PRIME MINISTER SAYS RAPID GROWTH OF KNOWLEDGE MAY BE DANGEROUS

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6801, 3 January 1929, Page 2

PRIME MINISTER SAYS RAPID GROWTH OF KNOWLEDGE MAY BE DANGEROUS

' LONDON. "Wc- arc living to-day in the midst of changes which will alter completely all our ideas of transportation, not only of our bodies, but of our speech," said the _ Prime Minister, Mr. Stanley Baldwin in an address at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. "We have tried to see," Mr. Baldwin continued, "what has been accomplished by the intellect of man and how intellect has dominated nature.

‘‘ln the present rapidity 'of the acquisition. of knowledge some due humility should be felt, by students in realising that the greater t,he sum of knowledge, the'greater the speed with which it is accumulated, the' mors ignorant the individual is, and must become. Knowledge as Impediment. “I often feel, as a looker-on, that there is a real danger of the abundance of new knowledge impeding our progress, that the apparatus accumulated by the scholar will be so great that he will not be able to move. No doubt wc are unable to control many of the forces that arc loose to-day. That is why wo statesmen and politicians cannot achieve the practical results which impatient scholars and impatient social reformers would have us do. There is no comparison between a human being and a piece of mechanism, and . popular metaphors which suggest it are misleading. We have to legislate for vast, complex communities. We look to the learned for inspiration and knowledge, to the churches for inspiration and holiness. We make the best pse we can of the mixture wc get from both these quarters. But it is with man wc have to deal, and not with machines, abstractions, or what is called the economic man. Real Basic of State. ‘•We have to deal with men swayed by passions good and bad, and by ignorance and ignorance played upon. They arc clment.s of primary importance tu us, because it is upon the reaction of those forces that the very health of the life of the state must depend. •‘Political institutions arc not a product of the intellect alone. I do not believe there, exists the most austere scholar who has not felt sometimes inside him the rumblings of those elemental feelings and impulses which in mankind grow into love and religion, or hatred and war. Those arc the forces with which your politicians have to deal.'’