HUMAN PROGRESS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 January 1940, Page 7

HUMAN PROGRESS

WHAT OF THE FUTURE? "Like most people nowadays, you’re insanely optimistic about people as they are, people living exclusively on the human level," says Mr Propter, a character in Mr Aldous Huxley s latest novel. "After Many a Summet. “You seem to imagine that people can remain as they are and yet be the inhabitants of a world conspicuously better than the world we live in. But the world we live in is a consequence ot what men have been and a projection of what they are now. If men continue to be like what they are now and have been in the past, it's obvious that the world they live in can't become better. If you imagine it can. you re wildly optimistic about human nature. But on the other hand you re wildly pessimistic if you imagine that men and women are condemned by their nature to pass their whole lives on the strictly human level. "Thank God. Mr Propter said emphatically, "they're not. They have it in their power to climb out and up. on to the level ol eternity. No human society 7 can become conspicuously better than it if now unless it contains a lair proportion of individuals who know that their humanity isn’t the last word and who consciously attempt to transcend it. That's why one should be profoundly pessimistic about the thing; most people are optimistic about such as applied science, and social reform, and human nature as it is in the average man or woman. And that s also why one should be profoundly optimistic about the thing they're so pessimistic about, that they don't even know it exists —1 mean, the possibility’ ol transforming and transcending human nature.”