TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20270, 12 August 1937, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Truth and Beauty. “Universality implies freedom from prejudices, which mostly spring from ignorance or narrowness of outlook. It means a fundamental impartiality and sensitiveness toward things and persons, a willingness to learn, and a curiosity to understand whatever life may bring us up against. Life means a widening and deepening of experience. It means our getting to know things, our acquiring a power of control over them, a capacity to look before and after, to expand and universalisc our experience, and thus to riso above the accidents and surprises which lie in wait for us round every corner. “Here you will begin to see this world, not as a matter of chance, a chaos a mere jumble of different jarring, warring things flung together at haphazard, but as a unity, as a whole, pervaded by law and order, in which our human life links up with and crowns life universal and forms I lie climax of activities which pervade all things. The vision of harmony in the universe, of principles of order and beautv which are its very naturo and constitution —this vision of truth and beauty once seen —will ever remain with you as the most satisfying and abiding experience of your life. It will give you peace in a world of unrest. Your soul will feed on this vision of order and beauty in the. world, and it will continue to grow on you till I the end of your days. Science, philosophy, poetry, religion—all will hpip you to clarify and deepen that great experience for you. —General 1 Smuts.