IMPRACTICABILITY.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4742, 25 August 1924, Page 1

IMPRACTICABILITY.

THE THEORETICAL & PRACTICAL. WHY LEARNING IS DISTRUSTED. (By John Blunt, in the “Daily Mail.”) Professor Einstein, discoverer of the theory of relativity and one of the profoundest mathematicians of his time, recently had a concrete mathematical argument with a Berlin tram-way-car conductor on the question of • whether the change given him was short—and was worsted ! This may be taken ats an amusing instance of the fact that the most brilliant theoretical minds are sometimes curiously incompetent when dealing with small, practical problems which are really a humble branch of their special subject. And this, I think, is one of the reasons why ignorant people often regard learning askance and learned people as futile. The frequent impracticability of learned people with regard to matters of. everyday existence is, of course, no valid argument against learning, for all the great practical results are due to deep knowledge and learning; but it does tend to show that there is a danger of the learned man getting out" of touch with the world around him. THE “SUPERIOR.” And that is a bad thing. If, for instance, people such as “high-brows” are deservedly unpopular, it is not really because they are clever and know a great deal, but because they are "superior” and look down upon other people. And that shows that they are really fools, however clever they may be — and nothing is more maddening than a clever fool. If they-were wise they would not despise the simplest, stupidest human being, because the simplest, stupidest human being is much more wonderful than all their cleverness.

To fave a mathematical brain like Professor Einstein’s is marvellous, but to have a brain at all, even the brain of an extremely dense yokel, is infinitely more marvellous.

There is, of course, a great difference between the impracticability of a learned man and the “superiority” of a “high-brow," but the result of both things is to alienate popular esteem. Getting through existence ?s a very practical affair which requires a large amouht of give and take. Unless we can adapt ourselves adequate-

ly to our surroundings and appreciate the fact that other people are not so very' much different from ourselves, we are in danger of sinking into daydreams or (what is worse) into cliques. SIMPLE GIFTS. The tramway-car conductor who argued successfully with Professor Ein-.-stein remarked that the famous mathematician was “weak in arithmetic,” and so he was from .the tram-way-car conductor’s point of view. And in the same way a famous philosopher may be weak in philosophy from the point of view of the man in the street’ or a “high-brow’ weak in humour from'the point of view of a holiday crowd. The use of mathematics to a tram-way-car conductor is to get through his daily work without error; the use of philosophy to the man in the street ■ is to face life’s tasks courageously; the use of humour to a holiday crowd . is to keep one another contented by j jokes that all can understand and • none will resent.

ly t us not despise these simple gifts, let us rather try and share them. For if they are on the lowed rung of that ladder which leads to the heights, that rung is the broadest and the oldest of all.