Intellectual Mean

In Turkey, kinetic President Mustafa Kemal holds that intellectual progress depends solely upon quick assimilation of Western ideas.

But in Germany, Oswald Spengler lucubrates that Western civilization, now toppling over a wave crest, declines by morphological law.

In Russia, Minister of Education Anatole Lunacharsky cries savagely against the soul because it individualizes man, believes that all men must be welded indistinguishably into a massman, that the only soul is the collective soul of all men.

In Africa, many a tribal chieftain organizes periodic Bacchanalian orgies to ward off extinction, maintain virility.

These and many more beliefs, added, divided, might yield an intellectual mean. That mean will be the intellectual situation of the world.

To discover it, Dr. Francis Xavier Dercum, President of the American Philosophical Society, last week set bravely forth. Assisting him are 41 men, each and every one high on the honor roll of U. S. savants.

Not merely inquisitive are these world-thought probers. Once they know what the world thinks, they will do something about it: They will "formulate a future program of service to all branches of learning."

In prospect, therefore, is a storehouse of all knowledge, a service station to all puzzled learners. Keen-minded citizens saw in so vast a plan no little nobility, some little obscurity.

Not always has the American Philosophical Society, oldest U. S. learned society, propounded such weighty questions. Founded in 1744 by Benjamin Franklin, but fallen into decline, it was revived in 1767 by Philadelphia aristocrats who were jealous of another Franklin- Franklin-founded society, "The American Society for Promoting and Promulgating Useful Knowledge in Philadelphia." By January 1769 the city's store of useful knowledge had become considerable; its philosophical riches were gratifying. It occurred to Philadelphians that the two were not perforce antagonistic. The two societies joined, elected Franklin president, called themselves the American Philosophical Society.

First of U. S. learned societies, also Franklin-founded, was the Junto (1727). As the Junto was the ancestor of the Useful Knowledge group, each one of the present society's 436 members may proudly and properly trace his philosophical descent from the beginning of U. S. wisdom. Simple indeed were the questions propounded to the Junto's applicants for membership. The first was typical of candor in the City of Brotherly Love: Have you any particular disrespect to any present members? Do you sincerely believe that you love mankind in general? Do you love truth for truth's sake?