Our Changing World-View

Reinhold Frederick Alfred Hoernlé, Sally Herbert Frankel, Cecil Sydney Richards, Theodorus Johannes Haarhof, John Young Thomson Greig, Ian D MacCrone, John Frederick Vicars Phillips, Robert Broom, John Patrick Dalton, Jan Christian Smuts

Description

A collection of ten lectures ranging from economics, psychology, a spurious rebuttal of evolution to a substantial revisionist history, and the perils of the ‘machine age’.

The University of the Witwatersrand a mere ten years old when, in 1932, these ten lectures were delivered under the auspices of the University Philosophical Society. They portrayed the ideas of the university’s leading academics of the day, and the programme of lectures reveals a studied effort to introduce an element of bipartisan political representation between English and Afrikaner in South Africa by including Wits’ first principal, Jan Hofmeyr, and politician, D.F. Malan, as discussion chairs.

As Saul Dubow explains in his new introduction to this re-issue of the lectures, Our Changing World-View was an occasion for Wits’ leading faculty members to position the young university as a mature institution with a leadership role in public affairs. Above all, it was a means to project the university as a research as well as a teaching institution, led by a vigorous and ambitious cohort of liberal-minded intellectuals. That all were male and white will be immediately apparent to readers of this reissued volume. Ranging from economics, psychology, a spurious rebuttal of evolution to a substantial revisionist history and the perils of the ‘machine age’, this book is a sombre reflection of intellectual history and the academy’s role in promulgating political and social divisions in South Africa.

Introduction – Saul Dubow

Preface – H. R. Raikes

Chapter 1 Some Recent Scientific Advances in their Bearing on Philosophy – Lieut.-General the Right Honourable J. C. Smuts

Chapter 2 The Material World—Yesterday and Today – Professor J. P. Dalton

Chapter 3 Evolution—Design or Accident? – Dr. Robert Broom

Chapter 4 Man at the Crossroads – Professor John F. V. Phillips

Chapter 5 Psychology in Perspective – Mr. I. D. MacCrone

Chapter 6 Literature in the Machine Age – Professor J. Y. T. Greig

Chapter 7 The Holistic Attitude in Education – Professor T. J. Haarhoff

Chapter 8 Our Changing Economic World – Professor C. S. Richards

Chapter 9 Africa in the Re-Making – Professor S. H. Frankel

Chapter 10 Old Truths and New Discoveries – Professor R. F. Alfred Hoernlé

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• África
• General officer
• History of Africa
• Historiography
• General
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776145577
• Langue: English

Extrait

OUR CHANGING WORLD-VIEW
Wits Press RE/PRESENTS
Wits University Press celebrates its centenary in 2022. Since its inception, the Press has been curating and publishing innovative research that informs debate to drive impactful change in society. Drawing on an extensive backlist dating from 1922, Wits Press Re/Presents is a new series that makes important research accessible to readers once again. While much of the content demonstrates its historical provenance, it remains of interest to researchers and students, and is re-published in e-book and print-on-demand formats.
OUR CHANGING WORLD-VIEW
TEN LECTURES
on Recent Movements of Thought in Science, Economics, Education, Literature and Philosophy
by
Lieut.-General the Right Honourable J. C. Smuts,
P.C., M.P., F.R.S.
Dr. Robert Broom, F.R.S.
Professor J. P. Dalton, M.A., D.Sc.
Professor John F. V. Phillips, D.Sc., F.R.S.E.
Professor J. Y. T. Greig, M.A., D.Litt.
Professor T. J. Haarhoff, B.A., B.Litt., Litt.D.
Professor C. S. Richards, M.Com.
Professor H. S. Frankel, M.A., Ph.D.
Professor R. F. A. Hoernlé, M.A., B.Sc.
Mr. I. D. MacCrone, M.A.
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Published edition © Wits University Press 2021
First published 1932
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/22021085553
978-1-77614-555-3 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-556-0 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-557-7 (EPUB)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Cover design: Hybrid Creative
Typeset in 10.5 point Plantin
CONTENTS
Introduction: Saul Dubow
Preface: H. R. Raikes
1 . Some Recent Scientific Advances in Their Bearing on Philosophy
Lieut.-General the Right Honourable J. C. Smuts
2 . The Material World—Yesterday and Today
Professor J. P. Dalton
3 . Evolution—Design or Accident?
Dr. Robert Broom
4 . Man at the Crossroads
Professor John F. V. Phillips
5 . Psychology in Perspective
Mr. I. D. MacCrone
6 . Literature in the Machine Age
Professor J. Y. T. Greig
7 . The Holistic Attitude in Education
Professor T. J. Haarhoff
8 . Our Changing Economic World
Professor C. S. Richards
9 . Africa in the Re-Making
Professor S. H. Frankel
10 . Old Truths and New Discoveries
Professor R. F. Alfred Hoernlé
INTRODUCTION
This remarkable volume, published in a handsome red cloth edition with gold lettering, can be read as a statement of aspiring confidence on the part of a young, civic university, asserting its maturation as a centre of serious and engaged scholarship. In 1932, Johannesburg was still a brash mining town, better known for the production of wealth than knowledge. Merely a decade had passed since the University of the Witwatersrand’s incorporation, by parliamentary statute, as a university. In 1932 it had a student enrolment of just 1 782, taught by forty professors and forty-five permanent staff. The beginnings of a shift from investment in mining to investment in cultural capital was clearly underway.
On Christmas Eve, 1931, a fire entirely destroyed the university library and its invaluable Gubbins Africana collection, housed on top of a temporary wood and iron structure in the Central Block. There was no contents insurance to make good the damage. This book was in significant measure part of an ambitious programme of reconstruction. It was conceived as a way of raising public awareness of the need for rebuilding by demonstrating Wits’ special role in the civic life of Johannesburg and its intellectual standing in the country. The fire was a baptism: notwithstanding the economic depression then engulfing the country (Wits suffered a 20 per cent cut in its state subsidy in 1932), substantial finance was raised by a special appeal fund. Progress was swift. A handsome new library, architecturally inspired by the Petit Trianon in the gardens of Versailles, was opened in 1934 by Prince George, Duke of Kent. The building was named after William Cullen, a Scottish chemist and metallurgist with interests in education, whose close links to the mining industry positioned him to spearhead the building campaign. Remarkably, half of the 60 000 volumes acquired by this time were donated.
Our Changing World-View: Ten Lectures on Recent Movements of Thought in Science, Economics, Education, Literature and Philosophy was therefore published in the midst of an interregnum. Four years after his appointment in 1928, the new principal, Humphrey Raikes, was yet to be confirmed in post by Council – a process that had been much delayed by internal political wrangling. Wits was in the midst of a major rebuilding on its Milner Park campus. The country was on the cusp of economic renewal, riding the wave of a mining-led boom occasioned by the country’s abandonment of the gold-standard in December 1932. The politics of racial segregation were actively being debated at this time with the ‘Native Bills’, first introduced to parliament in 1926, midway through their decade-long parliamentary passage. Prime minister J.B.M Hertzog had recently been confirmed in power at the 1929 ‘black peril’ election. Jan Smuts would soon return as deputy prime minister in the coalition ‘fusion’ government of 1933–1934.
For now, Smuts was leader of the opposition, a leading imperial statesman and intellectual, author of a widely discussed treatise on holism. He had just outlined this philosophy in a prestigious presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science on the occasion of its 1931 centenary.
Firmly supportive of the Commonwealth idea, and fully committed to white ‘South Africanism’ – whose politics encompassed Anglo-Afrikaner ‘racial’ reconciliation and cautious moderation in respect of the ‘native’ or ‘colour’ question – Smuts was a hero to the Anglophone liberals and industrialists who constituted Johannesburg’s cultural elite. It was therefore fitting that his chapter on recent scientific advances and their bearing on philosophy, in which he reprised his theories of holism, should open the lecture series. Most of the contributors to this volume engaged with his ideas. It was equally fitting that the closing chapter was written by Wits’ leading public intellectual, Alfred Hoernlé, who conceived the plan to commission these ten lectures as part of the library appeal. If the review of Our Changing World-View in the scientific journal Nature is anything to go by, the slim volume proved successful in showcasing Wits as a vital intellectual centre at a time of dynamic societal change: The frank facing of realities in the South African situation in these lectures should give them an interest beyond South Africa itself, and their pragmatism as much as the holistic outlook give unity to the series. Furthermore, they indicate the high conception of educational work that Wits cherishes, and represent an attempt to encourage the spread of a wider culture among the people of South Africa as a whole.
That all ten contributors to the volume were white and male cannot today pass unnoticed. So, too, were the chairs and discussants who gave votes of thanks after each lecture (the sole exception was the writer Sarah Gertrude Millin who delivered the vote of thanks to John Greig’s inaugural lecture on ‘Literature in the Machine Age’, chaired by Raikes). The selection of some of these government officials and politicians – including D.F. Malan and J.H. Hofmeyr – reveals a studied effort to introduce an element of bipartisan political representation. Yet, no black intellectual is represented here and, indeed, the politics of racial segregation bursts through the text only in a few of the contributions. For the most part, race is alluded to only in passing.
The chapter on psychology by I.D. MacCrone surveys contemporary trends in the discipline, from Wilhelm Wundt and Gestalt to Charles Spearman and Sigmund Freud. Although MacCrone is best known today for his pioneering study Race Attitudes in South Africa: Historical, Experimental and Psychological Studies (1937) there is no reference here to South African contexts. Similarly, palaeontologist Robert Broom, who along with Raymond Dart was the foremost expert on hominin development in South Africa, chose to lecture on evolution from the philosophical perspective of intelligent design and natural philosophy. No mention is made by Broom of his own discoveries, though examples from South African birdlife are adduced to make the point that Darwinism is insufficient to explain evolution: in Broom’s view, only an underlying telos or guiding hand, closer to Smutsian holism or Bergsonian élan vital , can account for the development of molars in horses or the special beauty of birds and flowers.
The irrepressible subject of race emerges alarmingly in the chapter by John Phillips, not least because of the clumsy way in which it is bolted on to his chosen subject, botany. A devoted protégé of Smuts, Phillips was a self-styled ‘ecologist’ who was committed to studying the interrelations of all forms of life. Phillips’s discussion of tsetse fly exemplifies his holistic ecological approach to the interlinked factors of plants, animals and humans in the ‘biotic community’. Yet, this topic is prefaced by a fevered discussion of eugenics encompassing miscegenation, degeneration, and overpopulation, in tones that were insistent even by the standards of the day. Here, the dark side of ecology and preservationism is clearly on display. Phillips’ fears extend also to the pace of modern life and the ‘nervous strain’ arising from telephones, machinery, and cinema. Even the ‘horror’ of television (a prospect that lay almost 50 years ahead for South Africans because of fears that it would corr