Pickering College - Voyageur Yearbook (Newmarket, Ontario Canada)

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The Voyatgeur us, though it is strange it hath no history what it was before us, nor cannot tell how it entered in us. What is this something? Wfhat is the soul of man? Men have sought the answer for ages but it has never been better given than in the passage from Sir Thomas Browne--and that passage gives it only as a qualified question mark. Nevertheless, that something, that soul, is the foundation stone of your heritage. From it spring all the works of man. And if we cannot locate it or describe it we can at least show the ways in which it manifests itself. For it is these manifestations of his soul which set man apart from other animals-it is these which give to your race a history and to you a heritage. They are several in number, and they may be called by a variety of names but wc may classify them roughly under four heads. They are wonder, aspiration, imagination, and discontent or disapproval. Wonder is the quality which has made man ask the eternal question, why. It is the quality that has made a philosopher of man, goading him on to seek a reason for everything-even for his existence here. It is the quality that has made him inquire after the first cause, made him want to know how the world and life began, how the universe began, what was in existence before the beginning of eternity, and where the end is. Wonder gave birth to the words where, when, why, how and what. Aspiration is the quality which has made man an artist and a worshipper. It would lift him out of himself and make him better than himself. It would have him emulate what he imagines the gods to be. Imagination is the quality which has allowed man to see things before they exist so that he may strive to achieve them. It has pointed him ever to a new way of life, it has tempted him with magnificent plans and tremendous schemes. Combined with aspiration it has made him an artist. Combined with the fourth quality it has produced man, the scientist. That fourth quality is discontent or disapproval. It is the most difficult to define and perhaps the most valuable of all the attributes of man. It is the most difficult to define because it is in a way merely a combination of the other three qualities. But in that very fact lies its great value, for all the other qualities partake of it and spring from it. It is a necessary and, indeed, a prime attribute of the scientist. Art becomes sterile without it. It is the very stuff of religion and philosophy. More than that, it is the driving force which carries all men through their daily toil. From the beginning of his time man began to exhibit these qualities. Our early ancestors wondered at the rising of the sun, the falling of the rain, at all the multifold phenomena of nature about them and in them. Early, too, we find the results of their imagination, the wheel, the harnessing of fire to their needs, the queer pictures they drew on the walls of their caves. Aspiration was theirs. One of the earliest graves ever discovered bore 24

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The Voyageur There are those among you now who would have you believe that that history has come to an end-that today's war is the final cataclysm which man has brought upon himself and which will finish him. There are others who will tell you that man's history has no significance at any rate, that his story is a cheerless welter of mistakes and that his race will pass into extinction and leave no mark. I would warn you tonight against both of these-the prophets of doom and the prophets of gloom. ln order to do this, let me point you to your heritage. I have said that man is a strange creature-that he does strange things. What is it that makes him strange-how does he differ from other animals? Here is a short story. It hasnit much plot but I hope it has a point. The scene is a wind-swept hill on a summer day. A boy and his dog have taken shelter from the hot sun beneath the shade of a lone tree on the very brow of the hill. The boy sits with his back to the tree gazing out over the Valley beneath. The dog lies by his side. It is a fine dog, strong, courageous, faithful, and intelligent, as animals go. The boy is a good-looking lad with fair hair and blue eyes. ln these eyes at the moment is a far away look. He is dreaming. The boy's brain is active, the mind of the dog is numb. The dog is contented, the boy is restless. The dog desires nothing but to sleep-the boy wants little short of the world. The boy lives in the future, his mind is alive with tremendous hopes and magnificent schemes, the dog lives for the moment, his mind conceives little beyond his bodily needs. The boy is indulging in that strange human practice of day-dreaming. The dog is indulging the purely animal need of sleep. On the first page of your chapel service sheet is printed a passage from the writings of Sir Thomas Browne. He was a physician in 17th century England. Religio Medici, the title of his book from which the passage is taken, means simply the religion of a doctor. For there were people in his day who thought that all doctors must be atheists God, they said, had made man after His image, and that was that. People should not go carving up corpses trying to find out what the nature of man was. It was a heresy to try to understand the handicraft of God. Sir Thomas wrote his book partly to refute this claim and partly to put down in writing his own tremendous curiosity about the nature of man. For he wondered with an all-consuming wonder about the matter of life and death. But he was also a good church man and profoundly religious. 'GRaking in the bowels of the deceasedfi he said in his curious way, did not turn him to atheism but rather produced in him an awe in which he contemplated the whole mystery of creation. The business of the nature of man interested him in particular. He was looking for manis soul-the attribute that set him apart from the animals-and lo, he could not find it. The corpse of a man produced essentially the same parts as that of any other animal. The dissecting knife could hnd no human part that might be the soul. So after a long harangue on this topic Sir Thomas winds up with the passage I have already pointed you to,--uThus we are man, and we know not how: there is something in us that can be without us, and will be after 23

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The Voyageur this epitaph-the body within must have been that of a philosopher of sorts-uHe fell down a well while gazing at the stars. But the chief factor in their struggle for existence was their disapproval of things as they found them. A nut would not crack in their teeth so they hit it with a stone. The same stone would not cut down a tree so they sharpened the stone. The tree once fallen was hard to move so they invented the square wheel. The square wheel bumped so they fashioned the round wheel. That early discontent and disapproval began the accumulated heritage of material safeties and comforts which are yours today. Its story contains many great names-Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Galileo, Edison, Pasteur, Marconi, Einstein, Bell, and lately, Sir Frederick Banting-men of every age and race and creed. After the early civilizations came the Greeks. Their great contribution to your heritage lay in the cultural field. Strangely marked in them are the qualities of wonder and aspiration. They were great seekers and great artists. Truth was their goal and beauty the high priestess of their art. Great was their achievement in sculpture and philosophy, in architecture and literature. The Parthenon still stands in Athens and will stand forever in countless pictures and models and in the minds of men, as a monument to free and uncoerced beauty, even though its physical remains be reduced to rubble in these coming days. The words of Plato and Socrates, or Aeschylus and Sophocles are yours, and their spirit will be ever, though the search for truth may be for a while an illegal and unpatriotic proceeding in some parts of the world. Towards the time when Grecian brilliance was on the wane a man was born in Jerusalem. As he grew older he taught a doctrine which said all men were brothers and should love one another. He said love was a prime necessity for man's salvation. Some men called him the Son of God-and others thought him mad. But a mighty Empire arose in the Western world, an empire of organizers and builders-an empire which believed in its own eternity and built things to last for just that period. The men of that Empire took over the culture of the Greeks. They added little to it but they forged it into buildings, and books, and laws. Then, as their life grew rich and soft, a great fear shook the Roman world. Fierce, energetic, dauntless men were pounding at the frontiers of their wide empire and, in the north, were breaking through. The men of Home saw all that they had believed permanent disintegrating and passing away before their eyes. ln fear they turned to a new faith- the faith of that Christ whom one of their governors had delivered to crucifixion in Judea. To that faith they erected a church and to it they attached that permanence which they had hitherto attached to the Empire. That church did live on and carried with it, throughout a thousand years of darkness, a strange companion. That companion was the culture of Greece as the church had inherited it from Rome. The period of the middle ages was dark-that is how we are accustomed to think of it-but it was far from barren. A new race had taken over Europe. The men from the north were in the lusty childhood of their civilization. For a thousand years they fought one another and preyed on one another, father killed son and brother slew brother. 25