The Brooks House pursuit of a mental healer for the distressed Yardlings has its parallel in the currents of life outside the academic fold. The greatly increasing quantities of nervous disorders occurring in our megalopolitan civilization, which was first noticed about 1820 with the final crystallization of the industrial society, have illumined the lack of adequate facilities for treating and especially for diagnosing the maladjusted. Of the cases that now come to the doctors, apparently requiring even surgical treatment, the number that can be found wholly mental in origin is only beginning to be appreciated. And for the first time, the hard heads of the business world are interesting themselves in the employment of men equipped to aid the troubled employee in confronting his own small section of life. Brooks House may be fifty years ahead of the times--more credit to it; the trend is there.

Take Up Thy Bed

It is only beginning to be realized that the inherent and inherited qualities of a man--President Conant would call it predestination--are of more importance than the medical training in this business of mental massage. Such learning which takes eight years to acquire and eight more to forget is only a well-paved detour in the careers of such men.

The study and adjustment of man and his environment has been a constant albeit changing interest throughout the ages. From Aristotle to St. Thomas and from Rousseau to Nietzche, the conception of the ideal relationship between man and his environment no less than that of the environment itself, has been in a state of flux. Now however, the great increase of knowledge of the pathology of the mind has made possible individual prescription as well as the general precept. Research is being made into all the complexities of men as a social animal, notably at the Yale Institute of Human Relations.

Society is so complex that the adjustment of the machine now receives more attention than the design of the machine itself, and the problems of the society of individuals are obscuring those of the society as a unit whole. This is perhaps the final development of the romantic conception of humanitarianism. WHANG POO