WHAT IS TRUTH?

The communication quoted elsewhere in these columns, though showing no appreciable insight into the subject with which it deals, is sufficiently representative of a certain class of opinion to deserve publication. The writer refers to a statement in the CRIMSON platform which appeared October 5, and in referring to it, adds a deduction of his own not included therein. The CRIMSON did not state that the world was advancing because the Church was losing its influence. What the CRIMSON did say, in its effort to seize the underlying problem which faces higher education today was as follows:

"Universities, at first founded as adjuncts to the Church, now stand alone, with the Church, now stand alone, with the Church exercising only a slight shadow of its former influence on the lives of men. This situation requires that Universities readjust themselves to the needs of the times and accept the full burden of that which formerly fell upon them only in part--of preparing men to live."

It is evident that the CRIMSON had not the slightest intention of diagnosing the ills of mankind in general, but only of the few who have the capacity for college education. The reference to the waning influence of the Church over these few is not conjecture, but a statement of fact; and far from representing an advance, this condition is recognized as a retrogression for the individual, and as such presents the modern college with its greatest problem.

Mr. Wickerham would say with the late Mr. Bryan that if such is the case, it ought not to be, and as a remedy he would propose a return to the "old time religion". The CRIMSON says that such is the condition, and moreover, that it is inevitable it should be so. The conflict of ideas in the individual of which the destruction of previously held moral conceptions is the logical issue, was described by Plato and his analysis reads as if it had been written especially for the present generation.

"There are certain principles about justice and honor," wrote the great philosopher in the seventh book of "The Republic," which were taught us in childhood, and under their parental authority we have been brought up, obeying and honoring them. . . . There are also opposite maxims and habits of pleasure which flatter and attract the soul, but do not influence those of us who have any sense of right, and they continue to obey the maxims of their fathers. . . . Now, when a man is in this state, and the questioning spirit asks what is fair or honorable, and he answers as the legislator has taught him, and then arguments many and diverse refute his words, until he is driven into believing that nothing is honorable any more than dishonorable, or just and good any more than the reverse, and so of all the notions which he most valued, do you think that he will still honor and obey them as before? . . . And when he ceases to think them honorable and natural as heretofore, and he fails to discover the true, can he be expected to pursue any life other than that which flatters his desires?"

Many a man finishes college with his earlier standards completely thrown down and nothing set up in their place. To revent to religion goes as much against his reason as to construct a new order goes beyond his ability. For such a man the difference between the super-natural--the resort of all religious teachers--and the natural--the real world of today--is merely the difference between ignorance and knowledge. The great need of the times is for a new Secrates to arise in the Universities and establish once for all, independently of super-natural hypotheses, that "Virtue vs's Knowledge."