TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 9, 11 January 1934, Page 6

TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

DOMINANT IDEAS. (By PRO BONO PUBLICO.) In a recent note I spoke of ideas, scientific, philosophic and religious, that are gradually absorbed, rather vaguely, into the current of thought of an age, colouring its life and governing human conduct. From period to period the advances of science and the philosophic systems worked out by great minds thus bring about changes in what has been called the intellectual climate of the world. Now in the nature of things these dominant ideas arc, and have been in the past, based on incomplete knowledge, and it is beyond doubt that their influence has sometimes been evil and not good, turning men's thoughts and ambitions in wrong directions, limiting freedom and restraining human progress. In some periods, even in highly civilised countries, the result has been to inspire and justify aii intolerance that took the joy out of life for masses of people. A life that has no joy in it is surely not worth living, and although some people seem to derive satisfaction from repressing the element of joy in the lives of other people, the repression of joy seems to me to be an unnatural human desire, even if it is inspired by a confident assurance of the purpose of life. Scarcely less to be condemned is a theory of life that denies, even unwittingly, the enjoyment of life to our fellow men. The age out of which we are passing, I hope rapidly, magnified the individual at the expense of the group. Man—and I mean the individual man—regarded himself as the centre of bis universe. He had to make good as an individual, be the cost to others what it would. Moral ideas were entirely selfregarding. It may come as a shock to some of you to be told that nineteenth 'century ideas of morality undoubtedly were radically unsound in important respects. And we still act and live under their influence. The "intellectual climate" of the nineteenth century, which brought the rise of industrialism, produced a selfish, even brutally selfish, outlook. The age was certainly characterised by an unprecedented display of charity and organisation of charity, and this was in a sense a recognition of the unsocial nature of its own dominant ideas, but even now we have not come to a realisation of the fundamental error in • the nineteenth century social theory. You need not run away with the idea that that error can be redressed by any change in the political system, or that the abolition of capitalism would bring the millennium. It is not the social or political or economic system that counts; it is the "intellectual climate." No system is better than the people who constitute it. Their dominant ideas must determine its character, and you have only to look around you in the world to see that injustice and hardship and intolerance may flourish in any social system. "I cannot tell you, with any certainty, what social ideas are going to come out of the present cpnfusion. I should be happier if I knew that the next generation was going to realise tlie supreme importance of biological education, because it seems to me that men cannot' organise their social system on right lines unless they have a knowledge of life processes and of the principles that govern the persistence of. living organisms. The greatest of biologists doubtless have still much to learn, but it is certain that mankind could even now make a wonderful advance towards | happier conditions if social ideas were brought into conformity with what is already known [of the principles life and living.