JULY, 1913

PLAIN TALK

13

## ABOUT BOOKS

### COSMIC THINKING

*The World Soul.* By H. Fielding-Hall:
Hurst & Blackett, 10s. 6d.

In his recent address to the Society for Psychical Research, Henri Bergson drew attention to the excellence of our centuries of struggle with the "natural" sciences as a training for the exploration of the unknown country now opening before us. This remark has constantly recurred to us during our perusal of Mr Fielding-Hall's book. It is in every sense of the word a scientific work. It has no assumptions, no gratuitous assertions to offer us. It stands for no school, creed or set of opinions. It sets out from the one invincible fact of life, the fact that has been twice named by humanity, being called "law" by one half and by the other "love."

Setting out from this basic fact of human consciousness the author has sought an inclusive hypothesis, something that can be built up from our observation of the laws of life, the way things work; in other words, from "facts," and which will in the end stand or fall by its power to include and "explain" these facts. We may admit the author's disclaimer of originality and agree that he has done nothing at the outset but co-ordinate evidence already to hand. But when we reach his presentation of the hypothesis of a world soul, of which the soul of every man is, so to say, a corpuscle, when we share his application of this hypothesis to the phenomena of life, to thought, to the religions, to the life and teaching of Jesus, to body and soul, secrecy, faith, . . . we must at the very least admit the original excellence of his work as an exercise in cosmic thinking.

We cannot ignore it. It is, in sum, the statement of a workable hypothesis, and does explain more "facts" than any theory of life put forth so far. It leaves one with the sense of a step taken, with the sense that one gets from all "live" writing, of a piece of actual experience from which there is no going back. It floods, as experience is apt to do, with new meaning much of the current coin of everyday life, the words and phrases whose vitality depends upon one's vision of things as a whole.

The glossary of common phrases at the end

of the volume is thus an inevitable restatement, and constitutes a philosophy in itself.

"Forgiveness," we read, is "non-persistence." What persists is not forgiven; what, by the law of evolution of the soul, does not persist is "forgiven."

"Sympathy is the capacity to put yourself in another's position and to feel glad or sorry, angry or proud with them, to analyse their situation and detect its causes and consequences. There is hardly any sympathy in the world. It understands neither the word nor the emotion." As a work of art this present book stands behind its predecessors. The urgency of feeling which has dictated it, the fact of its being thrown off under the pressure of the new vision of the whole creation is sufficient to account for this; and while we look forward to the embodiment of Mr Fielding-Hall's idea in a form that shall be, artistically, on a level with "The Soul of a People," we may be more than glad of the present accomplishment. Work like this is nothing less than a contribution to the development of man's soul.

## SLAVERY

*The Road to Freedom.* By Josiah and Ethel Wedgwood: Daniel, 1s. net.

Most critics of our modern civilisation have a two-fold aim in view. First, they would bring home to the public a vivid sense of the results which have been produced by a series of attempts at constructing a civilisation and then, so to say, imposing it upon the people from without; and in the second place, they try to show a way of deliverance.

Amongst these now almost innumerable attempts, "The Road to Freedom" is, in our opinion, one of the few which stand a chance of attaining their end.

Its authors are in agreement with most of their confrères in their diagnosis of Modern Civilisation as a Monstrous Misfit. Beyond this point they part company with them. They cannot remain in the camp of those who spend their time calling attention to specific evils, attaching the responsibility for the *status quo* to the "classes" and trying to get the political power, the power of ruling other men's lives, in the hands of the "masses," empowering a vast army of officials to see that everybody conforms to the rules which the official "scientists" declare as essential to

14

PLAIN TALK

JULY, 1913

the greatest happiness of the greatest number; nor can they find any way out of the present impasse in throwing up every form of government whatsoever.

They recognise that either of these methods of summarising and disposing of civilisation—both the method of the Socialistic Servile State and of Anarchy—besides being fundamentally pessimistic, fail to find either in their assumptions or their suggested ameliorations any support in humanity's experience of itself.

They set out in the book before us to show Modern Civilisation as the inevitable result of certain false assumptions.

They spend no time in denouncing it or in "constructing" Utopias. There are enough of these, they tell us, each of them framed on the personal tastes and ideals of its author and limited by the moral developments and scientific knowledge of that particular date, and each useless because "human progress is not a regular curve, of which the future can be calculated by the formula of the past, and there is no reason to suppose that humanity is being conducted—or conducting itself—towards the social conception of any individual, however enlightened he may be. It would indeed be truly astonishing if it were so. Such fancy remodellings of the world are downright mischievous when they become a guide to legislation or action, and when the many possibilities of human development are regulated within the limits of a present-day imagination."

This impresses us as divine common-sense. From its standpoint all "constructive" civilisations are condemned at the outset.

But our authors are not content with bare statement. They show us the psychology of state-craft in its most intimate workings.

The ordinary citizen is practically at the mercy of the administrative specialist, because he has been taught to accept unquestioningly all decision based upon "the unanimous consensus of expert opinion," so that when he is "shown by statistics that ninety per cent. of the children of drunkards inherit a tendency to drink" he is half ready to believe that the necessity for the sterilisation of drunkards is proven, that "the proved connection between consumption and the slums is an argument for compulsory farm colonies," or that if "the chest measurement of soldiers increases on an average two inches for every year of drill" the need for universal conscription is not to be questioned.

The case, meanwhile, of the experts is almost worse than that of the citizens, "Being part and parcel of a certain state of things they cannot conceive of any other as possible or desirable, and with the natural tendency to idealise one's motives they preach some hazy creed about the General Good or Social Morality or Equal Distribution of Wealth or anything that will justify them in arranging other people's lives for them."

The psychology of slave labour too is dealt with, and its inevitability as a result of land monopoly. After thus clearing the ground and getting back to the initial blunder, the initial defiance of natural "law," our authors take up the questions of free and forced exchange, test the various theories about Land Reform, Marginal Land and Economic Rent, the Single Tax, etc., and go on to consider the coming Revolution—the steps of the change.

We cannot resist the temptation of picking and stealing from the last chapter: "The alternative to a free state is the perfectly organised state. To make society safe it will be their duty—not to have prisons where offenders are punished, but to forestall all possibility of offence; . . . to have State factories where the necessary wealth is produced . . . marriage provisions for improving the breed . . . schools, above all, that the minds of the growing race may be trained in such beliefs as are necessary to preserve the State, in order that this superstition may receive the full strength of the soil, and that the seed of every other idea may be destroyed before it can germinate. This is all necessary for the preservation of the perfectly organised State, but let no one imagine that it is compatible with Progress. There are blind alleys in nature which are entered when any system is brought to work so perfectly that divergence from it and advance beyond it, become impossible. The community of bees is such a one. . . . It may require a hopeful temerity to face a peaceful revolution now, by resolutely restoring the land to the people; it will require more courage to face that blind revolution which may come if the discordant elements break loose; but it will need a courage without hope to face the world as it may be preserved, so doctored and so disciplined that no revolution is any longer possible."

PENSION, VEGETARIAN.—Moderate. Standing in three acres garden. Boating on Thames. London 10 miles.— "Artistic," c/o Goring, 3 Tudor Street, E.C.