MUTABLE & IMMUTABLE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 April 1941, Page 6

MUTABLE & IMMUTABLE

PARABLES FROM "ALICE IN WONDERLAND.” “Alice in Wonderland’’ is full of par- : ables; and none, I think, is more telling i than the game of croquet which you had to play with flamingoes instead 'if mallets, and hedgehogs instead of balls, writes Monsignor Ronald Knox. The flamingoes were always curling their neCks round, and the hedgehogs always punning away, which spoiled the game. You must have a mallet which moves only when you make it move, a ball which stays put until you hit it. In the same way, all measurement and all -bought depend upon the possession of a fixed unit by which your judgments can bo compared. Man’s thought is not . a fixed tiling. It is not merely that men disagree with one another: one generation of men sees tilings in a different light from the last. There are fashions in human thought: mechanism was the key-word of the eighteenth century, evolution of the nineteenth, relativity of cur own. Now realism will be the dominant teaching, now idealism, now pragmatism; there is no fixed point, we are always changing backward and forward. The human mind is as tortuous as any flamingo, truth as elusive as any hedgehog. And we are asked to believe that it is this eccentric ’ mind of ours which makes things true . . . Whereas, if you believe in God, you know that He gives to all things the truth that is in them, and imparts to all minds some adumbration of truth as He sees it in the mirror of His own eternal being, truth as it really is.