OBITER DICTA.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18479, 5 September 1925, Page 12

OBITER DICTA.

[ByK.j As they know who waste their time looking at these notes, I have no capacity for clear and positive statement. But I admire it in others, and everyone seems to have it but me. Especially the scientists. Professor Charles Henry, described as the famous mathematician," Jms this week that he has invented a machine which can measure the soul. And, so far as the public is concerned, this bold statement has made the radiopsychometer a fact, and I have no doubt that the Professor is already selling them at 1000 francs apiece, with something extra for the automatic thought-recording attachment. But he is not the only one. Sir Oliver Lodge is not quite so robust. He confessed, in " a remarkable sermon " to the British Association, that "the mystery of existence was, in his opinion, formidable." Me, looking for a thoroughgoing assertion, this miserable echo of a notion of my own rather dashed, but it was cheering to hear Sir Oliver declaring, a sentence or two later, this: "In all the distant worlds the same laws as the earth's prevailed and the same physics and the same atoms." He knows this, and one loves to hear it. As for Sir Arthur Keith, he says simply that the Galilee skull is the missing link, and there you are.

Thehj are others, of course. The British Association meeting has brought them all out, just as, presently, the General Election will bring out our own home-grown masters of loud and positive assertion. Sir Boyd Dawkins says that the Galilee skull is one of the most interesting discoveries in the last twenty years, just as the producers of " Quo Yadis?" assure us that it is "the world's mightiest dramatic triumph," or, to put it more clearly, "the mightiest spectacle of all the ages." The difference between "Quo Vadis?" and the Galilee bone—which really ought to be submitted to a Christchurch jury—is simply this: that the film is a good one. Of course Mr Ilcnri Yerbru'gghen does not trouble his head about bones and eternity, but he is as dogmatic as if he did. 4 " Jazz," he said this week, " will never last." If I attempted to convey such an opinion, my weak and halting accents and pusillanimous qualifications would bring forth a contradiction from even a child. But these positive fellows can say their, positive say, 1 and, in the idiom of Des Moines 111., "get away with it." AdmixaUe men.

Old Tom Mann, of course, can give lessons to them all. He knows what is "our most important task," and he says it in language as plain as thai of the late Mr W. J. Bryan on Darwin. To Tom the problem of the universe is an easy one. It means simply "an unremitting and relentless war on the .British Empire for its downfall. We must attack Imperialism." Although, as one of the smaller atomg of the Empire, I must regard Tom as any-, thing but a friend, I admire and envy his gift of heaving a plain uncompromising brick through the Empire's window. And Tom, if he is honest, will admire that other dogmatist who,