THE NEW AGE AND THE NEW MAN

By RALPH E. FLANDERS

from “Towards Civilization”, edited by Charles A. Beard

IN SEARCHING for the forces which have shaped our mod­ern world we shall find three that have exerted a decisive power. They are first, the freedom of thought which de­rived from the Renaissance and the Reformation; second, the de­velopment of science and the scientific method; and, third, the similar but separate growth of invention.

All of these had stirred the human imagination as early as the first years of the sixteenth century. Yet if the printing press was already busy then and Luther was soon to speak, and if the first crude microscopes and the first of modern philosophy were not far away, the form of the earlier world was still to envelop mankind for centuries. Bacon, writing his amazing "Novum Organum" in the early 1600's, saw about him a world awaiting deliverance, and his somewhat inarticulate prophecies have long since then been ex­ceeded by truth.

The Renaissance world was linked unit to unit by muddy highways and fragile wooden ships. It was the slave of in­finite infections, heatless and lightless houses, man-power imple­ments, and news that went by boat or horseback. The modern world of concrete roads, intricate factories, steam-heated offices and houses, words tossed by air or wire across seas and continents, armed scientific battalions routing pollutions and fevers - this world would have seemed a sun to its candle, a thunderbolt to its crude leaden bullet.

The modern world began its really firm and rapid growth in the eighteenth century. In science, Copernicus and Galileo had described the solar systems, Newton had announced the laws of grav­itation and studied the theory of light, and he and Liebnitz had developed the infinitesimal calculus. After these events came an active blossoming of invention. Watt with his steam engine, Ark­right, Hargreave and others with their textile machinery, and finally Fulton and Stephenson with the steamboat and locomotive, revolutionized manufacture, transportation, and commerce. A new figure, the industrialist, seized on these inventions, capitalized and multiplied them for his own profit.

The scientist began the revolution in man's thought and philos­ophy, while the inventor changed his whole material environment. These two agencies, both working to the same end, were practically independent. The scientist's work led to few practical applications, the inventor depended on "rule of thumb" and availed himself very little of the scientist's discoveries.

About the middle of the nineteenth century a change in relation­ship was well under way. Science and invention were joining hands. Their lusty issue was Engineering, which has grown to overshadow completely its parents, so far as material achievements are concerned. Science which is "pure" is getting further re­moved from immediate practical applications, and seems to be ap­proaching the boundaries of philosophy, religion, and mysticism. Invention of the non-scientific sort, meanwhile, has not disap­peared, but is playing a smaller and yet smaller part in transform­ing modern life.

As the outstanding material forces of our time, we would prob­ably select the steamship, the locomotive, the telegraph, the tele­phone, the automobile, the airplane, and the radio. If we examine any one of these in detail - the ocean steamship, for instance, we find a moderate amount of non-scientific invention in its minor details; we discover a deep foundation work of bygone pure sci­ence in such matters as the "Carnot cycle" and "Joule's equiva­lent" in thermodynamics, and in the premonitions and final discov­ery of the radio wave by the combined work of Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, and Hertz. But overwhelming and burying all is that vast mass of intelligent, patient, keen analytical work, combining in its operations intuitive invention and scientific research, which goes under the name of "Engineering."

Tens of thousands of engineers, in laboratory, drafting-room and work-shops, in an unparallelled co-operative enterprise which has stretched over gen­erations and knows no boundaries of race, language, or religion­all this it has taken to build the ship.

A spring night on the boat deck, a dark sky sparkling with stars, a gentle phosphorescence in the bow wave and the wake ... Breathing quietly, the great ship heads for its appointed land-fall, bearing its appointed freight of merchandise, mail, and men. There is the feeling of life in it, of accepted responsibilities- as if it were some massive, faithful, intelligent animal. That sense of life, of faithfulness, of intelligence is no illusion. It is the re­embodied life, faithfulness to natural law and intelligent co-opera­tion of the engineers and artisans whose concentrated efforts have given birth to this wonderful, effective creature.

The new man, the engineer type - whether he is a directing exec­utive, a practical laboratory scientist, or an inventor - cannot re­fuse responsibility for this brood of vital mechanisms which has grown from his work and has fashioned the world he operates. He has wrought the intricate framework of the machine age; he has an obligation to society for his product.

And the product, bringing mankind tremendous power, has brought certain evils.

The first century of industrialism is not a pleasant chapter in human life. The dark factories and mills, the long hours and iron routine for small wages have warred against human happiness; they are hateful things to contemplate, and in a measure they still exist.

Again, the machines have brought us ugliness. Not only is there the subtle ugliness of many machine-made articles (particu­larly painful in the product of the punch press, for some strange reason), but there are as well the more blatant manifestations of din, dirt, grime, and confusion which attend many of our major industries. A Pennsylvania coal town, a New England cotton­mill city, a dry-grinding cement mill, a copper smelter, the Chicago Loop - none of these is a centre of sweetness and light, and they are all children of the engineer's brain.

Nor are the noise and crowding, the sunless chambers and the subterranean rabbit holes of our megalopolitan civilization desir­able achievements. The self-hypnotized citizen may gesticulate himself lame and shout himself hoarse, but even so he shall not completely convince himself that quietness, space, green herbage, white snow, and blue sky are not essential to fulness of life here on earth. The extreme forms of noise and crowding in our great cities condemn themselves, and the new man has brought them to us. Consider but this one item: In a city in the suburbs of New York there was developed a new mechanism for carrying people in a vertical direction. It was christened the "traction elevator." It was very simple, but had the remarkable virtue of making it pos­sible to transport several times more people through an elevator well several times longer than had previously been possible. This simple development at once started the already invented steel sky­scraper to growing like Alice in Wonderland with her magic mush­room. And with like magic sprang into being that eternally pro­liferating and eternally inadequate web of subways, tunnels, bridges, traffic regulations, real-estate booms, apartment Babels and taxi-cab wars which constitutes the normal transportation prob­lem of the great city. Thus does the absorbed and harmless ap­pearing engineer strike the match that lights the fuse that explodes the mine beneath the old urban peace and complacency.

Finally, the engineer's work has in general led to a narrower, more concentrated, more intense, and less well-rounded existence for the mass of mankind and particularly for the more able among them. The vastness of the bulk of accumulated technical knowl­edge demands that the able man shall specialize if he would be effective. The character of the technical processes themselves re­quires that workmen shall specialize. Also, the competitive condi­tions which have arisen out of this technical complexity demand that both unusual and ordinary men shall concentrate on their tasks to a degree that is often wearying and sometimes dangerous.

The new man can justly refuse to take the full responsibility for such evils. A selfish and doctrinaire political economy must share the blame. So must the darker side of our general human nature, which has been no more grasping and inhuman in coal mines

and cotton mills than it was in the African slave ships or the sheep ­raising crises of Tudor days. The apathy of a public which could protect itself if it would has also been a factor. Yet the engineer, creator and operator of the apparatus which directly or indirectly has brought the world these miseries and indignities, must frankly admit his share of blame and his obligation to modify or remake that which misfunctions.

But engineering has also certain positive gifts to its credit, and certain resources which need only be understood to be appreciated. They are, indeed, of such potential value that the highest hopes of mankind for the present life may well lie in the proper compre­hension and application of them.

The first resource which engineering has to offer is its proved practical effectiveness. Engineering may be defined as science which works. In the same category may be placed chemistry, also much of modern surgery and a great part of modern medicine - particularly preventive medicine. Classing all of this somewhat rudely, but conveniently, under the one term, an outstanding char­acteristic of engineering is the almost uniform successfulness of its undertakings. There have been practically no serious failures. The only two which come to mind are the collapse of the partly finished Quebec bridge in i9o8 and the failure of the storage dam of the Los Angeles water system last year. The first of these was due to an obscure factor in the calculations of the compressive stress in beams of unprecedented size, unsuspected by one of the world's greatest engineers. The second was due to an unpardon­able carelessness on the part of a municipal engineer in the exami­nation of the rock on which his dam was based; and an inexcusable lack of consultation and conference with other engineers, traceable to special ordinances born of false civic pride. The first of these disasters led to experiments which have greatly increased our knowledge. The second will lead to a stiffening of the safeguards against inexpert or careless engineering where human lives are in­volved.

In asserting the general dependability of engineering, we are far from asserting the perfection of all or any of its achievements. They differ widely in their efficiency as the responsible engineers differ in ability. But it is rarely indeed that the product of the recognized engineer does not work. From this standpoint it is a far cry to the latest theories, experiments, and deductions of such sciences as psychology, biology, and sociology. There are no such differences of opinion among engineers as among the experts in these other subjects. The engineer asks questions of Nature and she answers with an indubitable "yes" or "no." To these others she answers as yet faintly, or in Delphic, equivocal terms. Fascinating and limitless have been the projects offered a perplexed civilization by these youthful sciences, but a wise choice will lean rather on the narrower but more certain promises of the engineer. Not that he has a greater or more subtle intelligence than these others - rather, he is more pigheaded. He refuses to deal with anything unless he has proved that it will work.

A second resource which engineering offers to mankind is abound­ing plenty. For much less expenditure of physical and nervous en­ergy than he is now putting forth, it offers the common man far more of goods, in the way of food, shelter, garments, travel, books - material satisfactions of all kinds - than he has ever hoped to have. This does not depend on some future engineering develop­ment-it is within reach now. Present mechanical and engineer­ing processes are producing an unparalleled flow of goods, with a surprisingly small fraction of the population engaged in the work really necessary to their production and distribution. The miner, the farmer, the workman, the engineer, the manager, the railroad, steamship and autotruck operators, the necessary minimum of storekeepers and salesmen - these form but a part of the buzzing swarm in the industrial hive. Take the telephone book in any large city, or make the rounds of the office directories in the vesti­bules of their skyscrapers. What an appalling mass of subsidiary activities is there revealed! The lawyers, the advertising men, the brokers, the vast sales organizations, the holding companies - and so on without end. Not a man of them but believes in his use­fulness and can make out a good case for himself if you will listen to him sympathetically.

It is only when we look at this thing in the large instead of in detail that we see the absurdity of the whole affair. Engineering has so tremendously multiplied the effective­ness of the individual workman that material plenty with moderate toil becomes possible for the first time in human history; and thereupon the perverse human being so complicates the process of distributing the manufactured goods that the individual man works as hard as ever and does not get such a tremendous lot more.

Think what could be done, with the ineffectives and supernu­meraries turned into workers. There are customers ready for the products of their prospective activities. Look out from the car windows. Observe the isolated farms of New England, the dreary monotony of the back counties of Arkansas, the grimey meagreness of the marginal dry farm in the Far West. Not alone in Europe, Africa, and the islands of the sea lie our future markets. When these economic frontiers of our own land are brought into the magic circle we may experience a height and breadth of material well-being here in America that will surpass the imagination. As engineers we have built the foundations for this prosperity; as citizens we must assist in the erection of the structure itself.

No students of our times have more carefully studied this ques­tion than Messrs. Foster and Catchings(1) Their general view-point and suggested programme are sane and constructive. One gets the impression from their books, however, of a vast and necessary in­tricacy in the financial and economic phases of the problem, and of a small margin of safety to work with in applying the proposed remedies. On this matter of the available margin, at least, the engineers, from their professional knowledge and experience, can confidently reassure them.

There can be plenty for all. There can be more for all with less than the minimum work needed to keep a man in good mental and physical condition. Take courage, Messrs. Foster and Catch­ings, and tell us, not how painfully and precariously to stave off imminent and well-nigh inevitable disaster, but how to direct and distribute the flood of goods that engineering skill can make avail­able.

1 See "The Road to Plenty," and their numerous articles in periodicals.

As a corollary to the resource of plenty, engineering offers the gift of leisure. It is a gift that is unappreciated and unaccepted. With the proper persons doing the proper work by modern engi­neering methods, the plenty which has been offered mankind can be produced in a working week far shorter than any which has been seriously considered hitherto. When the "five day week" is mentioned, most of us who are manufacturers receive an auto­matic reflex motor impulse from the spinal ganglia which disturbs the circulation of the blood, strangles the speech, and inhibits the free action of the reasoning powers. Perhaps all this can be averted if we avoid the disturbing phrase and discuss the "four day week" instead.

For the four day week is an engineering possibility. If all of us do useful work and if distribution is sensibly organized, four days will produce a sufficiency of the necessities and material satisfactions of life. Even three days might conceivably do it. It is all a question of values. As we value goods more and leisure less, we will lengthen our work days. As we value leisure more and goods less, we will shorten them.

We are not now, in fact, prepared for an excess of leisure. Our environment, our education, the air we breath, has unfitted us for its proper use. Reference has already been made to the unneces­sary elements in the machinery of production and distribution ­the thousands of names which choke the telephone books and of­fice directories. But perhaps it is a wise provision of Nature that as they have been squeezed out of the productive machine by its increased efficiency, these individuals have found employment in white-collar activities. Leisure would be a curse to them as to any of us until we are prepared for it.

Leisure is possible, leisure is desirable. But only a serious educa­tive preparation and the concurrent development of the deeper sat­isfactions of life by the individual, will ever give it real value in our times and environment.

The new age, then, offers tools of proved effectiveness in its somewhat narrow field- the satisfaction of material wants. It offers plenty to all. In addition it offers leisure for the cultivation of satisfactions which are above the strictly material plane. What programme can be devised for making these resources available?

There is no intention in this chapter of making detailed sugges­tions. That is the province of the specialists who follow. A few general suggestions only may be given here.

In the first place, there must be some general agreement as to the ends desired, if we are to obtain the co-operative action necessary to their attainment. There is no sense in stopping short of the highest goal on which we can reach a community of thought. There has perhaps been no better expression of man's sense of the deepest values of life than the time-honored trinity of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. Men of the same period, culture, and locality will probably come more nearly to a general agreement as to human welfare in endeavoring to give concrete expression to these values than in any other way. We must lose our self-consciousness, our uneasy sense of hypocrisy, in pronouncing these words. They must become the commonplaces of our thought and action.

This view-point must become a matter of formal education. In particular it must enter into the education of the technical student. Mr. Panders, editor of the Engineer (London), has recently written:

The murmuring will grow in volume, the protests against the obviously objectionable features of engineering will become louder and louder -we hope they will and the benefits which the works of the engineer confer will be overshadowed by the nuisances that accompany them, unless - unless engineers themselves are the first to recognize the defects and the first and most eager to remove them. We must not say, if you want rail­ways and motor cars, you must put up with the noise; if you want steel and coal, you must sacrifice a whole countryside to filth and ugliness; if you want cheap electricity, you must poison with ashes and sulphur the air of your cities. That was the attitude of the past; it will be intolerable in the near future. We must have the products which the engineer, and the engineer alone, can give, but they must be so purified from all offense that they can live side by side with less material, but perhaps not less im­portant cravings of civilized people. .It is of importance that the coming engineers should have the defects kept ever before them, and that they should be taught that the greatest aim that they can have is so to discharge all offense from engineering that not the keenest critic can find a word to say against it.

We are convinced that to the engineer all things are possible. He can give us a pure atmosphere and noiseless streets, he can remove slums and make wholesome factories, he can wipe away degrading occupations and improve the occupations of leisure, he can make a fair country out of a blasted waste, and clean rivers out of foul ditches. All these things, and a thousand more, he can do without robbing us of a single one of the benefits and advantages which his works confer. We say this with confidence, because we witness daily all that he has achieved. But a vast amount re­mains to be done, a mountain of ugliness remains to be removed, and we deem it a good thing that the coming generation of engineers should grow up in the belief that it is the duty of engineers to make the countries in which they live more beautiful and more pleasant and wholly free from the taunts which artists, literary men, and philosophers may justly throw at them today.

This change in view-point of the engineer alone, however, will not suffice. There must be a reciprocal desire in the heart of the capitalist who accumulates the funds, or at least an irresistible and implacable public sentiment which enforces these ideals upon him.

The case of the capitalist is indeed far from hopeless. Respon­sibility for humane policies and aesthetic treatment in industrial enterprises is being felt more strongly - not less. As a matter of fact, the effective pressure of conscience in our day is directed more strongly toward the business and industrial relations of the week days than toward purely formal morality, or toward specific religious observances on the seventh day. To many this may seem regrettable, but it makes for the consummation we have at heart.

In the early days of industrialism there was a complete callous­ness as to the means by which wealth was amassed and a purely perfunctory distribution of a portion of it in unconsidered "char­ity" was a satisfactory discharge of the social obligations incurred. In our time we have seen a decided advance both in the methods of accumulation and of benevolent spending. There are innumer­able things which the ordinary intelligent and conscientious business man will not do in amassing wealth; and, in addition, an incredible amount of clear-headed painstaking thought has gone into its use for general social betterment after accumulation.

There remains a step, not generally taken as yet, but seen more and more clearly, and plainly indicated by the course of events. There is now demanded an integral organic benevolence. The prin­cipal concern of the capitalist of the immediate future must be to so order his affairs that the very earning o f his money will be in itself a social service, irrespective of the use he later makes of it. So far as our present vision goes, the highest social service the individual can render is to engage in the manufacture and distribution of goods which are useful, or beautiful, or both; and so to do this as to give secure, remunerative employment to the largest possible number of people, under working conditions which give full opportunity to ability, and likewise satisfy the requirements of human dignity and self-respect. Much of this is under way, but only in scattered detail. Much of our output is neither useful nor beautiful; inse­curity of employment is the haunting spectre in the workingman's vision of the future; human dignity is so seldom conserved - and so on.

A re-orientation of our morality toward such an end would be ridiculous in a society which balanced on the verge of bare sub­sistence. It is only made possible by the wide margin of profit and high operating efficiencies which the engineer can provide. It is beyond the reach of the business which is inefficient, carelessly managed, or insufficiently capitalized. The industrialist and engi­neer of the near future, working together, are going to derive higher satisfactions and more durable and far-reaching human values from the work itself than they were ever able to purchase over the coun­ter with the lifeless monetary profits of that work.

Thus far, in indicating the desirable developments for the near future, we have explored the possibilities of an organic Goodness, supported by an engineering Truth which keeps its feet solidly planted on the ground. Dare an engineer and industrialist discuss so intangible, so bodiless a thing as Beauty ?

Why not ? The poet and the artist have not hesitated to discuss industrialism. The industrialist is no further afield in thinking and writing of Beauty.

The writer feels safe in saying that most attempts of artists to give expression to our age seem crude, ridiculous, uncomprehend­ing, and insincere. They are the products of an unsympathetic passerby who sees but does not comprehend. These endeavors to give expression to modern life are the products of rank outsiders, and instead of performing the avowed function of interpretation, they falsify instead.

There seem to be two courses open to us in the search for Beauty. On the one hand there is the development of an understanding of the great art forms of the past, and the careful and sympathetic adaptation of those forms to our own life, wherever this can skil­fully and appropriately be done. Yet the possibilities of such a course are limited in that they are imitative and not creative.

The other course is the search for fitness of line, mass, and color­ing, based on structure and use. Let us avoid top-lofty words. Let us call this "fitness" not beauty. The fitness of the racing yacht; of the bow and superstructure of the Bremen; of the New York Telephone Building; of a Cincinnati Milling Machine; of the stream line body of the Renault "Monosix"; of the sturdy self­-respecting splendor of the Kungsholm (a bas the Ile de France with its neurotic feminism) ; of an airplane; of the sleek electric train, gliding serpent-like up the grade to the St. Gothard; of the Philadelphia-Camden bridge; of the apparatus of the modern bath­room. All this fitness is of the integral, organic sort in which the engineering sense is the determining factor, whether designed by the engineer, or by the despised "commercial" artist inbred with the modern world, or by that rarer phenomenon, the real artist with the new vision.

The gift of leisure which engineering offers holds possibilities for real beauty also. There must be, here and there, men and women who will do routine work faithfully and gladly, for the sake of unencumbered hours with the arts. The plenty which engineering can provide offers support for the revival of craftsmanship as well, under conditions which permit dignified support and assured posi­tion to the craftsman. This consummation becomes possible as wealth is accumulated in individual, corporate, or public hands.

We may, indeed, descry the approach of an aesthetic dualism.

There will be a place for the monolithic cement structure and for the hand-laid masonry wall with its fascinating texture. The New Age will accept the flood of low-priced, standardized machine-made goods for the sake of the human value of wide-spread necessities and comforts; it will demand, however, that these goods be struc­turally and materially honest and that they have this fitness of line, form, and color. On the other hand the New Age will provide the resources for the study of beauty, for the understanding of what has been wrought in former ages, and for the making of a beauty that is truly modern. The craftsman's skill and the artist's daring may come to exist more richly and fully in this world of more abundant resources and more general freedom.

So we may awaken some morning to find that we have made the great synthesis - have joined usefulness and beauty and the char­acter of our daily activities into one organic structure - have once more made Art and Life one and indivisible. Here lies our way, rather than in obstinate and self-conscious plungings into the morass of the primitive and decadent.

We live indeed in dangerous times. The earlier civilizations did not survive their coming-of-age. In their youth they were safe, for their social structures were formed of customs, religious observances, taboos, and what-not, which, though ridiculous in details, yet con­tained elements of true survival value generated by the slow process of evolution. It was a sound instinct which led the Greeks to dis­trust Socrates and Euripides. In a real sense the profound intel­lects of Athens' greatest period, in examining the traditional values critically and rationally, thereby destroyed the Classic culture. Our age is a strictly homologous one and there is danger that we too may empty out the baby with the bath.

By blessed chance, however, the critical forces are not the only ones at work with us. The beginnings of wide-spread and deep­seated constructive forces are appearing as well - self-conscious, rational formulas to replace the unself -conscious mores derived from animal evolution.

This New Morality for the New Age is as yet a large and cloudy affair, but with certain characteristics already condensing into dis­tinctness. Some of them have already been touched upon - its aspiration toward sincerity in form and its tenderness of conscience toward secular rather than toward sacred activities.

Another outstanding character is its cheerful optimism, based on the epochal discovery that, in the engineering age, normal busi­ness relationships may result in advantage to all parties concerned. This is real good news - a veritable Gospel. It has its apostles also - drawn as might be expected from the mass of humanity rather than from the intellectually elite. Not many wise, not many mighty are called. It is the derided Rotarian who has caught the vision of the unity of service and profit. Only for us of this age, provided with the necessary machinery and organization, has it become fully, plainly and overwhelmingly true that the great ma­terial rewards come from co-operation rather than from plunder and exploitation.

This discovery relegates to the secondary rank the morality of frustration, pain, and self-sacrifice. So long as mankind was the plaything of material and social forces too complicated for it to cope with, so long was this morality of submission and compensa­tion necessary. With our new-born success in adapting ourselves to the laws of nature these virtues lose their importance, being ap­plicable only to the diminishing field of our ignorance and failure in the practical realm.

From the increasing success of our adaptation to nature there becomes possible for us a whole new ethos of accepted responsibility and of unclouded achievement. The new atmosphere is full of promise and deep satisfaction. Yet it holds no automatic blessings, everything must be searched out and worked for. Nor above all does it minister to human conceit and vainglory, for man has merely submitted to and come to terms with Nature -he has not con­quered her; he has even discovered that he can never hope com­pletely to understand her!

In the general and undetailed presentations of this introductory chapter, a certain order can perhaps be vaguely discerned as de­veloping in the flux of things. Some of its outlines may be clearly traced; other features are lost in the mist. Will this new order prove to be more satisfying to the human soul than did the old one ? Will it completely please us all ? Probably not.

Artists and philosophers are almost certain to pine for what is not, to find in the new strength and beauty and abundance certain definite limitations. They may miss the graceful, gracious, sophis­ticated style of living by a small and favored class which has char­acterized such periods as the eighteenth century. Perhaps we can­not today surpass the intellectual keenness, the social polish, the aesthetic sensibility of that period. We find it preserved for our own wonder and admiration in such charming repositories as Ken­sington Palace, close to the heart of modern London. The grace, the fine finish of that vanished world owed not the slightest debt to engineering and industrialism. It was destroyed by them.

Shall we, therefore, condemn and repel these barbaric invaders of the old culture ? Read the wise words of Violet Markham, writing of another time and another race, but of the same problem.

This Gallo-Roman society of the fifth century has a curious parallel in another age. Across the centuries generations touch; the wealth, the culture, the fine country houses, the sense of public duty, the total disregard of the poor and humble, save as objects of pity and patronage - this whole outlook on life links the English nobleman of the eighteenth century with the Gallo-Roman patrician of the fifth. Both had qualities as well as faults; both left a mark on the civilization of their age, without which the sum total of certain things might have been poorer. But the world, as constituted today, has other values of excellence than that of cultured idleness. It views, with an eye increasingly hostile, the irresponsible pos­session of wealth, and, as we turn the pages of the fifth as of the eighteenth century, we feel that, apart from the superficial amenities and the fine life of the few, the difficult world in which we live today rests on a sounder basis and aims at better ideals.'

On the other hand, the modern need concede little or nothing to such an age. The power to produce its glittering material shell is ours a thousandfold. The ability to recapture its exquisite rhythms of wit and manner is mostly a matter of desire. As a society we shall never sigh for it. And the new and particular activities of the mind and spirit which we may evolve are the vital matters for our impulses and abilities. They will be our own. As such they cannot be our ancestors'. Yet let us hope that eventually the new culture will shine with a light sufficiently bright and firm to make us willingly forego those which have preceded it.

After all is said, this complex continuum of human existence has resisted hitherto all rational analysis of its inner structure. The great cultural waves which sweep through it come from the great deep, and to the great deep they go. The tool of reason has given us a limited but effective control over their material manifestations. Beyond this we can with some confidence descry the movements and directions of the deeper currents a little before their disturb­ing power bears down upon us. More, we cannot do. Let us be­ware of expending our energy completely in a struggle with forces which we have not yet learned to understand and manipulate -let us rather, and in the constructive sense, join Candide and "cultivate our garden."

Furthermore, let us maintain an objective attitude toward life, and let this henceforth be the main direction of education. Ex­perience with "the modern temper" in the brightest of the young men and women of our time leads us to question how much there is to hope for in the purely personal experiences. The course of individual experience has been charted for generations. Our hopes, illusions, fleeting gratifications, and ultimate despairs are the theme of a limitless and authentic literature. This literature is reckoned to be the highest achievement of the human intellect to date, and is thus the principal educational material used on the superior youths of our time. As a result they go forth into life with the bloom rubbed off and the curtain lifted from its mysteries long before they have been personally experienced. Nor is this condi­tion necessarily undesirable. But it is the immediate cause of the irony and ennui which are rampant in the couchant mass of our young intellectuals.

For them the remedy is obvious. As compared with their per­sonal cycle, the varying and successive elements of the cultural cycle are on a vast scale and full of interest. The very recognition of them and of the nature of their relationships is new. Here are variety and novelty. Here flows an onrushing tidal sweep which will not reach its flood in the time of any individual now living. To point the view of the youth out and not in, and to set him, in this mighty manoeuvre, the objective task of adapting the material world to man's deepest satisfactions - all this will insure a useful­ness and a mental health of which the more highly educated among them had begun to despair.

We cannot retrace our path along the cultural cycle if we would. The nostalgia for antique simpler days may burn within us, but Time's arrow points ever forward. Mankind fulils its destiny in its advance, step by step, into new difficulties, new experiences, new accommodations to new environment.

We would not have it otherwise.