HIGHER CIVILISATION

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVIII, Issue 23392, 26 December 1945, Page 3

HIGHER CIVILISATION

What Scientists Believe “It must be remembered that the highest flights of human thought and action in religion, ethics, literature or art are grafted upon and draw their strength from the humble roots of man’s command over nature,” writes Sir Lawrence Bragg, the eminent physicist, in the “News Chronicle,” London. “Just as the change from depending on hunting to depending on agriculture. with its large settled communities, made a much higher type of civilisation possible, so surely the new and still greater command over nature which man is beginning to achieve through science will, in its turn, be a foundation for a higher civilisation still. ... “As I put it myself, there is a kind of compensating balance in the great fields of human thought. "I think of them in something like the following series—mathematics, science, the arts, ethics, religion. As they pass to what one instinctively recognises as the higher forms, those which touch man's soul the more closely, the less is any absolute certainty possible. ... "To sum up. we scientists believe that our subject is not merely a matter for technical specialists. It is a new venture in human thought and achievement, a new advance in civilisation. “The spirit of science, its methods ot controlled experiment and the rewards which they bring, its glamour, its inspiration, must be widely understood and appreciated if we are to play our part • in the difficult days which lie ahead’ _