Creative critique and anthropo-philosophy

should grow sane and the artificial economic problems of the world be solved, the combined and assured gifts of health, plenty and leisure may prove the final justification of applied science.’

‘For many years now’, wrote Professor Frederick Soddy in 1931 in “Money versus Man’, ‘the problem of producing wealth has been essentially solved. Nevertheless as science ever increases the destructive power of men, they will, ifnot prevented, end in destroying the scientific civilisation altogether. The problem that is not solved and which must be solved quickly, if civilisation is to be saved, is the problem of distributing the wealth that now by scientific knowledge can be so plentifully produced.’

The economic dilemma of Man now is the congestion of Plenty. The question of our time is whether man has the wit to co-operate in order to consume what his intelligence has enabled him to produce; and this not only in the economic realm but also in the realm of culture. Man’s history, the human experience of the past and the whole inheritance of knowledge, art and life wisdom is rich; and yet we feel poor and are poor in spirit and in fantasy. The average human experience is poor. So people demand to be amused and entertained and filled up with accumulation of facts.

That great prophet of the present age, Erich Gutkind, has thus described our human state:

‘Today man’s world desires to flower. The seed of our world has sprouted from the depths of Nature. The new compelling need is no longer the need for food, it is the need which urges the seed to lose itself in germination that it may not rot; it is the need which urges the flower at its height of blooming to enter once more into the mysterious stillness of seed-life. And as the age old struggle against nature is now in the ebb the former problems vanish. We are now

’ beyond nature, and herein lies the key to all new things that are to come.

‘But this dying of nature and of natural life which is taking place in us is something for which we have paid a heavy price, having sacrificed our immediacy to nature, our primitive spontaneity and our youth. Like Prometheus, we have separated ourselves from the primeval creative impulse. All that sprang from great passions and unerring instincts, all that drew the individual into electric vibration with divinity, is now being extinguished. The immediacy of the divine presence, the vigour of race and of folk spirit, are passing with all that is of the earth, the peculiarities of peasants, of savages, of folk, of race.

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