TO-DAY'S QUESTIONS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19460, 16 October 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

TO-DAY'S QUESTIONS.

THE RENAISSANCE ANSWERS.

BY KOTARE,

Humanity may bo moving steadily upward to the heights; wo dare not believe otherwise, or life becomes A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, : Signifying nothing. But it is not always easy to mark the line of progress. Wo can always flatter ourselves that there is a great gulf fixed between ourselves and tho attitude of mind that viewed with complacency the burning of unfortunate .criminals at the stake. It is 150 years since the last penal fires were lit on English ground—only 150 years. But last year a wretched negro, chained to a stake, writhed amid the fires of death kindled by white man's vengeance; only last year, in the Statn of Mississippi. Vengeance may, be a kiad of wild justice; but what crime at this time of day would be adjudged worthy of so ghastly a punishment? Death if you will, but death "with torture indescribable! At least our horror, the world's almost universal horror, shows we have made some advance on tho path of humanitarianism. The truth seems to be that we move in cycles, along an inclined plane. The progress is not in the whirling cycle but in tho fact that each later age goes through tho old cycle on a slightly higher level. At the top of each new cycle we are higher than the race lias reached before; at tho bottom we are not at so low a depth absolutely as tho previous ages have reached. But within each cycle the relative distance between top and bottom is about the same. The New Renaissance. It is very hard to say just where we aro to-day; whether the wheel has gone full circle, whether we are climbing steadily to the top or are on the downward slope. Only the historian of the future can determino that. One thing is sure. We are facing to-day very few new problems; the race has faced them all before, and has offered practically the same solntions of them. Lothrop Stoddard, in his " Scientific Humanism," believes that we are back again facing the same ultimate problems as Renaissance Europe had to solve in tho 15th and 16th centuries. There are the same impulses suddenly liberated, a resurgence of the same hostile forces, with the danger of the same disasters through the san e obscurantism and intolerance. The Renaissance was in essence the discovery of man. For centuries man had moved inside a huge fence built by custom and authority. He could wander at will within that circumscribed area. But there came a new faith in man, in man s powers of mind and heart. The chief interest to the questing soul was the vast unexplored territory outside the fence. Ho felt an irresistible lrge toward the far horizon and beyond, where the strange roads go down. The best and the noblest discoveries had still to be made, and man possessed in the unused powers of the human mind the key that would open every door, in his undaunted spirit tho urge, that would not let him rest till Nature's last secret had been wrested and revealed. In this spirit the men of the Renaissance launched out into the unknown. Their telescopes solved tho riddles of the heavens: they opened up tho path to the West, which none had dared to travel since tho bold Norsemen had blazed a trail hundreds of years before; they searched deep into the mysteries of the human soul. A restless, seeking age of unlimited intellectual curiosity—it has certainly its counterpart in the spirit of the present age. Thomas More.

One of the first questions that the men of the Renaissance set themselves to answer was this: What is wrong with the world ? What is needed in the light of all the new knowledge to make the world a better place to live in? In England, particularly, these were the questions to which the "best minds of the 16th century directed their finest resourced. First on the scene comes Sir Thomas More. To him the crux of the whole problem lay in the unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity. He was something of a socialist, in the broadest acceptation of the term. He thought the whole social system was based 011 a false foundation, and reared, according to false principles. Tll his " Utopia " he pictures an island in the New World, where society has been constructed on the principle that the individual exists to serve the whole community, and the community exists, not for the benefit of the few, but for the comfort and well-being of all its citizens. Reorganisation 011 new lines—there for him lay the one way of salvation. New institutions, new laws, these alone can cure the hopeless disease of civilisation; life can become what it was meant to Ijo for the average man, as all men are compelled to become average men, and each man's gift is claimed as a matter of course for the whole state. Education. Thomas Elyot, a few years later, published his " Governour." He is quite satisfied with the social system, but he thinks that there can be 110 satisfactory cure for humanity's ills until the men destined to lead arc properly trained for leadership. Let society remain as it is, but see that the men who shall one day rule are taken in hand in their plastic youth and fitted by careful education for the responsibilities that will one day devolve upon them. He has none of More's enthusiasm for the umjer-dog; none of his belief in the importance of the average man. The different grades of society are part of the natural and inevitable order of things ordained both by nature and by custom. Where More would save by reorganisation, Elyot would concentrate on education. The people must always he led; make sure that the leadership is wise and capable. Roger Ascharn in his " Scholemaster " is still concerned with the upper classes. He was au enthusiastic and successful educationist, but for him education was chiefly concerned with the creation of a fine race of cultured gentlemen, who would by their example raise the standard of maimers and character throughout the country. Both Elyot and Ascham begin and end at the top; their views of education are hopelessly narrow and inadequate according to our modern democratic ideas; but at least each saw the power and value of education and the place a sound education system must play in bringing into existence the new and better world.

The last great figure in Renaissance England is Francis Bacon. For him the solution of the world problem lies neither in new social systems nor in education. The future is with science. Let man with the new-found scientific method in his hands go forth boldly against Nature and tear from her her long-kept secrets. Knowledge, scientific knowledge, won hy a united and persistent assault on Nature's citadels, will liberate for man the treasures that alone can make man happy and cure the world's ills. You have tho vision of a world run on Bacon's scientific principles in his " New Alantis." That was how Renaissance England tried to answer the question, " What is wrong with the world ?" These were its solutions: reorganisation, education for leadership, scientific research. The wheel has turned a full circle, and once, again men are offering the same solutions for the same old problems. Will we get any further than the wise men of the 16th century?