THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1931. EARTHQUAKE AND MENTAL OUTLOOK.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21266, 21 February 1931, Page 12

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY , FEBRUARY 21, 1931. EARTHQUAKE AND MENTAL OUTLOOK.

The dread shock of the earthquake is over,' reconstruction has begun, and men’s thoughts have-resumed their customary ways. Yet not quite. A sudden visitation, as of a blow from some irresistible hand, must open up a new channel of thought, or rather reopen an old one. The time has gone when educated people like those of New Zealand could believe that such a visitation is a sign of the wrath of God about their wickedness. Nor can they believe that such calamities may be averted by supplication of invisible agencies. The civilised world has learned, in part at least, to think scientifically, and it realises that the blow from the earthquake, tragic as it .is, is as natural as the falling of the rain. The solar system has arisen through shock; our whole earth is the result of shock. In the minute world of atoms in and about us, shock and destruction are constantly proceeding. The atoms of radium disintegrate into atoms of lead and helium steadily year after year, not apparently following any plan which science can discover beyond that of a statistical probability. But it is no comfort to a living* thinking being, to realise that he, like the inanimate rocks and atoms, is exposed to the risk of disintegration, particularly to that of sudden and violent disintegration. Perhaps it is the suddenness and violence of the earthquake that render it so fearful. Scientifically considered, all natural phenomena are the effects of causes all of which are embedded in the physical structure of the universe. The earth is not a haphazard sphere where events happen by chance or by the caprice of some offended power. The earthquake in Hawke’s Bay would have occurred even had the white man never landed in New Zealand. The law of causation must hold, whether man suffers by it or not. The strange phenomenon to-day in scientific thought is that distinguished physicists like Eddington and Jeans tell us that in the world beyond the atom, in the world of electrons, causation no longer holds, but is supplanted by a so-called law of indeterminacy. Hence, say those thinkers, science no longer holds up to human view implacable causation as a warrant for determinism or the fettered will of man; rather does science offer in its law of indeterminacy something in the nature of a physical basis for the freedom of the will. The individual electrons in the grey matter of the brain apparently move only according to probability, not according to a rigid pre-determining causation. The common man will not be greatly impressed by this gift of freewill at the hands of the physicists. He may welcome their conversion from a mechanistic interpretation of the universe, but ho will also feel that they are cutting away the ground from under their own feet. To deny causation in the' world of electrons is to reduce the whole of science to a mathematical probability. The common man will find no comfort in

this; perhaps lie will even think that the law of indeterminacy exposes science once more to the obscurantists who in early clays clogged its wheels of progress. In any case electrons are not thoughts, emotions, and will. The common man will continue to think that if courage, sympathy, and brotherly helpfulness manifest themselves in a national calamity, then courage, sympathy, and helpfulness must be as much a structural part of the mental universe as electrons are of the physical. Whatever the geological history of this earth, whatever cataclysms have occurred or may occur, man will always, by his thought or action, or both, assert the supremacy of the imponderables of his personality over the aggregation of cells composing his body and over the atoms that compose non-sentient objects. It is in this belief, that man is something more than atoms and electrons and cells, that so many thousands of people not only in New Zealand, but throughout the world, have offered their sympathy to the sufferers in the recent earthquake. Scientific thought has conferred, and will confer, great benefits on mankind. But sympathy, courage, and goodwill have no atoms 6r electrons in them. ‘ They are a projection onto a corporeal plane of elements that are not inherently corporeal, and of which the true nature can therefore never be apprehended through merely corporal media, any more than the nature of a museum could be apprehended from the shadow cast by the building upon the street. There are, of course, always some who in times of calamity deny the existence of a non-material universe. Surely there is no time in which things of the spirit—sympathy, goodwill, and selfsacrifice —are more manifest. The experience of New Zealand in the calamity of the earthquake demonstrates that the non-material powers of man can prove superior even to the most dreadful convulsions of Nature.