The Fulness Of Life

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 196, 16 May 1936, Page 20

The Fulness Of Life

44 — F we are to have that fullness of life which is the appointed answer I to our human quest, it must be the common possession of all human I folk, and if—what haunting ‘it's’ these are-that is to be at all aceomplished, it must be our shared endeavour. Whenever in any region fullness of life becomes a monopoly, the monopolist has already lost

“It belongs, to use Dr. L. I’. Jacks’s pregnant phrase, to the civilisation of culture and not the civilisation of power. It can only enrich itself by enriching others. In its noble appropriation of the great values of life and its creative use of the great ministries of life, it takes nothing which does not thus become our common property. There are now the beginnings of some movement in this direction.

“The growing demand for the abolition of the profit motive, the loose, popu. • uses-of the word ‘service,’ the direction of the resources of the State toward the bare need of the unemployed, the almost lyric recital of how prosperous we all might be if we knew how to distribute what we could create, the highly idealistic programmes of the Shape of Things to Come, are significant, but they run counter as yet to the temper of the more forceful amongst us.. The values which lie behind the approaches to fullness of life have as yet taken no hold of our general imagination.

“One may venture to believe, for all that, that one release from 0111 malaise is down or up such a road. It should certainly foster the contemplative life, for contemplation may, I take it, be as usefully directed towau consequences or situations as toward the glory of God, and toward the wellbeing of humanity as the raptures of salvation. It would give a new meanin"- to enterprises and power, and, because it assocated personal initiative with the common good, would increase the dividends of satisfaction, which are the final dividends any enterprise can pay.

"All this demands a proper economic and industrial set-up, of course, and the intelligent quest for such a ‘set-up,’ if we could be whole-heartedly committed to it, might become for a long period an occupation so engrossing as to make the technical achievements of the industrial epoch seem colourless beside it.

“One can dream that it might be so. done as to furnish also in manifold ways (he beauty for want of which, though they may nor. know il. the gen erality are pitifully hungry, and an employment of our restless ereativeuess which would leave us no time to be professionally unhappy. But there would still remain the conquest of what defeats us through its simplicity- the subdual of all our restless power to kind and quiet ways of life in which labotii and rest, health and a day, the happy use of all the senses, the enrichment of our higher faculties and the comradeship of the like-minded, would furnish the substance of our contentment.

“It has been a long time now since Western civilisation lost the art of living in the present. Its religion made time only a prelude to eternity. Its statesmen have sacrificed the well-being of any present to grandiose policies of national aggrandisement. Its financiers have issued stock to return dreamful dividends out of future business at the cost of present solvency. Its idealists have always been adjourning its millenniums, its prophets have given it their vision for bread. About the only thing left to the present has been confusion and frustration. And yet life is always an affair with the present tense.

“The protests which meet any insistence that we should perfect the art of living in the present and explore the secrets of contentment are the best demonstration of how completely our entire force is spent upon preparation for something in the future, and how narrow the margin we allow ourselves of actual realisation. Our malaise is rooted deep in just this temper.

“Economically we have taken far too much out of any productive present to create a capital for future production, a capital which eventually turns out to be in a sadly considerable part only expensively engraved highgrade paper, and is not even like a well-known definition of faith, ‘the substance of tilings hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.’ It is ratherthe evidence of the self-defeating nature of a system which substitutes thingwealth for life-wealth and seeks to defeat the old-age law that what comes out. of life must go back info life again—or else end in sterile death. . . —Dr. Glenn Atkins.