Sibylla or, The revival of prophecy
are continually being found, and may not the Universities soon find
themselves in the position of the Church? Several things would make the
suggestion plausible.
In the first place, education is already being purveyed as a commercial
product. Quite apart from the self-educators produced fortnightly
by the Press, there are Mind-training Institutes and Correspondence
Colleges. Universities at the present time can afford to ignore this
competition. They have, they think, the pull in traditional prestige,
the advantages of the tutorial system, the general atmosphere of
culture, and they have, we trust, at present the most distinguished
scholars. But traditional prestige is a slippery foundation for any
institution now-a-days. The test that is being applied is that of
practical efficiency. Already happy-go-lucky methods in University
finance are being examined by Royal Commissions and by financial
experts. The next thing will be that they will start to scrutinize
the educational methods being employed. Already, moreover, the newer
institutions are being forced to mould themselves upon the model of
an up-to-date business office. Soon they will adopt those well-proven
adjuncts of commercial progress――modern methods of advertisement, for
instance.
When the printing press arose, priests, no doubt, preserved their
self-assurance by reliance upon the peculiar efficiency of the
spoken word. They clung to the sermon and scorned the weapon of the
pamphleteers. When comparing themselves with the Correspondence
Colleges, the Universities resort to a similar argument. One day,
however, the Correspondence Colleges will realize the possibilities in
wireless as an adjunct to their methods.
When with the assistance of its influential board of directors some
national broadcasting company finally secures its charter, the
following situation will arise. Phenomenal salaries will attract
the most distinguished exponents of the various arts and sciences
to the central broadcasting stations. District Colleges staffed by
automatic invigilators will call the roll of students at the various
lectures. These will be delivered by a loud speaker synchronized with
a televisual cinema projecting the lecturer’s blackboard and other
illustrative material.
The economy effected by conducting classes of say half a million or
equally easily ten million students will enable anyone to follow
courses by all the most distinguished exponents of his subject.
European students in psychology, for example, will attend say at 9 a.m.
for Professor Stout, followed at 10 by Dr Sigmund Freud, and at 11 by
Professor G. E. Moore. Nor need these distinguished men repeat their
lectures until they have something new to say, for dictaphones will be
included among the listeners-in, and another relay of undergraduates
will acquire their wisdom from the broadcast-phonograph.
Such a soulless business organization, it will be objected, could
never replace our present establishments of culture. But here, again,
I feel the objection is of purely transitory force. Progressive
differentiation which I have mentioned as an important aspect of
evolution has produced the antithesis of commerce and cultured life.
Differentiation, however, is to a great extent counterbalanced by
processes of integration; and such integration we can see in progress
in the business world.
The commercial applications of art besides influencing the dividends of
our railway companies must be exercising a cultural effect upon their
boards of directors; and culture filters through in many ways. The
justly renowned polish of the Oxford graduate is finding a lucrative
field of expression in modern salesmanship. An up-to-date salesman
now-a-days speaks considerably better English than his customer, and
the average waiter is better mannered than the proprietor of the
hôtel. It is inconceivable that the employer will continue to be quite
uninfluenced by his cultured and refined subordinates. Perhaps this
is the secret of the growth of those Learned Societies the purport of
which we understand is to supply that liberal education demanded now
by busy business men. When the captains of industry have mastered this
business of being cultured and have seen its possibilities in practical
affairs their own peculiar talents will be applied in ever wider
spheres; of which education will probably be the first.
V
Dr Schiller is of the opinion[8] that the evolutionary impetus is
spent, and biologically at least we have seen the end of change. I
wonder. And supposing he were right? The process might begin again;
this time with the men of science at the helm.
[8] _Tantalus._
The vast and powerful machinery developed to meet the needs of
Scientific Management in industry, government, and education may
make it possible to initiate and control the operation of the
natural laws of change. Side by side with the direct control of
character, belief, and action, large-scale experiments in eugenics
may proceed. Such experiments would not demand the clumsy expedient
of the Act of Parliament. The triple control will provide adequate
means for eliminating the intractable factors in the situation.
Perhaps the constitution of the United States of America provides the
most promising machinery at present for large-scale sociological
experiment. These States, moreover, are fortunate in the character of
their population. But whether by education or by eugenic control man
himself will change. Physically, by a process of atrophy (at which Dr
Schiller will not, I trust, demur), he may consist chiefly in a head
from which will depend a mass of atrophied limbs. He will presumably be
more or less permanently mounted upon a compact automobile, travelling
by road or by air. No doubt a submarine attachment will be available to
facilitate his morning bath.[9] But it is not with his appearance that
we are here concerned. What is the future of his mind?
[9] But on all questions relating to our mechanical future I must
refer the reader to Professor A. M. Low, to whose works _The
Future_ and _Wireless Possibilities_ I myself am chiefly
indebted in this respect.
There are interesting possibilities in the sphere of sense alone.
Some of our present senses, such as taste or smell, may disappear
altogether. More and more we seem to depend upon purely visual cues. On
the other hand, vision and hearing may be considerably augmented. Even
though they be supplemented by microphones and microscopes, we always
strive to see and hear a little more than the best of instruments
allows. If, after all, the biological vitalists are right, so long
as we are interested in the constitution of matter there is a motive
for further variation. But, as Professor Low points out, our æsthetic
susceptibilities will have to be modified on the way. When we first
begin to perceive the fauna in the cheese and the microbes on our
walls, and when, like the birds, we go into the country to listen to
the worms, we shall have to revise our values. Our poets, too, will
find new themes to sing.
Memory, even more than sense, suggests many possibilities of
development. By hypnotism, or by the natural working of the unconscious
mind, it is said that we can recall even the earliest events of life.
Soon, perhaps, this power will be under conscious control, and the
autobiographers will have their millennium too. But, quite apart from
this, new methods of education and a little Scientific Management would
enable us, even now, to do much more with our memories through the
powers we already possess.
The developments of intellectual life are the most difficult to
foresee. But there are a few clues which enable us to guess at their
possible nature. What purely intellectual achievements have been
made in the past seem to depend upon the development of language and
the elaboration of symbolism convenient to thought. Philosophers and
scientists have continually expressed dissatisfaction at the modes
of expression at their disposal in a language primarily devised to
express our emotional and practical demands. Scientists have invented
a technical terminology in their nouns. Mathematicians go somewhat
further, and have invented more thorough-going systems of symbolism.
Philosophers have always found it necessary to invent peculiar
manners of speech, and now are seriously beginning to follow the
mathematicians. It is possible that quite a new language will arise,
probably a variety of purely technical languages――useful for different
purposes of thought. The process of differentiation manifests itself
here as in other ways. Already people following different pursuits find
it almost impossible to converse, at least with anything approaching
mutual understanding. And this process of specialization which
education and increasing knowledge forces upon us points to another
obstacle in the way of the Esperantists and other propagandists for
a universal language. By the time this language is adopted, we shall
have lost all common interests for the discussion of which it might
have been employed. Perhaps our newer universities will inaugurate
professorships in small-talk to keep alive an obsolescent art and to
correct this serious menace of specialism.
More rapid than changes in the intellectual life will be those of
character and of temperament. There are two significant facts in the
trend of man’s emotional development, one of special and the other of
general interest.
Firstly, there is the curious decay of cruelty and the increased desire
to avoid inflicting pain. No one, surely, would deny an enormous
change in this respect even in recent centuries. And we are beginning
to discover the lengths to which development may go. Even now it often
causes a moral man to attribute base motives to himself in doing a
kindly act to spare his friend the subtle pain or sense of obligation
which occurs in the feeling of gratitude. Modest forms of generosity
often have this motive in their modesty.
There is not much further to go before we reach the social life of
Henry James’s novels――where the principal characters have exquisite
consciences, where good souls are tortured by the regret that they had
not expressed their reproaches a shade or so less directly so as more
to convey the impression that they had really said nothing at all.
Now-a-days you are afraid to forgive your enemies, lest the pain of
remorse you thrust upon them should exceed the discomfort inflicted by
a direct retaliation. The finer spirits of the age cannot live up to
their own ideals because of the sense of inferiority it would impose
upon their less advanced companions. Society in the thirtieth century
will assuredly be even more refined.
The second significant fact of the moral history of our age to some
extent ameliorates the prospect. We are gradually growing out of our
emotions. We are acquiring self-consciousness and becoming habitually
introspective, and, as the psychologists tell us, you cannot observe
an emotion without decreasing its intensity.
This partly explains what is curious in what is called “modern love”,
as practised and expounded by our younger novelists. It is essentially
introspective. Every schoolboy knows what is going to happen when he
falls in love. He knows about the illusions arising from emotion. The
undergraduate cannot make love extravagantly like the Elizabethan
poets, or sentimentally like the Victorians. When he feels the passion
rising, he informs the provoking cause of it, that he knows quite well
that, in spite of it, she is a perfectly ordinary little person with
nothing very much to recommend her. They both agree that they are
victims of an obsolescent mechanism designed for biological purposes, a