SCIENCE AND MAN.

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 5, 29 September 1937, Page 4

SCIENCE AND MAN.

"Not only aro we ungrateful in thought and attitude, but ungrateful in mishandlirig the benefits accruing from scientific endeaVonr. Blame sciencet We need not drive a Oar so fast that it kills, ' nor make a loudspeaker so loud that it deafens. Science was made for man, not man for science, and the one thing that matters ife control. Are We going to drive the machine or are we going to let it drive usf Mr Wells, in one of his inimitable word-pictures, portrays civilisktion as a high-powered motor-car gathering momentum on a precipitous hill, a quaking, gibbering monkey at the wheel, impotent to check its increasing spe6d. Not complimentary, but terribly suggestive. "And who cares ahout the direction along which scienee prOduces her gifts to mankind? We have an astronomer royal, hut we have no biologist royal, still less a psychologist royal. Is this a survival from the days when we thought the stars controlled our destinies ? But if 'the fault is not in our stars but in oilrselves, that we are underlings,' as I believe it is, should we not 'do something' about this? Hygiene of the body — the idea seems, at long last, to have been grasped: 'Mental hygiene,' after. a long and painful labour, is, I think, being born: what of spiritual hygiene, the hygiene of tem- ' perament? I believe that the spirit of man is fundamentally as amen^ able to scientific investigation if Uot to contfol, as is his body and his mind. After all, the two essential desiderata were laid down thousands of years ago : 'Know thyself.' " — Lord Horder.