FRANKENSTEIN FORTIFIED

"Unless man's capability to handle the enormous civilization he has created is increased the organization is likely to annihilate him." Thus Raymond Fosdick in his address before the Institute of Arts and Sciences at Columbia expresses a fear which all intelligent moderns must eventually feel. No one who appreciates this monster which man in the role of a Frankenstein has created can remain apathetic. So from the agile minds of certain European intellectuals as well as from "old school" Americans have come their expressions of fear. But while these have beaten the air of a careless world with the fury of their misgivings, the beast has kept slowly and methodically growing. And now the time has come when man must attempt to master the civilization he has created, for it is not to be thought that he will meekly submit to the forces that would crush him, once the danger is evident.

Since then the question resolves itself into one of preparation, man must search carefully for those qualities which are most likely to strengthen him in his fray with the thing he has built. A fair contention is that these lie with in the realms of the spirit. Whether the dreams of philosophy or the vapors of mysticism or the rigors of a revealed religion or even the flickering flare of a poet's fancy lead him on, he must at last seek refreshment and reincarnation in the world of a Jesus, a Plato, a Shakespere and a Dante, a world which Bertrand Russell describes as just beyond the cavern of despair where Self must die, out "where the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy; a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim's heart." Then, and then alone, when man has learned to control his inner life, can he stand forth, free of his fear, a fortified Frankenstein.