CICILISATION

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4558, 10 April 1942, Page 6

CICILISATION

DEVELOPMENT IN THE MIND “ Free men are defending a possession as dear as lives and homes, the city of their souls, the dreams of wider freedoms and duties that have possessed them since the dawn of out civilisation. “ They are threatened by forces that favour degeneration, a criminal conspiracy of countries of heathen superstitions, whose avowed and logical purpose it is to deprive the mind of the power of initiation, without which there can be no art, no learning. “ The menace is much worse than the shackles by which the religious system of the middle ages sought to restrict the inquiring spirit. That system was nervous of its prestigeBut the Nazi mind hates the Eroupean the European tradition as inferior minds hate the superior, as the bandit hates the law. “It knows that to allow scope to contemplative men to whom are granted the vision and the gleam means ultimate abrogation. “ Civilisation is not measurable by advance in mechanics, which are its toys—ill-used playthings alas ! —but by developments in the intensity and depth of man’s thoughts concerning humanity; it exists in the head and heart, or not at all, and is esteemed in proportion as man’s susceptibility to beauty and truth and loving-kind-ness increases declines. “ Literature, all the arts, are more than expression—they are a way of life, springing from and operating only in accomplished forms of society.”—Times Literary Supplement.