Pickering College - Voyageur Yearbook (Newmarket, Ontario Canada)

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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

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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 But wonder and aspiration, imagination and disapproval were not dead. For those same men by their wonder about the nature of God contributed volumes to our theological literature. Gothic architecture is the finest ex- ample of religious aspiration in stone known to man. The Holy Roman Empire which they strove to create was a magnificent political conception -all men living at peace under the protective vigilance of one Emperor- all men worshipping as Christians under the spiritual guidance and father- hood of the pope. This was the period, too, of the dauntless faith which produced the first crusade, of the burning zeal which drove men to tear their bodies with whips and assume the hair shirt and solitude of the hermit. The Black Death came, cutting men down like the sickle of a careless harvester, and some men went mad, and some lay down naked on hot coals, and some turned cannibal, and some drank themselves to death. But in the monastery and the hermit's cell, in the church and in the field others worked on. And the disapproval of mediaeval man finally brought on the Renais- sance, when the culture of Greece and the law of Rome was rediscovered and passed on to succeeding generations together with the church of Christ. The wonder, and aspiration and imagination and disapproval of the new masters of Europe added two great contributions to this heritage. One is the power of modern science, the other is the doctrine of the right of the individual. They, like all the achievements of men, have had evil results as well as good. The power of science has been and is being used to end the life of man as well as to prolong it, to make it insecure as well as to provide for its security. The doctrine of the right of the individual has caused bloody revolution, narrow patriotism, blatant nationalism, anarchy and warg even while it has liberated the oppressed and given rights and voice to those who hitherto had been without benefit of law. This has been a brief and very sketchy attempt at portraying the amazing story of man. I am afraid that by attempting to show you so much in so short a while I may have succeeded only in confusing you. If so, I apologize. But in a day such as ours, which to superficial examination may seem so dark and whose shadow falls on every man, I would beg of you to make yourselves familiar with manis story and with your heritage. For it is only by a knowledge of man's achievement in the past that you can keep a decent set of values in the world of to-day. I mentioned the prophets of doom and gloom. Pay them little heed. There have been dark times before. There was a time when every road in Europe echoed to the marching feet of the Roman legionaires. There were hundreds of years when not a sun rose in the western world but it blazed upon the burnished wings of the imperial eagle of Rome. The legions are gone and the eagle has found new arms to bear-but the true grandeur that was Home is with us still. History has been and will be ever thus, a chang- ing and a growing but never complete tragedy and death. I assure you that the work of the great men of the past is not to be blown away in the boast- ings of some of the leaders of our present day. I assure you that our civilization goes too deep to have its roots torn up by the shells and bombs 26