The Proper Study of Mankind
THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The...
...They suf- there were...
...they deny the one great miracle which world's foremost apostles of "social evolution...
...Lilian White Spencer 96 Bates, Henry Longan Stuart, Paul Crowley, Latin and Mass Education Henrietta Dana Skinner io6 Francis P. Donnelly 97 The Quiet Corner III THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND T HE young graduate's impression of the universe was the last complete artistic synthesis of mankind's in its relation to himself is not so equalizing as career, grouping hopes and realizations in stone that it may once have been...
...The scientist quence-but the fact that men are brave enough to suspects that a law upon which he prides himself will entertain a purposive dream of restored traditional be humbled tomorrow...
...Modern century placitum of continual human progress...
...expectancy-that next week we shall discover that a When Signor Mussolini spoke, Michelangelo had different Greek was the author of Homer...
...And the social dreamer, as he appears on pointblank possibility, undreamed of for centuries, of the platform, is too often a person who forgets that, the crippling, the senescence, the extinction of civilias Miss Agnes Repplier reminds us, "it is as revolt- zation, as the subtle, restless, fanatical enemies of ing to be robbed by a reformer as by a trust...
...The Europe exploit and develop the strains and cracks fundamental negation made by all these people is a caused by the great war...
...thought have flung before the mind...
...We, who are pledged to reverence a a violation of life's spiritual law...
...And the greatest error to which his exhilarating voyage...
...THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The Arts, and Public Affairs...
...we now choice that he cannot leave undecided...
...Failure to live out the human Christendom are merely the normal rules of scientific moment-however frail and transitory it may be-is human farming...
...duty to know what he is, and not to think of the em- The proper task of man is, of course, to escape from bryo that he was, nor the skeleton that he shall be the unknown, even in himself...
...The great Roman looks out boldly the complacent festival but very brittle charcoal...
...What does been dead almost four hundred and fifty years...
...In so proper elemental infinity is within-the multitudinous far as the newly equipped pilgrim to life realizes this seas which, in the course of centuries, have been ex- abiding salutary habit of mankind, he is prepared for plored by the spirit...
...It requires steady, pa. . . [Darwin] has collected, in the train of him, tient work of the kind which the farmer does in his every impudent imbecility in Europe, like a comet fields, or the saint in his cell...
...Since then we have struggled pretty of those who have left, or will shortly leave, college hard for existence...
...But we have never had an opportunity fer, as we all do-we from whom our machines gal- to watch another Michelangelo...
...we have got hold of continents and this year are a little too contemptuous of the dignity the strength of nature...
...rose like a sun over the seven eternal hills...
...Men of letters," he writes, glands, a highly degreed physiologist has said to them, "have never bowed the knee to the great eighteenthand you will take care of your personality...
...They have stressed by Professor Phillimore, one of the most disheard the prairie sage learnedly opine that "without tinguished of contemporary British humanists, in an the theory of evolution many of the humanities would address destined for some of those who went from colbe fatally distorted...
...We feel that we have not a new Rome which Mussolini has placed before the finished, cannot finish, a task...
...reflect that a mankind which has been wreathing itself The youthful voyager into intellectual life may in so many clouds of pink smoke, might conceivably profitably turn to see an exemplification of this miracle wake up some morning to discover nothing left of by Michelangelo...
...With this mean excepting that, tacitly and unaware, we have the help of closed eyes and a dim light (having care- been corrupted by the antique poison of the doctrine fully forgotten the day's news) one can realize a little of change...
...Least democracy, the demagogue has again and again of all we now who have seen a ghost...
...Yes, there is something in negation of discipline...
...and there are more of us than which education has conferred on them...
...But no one a beautiful old word which means precisely what it has ever pinned a durable fiction on the human race...
...It may be termed, in wagging its tail of phosphorescent nothing across the contrast with unregulated naturalistic change, the dissteadfast stars...
...We have a And yet it is trumpeted by the army of those who, in suspicion that a mankind which does not muster itself the words of the Oxford student of long ago, "Repre- into an-army may turn out to be only a crowd of bad sent throughout the land, the second-rate at second- boys...
...upon the wake of time because he was the captain of The young graduate may hesitate to express hima great inherited cargo...
...It will probably never be fully ever we think, do, or say, somebody will turn up shortly realized-one must make allowance for Caesarian elo- with a neater version of the matter...
...It has been listened to, during periods of wakeful- One of these details, and a rather impressive one, is ness, by those who have just left college...
...There is something in man which sickens when Sooner or later it turns again to the shrines it has he merges himself in nature...
...And there are at least a few plain details of hand...
...And so may he remember that it is as England and scarcely took breath until it was choked easy to drape mother nature with theories as to plant in the grapple with religious revolution...
...The great social and vehement, but, like so much of what Ruskin had and religious maxims which have been established by to say it was true...
...Therefore, one Manifestly, if anything is characteristic of us, it is may not unsalutarily turn to the grandiose vision of dissatisfied restlessness...
...is confidently turned over to the sun...
...He must make see only too well that it was really the end of a new up his mind about which way he is going-with thing---the finale of Europe's joyful recovery of its "nature" and its protagonists, or with man and manculture, which began before the Normans came to kind's hopes...
...It humanity can really perform-the miracle of raising may be chilling, but it is after all not unhygienic, to itself by its own spiritual bootstraps...
...People used to remark, of self about many things, but there is a fundamental course, that the renaissance was a new thing...
...says...
...The idea that mere long sequence of human achievements, are more than acquiescence in the counsels of nature, growth and a little afraid that weeds will sprout in a field which mutation, will develop men is simply a stupid idea...
...This speech was somewhat poetic ciplined "evolution" of ourselves...
...Our and mountain snows, in the house of its fathers...
...Volume IV New York, Wednesday, June 2, 1926 Number 4 CONTENTS The Proper Study of Mankind 85 The Pied Brothers' Pensioner Week by Week 87 Helen Parry Uded 99 The Fad of Motion 9o The Siddons of Spain Thomas Wa1sh 1U The Pope and Central Europe 91 Communications l1Q2 Poland and Pilsudski Charles Phillips 92 The Play R. Dana Skinner 104 The Beggar of the Eucharist Giants (verse) Daniel Sargent Io5 Thomas M. Schwertner 94 Books Ernest Sutherland City Storm (verse...
...In fact, perhaps the majority throbs spiritually...
...Round about us are vast builded on the everlasting hills, knowing that its place, oceans in which we can swim with exhilaration, but though perilous and confined, is apart from zephyrs they are not the seas which circle the globe...
...The depthless nificant that we term this culture the "Humanities," silence of the earth does not complain...
...They affirm a miracle which that...
...Whatever modern names and degrees the of what those figures mean-the rushing of busy cen- dark Democritus may assume, he makes us dance to the turies after the day when the great Petrine dome first same old tune of "progress...
...and even our delight in Homer glory is, in its own way, an event quite as stimulating is marred by the expectancy-the wholly irrelevant as a cup of wine...
...It is sig- theatre placards in front of a forest...
...Take care of your ductless lege a few years back...
...We have lived wheezily opined, is the golden and inevitable child of through a decennium in which there has been felt, and fallen political systems, and therefore beyond good there may still be felt-with a cold shudder-the plain and evil...
...This dome Ruskin, who had dreamed over the carven stone of 86 THE COMMONWEAL June 2, 1926 Michelangelo and all Italy, saw this state of mind ap- a groping mind can be exposed in our time is, in more proaching when he said of Darwin: "It is every man's ways than one, a confusion of infinities...
...No man has manlop away uncontrolled-from inhibitions suggested by aged to bring us to a halt for a searching spiritual the vast complexity of the universe which science and inspection...
...The gentlemen of Petrograd, so calmly devoted never happened, the development of reason through to snuffing out the lives of crowds, have been the physical law...
...fact which seem to indicate that we may be right...
...It is assumed that whatconsciousness of Italy...
Vol. 4 • June 1926 • No. 4
