NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20758, 29 December 1930, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

OBSERVING THE UNIVERSE. ' " Man is a biassed observer of the universe," says Dr. L. P. Jacks, in a re-cently-published book. He suggests that observation is concentrated on things visible and that things audible, tactual, olfactory are unnoted. The grand question may well bo, "Is the universe a fortuitous concourse of noises or an ordered symphony of tones?" By way of illustration he takes a sheet of printed music. "The score as read off by the eye on a sheet of paper is obviously a very different thing from the audible music when Kreisler is rendering it on his violin. Nobody in his senses would maintain that the score which we see is identically the same as the music which we hear; the score is a translation into the language of the eye of something that speaks in the language of another sense. Our astronomy and our physics, with their space-pictures and diagrams, their formulae, their measurements and their general technique, bear much the same kind of relation to the realities they deal with as the musical score printed on a sheet of paper a.nd the theory of music behind it bear to the actual music as we may hear it at a concert. It translates the continuous flow of the sounds as they go on in time, into fixed characters', which do not flow, but stand immovably there on a sheet of paper. It translates the dynamic into the static." LIBERAL PARTY TACTICS. The attitude of the Liberal Party was strongly criticised by Sir John Simon in a speech at Clcckheaton, Spen Valley, last month. He said that the sole reason why this year, for the first time in his experience, Liberals had failed to put down an amendment to the Address, was because, if they did so, and there was any danger of the Conservative Opposition voting for it, Liberals would have to run away from their own amendment, if they did not wish to seo the Government defeated. That was a position which seemed to him intolerable, and he did not believe that Liberal influenco in Parliament or in the country could revive as long as it continued. The decision of the Liberal Party to support those measures of which they approved and to oppose those measures which they believed to be bad seemed to him in recent months to have undergone a subtle change. They still supported the Government in matters of which they approved, but when they came across a thing of which they as Liberals did not really approve at all, instead of voting against it, some of them constantly abstained. This shrinkage from giving an adverse vote easily became a habit. It might proceed from the highest motives, but it was not understood by the country or respected by the Government. They should, he believed, best serve their country if they did not spend too much of their time in tactical calculations, but took a bold stand, come what might, for the things in which they believed.

DUTY AND HARD WORK. Look back to the old, much-abused Victorian days, and estimate the qualities of our fathers, tho men who held the world's markets, and were the unchallenged dictators of commerce," writes tho Bishop of Chelmsford in the London Evening News. "To them duty was a constant driving force, and hard work was tho reply their conscience made to duty. All those qualities have disappeared from tho people ,of to-day. Tho austere persistence in pursuit of efficiency and world-leadership has been exchanged for easy-going habits. Possossed of education vastly superior to their parents, dowered with a personal charm which makes their forebears look woofully bedraggled, our young people suggest by their attitude to their work that they regard it as a curso and a bore. Tho national character has gone soft. Tho dignity Eof labour and tho joy of hard work are gone. The principal art to-day is to discover how to tako as much out of the concern as possible by putting into the concern tho least possible, whereas our forefathers' method was to put in the maximum and take out tho minimum. Quito likely before the ship sinks the crew will como to its senses. That has happened more than once in our own history, but all hands should have been at the pumps long before this. It is not political nostrums which will save us, but hard work, thrift, devotion to dull and monotonous duty ? and a far more sober view of life and its responsibilities."