Another Room

Today these elements are still present, but it is my impression that the argument is now going on in another room. The concentration of attention on political and economic measures has been supplanted by religious issues, or rather, by the re-interpretation of religious beliefs in terms relevant to the problems of our day. It has been succeeded to a lesser extent by fuller development in matters of aesthetics and an ever greater interest in science and its wonders—tilings by no means antithetic in themselves, but worlds apart from the religious outlook previously mentioned. Indeed, if the nineteen-thirties had as their motto that the proper study of mankind was man, the motto today would seem to be that the proper study of mankind is atomic structure, and that learning the alphabet means learning about alpha and beta particles or radiations.