Goad Joad

Philosopher Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad of the University of London is by turns persuasive, glib, caustic, profound. In Return to Philosophy, Common Sense Ethics, Mind and Matter and other books, he has furnished, he says, "a restatement in modern terms of certain traditional beliefs." He argues that reason, "properly employed," can arrive at truth. A praiser of times past, he dislikes Sigmund Freud, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Stravinsky music, surrealist painting, modern advertising. His objection to science appears to be that it does not provide enough digestive pills of wisdom to go with its banquet of knowledge.

Last week Philosopher Joad joined several other philosophers, sociologists, politicians and job-lot thinkers in proposing that somebody stop science. Though typically visionary, the Joad proposal was specific: let a board of wise men be created with powers to grant or refuse permits on inventions which affect human living.

"The superman made the airplane," observed Professor Joad, "but the ape has got hold of it. To step on foot throttles, insert coins into metal slots, scan headlines, crowd through clicking turnstiles, turn on the radio, hurl ourselves over the surface of the earth in a mechanism propelled by petrol--these constitute the modern notion of entertainment."

Though he thus flinches from the hurly-burly of modern life, Philosopher Joad is no pantywaist philosopher. Three years ago, when he witnessed the first firewalk performed in England (TIME, Sept. 30, 1935); newshawks asked him, as a well-known student of psychic phenomena, what he thought of the feat. Scholar Joad, taking a leaf from the book of George Bernard Shaw, who charges $1 a word for answering questions, said he could make no observations unless he was paid five guineas ($25).

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