Abstract
MR. MUMFORD'S aim in the series of volumes that opened with "Technics and Civilization" was to give a rounded interpretation of the development of modern man, and to show what changes in his plan of life are necessary in order to enable him to make the most of the vast powers that are now at his command. The third volume, which has now appeared*, deals with the purposes and ends of human development. Whereas in his former volumes Mr. Mumford was concerned with the effect of technical and social factors on the condition of man, he is here concerned with that of symbols, or what he terms the 'idolum' which complements man's natural environment. By this term he understands a symbolic milieu of images, sounds, words, fabrications, and even natural objects to which man has attached a representative value. The ability to write symbols and respond to symbols, he says, is an essential difference between the world of brutes and the world of men. Communication, communion and co-operation, the three essential attributes of human society, all depend upon the acceptance of common symbols to which the same meanings, functions, and values are, attached. They are not substitutes for experience but a means of enhancing it and enlarging its domain; and ritual, art, poetry, drama, music, dance, philosophy, science, myth and religion are all as essential to man as his daily bread. It is through the effort to achieve meaning, form and value that the potentialities of man are realized, and his life raised to a higher potential; and this survey of the condition of man attempts accordingly to emphasize those aspects of man's life that are usually neglected: his dreams, his purposes, his ideals, his utopias.
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Man in the Modern World. Nature 155, 677–679 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155677a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155677a0