A RACE WITH LIFE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4706, 2 June 1924, Page 3

A RACE WITH LIFE.

THE SCIENTIST'S PROBLEM. AN EVER-ELUSIVE QUARRY. In a recent arresting article Dr. L. P. Jacks discusses the question of the uses to which men put the knowledge which scientific discovery has given them, and cites Plato with telling effect. He asserts :— "Greek civilisation stands out preeminent in the admirable use it made of what it knew. Yet measured by our standards it knew very little. In the sphere of science their knowledge was elementary, but it led the Greeks straight into art, into the creation of things of beauty which are joys for ever. Out of their elementary mathematics arose the incomparable proportions of the Parthenon, "We, with a hundred sciences at our elbow, make our cities sordid and ugly ; they, with the bare elements of two or three, made Athens beautiful and glorious. They had the secret of turning truth into beauty. They passed from truth to beauty with an ease of transition which the modern world has lost. What was truth today became beauty to-morrow. "May we not say that a little science turned into beauty is worth more to mankind than a lot of science turned into money ? "Or think how Plato was educated. Plato was a great educationist, but what kind of education did he receive himself? What would modern standards say to it ? No dead languages. Of course he knew Greek, having learned it at his mother’s knee. He knew it far better than many of us know the English into which we translate him. "But he himself could not translate the ‘simplest sentence’ of Greek as set by a modern examiner into English or into anything else. No Latin. No modern languages. No literature, save that of his native land. No Greek history after the year 347 B.C. He did not even know the difference between B.C. and A.D. No Roman history beyond the Samnite wars, if even that No European history. Of all the lessons which history has been teaching mankind for the last twentythree centuries, Plato knew not one. Nothing about the American Civil War, or about the World War. WHAT PLATO MISSED. "And what about science? What about ‘evolution’? Mathematics of the simplest, physics of. the crudest, no algebra, no calculus, no laws of motion or theory of gravitation. Nothing about the circulation of the blood and the foggiest notions about the brain. Of astronomy a little, and yet a little that was surprisingly effective in expanding his imagination, in spite of the fact that it was upside down. ‘But of chemistry, geology, biology, botany, physiology, as we understand them, virtually nothing. All these were as yet unopened chapters in the history of science. No printed books to tell him about them or about anything else. His whole library might have been carried in a wheelbarrow. No illustrated editions. "No newspapers. No monthly reviews. No ‘Atlantic.’ No South Kensington, with its stuffed gorillars and its models of the dinosaur. No British Museum, with its Library and its mummies. When Plato was horn King Tut-ankh-amen had already been sleeping for seven hundred years, but no Egyptologist had yet thought o putting him in a glass case. "Such was Plato’s education. If we cannot say precisely what it was, we can at least say what it was not. It was neither classical nor scientific nor theological, in our sense of the words. What a limited outlook for a philosopher who claimed to be the .spectator of all space and time! How queer the obvious is when we cojne to thi?ik of it! "And yet, in spite of his limitations ;he limitations of his science, the limitations of his classics, the limitations of his history, the limitations of his theology—Plato was not only a supremely educated man, but has left us in the ‘Laws’ the profpundest treatise on educational theory that was ever written. How did he manage it ? I leave that as a conundrum to the educationists. . ‘My own answer to it would be, that the test of sound education lies less in what we know and more in the use we are making of our knowledge. Plato made good use of his. THE SCIENCE VERSUS LIFE RACE. "In the history of the human mind we observe a kind of race, a race between science and life, in. which the science that explains our life never quite overtakes the life that is being explained. It is an exciting phenomenon. Science is the pursuer; life is the pursued; and we may observe that the more science quickens its pace in pursuit, the more rapidly does life speed on ahead of it, so that one can never overtake the other, “Every new acquisition of knowledge thrusts our life forward into new conditions and raises-the rate at which we are living. By learning to understand our life up to date we put ourselves in a position to live differently henceforward. “When science declares the law of their action to human beings she provokes them to make themselves exceptions to it. Tell me, for example, that all men are liars, and you at once suggest to me the desirability of beginn.’ng to speak the truth ; so that, when science comes upon the scene to-morrow, she will have to modify her law and say ‘all men are liars exc°pt one.’ "And so it goes on. I am always just ahead of your scientific generalisations about me. Nay, it is precisely your telling me what I am today that puts me on my mettle to be something else to-morrow. The life of the human mind thus presents itself as an endless movement in which the march of science, whether natural or supernatural, never quite overtakes the final problem of its application. “The point where responsibility rests upon us all lies just ahead of the

last point reached by advancing science, and is continually being thrust forward by the forces behind it. The more the pursuers quicken their paces the more the fugitive quickens his. “The inability of science to overtake responsibility is what T mean by its limitation. "Tlie applied sciences are no exception ; they are, rather, the chief examples—precisely those which are most easily misapplied by bad men. Applied science will tell you how to make a gun ; but it will not tell you when to shoot or what to shoot at. Do you say that moral science will look after that? I answer, in the words of St. Paul, that *1 had not known sin but for the law.’ "Moral science, in revealing the right use of my gun, inevitably reveals- the wrong use also; and since the wrong use will often serve my selfish purpose better than, the right, ihy neighbour,s run a new risk of being shot at and plundered.

“How shall wc name this fugitive something which science can never ov<?"t'ake ? I have called it ‘life.’ Others, more correctly perhaps, would call it the-spirit, the soul, the self, the miud, the will. I do not think it matters greatly what we name it, so long as we recognise, first, that it exists, and, second, .that it carriers the fortunes of humanity. "Let education look to that! This is the point where all the enterprises of education, and all the activities of religion, which is education raised to its highest power, come to a focus. If we educate at all other points, but fail, to educate at the point of responsibility, wc shall inevitably come to no good end.”