Symbolism: The Larger Issues of Life

Symbolism— The Larger Issues of Life

BY W. S. LANGTON, PROF. OF MATHEMATICS AT THE UTAH AGRI- CULTURAL COLLEGE, FORMERLY OF COOPER INSTITUTE, NRW YORK

This splendid audience will pardon me, I am sure, if I address myself almost wholly to the graduating class. There are a few of its members who studied with me in years gone by, and this fact serves to establish a sort of personal relationship between us. Life holds out to us the promise of rare gifts and beckons us through the years. Taking these gifts as we come up to them, the day in which we receive them becomes to us a memory. And so it happens that there are days in our lives that, because of some precious memory that they hold, stand out from other days. This day will ever remain to you as such a one, for it is at once a completion and a commencement. You will be offered today the congratulations of your many friends, and the good wishes of this community and of the state will go with you as you go out into a busy world. You will be received into membership in the Alumni Association of this institution, with the hearty good wishes of the men and women who constitute its present membership, and in nameless little ways you will be made to feel that you have come into new and more interesting relationships with the affairs of men. It is entirely fitting that this should be so, for you have had the courage to face the trials incident to student life, and the perseverancec to follow, year after year, a directed course that has led you at last to this commencement. It is to distinguish one's self, to be named among the fewer than five hundred of the many thousands of young men and women who have matriculated here at some time during a score of years to complete the prescribed course of study for the obtaining of a degree. You have come up, so to speak, out of the crowded places yonder in the valley, onto the bench lands where you have larger range of vision the uplands lie yet beyond, reaching at last to :

the summits of these towering mountains. These gained, the "beauty and the majesty of earth spreads wide" before you and you may see out to the throbbing, pulsating, heart of the world.

*An address to the graduating class of the state Agricultural College, 1914.

1140 IMPROVEMENT ERA It is sometimes a serious matter, this coming out of the valley to the uplands, and if today is a day for congratulations, it is as truly a day in which to face a new responsibility. Little more than a score of years ago you might have seen in the little towns of this beautiful valley, Indian boys and white boys together, throwing stones at night hawks as they sat asleep on the dead limbs of trees that grew along the streams but as the ;

white child came to his commencement, the responsibilities of white life fell upon him, and he began to till the fields. Even so the responsibilities of the new life are upon you, and you are to find your place among skilled hands, trained minds, and awakened spirits. Nor is the responsibility all yours. This splendid institution which henceforth stands sponsor for you feels an added responsibility. Today your alma mater presents you to the state and to the nation, as her chosen sons and daughters, and declares over her hand and seal that you have been faithful in the discharge of duty, obedient to counsel, and that you have been trained for service among men and women who toil. She certifies that you are of good moral character, exemplary in your lives, clean in mind ; that you have faith in yourself and in your fellows that you have courage, and patience and that you will ; ;

do the things that come to your hand in a thoughtful and painstaking way. She certifies, moreover, that you have received such training of the mind as to enable you to meet the problems of life and solve them in an expert way. Nor do we mean here those problems only for whose solution you ha: eceived special training, but you will be expected to meet problems that have to do with our political, social and spiritual life, and to apply to their solution the methods of a trained mind. Large sums of money have been expended by the state upon your education and she has a right to expect that you will live your lives in a big way. One cannot live life in a big way who does not see life as a big thing, and to see life as a big thing one must have reduced the laws of true living until they are few in number, and these should underlie principles that are fundamental. These fundamental principles will be found to be well nigh independent of time and place, of association and environment. They often lie completely hidden from the observation of the untrained, and always from the vision of those persons who see life only through narrow prejudice and who measure life by standards that are dependent upon time and place and association. The world's greatest science was founded upon five postulates or fundamental truths, and the changing of one of these has in the last half century opened up a new world to the gaze of the intellect. It is upon the smallness of the number that stress must be laid, and while they must be as nearly fundamental as our limited experience will allow, it is not necessary to assume that we shall not

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find as we progress in knowledge that some or all of them were dependent upon other truths still more fundamental. At the very foundation of all right living must be found that indefinite and yet very definite something the world calls character. It may be worth your while to remember that in some things pertaining to morality and its bearing upon characterforming, you have received in this institution such training as is scarcely to be found elsewhere outside of Utah. Men may be found who will defend the living of life to other standards than those that have been set for you, but you will nowhere find a right thinking man who will condemn a life that measures up to these standards. What shall we say is the second of our few fundamentals? Mr. Chesterton once said, if you wish really to know a man, the most practical question to ask is, not about his occupation or his club membership, or h'S party or church affiliations, but what are his views of the all-embracing world ? What does he think of the universe? Dr. Keysor says upon this same subject. "Nothing is quite so practical in the sense of being effectual and influential,

as the views men hold, consciously or unconsciouslv, regarding the great locus of their lives and their cosmic homes." Every man, whether he be of trained or untrained mind, is influenced in very large measure by the conception he holds of. the universe. The whole philosophy of life underwent a reconstruction when, in the days of Copernicus and Galileo, the earth was removed from the place that had been assigned it before the days of the Ptolemys, and the sun was given the center position of our planetary system. When it became known that this earth had sister planets revolving in orderly fashion about the same sun, and when the further fact became known that each star that is visible in the moonless sky is a sun having its system of attendant planets, man seemed to have been deposed from his position as the especial creation of an all wise Creator. Not until a complete readjustment of ideas came, and the splendid minds of Kepler, Newton, Barrow and others of their like were applied to the task of giving to mankind a proper conception of the creation of worlds, did the ordinary man find his place in this vastly enlarged world system. But these readjustments of ideas come at first to the few. and a long time often passes before the effect of a new philosophy is felt by the many. Only a week ago a six-word message was flashed under the sea telling the astronomers of the Lowell observatory that the great Nebulae in Vergo, upon which the telescopes of astronomers have been turned for many months, was beginning to rotate and a new world was known to be in process of formation. We have come to know that "of making of worlds there is no end," and you may well ask your-

1142 IMPROVEMENT ERA selves, what are my views on the "all-embracing world," what views "do I hold regarding the locus of my life and my cosmii home?" Again, in order to live lift' in a big way it is necessary to sense and to interpret aright the spirit of one's age. It is not a difficult matter, as we look back over the past, to see what the influences were that controlled the thought of the last half century. It may be well called the period of scepticism, if indeed it may not be called the period of infidelity. The writings of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Tyndal, Helmholtz and others were the principal sources from which its inspiration was drawn. Smaller minds than these failing to understand the message of these great minds drew wrong conclusions from the sequences of facts presented by these scientists, and the schools and colleges were filled with little fragments of truth wrongly applied and harmful in their influence. Libraries throughout the land were besieged by persons inquiring for books upon the new evolution, and all sorts of misunderstandings spread abroad in the land. Following fast upon the heels of the new evolution, came what has come to be known as Modern Criticism. Again the harmful influence of the new movement was due not so much to the teachings of the big minds in the movement, as to the influence of the little minds that attempted to interpret a message which they did not understand. William Rainly Harper, Marcus E. Dodd, Geo. Adam Smith, and scores of other brilliant and scholarly men declared that a more rational and reasonable arrangement of the matter that made up the scripture was possible, making it easier to distinguish the writings of the author of a book from the foot notes and interpolations of editors. Not a line was to be omitted from the scripture, not a truth changed. The avowed purpose was to stimulate interest and to strengthen faith, but their work interpreted by others did much to destroy the very thing these great minds intended should be stimulated into healthful activity. Again, libraries were besieged by readers who called for books on Modern Criticism and many came to feel that the Bible had been taken out of our lives. What has been said upon the spirit of this period is necessarily so fragmentary that it may easily be misunderstood. It is well to remember that it would take a volume to properly amplify this fragment. It is not important save to indicate a tendency and to properlv unfold before you the parchment upon which is written the spirit of a passing age. It is of the utmost importance, however, that you should recognize the fact that you are walking forth into the world at the breaking of a new dawn. A quarter of a century hence, when some one of your members shall occupy this position, he will be permitted to tell quite a different truth. The spirit of the time has changed, and among college men

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you will frequently hear the prediction that we are just beginning on a period of a 'return to faith such as the world has not known since the days of the renaissance. To know how wide-spread this movement is one needs only to ask librarians what is being read to sit at tablewith the faculties of science and philosophy in our universities attend the gatherings of the authors' club of ; to America and to listen to the lectures of exchanged professors ;

from abroad, delivered before cultured audiences in our American Universities. You are fortunate in that you are coming into the world's service at such a time as this, and you will be permitted to spend the active years of your lives in a period of reconstruction. Permit me to name one more thing that must be kept in mind by one who hopes to live his life in a big way. There are many domains in which the human mind operates and out of which it gathers knowledge, and the better your training the more richly and fully can you live in other domains than the domain of sense. These domains are so related that the things that are begun in one often find their completion in another. The domain of sense is usually identified with the world of light and sound and taste

and touch it is the world of perpetual things. The beasts of the ;

field are confined wholly within its borders and the unthinking of ;

mankind, and the demander of signs, see little that lies beyond the range of perception's light. It is in the world of sense that many of life's sequences have their beginnings, but their limits lie beyond its borders in the rational world. In the world of sense there are manifold motives of varying velocities of fast and faster, slow and slower, but no rest. Rest is a limit of a sequence of decreasing velocities in the sense domain, but the idea rest is a pure concept and exists only in the world of the rational.

Poincare in his New Physics points out most beautifully that the measure of length, and all other measure, for that matter, exists only in the rational domain, i. c., as concept. Though we can measure as accurately as 3- 10,000 of a m. m, a millimeter does not exist in the world of sense. Measures are limits of sequences that take rise in the world of sense. In mathematics you learned that the word limit always denotes something that from the point of view of some domain is an ideal in the sense expressed. A limit does not belong to the domain of the things it limits : we do not realize our ideals in the world in which they are formed.

This rational or conceptional world, transcends the domain of imagination as radically as it transcends the world of sense. You learned in your freshman days that straight lines are one dimensional figure and that they intersect in points circles of ;

1144 IMPROVEMENT ERA two dimensions and they intersect in one dimensional figure, viz., lines that spheres are three dimensional and intersect in two ;

dimensional figures, via., circles. But these all have existence in the world of sense and there is associated with these figures a definite language. Having learned to speak their languages and to verify its truth-revealing power in the world of sense, we may pass over the border line into the world of the conceptual, tfie world of thought, of logic, of reason, of analysis. Once over the border line with our language, or symbolism, or ritual, if you please, as a vehicle for thought, many and startling truths unfold themselves, and these again may be carried back by the same process over the border line into the world of sense. For example, you will find that lineoids which are of fourth dimension and therefore without existence in the world of sense, or yet in the world of the imagination, will intersect in three dimensional figures, which are in the world of sense. You will find that there are a definite number of different types of lineoids and that they intersect in a definite number of distinct three dimensional figures and that the whole thing is so simple that the figures in which the unimagined yet existent lineoids intersect have been constructed by a youngster in his sophomore year. Thus we have come upon a world whose existence can no longer be doubted, though it lies beyond the world of the imagination. The conceptional world is something more than the holder of the limits of sequences that have their origin in the world of sense, for there originate in it other sequences whose limits lie, for the reasons already given, in the sub-rational domain. Plato knew this fact and in the Symposium he voices this thought in the speech of Socrates, who is supposed to have these words from Diothima : "These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates, may enter to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of those, and to which, if you pursue them in a right spirit, they will lead. I know not whether you will be able to attain. * * * the true order of going or of being led by another to the things of love, is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upwards for the sake of that other beauty going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This, my dear Socrates, is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute." But this beauty absolute is not a thing of the rational world, for in the rational world we know only sequences of beauty, and the limits of these sequences are to be found only in the subrational world. They are the sub-rational concept of perfect

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beauty. Omniscience is another such idea. We think of knowledge as having some kind of extent, and we often figure it as enclosed in a sphere of ever-widening radius. We expand it into an ever-widening sequence whose limit we call omniscience. If we attempt to deal with omniscience in the ways familiar to the rational world we shall come upon difficulties and contradictions. Thinking is in the domain of the rational omniscience is the ab- ;

sence of ignorance and is above the rational. So with the other attributes that are commonly ascribed to Deity, viz., eternality, omnipresence, unchangeableness, absolute goodness, all of these are the limits of sequence that take rise in the rational world, but they cannot be dealt with in the ways familiar to the rational world. So modern philosophy has come to be a discourse on limits and limiting processes, and by this means modern philos- ophies are resolving the contradictions and expounding the para- doxes that troubled the logician who attempted to reason by means of sylogism. Modern philosophy is as much in need of a symbolic language as is modern physics, and the truth-revealing power of the symbolic language is destined to do for philosophy what it has done for the world of physics. Only by means of such language is it possible to penetrate into the far corners of these different worlds of which we have seen a glimpse. Profs. Whitehead and Russell of Oxford have formulated such a language. In a series of lectures recently delivered before the departments of philosophy in Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, Prof. Russell pointed out many errors that had been made by earlier philosophers and that could be detected only by use of a symbolic language. By means of this language we are able to establish not only a definite doctrine of limits of sequences and of limiting processes, but of other stately doctrines as well that for years have lain just in the outer fringe of thought. The concepts of invariance and of infinitude that form so long a part of the mathematical world, what are they but the ideas that have ever been the chief of life's hopes and dreams, of that which has ever been the object of its deepest passion. The great minds of the world have been given to the search for worth that abides, the finding of permanence in the midst of change, and the discovery of the presence in what has seemed to* be a finite world, of being that is infinite. If one finds in oneself that which is independent of condition or circumstance the aspiration that transcends temporal desire the ; ;

touch of the infinite the love that fails of full expression these ; ;

all unite to give us our faith in immortality and make us demand for ourselves a life in a transformed world where we shall come upon the limits of the sequences that have their beginnings here, and where we shall realize our highest ideals. To you, young men and women, all these domains in which the mind operates are open, and this is the chief advantage to be gained from your

1146 IMPROVEMENT ERA education. Remember that the human spirit is susceptible of a variety of lights, and that it lives at once in a corresponding variety of worlds. We have spoken only of the worlds of sense and reason, but the worlds of imagination and of emotion are equally real and equally independent. The world of emotion is full of things that, save by gleams and intimations, are not revealed in the worlds of perception, or imagination, or in thought. Tt is the world of the good, the true and the beautiful; of the spirit of art and hope, of aspiration, of faith, and of religion. You will do well to spend much time there, for there are in it poetry and song and beauty it is the veriest school of peace. ;

There are many who entertain an honest doubt a^ to the existence of these worlds, and who deny the truth-reverting power of symbolism, but the day is gone when they can assume to deny their existence because of superior knowledge. Men are coming to know that what has been regarded by many as a meaningless symbolism has in reality a wonderful power for revealing hidden truth, and that the Greatest of all teachers gave a vital truth to the world when He said that the means of keeping in touch with Him is through the symbolism of the sacrament. Young men and women, may we hope that, as you go out from this commencement into the world's service, you will look for the larger issues of life, and that as you continue to gather information and increase in knowledge you will transform it into wisdom, until she shall come to be your companion and friend. Then it shall transpire for you as it did for the great psalmist that "her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are paths of peace." I thank you.

t-i ., M, Til-

Tro\r ma ji»«Y' j r * '

Photo by K. N. Winnie, Xante, Alaska. REINDEER Feeding on arctic moss, their native food. This is a part of a herd of one thousand.