The Daily News. TUESDAY, JULY 25, 1911. ARE WE GOING AHEAD?

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 26, 25 July 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. TUESDAY, JULY 25, 1911. ARE WE GOING AHEAD?

An original and striking book, entitled "Is Mankind Advancing?" is reviewed in j Current Literature for May. The writer is an American woman of evidently fine | culture and strong convictions—a Mrs. i Martin. Having set forth in an aloquent passage her definition of progress, Mrs. Martin goes on to ask what method wc may use to measure the degree of progress in any age. She answers this question in the spirit of Huxley's statement: "The advance of mankind has everywhere depended upon the production of men of genius." It is by the number and calibre of its men of genius,' she holds, that any epoch must be tested. In the realm of practical science and pure thought Aristotle and Plato are probably the two greatest intellects the world has ever known. Have we, in modern times, Mrs. Martin enquires, any thinkers who can compare with these ancient Greeks? Kant may he cited, and Darwin and Herbert Spencer; but are they as great as Plato and Aristotle ? Greek sculpture, by universal consent, is unexcelled. The work of Phidias has no rival unless it be the work of Michael Angelo. Greek poetic genius finds transcendent expression in Homer, one of the four or five greatest figures in the world's literature, and the dramas of Sophocles, Euripedes and Aeschylus take their place with the dramas of Shakespeare. Dante, of the thirteenth century, and Goethe, of the eighteenth century, have no peers today. "The great story-tellers/' Mrs. Martin reminds us, "appeared, as was fitting, in the childhood of the race. As for animal stories, fables, etc., Aesop, writing seven centuries before Christ, has never been surpassed for point and brevity as well as for practical common sense. Boccaccio (1313) and Cervantes (1547)' can hardly be said to have been outdone by any of the countless numbers of story-tellers who in our day are pouring out such a flood of fiction." Coming next to men of action and statesmen, Mrs. Martin names four as being of the first rank—namely, Alexander, Caesar and Pericles, who lived before Christ, and Napoleon, who belongs to the nineteenth century. ''We may sav," she continues, "that there seem to have been in history about thirty-five men of absolutely first rank. These are Raphael. Michael Angelo, Phidias. Minus, Homer. Shakespeare, Demosthenes, Goethe, Aeschylus, Beethoven, Aristotle, Newton, Euclid. Plato, Dante, Kant, St. Paul, Pericles, Darwin, Moses, Cicero, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Jesus. Buddha, Confucius, Mahomet, Socrates, Columbus. Thucydides. Hipparcluts. Hannibal, Washington." If Cicero, Thucydides, Hipparchus, Hippochrates, Hannibal, Columbus, Washington and Darwin be omitted from this list, as possibly not measuring up to the first rank, we have twenty-seven names. "Of these twenty-seven men of tranccndent genius," Mrs. Martin comments, "eleven were produced by one small district. The little city of Athens produced in a few years more men of consummate genius than did all the millions of inhabitants of China, Arabia. Tmlia, Palestine. "Rome, Carthage, and all of Europe breeding for two thousand years!" But surely, it will be objected, genius is not the only standard of progress. Mankind, though it may not produce to-day the equals of the intellectual prodiges of the past, is nevertheless advancing in industrial and scientific efliciency, in moral insight, in democratic culture. Mrs. Martin meets this objection in a series of chapters. Tlie fact that we have more things than we ever had before, and can ge to morep laces and "get there" more rapidly, is not necessarily, she contends, a sign of progress. "I detest," she quotes Herbert Spencer as saying, "that Conception of social progress which pre-

seats as its aim increase of population, growth of wealth, spread of commerce. lil this ideal of human existence there is contemplated quantity only, and not quality. Instead of an immense amount of life of low type, I would far sooner see half the amount of life of a high type." "Machinery," says -Mrs. Martin, "is the great disappointment of the modern world. We have quadruple-ex-pansion engines which have a thirtyseven thousand horse-power, hut they have not rendered less arduous the labor of coal miners. The sewing-macTTine was hailed as the deliverer of the sewing woman, but since its invention the sweating system has spread. The digging of "the Suez Canal brought India four thousand miles nearer to Europe, but India remains as miserable and poverty-strick-en as before. Ocean freight rates on wheat from England to the United States have dropped to one-third in thirty-five years, but twelve millions of people, it is reported, remain in that country on the verge of starvation." The argument proceeds: "Many modern inventions, instead of being sources of pride, should be occasions to us of the deepest humiliation, and others are only suggestive of the varied misery whose existence demanded their invention. Thus ingenious firearms witness to burglary and need of self-defence, and the sleepless hatred between men; varieties of medicine indicate new varieties of 'disease, while surgery points to the failure of the whole science of medicine, even as the charities reveal the depth of the national poverty and the breakdown of the national economies; the police force marks the extent of national crime; insane asylums, prisons, tell their own story, as do the mountains of false hair, legs, arms, and the annual consumption in the United States alone of twenty pillions of false teeth!" The real point as issue, as Mrs. Martin sees it, is summed up in the question: Is it possible to point to the modern world and say, "Here are men of a more developed type, more intelligent, healthier, more moral, and made so by our vast improvements in the material conditions of life?" She herself does not see how this question can be answered securely in the affirmative. Genuine progress, in •Mrs. Martin's sense of the word, takes place when certain individuals emerge from the common level and establish a higher standard of human capacity and excellence. The problem of progress is therefore synonymous with the problem of producing great men. She says: "The ideal aim of society is the production of men of genius, because, it is through the activities of these that mankind acquires the means of its highest development and the satisfaction of its deepest needs."