HIGH AND LOW ROAD.

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 72, 12 April 1937, Page 6

HIGH AND LOW ROAD.

"It required the convulsion of a great war abruptly to remind us that if we had subdued nature externally, internally, in ourselves, she is as cruel and bloodthirsty as ever," said Sir Walter Langdpn-Brown, M.D., D.So., Emeritus Professor of Physic in the University of Cambridge, in a Maudsley Lecture. "Mah has acquired a control over machines without acquiring anything like a corresponding control over himself. He does not even appear to be able to control satisfactorily something he has created fpr his own convenience — namely, currency. He has a fatal aptitude for applyjgg Hjs discoveries to destructive ends. Aviation has heen described recently as 'the discovery which took the wrong turning, and that-is typical of much. "Evolution always offers a higher and a lower rojid; to a form which involves an expanding, more complex unit, or to one which degenerates to a lower level, though more consonant with the capacity of its components. This is what makes present-day conditions so disturbing. Whole nations which apparently feel unable to maintain the ideals that we regard as the higher ones actually seem to gain a new hope and a new faith by departing from them. The new level is more suited to their evolutionary development, and they are more comfortable in it. Depreciation of ideals,. like depreciation of currency, seems to give them a new stability. In this process, no ideal has suffered so severely as that of liberty. The segregating, species-making impulse has for the moment the upper hand; in three-fourths of Europe liberty is, now regarded as a curse, tyranny as the way of salvation."