh. The great distinguishing mark, as I believe, ot the psychologically well-adjusted individual is the ever-present sense that the dark behind and around and in front of him is somehow friendly. That sense of security, though it may never be clearly felt in consciousness, or directly expressed in words;* or fully elaborated into religious faith or anything of the kind, can be a very real thing at every stage of life, but is most perfectly and gloriously seen in healthy adolescence. The great Huxley, of all unlikely people, not only wrote in one of his essays of the friendly dark around us, but actually went the length of personifying it. He compared life tr a game of chess, and that opposite to each of us there sits the unseen Player. “We make our move,” he says, “and all the time we feel that that mysterious Player wishes us not to fail.” A patient with whom I had once been discussing this matter of the friendly dark came back and told me that he knew what 1 meant but did not like the name, so I told him about Huxley’s chess player. “That’s it,” he said. “It’s not a friendly dark; it’s a kindly light, in which—no, in Whom—there is no darkness at all.”

A PARABLE FROM HISTORY. In 1650 Oliver Cromwell came nearer being heavily defeated than on any other occasion in his military career, recalls Mr R. C. K. Ensor, of Oxford University in the “Sunday Times.” The scene was Dunbar; his opponent, the Scottish general, David Leslie. Leslie was an excellent strategist, trained abroad under the great Swedish King, Gustavos Adolphus. He outmanoeuvred Cromwell into a position from which the English commander could not escape without attacking, and could not attack save against a terrible disadvantage of ground. If Leslie’s army sat tight, Cromwell’s number was up. undid Leslie and saved Cromwell? The fidgeting impatience of the Scottish troops. Stirred up by their Presbyterian ministers who together with religious duties combined demagogic functions, such as to-day might fall to stunt newspapers or to opportunists in Parliament— they refused to wait for Cromwell to attack them: Attacking instead, they threw away their advantage and wore decisively Lenten. Which things are a parable. Mr Ensor points out. (He was writing before Hitler took the initiative in Norway and the Low Countries). For Cromwell read Hitler, for the Scottish army read the British and French democracies, and for David Leslie read the present prudent directors, of their war policyIf they sit tight Hitler must evevdaially attack, and attack at a great disadvantage. If instead they listen to people proclaiming that “it is essential for us to seize the initiative,” they should beware of doing the very thing that Hitler would like them to do.