Yale University - Sheffield Scientific School Yearbook (New Haven, CT)

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CLASS ORATION 85 fact that many of today's problems will remain unsolved in our life- time. There will be times when the rational process appears wholly unable to cope with the complexity of human affairs. At such times we must have the courage not to throw it away in disgust but to go on groping about in the darkness. But the reward of the ideal is in the knowledge that we are hitch- ing our wagon to an actual star, not tying it Hrmly to a Firecracker. When we examine this ideal more closely we see that it is merely the ideal of science. Of course, when I have said that most of us have not been duped by the Youth formula, I have not proved that we have adopted the ideal of science. I don't think we have. But in those rare moments when we are concerned with anything beyond present pleasures, we may have gone a little way in that direction. It is, it seems to me, the task of Sheff, and one for which it is peculiarly fitted, to strive to make the ideal ever clearer. It is the task of pre- serving, in a world wearily turning to nostrums, the intellectual courage and integrity which alone can find effective remedies for our ills.

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84 CLASS OF NINETEEN THIRTY-FIVE S. AND E. It is for this reason that we can hope for no permanent contribu- tion from any of the groups which satisfy the accepted notions of what Youth ought to be: eager, bold, confident, and naively idealis- tic. For such contributions must grow out of a realization that the state of the world is not the result of the pathetic and inexcusable incompetence of a generation, but rather of the incredible complex- ity of the problem. Until we understand that social advance takes place in small increments, each one tested by the blast of an un- flinching rational skepticism, until we recognize that any simple so- lution is by virtue of its very simplicity suspect, until we adopt the attitude that every conclusion is tentative and subject to revision or discard, our dreams are doomed to shatter in a rude awakening. But such constant reexamination of oneis most fundamental political and social beliefs is fatal to a Youth Movement. You can't give your life to a cause if you have the slightest doubt that it is divine revelation. And so I say again that it should be cause for general rejoicing that only a negligible portion of the undergraduate body have sought intellectual shelter beneath the scrawny wings of Youth Movements. It is widely maintained that what we need in these times of stress is faith. But what does faith mean? For ever increasing numbers of people it means faith in Huey Long and Father Coughlin, faith in Hearst, faith in the Townsend Plan, faith in any scheme at all which offers hope of a speedy millennium. On the contrary, what we need is the courage to attack any and every faith mercilessly with the tools of reason, the independence to reject the comfortable certainty of a Cause for the disappointments and occasional bewilderment of ob- jectivity. My friends of the United Youth Front will accuse me of defeat- ismg sentimentalists no longer young will say I have no heart. But the steady determination to push the world a little farther along the path of reason is an ideal far more permanent if less spectacular than the hectic hope of immanent paradise. It is, of course, likewise a faith. But it is a faith not in any plan or program, but in the pos- sibility by analysis of coming to an ever better and better under- standing of the workings of society, a faith that by testing all human institutions and ideas in the crucible of rational examination, not once but again and again tirelessly, we may approach by successive approximations a harmonious adjustment of the social organism. It is not an easy ideal. It requires unflinching mental vigilance. It does not permit of relaxation into the permanent acceptance of anything. It holds out no hope of immediate salvation. We must accept the

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CLASS PROPHECY As delivered on Class Day by William T. Sperry. ICOKING through the archives of history, we Hnd that Elijah was the last Prophet to make the grade, at least, rumor has it that he went up on high. Now, traditionally, prophets gaze into globes to see into the future, this prophet went around the globe and, strangely enough, saw several of his classmates. It was in the winter of 1945 that the good ship, S .S . Callan, named after that barrel-chested, barrel-bung manufacturer, was scheduled to sail for Havana. Driving down Fifth Avenue on the way to the docks, one could see looming up in the darkness the tall spire of the Combs Corset Corporation building and its emblazoned motto, 5'Satisfaction and Comfort for the Well-Dressed Woman.,' Turning west, we entered the Mazda gulch. All the Broadway playboys were to be seen here and Angie Smith's column on the theatre and its habitues Hashed into our mind. At the end of the Avenue one could see the name Dunbar outlined against the dark buildings. This was the second month that this great lover had been wringing the hearts of the society ladies by his brilliant performance in that scintillating new play, The Dove? Looking up at the moving news strip on the Times building, we glimpsed the news that the Horton filibuster had finally been stopped by the cool thinking of Iack Meehan, the Huey Long of the North, who broke down the mo- rale of his former classmate by serenely handing him a shovel. The taxi turned down a side street and sped towards the piers, and soon We were sailing out of the harbor. There was great excitement in Havana, and every tongue was tell- ing of the great contest to take place that afternoon. It seems that the famous sportsman, Chris Meyer, had brought his string of ponies down from Long Island to face the famous Cuban polo team that Spence Weaver, now running the new Havana Park Lane, had been starring for. As you remember, both these playboys drove Mer- cedes in New Haven. Ted Gardner was there, too, sporting a flashy costume, he said that he had just come down from Virginia, where he had been riding to his famous Elmo pack. The next day our fair ship was heading for the Canal, and soon