Evening Star Newspaper, December 13, 1931, Page 85

he Sundy Shee Magasine WASHINGTON, D. C, DECEMBER 13, 1 Art Notes | | Features 20 PAGES. THE OTHER PROGRESS Present Prophets of a Scientific Future Are Unable to Vision Correctly—Progress Alters, Not Merely Its Position, but Its Direction—Scientific “Palace of Dreams or Nightmares.” E have all heard a gresat deal of the wild and won- derful scientific imagina- tion of those books which project the world into a purely scientific future, in which the planet is worked from one central power station or all human intercourse is con- ducted by television, or babies are pro- duced in incubators or food manufac- tured in chemical laboratories. These works of scientific imagination have been produced in larger and larger numbers, for the simple reason that they require no imagination at all. For that matter, they do not require very much science; or, indeed, very much sense, even of the rudimentary sort that raises man above the brutes. They need no Becoration for The Star Magagine by J. Scott Williams. By Gilbert K. Chesterton imagination because they only imagine what is, exactly as it is, only more so. We already centralize as much as pos- sible the electricity or water power of all houses or all streets; it is only a very humdrum repetition to apply it to all cities and all nations. We already talk to everybody by telephone; it is a dis- mally obvious inference that we might see everybody by television. We already separate babies as much as possible from their mothers by putting them in schools and creches; it is not very novel to com- plete the work by putting them in in- cubators. We already have nearly all our natural food commercially altered by chemicals; it would not make very much difference if we took away the nabural food and left only the chemicals. NCE these directions of thought are established, only a very rudimentary inventiveness is needed to complete them. There have, indeed, been touches of true imagination, in the old days when such prophetical books were sometimes written by real prose poets like H. G. Wells. Even here it may be noted that some of the most vivid strokes concerned the failure and not the success of the seientific expedient; as when spectral streaks of snow and rain outlined the vanished body of the invisible man, or when the titanic tripods of the Martians began to wither and decay like spiders’ webs, through the invisible, infinitesimal invasion of the germs. But we can infer with certainty that the present prophets of a scientific fu- ture cannot really imagine it, because they cannot really imagine any interrup- tion of it. “It all comes out of the bocks they read and it all goes into the books they write”; and it is as dull as a railway time table, No intellectual power is needed in order to say that if we can now fly to Rome in a day, we might some day fly to Rome in an hour. A