Janus in Modern LifePetrie, W. M. Flinders (William Matthew Flinders)
Philosophy
Janus in Modern Life
Petrie, W. M. Flinders (William Matthew Flinders)
Civilization; Progress
From another point of view, toleration is essential to completion.
The enormous variety of character, and ability for special work, is
all needed in a complete community. There are many "wrong paradises"
in a whole society. We see the necessity for mental diversity, from
the pure mathematician who is proud of the inapplicability of his
results, through all the successive stages of research work, commercial
work, administrative management, and mechanical work, even down to
merely automatic work which needs no more mind than a cow's. And it
is perfectly clear that such mental diversity must have corresponding
variety of external life to accommodate it. The student or experimental
worker finds the disturbances of communal life almost insufferable,
while the mechanical worker would be miserable almost to suicide in
the silence and lack of excitement of a life devoted to abstract
thought or to millionths of an inch. If, therefore, the productions of
the externals of life differ so profoundly in a complete society, we
must expect and allow equally great differences in all the feelings,
instincts, and requirements. One man may have a physical repulsion
to affecting his mind and condition by stimulants and narcotics, a
repulsion that extends more or less to every one addicted to such
drugging of the senses. But it would be a misfortune to be without
that variety, and the world would be poorer by losing Falstaff, or
even Bardolph. The utmost we can say is that we should never be blind
to the bad effects on the community of a low type if it be too widely
diffused.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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