METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM 



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,^ when 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, 

 Hayes — everywhere 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 com- 

 bustion engine. It is a civilisation in which children grow up with an intimate 

 knowledge of magnetos and in complete ignorance of the Bible. To that civilisation 

 belong the people who are most at home in, and most definitely of, the modern 

 world; the technicians and the higher-paid skilled workers, the airmen and their 

 mechanics, the radio experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial 

 chemists. They are the indeterminate stratum at which the older class distinctions 

 are beginning to break down." — (The Lion and the Unicorn, London, 1941, p. 54.) 



We are reminded of a great scholar venturing to stand up against one of Inge's 

 diatribes against modern Ufe — "I do not regard it as absurd," said Rashdall, "to 

 contend that there is value even in the life of East and West Ham" {Ideas & Ideals, 

 1928, p. 85). 

 " In his introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern English Poetry. 



