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Caption: Convocation - 1930
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has perpetuated these as a in- ma to an end?" The latter is my own belief. Some i our greatest physicists are now telling us that their latest investigations appear to reveal some evidence of the existence of a directive force underlying these unchanging- laws and that "thought waves may themselves be i creative or causative force." I cannot help agreeing with Doctor Pupin, the great electrician, when he says, "Our faith in the creative power of the soul should be at least as strong-, | as our faith in the radiating power of the atom] for surely the world of consciousness, the product of that creative power, is at least as real as atomic radiation." But even this newest conception of the laws of physical organization and operation does not give us God in the sense in which humanity needs God. If science finally concedes the presence of such a directive force, the force as such will be of no use to humanity unless it is found to have a personality, and that, too, a personality recognizing the difference between "good" and "evil/' "beautiful" and "ugly," "holy" and "obscene." " H o w can we know? How can we understand? W h o build a house of T r u t h upon the sand . . . . How can we know, who know our truth is based On finite facts by infinity effaced, On parallels that meet in space behind. On matter that is force, unconscious, blind? . . . . Why should we know? W h y should we live at all? Why all this toil and strife?" And so today you go—where? how? with what spirit? —to seek new answers to some of these questions and new solutions for some of these problems, which answers and solutions will be no more final (ban ours? Some o( you will go to homes across the sea. Some o\ you will go to 1 mds thai are foreign to you. Some of you will £0 to live in parts of our country other than those in which YOU have 'Brown, "On ativc Spii it," pa e 27. { u )
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