Indiana State University - Sycamore Yearbook (Terre Haute, IN)

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THE NORMAL ADVANCE: 9 mind, for the character of a man or a nation, it is likely to be in the same strain. Do we not know more than we used to? Do not our chil- dren treat as common mental necessities the things which were luxuries to their fathers, and have they not long ago ceased to cry for them? And that also is undeniable and there may be some good in it also, especially if we can agree upon the definition of ttgood? At any rate, the most evident factor in such an estimate is that two such clearly distinct things as the mind and the stomach are spoken of in the same way. The sum and substance of it is that in both cases we can get the things to fill them withal, more quickly and in greater abundance and variety than was formerly the case. And in making our estimates, we simply transfer our knowledge from the sphere where it is full and sure, to that in which it is hazy and fragmentary. We do know the stomach- we are acquainted With its size and habits, and know from experience how much it will stand. And one result of this closer familiarity is that the stomach also, knowing our weaknesses, is not slow about protesting, and, as a matter of fact, he manages to hold his own fairly well, in spite of all the improved methods of com- merce which threaten to overwhelm him. The same can not be said, on the other hand, of the mind. We seem to know much less about its capacities, or its peculiarities either. To judge from our actions, when we undertake to store it With knowledge, for instance, all minds must be about alike and of the same size, and there is no limit to What they will hold. And the mind, having, apparently, a much less . intimate connection with us as individuals, does not take the liberty to protest as the stomach does. And so it comes about that with our im- proved methods of communication and devices for the spread of knowledge, the poor thing is beset, or we might better say, assaulted, cram- med, swamped, every hour and day, by a mass of ideas and facts from which it was happily free in the time of our fathers. Think of the books and newspapers and magazines of today; the libraries and bill-boards; sermons, lectures, political speeches; vaudeville shows, grapho- phones, Sunday supplements; moving pictures, advertisements and street-fakirs, to say nothing of the hundreds of new scenes and faces and noises you hear inside of the ten minutes it takes to come down town on the car, or of the endless movement and change in any kind of business in a modern city. All this seems to me clearly abnormal and the worst of it is that, like all abnormal conditions, it has speedily come to be regarded as perfectly natural, and has even been set up as the stan- dard by which we shape our policies. So it comes, for instance, that we have the variety show instead of the drama, the clatter and con- fusion of amusement park instead of the con- cert or lecture, that we have all the multifarious activity, and sometimes even the noisy sensa- tionalism 0f the modern church, and the over- crowded curriculum and itget-rich-quickii methods of our schools. Everything is buzzing and rattling about us in such a way that we feel as if we must be missing something when we do not buzz and rattle also, and teach our children to buzz and rattle. I hope I may not be misunderstood. I do not mean to disparage the knowledge and experi- ence which modern inventions bring us. It is, most ofit, important. A single issue of a daily paper contains enough to keep our minds busy for a year. What I feel like protesting against is not the character of the knowledge, but the overwhelming mass of it. We are not feeding the mind at all, but starving it; we are not clothing it, but even taking from it that which is by right its own. Our life and experi- ence, instead of being internal and 0f the soul, is more and more becoming an experience mere- - ly of the eyes and ears, a dealing at arms length with a tremendous mass of raw, undi- gested, unassimilated facts, a life, in short, that lies entirely on the outside of us. The capacity of the human mind, like everything on earth, is limited. It is humanly impossible for it to take up all this avalanche of things that pour upon it from day to day, and to transform them into its own substance, and make anything out

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8 t THE NORMAL ADVANCE wateringamachine in a field, he shall pay Iive Shekels of silver to the owner of the watering- machine? tCIf a physician operate on a man for a severe wound with a bronze lancet and cause the man,s death; or open an abscess tin the eyey of a man with a bronze lancet and de- stroy the mants eye, they shall eut 01f his fin- gers? ttIf a'veterinary physician operate on an ox for a severe wound and save its life, the owner of the ox shall give to the physician, as his fee, one-sixth of a Shekel of silver? ttIf a man hire a boatman and a boat and freight it with grain, wool, oil, dates, or any other kind of freight, and that boatman be careless and he sink the boat or wreck its cargo, the boatman shall replace the boat which he sank and what- . ever portion of the cargo be wrecked? The domestic, legal, and social aifairs were .very complicated. ttIf a man present field, garden, or house to his favorite son and write him a sealed deed; after the father dies, when the brothers divide, he shall take the present which the father gave him, and over and above they shall divide the goods of the fathefs house equally? ttIf a man be in debt and sell his wife, son, or daughter, or bind them.over to service, for three years they shall work in the house of their purchaser or master; in the fourth year they shall be given their freedomfi Marriage licenses were required before mar- riage. The state handled petty family troubles in ancient times. ttIf a man take a wife and do not arrange with her the tpropery contracts, that woman is not a tlegaD wife? ttIf she have not been a careful mistress, have gadded about, have neglected her house and have be- littled her husband, they shall throw that woman into the water? A civilization so ancient and 'yet so rich is the wonder to the modern student. This civi- lization has been buried beneath the ages and mountains of sand, but has been preserved in tablets of stone. It is now the common prop- erty of the world, largely through ctThe Code of Hammurabiy The text from which this source material was taken is, ttThe Code of Hammurabi;7 published by the University of Chicago Press, Chicago. This text, which has the reprint of the original, its transliteration and translation into English, was planned by Robert Francis Harper, pro- fessor of Semitic Languages and Literatures in the University of Chicago. He was director of the Babylonian Section of Oriental Explora- , tion Fund at the time of the discovery of the Code. The External Life J. J. SCHLICHER When we consider the effects that have been produced by modern means of communication and transportation, we are sure to think first, if not exclusively, of material things. So much more freight can be hauled, so many more pas- sengers can be transported at such a speed, so much news can be obtained from so great a dis- tance in such a short time, that great has be- come small and far has become near. What- ever is done can be done with greater dispatch, more certainly, and with surer confidence in the result. Business, in short, has expanded, nations have been drawn together, and by using each others surplus, promote the common wel- fare--in material things. It may occur to us also that the banana may now be eaten at the North Pole, and the sea-loving oyster in the desert and on the mountain top, and we may even be led to make that interesting and novel remark about the necessities of life that were luxuries to our fathers. Such, in brief, are the results that come to our minds. We take it for granted that they are good things, and perhaps they are. And if we go farther, and speak of the results of the same improved methods for the life of the

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10 of them that will be of real significance to the individuaPs inner being. Hence instead of be- ing the center of their lives, men and women become mere dangling pendants, without any inner meaning or purpose of perfection. It is as if the school of our existence were being continually disturbed by a passing circus of ex- ternal events, with the children of our thought rushing madly from window to window in their Vain effort to see it all, and the room itself and its work, meanwhile, deserted and neglected. It appears to me that some serious and evil results have followed from this driving out of our lives from within uswresults which we can readily see, but which we do not perhaps con- nect with their real cause. First of all, and per- haps least important, I would mention the un- due preference which is given to the man who does things as against him who thinks and is, to actions as opposed to character, and to the Visible, tangible, practical side of things gen- erally. It is our eyes and ears, our hands and noses that are kept busy by our modern environ ment, instead of our thoughts. The power of meditation and reflectiOn becomes, consequently, in a corresponding degree, atrophied, while on the other hand the mere acquisitive faculties are trained and exercised. Hence it is that these call so constantly and insistently for food, and this food for them only the actual happening of things on the outside can supply. It is large- ly because the doer of deeds and the performer of stunts can furnish us with something for our pampered ears and eyes to feed upon, that they keep us busy without the necessity of thinking, that they have come to have the honor that they have. Distinctions between good deeds and indifferent or evil deeds, between beautiful and ugly deeds, tend to fall into the back- ground. It is a stimulus, a thriller, from the outside that we want, and this the mere thinker, or he who simply is something, can give us in only an inferior degree. I am not saying that simply by way of criticism, but to present a condition the effects of which will be found per- meating every activity and estimate of our modern life. I am not saying that the condition THE NORMAL ADVANCE is all bad, or that it may not be made to bear good fruit, but that it is present and abnor- mally exaggerated and therefore. constantly tends to harm, will not be denied. More serious than the condition just describ- ed is the woeful distraction and desire for dis- traction which characterizes so many people of the present day. Having no inner life in which they may find their resources of happiness and satisfaction, they flee to the world without of their own accord. Religion, for example, to use but a single illustration, has for many peo- ple long ceased to be a thing of the heart and the closet, and has become a round of club and committee meetings, of devices and schemes and external show. People get the feeling that they do not count unless they can see themselves somewhere exposed to view and in the push. But the worst of it is that this everlasting search for external satisfaction, for an unceas- ing round of activity outside of ourselves, is disintegrating character. Flitting from one thing to another, each with little or no intimate significance for the individual himself, we lose all steadiness of purpose and all desire we may havelbeen born with to do anything completely and well. It would not be possible to do all the things that appear to make claims upon our time, and the mere attempt to do them leaves us at the end with our sensibilities dulled to- the distinction between what is and what is not worth while. And with out standards we lose our integrity and independence, too. For you must not think that you can constantly indulge in a revel of sensations and external experia ences, without forming the habit of yielding, in general, of being led from without instead of within. Stubbornness and prejudice you may still have, and probably do have, but that thorough downright action of character and personality, which flows from a soul well bal- anced in its own convictions, is surely gone. Finally, and perhaps most disastrous of all, the external life of our day dulls our moral sense and weakens our feeling of responsibility. This, too, comes about most naturally. So long as our experiences and standards of conduct are