Year: 1943
Type: book
Abstract: beauty of these people is not strange, not irresponsible, but pregnant with the beauty of the new world-order.^Perhaps a word about modem English poetry might be interjected here.The writings coHected in the present book go to show how a scientist deeply responded to the work of poets contemporary with him during the period bet^'een the two world wars.He could not refrain from quoting them because they embodied all the elements of his own world view, the evolutionary background, the materialist view of human history, the task of Eros in social progress, the revo- lutionary belief in the future world of justice and comradeship.W. B. Yeats,^w hen discussing the achievements of the "New Country" School and their successors, remarked that certain technical factors such as assonance and sprung rhythm, had permitted at last the inclusion of necessary scientific words into poetry.Scientific socialism could then bring science and poetry together.It is essential, therefore, to view all the forms of human experience in a social context.But I was profoundly sceptical of the right of any one of the forms of experience to have the last word about the world in which we live.To-day I feel more confirmed in this scepticism than ever.A concentration on scientific experience alone gives you the individualistic researcher, inapt for team-work and bent on priority, the easy prey of all the reactionary social forces tending to ^Compare with this a notable passage from George Orwell: "The place to look for the germs of the future England is in the light-industry areas and along the arterial roads.In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayeseverywhere indeed on the outskirts of great towns -the old pattern is gradu- ally changing into something new.In diose vast new wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its slums and mansions, or the coimtry, with its manor houses and squalid cottages, no longer exist.There are wide gradations of income, but it is the same kind of life that is being lived at different le\'els, in labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads, and in the naked democracy of the swimming pools.It is rather a restless, cultureless life, centreing round tinned food.Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine.It is a civilisation in which children grow up with an intimate time: the refreshing river (Nature, delivered from every haughty Lord And forthwith free, is seen to do all things Herself, and through herself of her own accord, Free of all Gods.)On the one hand there is the cosmic force which is "responsible" for the vast evolutionary process wherein we form a part, if any- thing is responsible for it.The modern mind finds the ancient schol- astic arguments for the existence of this force or "prime mover" in no way convincing, still less that it partakes of the nature of what we call "mind" or "personality," and even less still that its essence is good.The good seems to arise out of the evolutionary process rather than to have been in it from the beginning.But the good is an immediate datum, and the holiness of good actions is an immediate datum.These are the occasions of modern religion.
Source: The Macmillan company eBooks
Author: Joseph Needham
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2493666511