The Spark Of Personality

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 113, 6 February 1937, Page 17

The Spark Of Personality

4 4’ey F personality is imperishable and indestructible, surely it is a foul | wrong to stifle or weaken it in any State at the hands of any single I Dictator, or a Government which may be merely a group of Dicta,■1 tors who have snatched a brief authority over human lives,” writes .Mr. Joint Scott, in a notable article on “Personality” in “Chambers’s .1 ournal.” "No doubt, in an Army, Navy or Air Force, the only possible basis of operation is that the men should be mechanised and not allowed to think or reason, theirs only to obey. That is, clearly, the condemnation of such a system in a world of responsible human beings, and personality will never come into its own widest kingdom until the reign of. universal peace, when military service will be no more. "But equally stand condemned all class, mass or national movements in which the individual is nowhere and the class, mass or nation is everything; where men and women are ordered and drilled into submission along certain roads of conduct, or drift with the current, with independent thought and judgment submerged and the rights of personality obliterated. "The State, the Soviet, or the Union is then not the servant, but the master, and the individual is the slave. On the contrary, there will never be a rightly ordered world until the value of each individual is appreciated, and the fullest opportunity given to every man of intellectual freedom to act according to his own thought and judgment, and to develop his own personality, and for every woman to have this same privilege in full equality with men. ... “Bureaucracy is the deadly enemy of personality. Its red tape has strangled personality. The divided and subdivided responsibility of officials, and their iron discipline, leaves little scope for individual expresssion of personality. “. . . Life has become such a complex affair, and personality is assailed and ruined by false ideas of life and by materialism. Great cities are not amendable to the production of personality, and with the decay

of village life has come a dearth of rugged, brusque and picturesque per sonalities, and handicraft men and village ‘characters’ are fewer.

“We take our opinions too much from the daily Press, and are apt io become smoothly planed and rounded-off. It is suicide to be different, and a crime to be odd.

“But in every community, circle or family there rise ami stand out men and women who have the spark of personality. They protest or plead, launch out on or lead an enterprise; they have ideals and spread them; they espouse a cause they believe in; they defy convention if it muffles justice and the right; they create, impress, persuade and mould opinion, and so change lives.

“They prove the dynamics of personality and radiate it. They stand out against conduct lower than the best, and scorn the dead-level of debased or vulgar standards. They realise the preciousness of individual men and women, and will not have them put in irons under boards or bureaucracies which prevent their thinking and acting for themselves.

“They feel that every life has a purpose, a service to render, a testimony to give, or something to discover. Everyone, they believe, is born with tiie miracle of life, an individuality to realise, a personality to mature, and a judgment to exercise. Their own contagious personality enlarges the sense of possibilities and powers in others, and personality is to them a thing of royal worth.

“Personality is then known as their supreme good, the divinest reality with which they deal, and they discover that the only way to develop personality is by loving service of their fellow-men. Lands, houses and investments, the wealth of Croesus or the conquests of Alexander, decay and vanish; but live, throbbing personality will alpne abide beyond Time.”

Mr. John Scott’s powerful plea should be read in full, advice it is a pleasure to give, for the Christmas Number of “Chambers’s Journal” is well worth getting.