Alumni Oration

"The Alumni Oration" University Monthly 38, 6 (May 1919): 164-170. (UA Case 67a, Box 1)

The Alumni Oration was delivered by Professor D. Frazer Harris, M. B., C. M., B. Sc. (Lond), D. Cs., F. R. C. S. C, L. M. C. C, of Dalhousie University, who spoke on the subject of Science and Character Building as follows:

Most people, if asked to say what went to the building up of character, would probably reply somewhat as follows: Religious instruction, education and early example; in other words, one's early environment; and they ought to add, one's hereditary dispositions. This afternoon, however, I want to lay before you some considerations in connection with the subject of Science and Character Building. Of course, it is obvious that the pursuit of science gives a mental training second to no other intellectual exercise, for science is against all mental haziness and mental laziness. Superstitions fly before it, and fallacies and non sequiturs are excluded. Science tells us, for instance, that we cannot get something for or out of nothing; no heat without food; that no work can be done without drawing upon a source of energy. It clears the atmosphere and widens the mental outlook.

Now, character is something more than being conventionally moral, for weak people can be moral; and some quite conventionally immoral people have been strong characters, as for instance, Caesar, Nelson and Napoleon, not to speak of King David. Character meets and defeats the temptation rather than avoiding it in a cell, which is monasticism. Morality, that is true ethics, recognizes the claims of others, but character does this and more; it influences, stimulates and directs other people as well. Character is the substance of the mirror, reputation is the reflection from it seen by other people.

Character is strong without being oppressive, just without being narrow, self-reliant without being self-centred, having fortitude without obstancy, being broad without being complacent towards low ideals, being tender without being weak—in a word, "hating the sin, but loving the sinner." As Chaucer puts it, "being a most perfect gentle knight."

What Science Does

Now what do we mean by Science? I mean by Science that training of the mind imparted by a rigorous, unbiassed and sympathetic study of nature. Towards character building Science in the first place teaches us patience, care and exactness. Patience over the difficulties and obstacles which abound in our wrestling from Nature her elusive secrets, for Science tells us that we must not expect results easily and without effort, and it is not a simple matter to question her aright. Science teaches us care in planning our experiments so as to avoid pitfalls. We are taught care in interpreting results, in distinguishing between facts and inferences, in eliminating the accidental from the essential. Science gives us courage to overcome difficulties, and it rewards us by allowing us sometimes to think the very thoughts of God.

Science teaches us dignity in all things, that nothing is "common or unclean," that everything in its own place is good and that "every creature of God is good and nothing to be despised." It shows us everything to be full of interest and how everything may be ennobled; it tells us that nothing is insignificant or worthless. To it the weed is but a humbler flower, the flower a fairer weed. In Science nothing is trivial, everything has at least a potential import. There is, for instance, no such thing in surgery as a trivial wound; the most trivial wound has sometimes led to blood poisoning and death. I venture to think, for instance, that it is such men of science as have been sent to the House of Lords that have conferred dignity upon that chamber. The presence of men of exact knowledge like Lord Kelvin and Lord Lister in such an assembly could not fail but to contribute to its dignity and efficiency. Science to that extent has given it its character.

Science produces heroism in her workers, who labor often alone, unfriended, abused, misrepresented and misunderstood. To whom do we owe the emancipation of the body and mind from the thraldom of ignorance? To the heroic men of science. To whom freedom from pestilence? To the heroic microscopist. He is not the only kind of hero who wades through blood to a coronet; he is the hero who in the silent hour after hour works at the laboratory bench, his name on no man's tongue, no nation's thanks or parliamentary votes awaiting him; who works in close quarters with death while the pestilence rages all round about him.

Science Had Her Martyrs

And has Science not had her martyrs? What about Roger Bacon, was he not worried? What about Copernicus, was he not worried, no less a man than Luther calling him a fool? And what about Bruno, who was burned alive; and Galileo, who was imprisoned for the last third of his life; and Van Helmot, who had heresy attributed to him; and Vesalius, who was very effectively worried? And what about Tagliacozzi of Bologna, whose bones were scattered by the order of the Church? And what about Priestly, whose house and papers were destroyed? And what about Harvey, who found all his professional brethren against him and whose papers were burned? And Jenner, who was worried and obstructed all his life; and Lavisier, who was executed in the middle of his researches; and Simpson, who was violently railed at; and Lister, who was stupidly ridiculed? And there have been many others in the noble army of the misunderstood and persecuted, some of whom have been martyrs in the active sense. Did not John Hunter inoculate himself with a loathsome disease in order to study its clinical manifestations? Did not Simpson experiment with chloroform upon himself, and Sir Patrick Manson's son inoculate himself with malaria?

And yet Science also gives us humility. How could it be otherwise when we get a sense of the vastness, the detail and the intricacy of Nature? We must stand amazed. Consider the scale on which Nature works, consider the majesty of the cosmos, the magnitude of the divisions of time and space on the one hand (think of "light-years," which is the measure of the time that light takes to reach us from the most distant stars), and the minuteness of the divisions of time and space on the other, when we are dealing with billions of vibrations of light per second—the stupendous vastness of the one, the inconceivable smallness of the other. Truly, we can but stand amazed, and say in all humility:

"When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, The moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; What is man that Thou are mindful of him, Or the son of man that Thou visitest him?"

Teaches Respect For Nature

Science teaches us respect; respect for Nature, for her grandeur, her everlastingness, the inexorable uniformity of her procedures, the inevitableness of the recurrence of her cosmic rhythms. Science, I say, teaches us reverence for facts, for truths, for truth. If "the undevout philosopher is mad," the irreverent man of science is out of harmony with the highest and best. And do you ask what is truth? Truth is what men of character search for, reverence and seek to declare. Science in particular teaches us reverence for life. I take reverence for life as the touchstone of character. Neither the science without morality of the Germans nor the science-bereft immorality of the Bolshevik has any reverence for life. Now, the following great men of science were reverent, and they were all minds of the first order—will you bear the repetition of their names?-Pascal, Descartes, Pare, Harvey, Hales, Priestley, Dallon, Faraday, Pasteur, Lord Kelvin, Sir Gabriel Stokes, Sir James Simpson, Lord Lister and Sylvanus P. Thompson. Have we an equal number of men equally eminent and equally reverent in literature, philosophy or art?

And Science gives us sympathy. The man of science who knows the heights and depths of nature and especially of human nature, cannot but have sympathy, for sympathy is intelligent insight, it is imaginative comprehension. Thus it comes about that children, people of feeble intellect, idiots and animals are what we call cruel in that they have not the knowledge necessary to give them that sympathetic imagination. Men of science, especially physiologists, arc supposed to be particularly lacking in sympathy. May I tell you how one physiologist died? My friend, the late Dr. Page-May, an eminent physiologist, was walking along the street in Brighton when he noticed a carter ill-treating a lame horse. He reproved the man, who replied in the unrepented blasphemy of his kind. Dr. Day's righteous anger was so aroused that he went over to give him a little of the same treatment that he was giving the horse, when the doctor burst a blood vessel in the brain and died within a few minutes. He was not only sympathetic, but he could express righteous anger. I venture to say that one of the most horrible crimes committed in this recent war was the making of the dumb animals, the horses, suffer. "Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn," but it never should have included the lower animals.

Teaches New Criminology

Science teaches us respect, respect for other people's opinions, rights, beliefs, doubts, prejudices, tastes and foibles. It teaches us that we are what we are by reason of hereditary disposition and constitution and owing to the atmosphere of an early environment. It tells us that the child is stupid because it is anaemic or tubercular or has adenoids or a brain centre congenitally and undeveloped. It tells us that the man's temper is the result of disease latent or actual in his nervous system. It tells us that that woman's behaviour is due to neurasthenia.

It teaches us a new criminology. It recognizes in the parental germ-cells physical factors for the various inherited features and qualities. Hence, it declares that so much of us is pre-determined, if not pre-destined. It explains a very great deal of the puzzles of behaviour by recognizing the double and even the triple personality. Personality. Personality "A" may be your amiable friend; personality "B" may be that extremely disagreeable person who is, however, one and the same. It tells us, in fact, that all men are not equal, not equal physically or mentally, neither in constitution, disposition, capabilities, endurance, nor in powers of resisting temptation. If there is one fact more obvious than another which has been made evident in recent sociology it is that all men are not equal. We are assured that much crime is due to enfeebled mentality, and therefore it is "weakness to be wrath with weakness." But surely we can have sympathy with weakness and be ready to admit that "to know all is to forgive all," not in the indifference of lattitudinarianism but in the fervor of an intelligent, scientific comprehension.

And Science teaches us restraint—it calls it by the arid term inhibition. Here, at least, Paganism, Christianity and Science are agreed and can all meet on common ground. Pagan philosophy always counselled moderation; Christianity said "let all things he done decently and in order"; Science teaches us the extreme importance of avoiding extremes, of restraining tendencies to overaction. Science has actually discovered nerves for that very purpose. It, therefore, may well preach restraint, and when it says restraint it means restraint all round, in matters of food, drink, sex, exercise, rest, money and power. It agrees with Shakespeare that "It is excellent to have a giant's strength, hut it is tyrannous to use it as a giant." Monasticism fled from the world in total abstinence. Science meets the temptation by restraining the tendency to succumb. Inhibition was preached long ago by the Hebrew poet, hut in words far more beautiful than those of modern science, "He that hath no role over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down and without walls but he that ruleth his own spirit is better than be that taketh a city."

The Beauty Of Nature

And, lastly, Science reveals to us beauty; just as religion teaches us the beauty of holiness, so Science leaches us the beauty of nature, the intellectual beauty in exactness of the fulfilment of a prediction, an eclipse for instance, occurring, or a comet returning to the fraction of a second as predicted. Science sees beauty in the majesty of that law whereby the planets are rolled through the corridors of Heaven, it sees beauty in the recesses of the infinitely little, beauty in the adaptation of means to ends in living bodies, beauty in the simplicity of the means whereby these ends are attained. It reveals marvels of mechanism which man has but discovered, which have been in operation in animal bodies for aeons and aeons of time—pulleys, levers, valves, lubricated surfaces, lenses, sensitive plates, iris diaphragms, solid tissues as transparent as glass, electric currents and the utilization of negative pressure all were in existence ages before man himself appeared.

The goal of the highest science is the comprehension of the true and the beautiful as only two different aspects of that supreme knowable, the intelligible cosmos. Great is Science, and it will prevail. Let us not listen to people who tell us that Science destroys poetry, the aesthetic sense, reverence or religion. The day of the materialistic, unpoetical, unlovely omniscient scientist is gone, we hope, forever. The poetical man of science is certainly a possibility; he has come and seen and conquered the absurd notion that the poetical outlook is incompatible with the scientific. "Proud philosophy" and "Cold science" belong to the eighteenth, not to the twentieth century.

The tints of the rainbow are not less but more beautiful to the physicist because he knows how they come to be there and why in that particular order. Keats' lament that Newton, by explaining the rainbow, had taken the poetry out of it, means merely that Newton had taken the poetry out of the rainbow for Keats.

The lily of the valley will smell quite as sweet to me even though I may live to see the day when its odor-producing substance has been identified, extracted and named by the chemist. The man of science can be as sensitive as the veriest artist in presence of the beauty of coloring or of outline, even although he is able to explain the source or origin of them both. The man of science is not the less sensitive to physical beauty which appeals to the senses because he happens also to know of another order of beauty which appeals to the intellect.

It is some time since true men of science jeered at religion. For, to some of them, what is called "religion" is one more phenomenon they are called upon to explain. The complete man of science is not only a poet, he is a reverent poet. The prayer of the lisping child, no less than the profoundest abstraction of the philosopher, is worthy of his study.

Why is life so vapid for so many? Because they know neither facts nor the explanations of facts. They know not the wonder, the beauty, the richness or the variety of Nature's treasures. Culture is too often thought of as a state of mind which is the outcome of a knowledge of some of the expressions of Art; it is very rarely imagined as due to the possession of the scientific temperament. But culture is really not so much the result of the possession of knowledge as an attitude of mind or disposition, a sympathetic attitude of mind towards all mental products and intellectual interests.

The study of science is in many cases able to confer a truer culture than half a lifetime spent in studios or around pianos. Your painter or musician may be a perfect barbarian, ignorant, superstitious, self-satisfied and intolerant. There need be no fear of allowing science to be freely taught. Not science, but a hideous, preposterous, soul-destroying ethic it is that has made the Germans what they are today. Science without a love of the beautiful, without respect for the past, without poetry, without sympathy, without reverence, is the most repulsive product of the mind of man. Such is the science of our enemies; and it has led them into the bottomless pit of national suicide. But such, truly, is science falsely so-called.

Science, the true, is the patient, loving interpretation of the world we live in. It is striving to attain not merely to an understanding of the laws whereby the world is governed, but to the enjoyment of the beauty and order which is everywhere revealed. And the minds of men capable of attaining to such heights of appreciation, and the evidences around us of all-pervading personality, are only so many additional phenomena to be apprehended as constituent elements of that vast, sublime, age-enduring cosmos which we call the Universe.