Symposium

TOWARD CIVILIZATION -- Edited by Charles A. Beard--Longmans, Green ($3).

Whither Mankind (TIME, Nov. 5, 1928) was an examination of modern civilization by "outsiders"--specialists in the humanities--who reported that the basis of modern culture is technological: i.e., founded on science and machinery. Toward Civilization is a companion volume, also edited by Sociologist Charles Austin Beard, written by "insiders"--scientists, engineers. Says Editor Beard: "[The contributors] are inquiring whether engineers and scientists are at present a lot of small fellows doing great things dimly understood or are big men capable of heroic and highly imaginative enterprises if set free. . . . There are many signs that the engineering fraternity is on the eve of a great intellectual awakening."

Says Contributor Robert A. Millikan (Science Lights the Torch): "Training in the objective method, which science and engineering furnish . . . constitutes the best preparation for life in almost any of its phases that can be obtained today." Contributor Lee de Forest (Communication): "Back of all this [communication] broader and deeper in results and widespread benefits, although quite involuntary and unforeseen by most of the agencies now involved, is the quiet, constantly working tendency toward education, culture, broader-mindedness, community of aims, mutual understanding."

Says Contributor Michael Pupin (Machine Industry and Idealism): "Every modern machine has a soul; it is a part of the soul of its inventor and of the patient souls of the men who developed it. . . . I do not regret that 54 years ago I deserted my beloved Serbian oxen and ran away to the land of machines." Concludes Editor Beard: "These writers . . . are fully aware of the criticisms brought against machine civilization in the name of humanism, religion, and aesthetics . . . but . . . one note runs through all the chapters: the revolution wrought by science and machinery is not completed: it has just started and its immense possibilities are only beginning to be appreciated. . . . For the pitifully limited humanism of the 15th Century, our authors offer a humanism of science and engineering that has multiplied the powers of mankind to deal intelligently with human affairs far beyond the dreams of those who rescued the classics from the deadly grip of scholasticism,"

The Authors. Editor Charles Austin Beard, (56), white-haired, keen-eyed, hard of hearing, quick of mind, lives in New Milford, Conn., was onetime professor of politics at Columbia University, onetime director of Manhattan's Training School for Public Service, onetime advisor to the Japanese Minister of Home Affairs after the Tokyo earthquake (1923), onetime president of the American Political Science Association (1926), is famed as co-author with his suffragist, sociologist wife, Mary Ritter Beard of The Rise of American Civilization (TIME, July 18, 1927).

Robert Andrews Millikan (62), onetime president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, professor of Physics, University of Chicago, was given the Nobel Prize, 1923 (for isolating and measuring the electron).

Lee de Forest (56), famed inventor, producing engineer, invented an electrolytic receiver for wireless messages, the radio amplifier, the "phonofilm."

Michael Idovrsky Pupin, (71), professor of electromechanics at Columbia University, onetime president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, invented the loading coil for telephonic circuits.

Other authors: Lillian M. Gilbreth, Elmer A. Sperry, Richard F. Bach, Thomas D. Campbell, Harvey N. Davis, Ralph E. Flanders, C. F. Hirshfeld, Dexter S. Kimball, Stephen F. Voorhees, Ralph T. Walker, L. W. Wallace, William E. Wickenden, Roy V. Wright.

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