Evening star., 1931-12-13

told about the Seven-leagued bootS, that
there might be seventy-leagued boots.
We can almost hear little boys voice
saying, But I'm going to have seventy
hundred-leagued boots" The voice is
more agreeable to listen to than that Of
the scientific prophet, and the calcula-
tion is quite as easy. Indeed, the child
has resources of real imagination which
are quite untouched and untapped by
the scientists, but that is point to
which I shall return later.
The same fact which makes it inevi-
table that these prophecies should be
Illuminated makes it quite the reverse OF
inevitable that they should be fulfilled.
Indeed, the very fact that makes the
prediction probable makes the fulfillment
impossible. The world most certainly
never did, and almost certainly never
will, go along the same road endlessly,
or even to its extreme end. Progress in
variably alters, not merely its position
but it's direction.
ROOKS like these are like romances
written for the court of the last Bour-
bons, describing the grand monarch as
growing grander and grander and his
palaces more splendid and full of tro-
phieS. In 40 years the palaces were pill
laged and the monarch had ceased to
exist. But (what was much more i'm
portant) a new mood, once called the
modern mood, mood that did not care
for monarchs or palaces had set in;
mood Of machinery and mer. money
hot ic al du
passing But its courtiers still write ro-
mances about its gold and iron kings,
and how they will soon storm the moon
and send their fleets to the stars; exactly
as the old courtiers would have promised
the French King, on the very eve of the
French revolution, the spoils of Eldorado
and Cathay.
This scientific palace Of dreams, or
palace of nightmares, has already been
shaken by a shock as abrupt as the fall
of the Bastille. As in the other case,
there has simply been an economic
breakdown at the very base of the tow
ering ambition. The whole theory Of
modern trade and machinery has al
ready been turned upside down in the
real revolutionary world, which is the
mind of man. Scientists had multiplied
production, only to be told that they had
produced too much. Psychologists had
instructed statesmen, only to be told that
they had sold too much. Experts had
made the very best machinery, only to
be told that it must go on producing
the worst goods as the only way of keep
ing it going.
BY this time such men have obviously
lost their grip on machinery and money;
both have gone mad and are merely de-
stroying men. 1t will not last long. Man
will escape somehow from such lunatic
asylum and the only question here is
what use he will make of his liberty.
Now, real imagination consists In
imagining new point of view; not in
extending the stale scientific point of
view into endless impossible perSpectives.
1t Is catching glimpse of a new light
on things; new angle or attitude to-
ward realities, which is new If only be-
cause it is neglected. That is why really
original men of genius have SO often
turned to ancient things rather than
modern; as the Renaissance caught a
glimpse of what the Greeks had meant
or some modern artist of what the Egyp-
tians had meant.
And II I give hint or two here of a
happier society, at the very opposite ex-
treme from the servile state of science,
world of men who produce to enjoy
and not merely to barter, in which hu-
man beings are heads in workshop and
not merely hands in a factory, shall
doubtless be accused of going back to a
barbaric past and being content with the
bare level of peasantry Some are
aware that am a distributist; one who
would have most men owning and work
ing their own farms for food. And some
may suppose that I only mean going
haek tn the old farm axao+ly n e ~ xx,or.