"Only Babies Have Open Minds"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 357, 26 April 1946, Page 15

"Only Babies Have Open Minds"

"THE belief that history repeats itself is entirely unfounded. History never repeats itself, and never can repeat itself," says Lord Raglan, in his new book Death and Rebirth: A Study in Comparative Religion, "Every historical event of any importance brings about a change in ideas; so that a subsequent event, however similar it may seem, is teally quite different in its results because it takes place in a different mental environment. "It is not an action, or series of actions, which constitutes an historical event, but actions combined with their consequences and these consequences are conditioned by the occurrence or nonoccurrence of similar events before. The same conduct which, in one age, causes a man to be regarded as a hero or saint, in another causes him to be regarded as a criminal, a fool, or just as an ordinarily decent man. "This is because we regard every idea which is presented to us, not with an ‘open mind’-there is no such thing except in a new-born babe-but in the light of ideas already present in our minds. No two people think exactly alike, because no two people have had the same set of ideas presented to them in exactly the same order. It is impossible for us to put our minds back into the past, "To go back only four centuries in our own country-we cannot imagine how it was that the most enlightened and humane man of his age, Sir Thomas More, could have thought that the proper punishment for the crime of translating the Bible into English was death by burning. How much further beyond our grasp must be the mental processes of those who, eight or ten thousand years ago, or perhaps more, were the original founders of our civilisation," /