The Great Men of the Present Day

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 12, 8 October 1927, Page 19

The Great Men of the Present Day

-OR 2,000 years past,” said Dr. Nicholas Murray’ Butler, Presi- | dent of Columbia University’ (U.S.A.), in the London “Evening News”, ‘‘there never was a period when somewhere i in the world there was not a really great poet, philosopher, or genius of some sort who dwarfed his fellow men. Yet to-day there is not a single such great man in any’ country’. . . . The world is suffering from an intellectual famine.” “Is the world—the poor, battered, weary old world in which we Jive—really passing through a slump in genius?” asks the ‘News.” “Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, aloofly surveying mankind from China to Charing Cross, has coldly turned down his thumb. He turned it down in an interview with the ‘Evening News,’ and now he has gone back to America, thinking sadly of the days when there were genuises—- .... and we petty men Walked under their huge legs and peeped about To find ourselves dishonourable graves. “Meanwhile the old planet is taking a ruminative look at itself. “Sir Oliver Lodge, speaking to an ‘Evening News’ representative : “ ‘I do not agree with Dr. Murray Butler. There arc some astronomers alive to-day who are as great as any that ever existed—men like Professor Eddington and Dr. Jeans. They are as great as any of the famous men of the past. “ ‘There are wonderful physicists in the world now. ’* ‘People do not realise the wonders that are happening, quite quietly, in their midst. We are in a great revolutionary period: the world is changing as it sweeps along. Great discoveries are being made, unknown to the millions of people who live their daily lives in the hurlyburly of the modern world. “‘■“No great men”! No, I do not agree. " ‘Of science the charge is palpably untrue. Science is now at the very top of the wave—greater than it-has ever been.’ ‘

lOf the two geniuses quoted by Sir Oliver Lodge, one is Dr. Janies Hopwood Jeans, a 49-year-old mathematician who lives at Dorking. He has won the royal medal of the Royal Society and the gold medal of .the Royal Astronomical Society, and has written such works as ‘Radiation and the Quantum Theory’ and ‘Cosmogony and Stellar Dynamics.’ The other is Professor Eddington, the 44-year-old Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge.] “The new President of the British Association, Sir Arthur Keith, the distinguished anthropologist said:— “ ‘I think it is sheer audacity for any man to say there are no geniuses to-day. flow can any one man judge? The world of knowledge is so vast now—it covers such an enormously wide range—that no one brain can comprehend it all. “‘I do not think there is a dearth of genius to-day. Great men come in waves, I know—more at one time than at another—but how can you tell who are the real geniuses among your contemporaries? “ Tn a hundred years’ time people will look back on onr age and pick out its geniuses. We cannot possibly do it. “ ‘I could name half-a-dozen -whom I consider geniuses, but it would not be fair for me to do if.’ ” “Perhaps a decision one way or another is impossible to us,’’ comments the “Evening Standard.” “We can no more appreciate the greatness of a contemporary than we can see the grandeur of a mountain when we are climbing its slopes. The peak seems ever at the end of the next incline, and it is not Until we look at it from a distance that we realise how far we were from it. “Another- difficulty lies in some doubt as lo the proper definition of greatness. Is a great man one who does large things? But many little men have been pushed by accident into positions where they could do nothing else. Accident plays so huge a part in human affairs. And who has not met, in some humble position, a man who radiated from him by mere force of being himself the very sense of greatness?”