DISCOVERY 



A MONTHLY POPULAR 

 JOURNAL OF KNOWLEDGE 



Vol. II. No. 23. NOVEMBER 1921. 



PRICE Is. NET. 



DISCOVERY. A Monthly Popular Journal of Know- 

 ledge. 



Edited by Edward Liveing, B.A., Rothersthorpe, 

 Northampton, to whom all Editorial Communications 

 should be addressed. (Dr. A. S. Russell continues to 

 act as Scientific Adviser.) 



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 London, W.i, to whom all Business Communications 

 should be addressed. 



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Editorial Notes 



Not many weeks ago we wiine.-^scd a strange phenome- 

 non in British mentality and psychology-. During the 

 meetings of the British Association, in which momen- 

 tous discoveries in every branch of natural and applied 

 science were being revealed and discussed by our most 

 eminent scientists, a well-known film " star " arrived in 

 England. We need not dwell on the many details of 

 his popular triumph at the hands of both public and 

 Press, to show how great and spontaneous it was — far 

 greater and more spontaneous, for instance, than the 

 interest accorded to the members or the discussions of 

 the British Association. Now it serves no purpose to 

 wail over such a phenomenon as though it were a proof 

 of national decadence. We need to look at the facts 

 clearly and cahnly. The facts are that Charlie Chaplin 

 is in his own sphere a genius ; that the average man 

 and woman need something not too serious to enliven 

 their leisure hours, and that one of the easiest channels 

 to such enlivenment lies through the moving picture ; 

 that cinemas have spread to the smallest town and to 

 the remotest corners of the w'orld. and are therefore 

 able to bestow a world-wide fame on cinema " stars " 

 such as no scientist, philosopher, or wxiter can expect 

 to attain to till long after he is dead. 



But these are only some of the facts, and, making all 



allowances for their importance, we feel that they do 

 not explain the phenomenon to our satisfaction. For 

 the phenomenon grows out of some deeper tendency, 

 such as has recently produced the strange eclipse of 

 interest in any other current topic by the attention paid 

 to the Carpentier-Dempsey boxing-match, such as every 

 day turns the gaze of the average man to the " sports " 

 page rather than to the more serious news in his daily 

 paper, such as would, in the event of their death on 

 the same day, induce our Press to publish far longer 

 biographies of Charlie Chaplin than, say, of so dis- 

 tinguished a scientist as Sir Edw-ard Thorpe. If we 

 had space we could put forward a hundred and one 

 reasons for these phenomena, but we believe that the 

 chief reason lies in the peculiar social evolution of our 



times. 



***** 



It is easy enough to look back to past centuries and 

 sigh for the active pursuit of knowledge that character- 

 ised the reigns, say, of Elizabeth or Victoria. But that 

 pursuit was confined to a small, leisured class living, in 

 the days of Elizabeth, amongst a multitude of semi- 

 barbarians, and, in the days of Victoria, amongst a 

 population that w^as only beginning to learn the rudi- 

 ments of reading and WTiting. As we pointed out in 

 our editorial notes several months ago, " the spirit of 

 our own age is affecting all grades of our social com- 

 plex." So far as the public to whom intellectual workers 

 are to appeal is concerned, democracy produces a 

 process of levelling up and levelling down the collec- 

 tive intelligence of a nation ; a wider but more mediocre 

 public. Now comes the question, " How is a powerful, 

 living contact to be made and maintained between such 

 a public and the advanced intellectual workers ? " 

 This question must be met in some practical attempt, 

 for otherwise democracy will not promote, but obstruct 

 progress ; more than that, in the long run, without 

 the stimulus that the sciences and arts supply to the 

 social condition of the community, it will not produce a 

 Utopia, but a break-down in civilisation. 



***** 



There is no doubt that our men of science are to-day 

 more than ever cognisant of this danger. Such a 



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