United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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senters like Bland. Literature under Allison brought the great and shining names down to earth to dwell in the minds and memory of students, blessedly free of the seven kinds of ambiguity which bedevil so much later literary appreciation. We exposed our cerebral surfaces to the wisdom of the classics under the inspira¬ tion of Jolliffe and Skuli Johnson, whose re¬ cently published translation of the odes of Horace has stirred such pleasant eschoes in our minds. Mathematics under Norman Wilson was a rebuke to those who would corrupt the clarity and directness of thought. And shining through all there was the abounding humanity of Fletcher Argue, whose words and example forged the screws of faith which bound a young man’s character together. Those of us who sat under these men have since tried to be honest to their memory and within the limits of flesh and blood have not bowed ourselves in the house of Rimmon. That happy academic world was shattered by the war of 1914, which still continues and casts its dark shadow across the world. The toll among those bright faces was heavy, and those of us of a thinning generation who lived through the fire and slaughter of the years 1914-1918 have always present with us an awareness of fate, an abiding sense of the tragic proportion of things (the lacrimae rerum of the heroic age) and the realization of the tragedy and pity of war, the bitter price that continues to be paid for man’s life on this planet. You will understand, then, that in the light of these experiences there is for me a certain haunted and dream-like quality about the halls of United College. I know now, in the words of Kierkegaard, that life can only be understood backward but it must be loved forward. Thinking about these things gave me my theme. For presently I asked myself the ques¬ tion: “In spite of all, what is it that makes life so abundantly, so triumphantly, worth living”? And I found myself answering the question (quite inadequately I admit) in two words: “Beauty” and “Integrity”. That somehow brought to mind a sentence of Sir Thomas Browne, one of the patron saints of medicine, who in his Urn-Burial of 1658 wrote: “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us”. “The invisible sun”—it was that he was thinking of when he wrote in another context (the Religio Medici ): “There is surely a piece of Divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun”! It was that pure flame within which in my own case was kindled in this Western land and was first nurtured and received its strength in this College. Within that “invisible sun” there reside love of beauty, integrity of mind, and its rays are those of imagination with which “we see into the life of things” and face with Words¬ worth the “presence that disturbs” us. So it has been with me—and I can only hope that you are on the way to saying the same thing. It is in the reflected light of this “invisible sun” within each one of us that I want to chat a bit about the world, the flesh and the college. I am leaving the devil out of it as being entitled to a separate dissertation. Do I sound too metaphysical? I am paying you the compliment of supposing that you are interested in something more than passing sensa¬ tions—that you are an intellectual even! Do not cring at the word. Let people call you an intel¬ lectual, a long-hair, a highbrow—and be damned to them 2 It is time that these terms were assessed at their true worth—cheap overworked words flung by those who are either too lazy or dense to follow anything but the road of tiresome mediocrity. I note that the latest term used in these tirades against excellence is “egg-head”. At least it has the refreshing merit of novelty. As one egg-head to what I trust is an audience of the same interesting species may I give you the rallying cry for our oppressed minority. It was recently coined in England and I pass it on to you to exalt you: “Egg-heads of the World Unite: You have nothing to lose but your yokes”. May we now glance briefly at the world around us. Few can doubt that we have entered a crisis of our civilization. As always, it was foreshadowed by the poets—first of all in Mr. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, in which he showed a world in which moral values are debased, tradition shattered and the spirit of man con¬ fused and broken. Then in W. B. Yeats’s great visionary poem, The Second Coming, which warned us that our civilization was disintegrat¬ ing for lack of a cure of faith or strong philo- 26

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THE INVISIBLE SUN E.P. SCARLETT, B.A. (Man.), M.B. (Tor.), F.R.C.P. (C) F.A.C.P., L.L.D. CHANCELLOR, UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA An address delivered on the occassion of the Annual Commencement, United College, Winnipeg, Nov. 5th 1953 Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. — (Sir Thomas Browne) R. PRINCIPAL, Members of Board and Faculty, Fellow - Students, Ladies and Gentlemen: When this College honoured me with an invitation to be its guest at this Commencement I was at some trouble to find a theme that would worthily fulfil the purposes of the occasion. Pro¬ perly such a theme should deal with this land, its people and the spirit that moves them. But that is not an easy task. Our history is still blurred, it lacks point and compelling distinc¬ tion. So many currents are stirring in this West¬ ern land, none as yet in a broad channel. No spirit of a great man or a transmuter of ideas has brooded over these plains. We are only faintly conscious of our past and of ourselves. We still have to produce our geniuses who will interpret us to the world at large and to our¬ selves. For one of the rare gifts of genius is its capacity to make roads along which succeeding men may walk in honour and confidence. Can¬ ada still lacks its Burns and its Scott. I have another difficulty to confess. I am a physician. We in my profession are children of Hippocrates. As such the magnificence of the Hippocratic Greek language with the aid of Latin tags helps to preserve for us what little influence we have over mankind. On an occa¬ sion such as this I must come out from behind this veil of language, drop the air of gravity and the bedside manner that convey a sense of deep knowledge and the subtle suggestion that the disorder from which the patient is suffering hurts the doctor as much as it disturbs the patient. Now I must shed all this, stand before you as a plain man and ask you to show me some of the charity which I hope your physician has shown you in times past. My credentials are plain and forthright. As a physician I love the battered old human body and the things it can endure and think nobly of the spirit of man and the things it can create. As a citizen my posi¬ tion is slightly more involved. As Chancellor of the University of Alberta I must perforce practise civic bigamy, giving allegiance to two cities-—Calgary and Edmonton, and further com¬ pound that bigamy by serving two mistresses— medicine and education. In search of my theme I harked back to the early days of United College in this city. I was a charter student, so to speak, of the institution which came into being when Presbyterian pride and Methodist vigor joined hands, and, when history and poetry failed to provide any inspira¬ tion, adopted the term “United” to pl ace on its banner. After forty years it would seem to have been a good omen and to have found favour with the gods. Thinking back to those days I found the clue to my theme. And I now propose to address myself primarily to the young people in this audience—nymphs and shepherds who have worked and played together in this College and, I hope, not lost too much time in dalliance. To those of you who are older (and at this moment may be wishing that you had spent more time in dalliance during your college days) what I say may appear as foolishness to some, and to others a stumblingblock. But I shall have to abide that. Will you forgive a personal note of reminis¬ cence? Those of us who were students in the first days of this College were fortunate beyond measure. We shared in the sunset of the Vic¬ torian age. We were innocent of war and only later learned to face time with fortitude. We were “up” at university during what I like to think of as the closing years of the Golden Age of teaching. Our professors cultivated the higher reaches of art and morality. Men like Elliot and Fleming wrestled with the problems of philo¬ sophy and religion. Others were stirring dis- 25

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sophy, that brute instinct was crushing reason and evil fanaticism replacing belief. Wherefore: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. These things have already come about in full and terrifying measure. And thinkers like Schweitzer of the West and Radhakrishnan of the East are in agreement on the symptoms and causes of our present state—industrialization and urbanization, the over-organization of life, the debasement of nationalism, and obsession with material achievements. “The words written large over the present age are insecurity, guilt and helplessness”. If this is another Dark Age (which I still beg leave to doubt), at least there is a certain important difference between it and what we term the Dark Ages in our history. Then men did not indulge in communal despair. They were bound by a common humanity rooted in religious faith. That religious tradition, the essential core of our civilization, has gradually receded with resulting confusion in the moral and spiritual order. And we are now called upon to build our spiritual defences against the new paganism, a corroding materialism and the atom- bomb mentality of fear and impious pride. For this state of affairs science is not to blame —it is so easy to make science the scapegoat. The threat is not from science but from the fears, prejudices, ignorances, loose thinking and weaknesses of human nature. It is not my purpose in this recital of our present woes to add to the chorus of opinion that we are nearly at the end of an era which is disintegrating through its own moral inade¬ quacy. I am setting down these things rather to suggest that education has a supreme task in which it should be joined by all men of good¬ will—the task of once more creating compelling values and asserting the conception of a moral universe and a significant way of life. Self- examination is the first step to salvation and I suggest further that we should be busy finding out where we have gone wrong. That is surely a task for the graduates of our arts colleges. They will find among other things that, lulled by the ease of riding in motor vehicles and by the sirens of advertising, we have surrendered our belief in the absolutes in our journey to reality, that we have lost our conviction that the spiritual values are supreme and supremely re¬ warding, and that there can be no such thing as a sacrifice for truth. They will find, too, that we have increasingly substituted for the freedom of the individual soul the security and welfare of the collective man and have been hypnotized by that bleak abstraction, “the common man”, with its corollary, the pitiful cage of conformity. Seeking our salvation in material means and technology, we have reduced man to the propor¬ tions and character of an engine. In this order of things it is time for every student and univer¬ sity graduate to assert once more the essential value of the individual man and to insist, with Sir Francis Walshe, that no one will “interpret for you in terms of microvolts and feed-back mechanisms in the brain, the sonnets of Shake¬ speare, the paintings of Botticelli, or the going out to death of Captain Oates in the dark wastes of the Antarctic. There are more things in heaven and earth than are revealed by an ampli¬ fying valve”. In the end we may realize once again that there is only one rule of conduct which can re¬ solve our discontents—a rule known in various forms for at least two thousand years. That rule is: “Love thy neighbor as theyself”! Again poets point the way and echo the old commandment. The theme of contemporary poetry, if one may speak of such, is in Mr. W. H. Auden’s phrase: “We must love one another or die” —we are all responsible for one another. As John Donne said long ago: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in man¬ kind”. May I be permitted to say a few words about Education in this context. I am not going to invoke any of the educational ghosts that squak and gibber in the press and at countless confer¬ ences. The cry has been: “What shall we do to be saved educationally”? And a healthy answer is beginning to emerge from the result¬ ing debate. There must be a closer relation and interpenetration of the two orders of thought: science which proceeds by observed fast and concept, and the other, the humanities which follow the route of myth and symbol and image. It is not the subject but the spirit and approach of the teacher that counts. Two things have changed our prevailing attitude to man and the universe—the recognition from the work of Sherrington and others that the mind cannot be explained in terms of a physiological machine, but requires higher and other perceptions for its understanding; and the second, the result of relativity, the quantum theory and nuclear 27