NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21258, 11 August 1932, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

"FALSE GOD OF REPUBLICANISM" Sir Thomas Inskip, the AttorneyGeneral, speaking at Elvaston Castle, Derbyshire, said that Ireland had created a situation which was likely to become a tragedy. The Free State had entered into a bargain which it was not prepared to keep and wanted to make another. There was time, however, for Mr. de Valera, who was an inexperienced politician, to repent, and it was to be hoped that he would. Ho was running after the false god of republicanism, and there was no room in the British Empire for those who used such language as he employed in reference to his ambitions or intentions. Sir Thomas said he refused to believe that the Irish people were behind Mr. de Valera in the suggestion that they were prepared to forfeit their part in the British Empire for something as unsatisfactory as a Republican ideal. Unswerving observance of obligations and loyalty to the Crown were indispensable for the permanence of the Empire. " WAY OUT OF OUR EVILS" "Let us lift up our hearts. There is a growing discontent with the yoke of the past, and vet on all sides a desire to relearn the secrets of the age-approved wisdom," writes Professor Sir J. A. Thomson in the Daily Express. "There is a determined playing of the peace-name; we are increasingly in touch with ono another, and good will spreads. Everywhere there are growing points and promising new departures; man is girding his loins to the task of applying the higher sciences to the problems of life; there are many recoils from mechanisation and many quests after a more satisfying polity in which things will not ride mankind so cruelly. Hope will no longer acquiesce in being blindfolded by ignorance, and the diffusion of this determination to understand social evolution is the biggest thing that is happening in the world to-day. For the way out of our evils, of which the financial are but symptoms, is the old way of the Book of Proverbs, that 'wisdom should find a welcome within us and knowledge become a pleasure.' This is the way of Life." THE " BOLSHEVIST I.R.A. " The Dublin correspondent of the Spectator concludes his article published on July 2 as follows"The question of the next election and its date is beginning to be canvassed. The Government has decided to give a year's moratorium on the payment of land annuities. That is taken as indicating that an election will take place within the year. It is evident that once the annuities have not been paid for a year it. will be next to impossible to collect them thereafter. If Fianna Fail is beaten in the election they will have left an ugly heritage to their successors. But that is not likely to trouble them. The moratorium is calculated to convince the farmers that they have at least one tangible gain from having iianna l* ail in office. And if as a result they vote again for Mr. de Valera's party and he is reejected, it is well known that—in his own words-—he docs not believe in crossing bridges until he comes to them. He will take office again trusting that something may turn up to solve the land annuities difficulty that he will have created by his moratorium. Meanwhile, there is something of an air of optimism coming from the Eucharistic Congress. People feel that the real, vital danger to the country comes from the Bolshevist I.R.A. And the demonstrations of ljving faith during the last week justify one in hoping that, the people will be less anil less tolerant of the 1.R.A., its doctrines or its activities."

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

At a jubilee meeting of the Society for Psychical Research Dr. William Brown, Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy, Oxford, lectured on " Psychology and Psychical Research." He said that advances in the study of psychology during the last 50 years had had strong repercussions in the domain of psychical 'research. This was especially so in the case of hypnotism and hysterical dissociation in relation to the phenomena of mediumistie trance. Hypnotic and psychoanalytic investigations had greatly supplemented the theory of the "subliminal self" without, however, really supplanting it. The evidence of supernormal power working below the threshold of consciousness, whether in the form of apparent telepathy, clairvoyance or premonition, or in the apparent production of physical phenomena, must be estimated on its own merits and not hastily prejudged in terms of coincidence, self-deception or conscious fraud. The employment of the statistical method on large numbers of cases was entirely in the spirit of strict science, yet the predominantly negative results recently obtained along these lines as regards manifestations of telepathy and clairvoyance should not blind the public to the possibility of such phenomena in special cases and under epecial conditions. The intensive study of well-attested individual cases was needed to correct the balance, and it was especially along this line,that the Society for Psychical 'Research had done so much brilliant work. One might base one's belief in survival most firmly on general philosophical and religious considerations as to the nature and value of human experiences, but nevertheless the sum total of evidence of a scientific nature accumulated by the Society for Psychical Research in'support of survival was far from negligible*