NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18224, 18 October 1922, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

h WOMEN IN THE PULPIT, tl Discussing the admission of women to i- the ministry, Mr. A. G. Gardiner, in the t London Star, says:—" What has sex to do with the matter? That the faculties of e men and women differ we know. The £ attempt to ignore the difference is sometimes the vico of the modern woman movement. She wants to be the same as man instead of being the equal to man. But, whatever the differences are, they have nothing to do with the things of the ® mind or the spirit. Ae to the qualifications ' of women for receiving or communicating ' grace,' in what respect are they inferior to those of men? If the barbed wire s fence remains round the Church, so much - the wyse for the Church. It was the f Church which should have taken the lead in repudiating the offensive doctrine of the inferiority of women. It had moßt to ? gain from the release of the energies and 9 enthusiasm of women for its Bervioe. For t whatever doubts there might be as to the fitness of women for the secular field, as doctors, scholars, teachers, barristers, legislators, and so on, there can be none as to their peculiar equipment for spiritual tasks. They have the genius for service: they have in an infinitely larger measure than men the sense of spiritual life, and their gifts of eloquence have made , Johnson's gibe about women preachers a • monument of foolishness. If the Church - is perishing, it is perishing not because E arsons are ndl masculine enough, but ecause it is the last refuge of the anti--3 quat-ed doctrine that it is a men'a dub , with barbed wire entanglements to keep out the women from its holy places." 3 . » SOCIAL REFORM IN BRITAIN. 3 Writing in the Fbrtnightly Review, ] Mr. J. A. R. Marriott, M.P., declares , that 28,000,000 out of the total popula- ' tion of 47,000,000 in the United l Kingdom are receiving " public assistance," which now amounts to over £257,000,000 a year. The public ser- } vices comprised in this figure include education, various branches of public health measures relating to individuals, un- ) employment and poor relief, housing, war and civil pensions. Pensions alone account for nearly £99,000,000. These t figures are quoted in the courso of a j review of an American writer's warning that civilisation has resulted in racial ! decay, and Mr. Marriott continues: — " We have an appalling annual expenditure on various forms of public assist- ! ance, some of which, notably the ex- - penditure on public education, ought, in the course of a half century, to have produced measurable results in regard to > mental intelligence, while others ought to . have produced by now, if not a marked improvement in the physique of the , raco, at least a slowing down in the process of (degeneration. The question which it is difficult to evade may bo for-, i mulated as follows: Is there any logical I connection between intellectual degeneration and the rapid growth of expenditure i on public assistance ? In other words, is , social reform enervating the intellectual. | equipment of the people for whose benefit it is ostensibly promoted ? It is easy • to formulate the question; it is imposI siblo dogmatically to answer it. Other questions may, however, bo pressed homo. We have now had nearly thirty years of social reform, and half as many • of legisl-.tivo and administrative projects i which are really based on the principle , of Stato Socialism. Are we, as a nation, better or happier or wealthier by reason of all this public assistance ? In particu- ' lar, are the poorer classes more contented or less? Are the actual recipients of public assistance really benefited thereby ? A continuance of public assistance, ad--1 ministered on the present lines, seems to be fraught with consequences fatal to all parties. Unlike mercy, it blesses neither the giver nor tho recipient. Unless we cry a halt it bids fair to demoralise the individual and to ruin tho State." THE HUMAN MACHINE. The inaugural address at the 90th annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Hull, was delivered by Sir Charles Sherrington, the famous authority on the nervous system and the brain. He in considerable detail upon the relations between the nervous and muscular functions, particularly those in which muscular action, such as breathing and change of posture, is independent of the will. A pair of tiny water-filled bags are set one on each side of the skull. In each of these is a patch of cells endowed with a special nerve. Attached to hairlets of these cells is a tiny crystalline stone, the pressure of which acts as a stimulus through them to the nerve. The nerve of ea<;h gravitybag connects, through chains of nervecentres, with the muscles of all the limbs and of one side of the neck. In the ordinary erect posture of the head the stimulation of the two bags right and left is equal, becauso the two gravitystones then lie symmetrically. The result, then, is a symmetrical muscular effect on the two side 3 of the body,- namelv. the normal erect posture. But the right and left bags are mirror pictures of each other. If the head incline to one side tho resulting slip, microscopic though it be, of the two stones on their nervepatches makes the stimulation unequal. And from that siip there results exactly the right unsymmetrical action of the muscles to give the unsymmetrical pose of limbs and neck required for stability. That is the mechanism dealing with limbs and trunk and neck. An additional one postures thfr, head itself on the neck. Thrse same gravity-bags manage tho postur ng of tho eyes. Whichever way the head turns, slopes, or is tilted, "these adjust the eyeballs' posture compcnsatingly, so that the retina still looks out upon its world from an approximatelyr.ormal posture, retaining its old verticals and horizontals. In such a glimpse of mechanism what we see mainly is how the machinery starts and what finally comes out of it; of the intermediate elements of the process we know less. Each insight into the mechanism reveals more 1 mechanism still to know, THE SEAT OF THE MIND. The second part of Sir Charles Sherring- : ton's address was devoted to the question : Is life the running of a mechanism ? His . answer was understood to be that mind, as it has hitherto been regarded, is non- ' existent, but is simply the highest point c of development of the nervous system. < He said that we know that with struc- £ tural derangement or destruction of cer- j tain parts of the brain goes mental de- r rangement or defect, while derangement or destruction of other parts of the nervous system is not so accompanied. Decade by f decade the connection becomes more ascertained between certain mental perform- , ances and certain cerebral regions. Could ( wo look quite naively at the question of a j seat for the mind within the body we might perhaps suppose it diffused there, not localised in any one particular part at all. That it is localised and that its j localisation is in the nervous system— j can we attach meaning to that fact? The nervous system is that bodily system whose Bnecial office from its earliest appearance < onward throughout evolutionary history has beqn more and more to weld together the body's component parts into one consoli- : dated mechanism reacting as a unity to 1 the changeful world about it. It, more than * any crther system, has constructed out of a 1 collection of organs an individual of uni- 1 fied act and experience. H represents the J acme of accomplishment of the integration 1 of the animal organism. That it is in this ® system that mind, as we know it, • has 1 had its beginning, and with the progressive development of the system, has step for step developed, is aurely significant. So 1 is it that in this system the portion to 6 whidh mind transcendently attaches is t exactly that where are carried to their i highest • pitch the nerve-actions which e manage the _ individual as a whole, o especially in his reactions to the external t world. There, in the brain, the integra- s ting nervous centres are themselves further a compounded, interconnected, and re-com- t bined fcrr unitary functions. The cortex of a the forebrain is the main seat of mind. n That cortex with its twin halves; corres- 1 ponding to the two side-halves of the body n is really a ainfle organ knitting those a halves together by a still further knitting e: together ofl the nervous, system itself. n