s was attracting great popular interest, an ingenious
writer undertook to make the idea intelligible to "the general" by
picturing the state of mind in regard to three dimensions of a race of
beings whose life and whose sensual experience was limited to space of two
dimensions. He gave his little book the title "Flatland," and it gained
wide attention. In his Commencement address at Columbia last year,
President Butler had the happy thought of applying the term in the
characterization of certain aspects of the intellectual and political life
of our time. He was speaking particularly of that absorption in the
immediate problems of the day which makes almost impossible a true study
and contemplation of the lasting concerns of mankind as embodied in
history and literature. "Every ruling tendency," he said, "is to make life
a Flatland, an affair of two dimensions, with no depth, no background, no
permanent root." That this is a literal truth probably neither Dr. Butler
nor anyone else would contend; but it hits off with great force and with
substantial accuracy the prevailing character of thought in the circles
most active and most influential in almost every department of human
activity at the present time. And the tendency which President Butler
describes as arising out of our absorption in current problems is still
more manifest in the spirit of our actual dealings with those problems
themselves. On every hand we find a surprising readiness to accept views
which explicitly tend to take out of life that which gives it depth and
significance and richness. Each one of the four movements we have
mentioned affords an illustration of this: in following any one of them we
travel straight toward Flatland. They differ very much, one from another;
they have very different degrees and kinds of justification; it may be
difficult in the case of some of them to strike a balance between the gain
and the loss. The remarkable thing--the ominous thing, if we are to
suppose that the present tone of thought will long persist--is that the
loss involved in the flattening of life, as such, apparently almost wholly
fails to get consideration. I say apparently, because there is, no doubt,
a deep and strong undercurrent of opposition which, sooner or later, will
manifest itself; in speaking of "ruling tendencies" we are apt to mean
merely the tendencies that are most in evidence. But after all, it is to
these that criticism of contemporary life and