NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 60, Issue 210, 13 June 1940, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

MECHANISED MINDS. To-day the really terrifying fact in the world, worse than the horrors of war, is"a universal dumb acceptance of conditions which mean the surrender of all personal worth and dignity, .writes Mr H. A. Tomlingon in the ‘'Daily Herald.” In some countries there is hearty approval of the degradation of the person to a standard pattern of thought. Personal initiative and aspiration, the free use of the mind, aie reckoned as treason. At last it lias come to it! Mind is inferior to the machine; is controlled by it. The mindless wheels are the master, and man the Inventor of them their dumb drudge, presently to go under them. Civilisation came of thd free ranging of the mind. It spread from a point of directing light in brute creation, a light now threatened with extinction. The only justification for man’s dominance on this planet is going; and man will go with it, as have other animals which failed to be superior to circumstance.

•‘NATURE’S SOLE MISTAKE.” In these clays when man’s ingenuity • turned to diabolical ends, when his still recent conquest of the air has in little more than -30 years already brought him incalculable suffering (and questionable advantage or pleasure), when the principal motive that now appears ,to be restraining him from mass-slaughter of his kind, is feai of the consequences to himself, it is only too easy to surrender to pessimistic thoughts and moods, says the "Listener” (London). There appears to be only too good reason for concluding that Gilbert inadvertently stated a bitter truth when he playfully asserted, with { . r ather different meaning, that ‘ Man h Nature’s. sole mistake.” Man, it seems, is not merely useless; he is dangerous—and dangerous, above all. t.,> himself, Such reflections must be fiercely combated. Their origin is unmistakable, whether one says piously that "they are of the Devil” or profanely that "they are the very devil.” Metaphysical brooding on ultimate ends and uses gets one nowhere, except perhaps into the Slough of Despond. It- was their overpowering leaning to the metaphysical that, made the German intellectuals. Liberals and Socialists so ineffectual in politics, equally in Bismarck’s Reich and in the Weimar Republic. There is no healthier antidote, than a dose of prosaic, realistic pragmatism. Man may be an end in himself or only the means or the way tr an end; he may be entirely "useless cr the most valuable of all the instruments of an inscrutable Will; be does not know and be cannot know. But whatever be is, he is hero and he has got .to make the best of his position. However futile he may bo, # he cannot be more so than lfiotaphysical speculation about bis ultimate use. He is a sad blunderer, and from time to time lie gets himself into very'serious difficulties, but if history, teaches anything at all, it teaches that he gets out of them again—although lie is not t, out of them by those who wring their hands or by those who retreat to ivory towers.