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Show I WHO'S NEWS I THIS WEEK... By Lemuel F. Parton Trophet Who Predicted U. S. Trailer Craze. NEW YORK. The report-ers report-ers gave due attention to Aldous Huxley when he came in from England recently, re-cently, but they overlooked his interesting companion, Gerald Heard, British author, au-thor, critic and broadcaster, Mr. Heard Is a prophet and philosopher, phil-osopher, which isn't hot news perhaps, per-haps, but the ship news men probably prob-ably would have run him down had they recalled that, in 1923, he Quite definitely predicted the trailer craze. He has an uncanny way of putting two and two together -not necessarily necessar-ily a house and an automobile which has made him a star of both the British broadcasting and forecasting fore-casting companies, so to speak. His fortnightly radio program, "This Surprising World," has long been an Important feature. The Huxley-Heard team, In step here on an important enterprise, Is not impelled by the European propaganda prop-aganda surge. They expect to go about quietly, and the fact is It would take a man like the late Wlllam James to report their mission properly. prop-erly. After a trip west, they will check at Duke university on those startling experiments and findings in telepathy which have been the sensation of the year among psychologists. psy-chologists. This writer has read the Duke data and conclusions. They cinch up the fact of telepathy to a degree which makes a correspondent hope he will soon be able Just to think his stuff, with nobody paying wire tolls, and no wear and tear on the typewriter. Mr. Heard Is not Identified with fuzzy pseudo-science, and It Is as an intellectual and not as a mystio that he does his prophesying. lie is rated in England as one of the most important liaisons between science and psychology, and it Is with the reserve of the scientist that be has examined psychic phenomena. phenom-ena. In his numerous books, he has traced a continuing pattern of psychological, psy-chological, not physiological, evolution. evolu-tion. There was the pre-individual, the individual, Intellectually effective effec-tive but "morally monstrous," and now there is emerging a super-consciousness, within some life-ordained rubric of growth, which gives hope for the attainment of a real civilization. That seems to be Mr. Heard's main idea, advanced through his "Narcissus," "The Ascent As-cent of Humanity," "The Social Substance of Religion," "Science in the Making" and other books. He is forty-eight years old, Cambridge Cam-bridge bred, a small, alert man with eager blue eyes and blonde hair. At the risk of being too flippant, flip-pant, it may be observed that he is one of the main Intellectual spark plugs of England today. He and Mr. Huxley were the guests of Mrs. Leonard Elmhirst, 1172 Park avenue. They will start collaboration collabora-tion on a book on their western trip. Scientific War Curve. BUT, when It comes to prophesying, prophesy-ing, here's Professor Pitirim A. Sorokin of Harvard, also in the news, who has maintained that neither a man nor a nation can lift the veil beyond today or tomorrow. As the head of the Harvard department de-partment of sociology, he says a great deal of sociology is hokum or just a "clerical exercise." Currently, he catches national attention at-tention with his report on wars. The first quarter of this century, he finds, was the "bloodiest period in all history." Supplementing researches re-searches which he conducted in 1933 with General N. N. Golovin, he offers of-fers the first scientific war curve, covering 902 wars from th year 500 B. C. The World war was eight times bigger than all the rest rolled into one. Professor Sorokin Is no merely bookish student of wars. In the kick-back of war, he was jailed, sentenced, and awaiting the firing squad. That was In Russia, where he had opposed the Bolsheviks. Freviously he bad been arrested once for being; too conservative and once for being too radical. Lenin saved his life on condition that he leave the country. He came here In 1923, joined the Harvard faculty, and in 1930 became an American citizen. Looking over the Martian box score, he says to believe in peace is to believe in miracles. While he is much gloomier about the future than Mr. Heard, he has written one sentence which seems to put them, for the moment at least, on common com-mon ground. He demands, "a liberation lib-eration of imagination, intuition and speculation from the prison chains of the fact finders." Consolidated Nws Feature. WNU Service. |
