THE ENGLISH.

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 4, 28 September 1937, Page 4

THE ENGLISH.

fWlietber the suerness of instinct in the English or the creative force -of intelligence is to be rated the higher, the one more obvious but the other indubitable, need not be debated. The balanee between intelligenc.e and instinct is at any rate peculiarly happy. It has been said of the English that they have 'a certain gravitation towards truth.' Their minds are intuitive rather than analytic. Some men only know a tlpng when they have exhausted the detail of parts, elements and relations— a useful and neeessary type. Even then, perhaps, they know rather than understand. Others leap td conolusions, surer of a thing as a .wkole than of its parts, and understand long bef ore they know. Of laborious exploration of detail the English. are impatient : they rely rather on a premonitory sense of shape, trend, meaning, and the truth. They go by presentiments, and fare thus fairly well. They are averse, they will tell you, to philosophy: and yet their groping search for the totality or unity of a matter is more philosophical than the preoccupation of some other inquirers with the partial, the trivial, the infinitesimal."=-r Dr. J. Murray, University College, Exeter.