THE FRIENDLY DARK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 May 1940, Page 3

THE FRIENDLY DARK

CONFIDENCE IN ENVIRONMENT.

The greatest psychological asset that any human being can have is, I think, that peculiar and indefinable, but I hope familiar, sense of confidence iri his environment, of trust in the whole queer, big. incomprehensible world into which ho has mysteriously come and from which he will as mysteriously depart, said Dr. Henry YellowIces, in the Morison Lectures to the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh. The great distinguishing mark, as I believe, of the psychologically well-adjusted individual is the everpresent sense that the dark behind and around and in front of him is somehow friendly. That sense of security, though it may never be clearly felt in consciousness, or directly expressed in words, or fully elaborated into religious faith or anything of the kind, can be a very real thing at every stage of life, but is most perfectly and gloriously seen in healthy adolescence. The great Huxley, of all unlikely people, not only wrote in one of his essays of ihe friendly dark around us. but actually went the length of personifying it. He compared life to a game of 1 chess, and said that opposite to each of us there sits the unseen Player. "Wo make our move," he says, “and all the time we feel that that mysterious Player wishes us not to fail.” A patient with whom I had once been discussing this matter of the friendly dark came back and told me that he knew what I meant, but did not like the name, so I told him about Huxley’s chess player. “That's it,” he said. “It’s not a friendly dark; it’s a kindly light, in which—no, in Whom—there is no darkness at all.”