CIGARETTE PAPERS.

Southland Times, Issue 21577, 15 December 1931, Page 8

CIGARETTE PAPERS.

THE POOR MAN’S MIND. At school we were told that the penguin’s wings atrophied because it ceased to use them, and I remember wondering if my arm would drop off were I to keep it immovable for a few years. Fortunately the arm is a fairly substantial thing and many generations of immobility would be necessary to secure even partial atrophy. But the Mind is much more delicate, and in this age we are permitting it to become immobile. Tell that to educated, intelligent people and they will laugh at you, because being educated, intelligent people, they know they have to use their Minds thousands of times a day—minding their own business. So how can their Minds be called immobile? Actually they are becoming lethargic and at times motionless because people more and more are permitting others to think for them. Dentists have made it clear that young people who take nothing but soft foods do not develop strong teeth, and well-formed mouths. Well, the mind which is denied the hard crusts will fail in the same way, and finally will be content to permit other minds to do the “chewing” for it. On every hand to-day there is evidence of a disinclination for hard thinking. Young people will work up white-hot enthusiasm, but they are the spasms of mental indigestion, and are exhausting instead of being stimulating. Useless information is accumulated, because the so-called educated people have been trained on short-cuts, and have lost the knack of thinking for themselves. Unfortunately the poor man’s mind will not admit its faults, and so it goes on gathering effects without troubling itself about causes. Curiosity may have been the cause of a cat’s death, but curiosity in a human being can be encouraged without leading to cattiness. The poor man’s mind, however, spends its curiosity on things which do not matter, and it devotes a lot of thought to the means by which it can avoid thinking. Boys who use cribs at school are no worse than their adult companions who gather their knowledge from junk piles, from potted information, and who by never troubling to find out the “whys” miss the opportunity to develop wisdom. The poor man’s mind is too often a poor man’s mind. —CRITICUS.