MEN OF TO-DAY.

Wanganui Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 160723, 9 August 1920, Page 6

MEN OF TO-DAY.

NO PHYSICAL PROGRESS. There has been no physical progress in our species for many thousands of years, and mentally the men of the Stone Age, ugly as most of them must have been, had as large brains as ours. So declared Dr Inge, the Dean of St. Paul’s, in delivering the Romanes lecture in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. The “Gloomy” Dean’s subject was “The Meal of Progress,” and not infrequently, during the course of a brilliant and epigrammatic address, it might have appeared that his own idea of modern progress was that it was consistently crab-like—backward. , ENVYING THE ZULUS. The Cro-Magnon race, which lived 20,(100 years ago, was equal, he said, to any modern people in size and strength. The ancient Greeks were, he supposed, handsomer than wo were; and 'some unprogressive races, such _as the Zulus and Samoans, were envied by Europeans cither for strength or beauty. Although it seemed not to he true that the sight and hearing of civilised peoples were inferior to those of savages, they had certainly lost their natural weapons, which from one point of view was a mark of degeneracy. Then he would he a hold man who should claim that wo were intellectually equal to the Athenians or superior to the Romans. MORAL PROGRESS. The question of moral improvement was much more difficult. Until the Great War few would have disputed that civilised man had become more human, more sensitive to the sufferings of others, more just, more self-con-trolled, and less brutal. It seemed to be very doubtful, however, whether, when we were exposed to the same temptations, we were more humane , or move sympathetic., ov ),ustcv, or less brutal than the ancients. The best hope of stopping progressive degeneration lay in eugenics. But they were pot yet agreed what . they should breed for, THE NARROW RATH. They had been driven to the conclusion that neither science nor history gave them warrant for believing that humanity had advanced, except by accumulating knowledge and experience and the instruments of living. “For individuals,” said tho Dean, in conclusion, “the path of progress is always open; hut it is a narrow path, steep and difficult. “For this reason we must cut down our hopes for our nation, for Europe, and for humanity at large to a very modest aspiration. We have no millennium. to look forward to, but neither need we fear any widespread retrogression. There will be new types of achievement, which will enrich the experience of the race, and new flowering times of genius and virtue not less glorious than the age of Sophocles or the age of Shakespeare.”