Conceited Fledgelings

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 15, 12 April 1906, Page 1

Conceited Fledgelings

' Our Glorious System of National Education ' does not seem to be as successful in eliminating ignorance

as its admirers suppose. It has left quite enough of it to go around. And this mental rawness renders itself too often intolerable by its pride, its dead-sure-ness, the airs that it puts on, and the off-hand manner in which it disposes of high and deep fcjuestkns that are quite beyond its ken. Mental ripeness is habitually humble. It is mental greenness that is conoeited. And, it Is smatterings and halMcnowledge that ' educate " so many young people ' cph their feet,' as Billings phrases it. Says the ' Otago Daily Times' in a recent issue .—. — ' There are thinking men who, taking a wide survey of the world to-day and noting carefully the tendencies of the time, are' inclined to question whether the almost universal educational facilities provided for the children or the twentieth century are going tc prove an unmixed blessing in days to come. Such men argue that, since a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, in a superficial age a generation fed upon snippets and brevities is apt to assume omniscience : he who knows a little about everything and knows nothing well is not able to recognise his own ignorance. The real student, on the other hand, the loriger he lives is more painfully aware of his limitations. Thus the tendency of the age is for every realm of thought and action to be rudely and rashly invaded by boastful know-littles, to the serious detriment of true culture and learning.' A coterie of tfiose ' boastful know-littles '" have recently been airing their mental superficiality and con T ceited omniscience in the columns of our local morn-j ing contemporary. Their subject was Darwinism and evolution. They assumed, with offensive dogmatism, that these theories are the proven facts of science. Their speculations postulated spontaneous generation, which science rejects. They ignore the verdict of Hartmann, Zoeckler, Fleisclimann, and other 'foremost scientists of our da»y that ' Darwinism has been

weighed and found wanting. 1 The devout Pasteur and Meiflnier and others point to the trend of the philosophy of science in recognising the source of all things in the great Cause that is ' exterior to the earth ' and ' anterior to the world.' But our local farthing-candle illuminators turn God out of His universe. And they endow with His self-existence and knowledge and power the Almighty Atom— the first speck of primordial matter. They capnnot do wilhout a God— of some kind. They did not dare to knock their wooden heads against! the Seven Enigtmas of Dv Bois-Reymond : (1) the nature of matter and force ; (2) the origin of motion ; (3) the origin of life ; (4) the apparently designed order of nature ; (5) the origin of sensation and consciousness ; (6) the origin of rational thought and speech ; and (7) free-will. Here are riddles which it is the duty of our theorists to explain— if they can. No solution of them has ever yet been given ; and to the first, second, and fifth (the ' transcendcntals ') ' none,' says Gerard, ' will ever be found.' Let theories be honestly advanced as theories — for what they are worth as theories. But the chief of sublunary abominations is the empty-pated and cocksure fledgeling who tries to force his crude guesses down the public throat as a dogmatic definition (so to speak) of science.