Huge Crowd at Whitehead Lecture Forces Migration to Memorial Chapel

Memorial Chapel had to be substituted for the smaller lecture room in Emerson Hall yesterday afternoon to hold the large audience at Alfred North Whitehead's lecture on "Immortality."

After an introduction by Dean Sperry of the Divinity School, the 80-year-old professor of Philosophy, emeritus, climbed the circular stairs to the Chapel pulpit. He began his lecture with an explanation of how the universe is separated into two abstractions consisting of "the world of activity and the world of values." The values are timeless and immortal, and all facts depend on the realization of these values.

Attacks Self-Confidence

According to Professor Whitehead, the misconception of independent existence has haunted Western philosophy for centuries. He attacked our dogmatic conceptions of "knowledge" stating that "the self-confidence of learned people is the tragic comedy of human existence." Out sciences, based on dogmatic exactness are a fake, he concluded.

Professor Whitehead's discourse was the annual public Ingersoll Lecture given this year as part of the visitation day at the Divinity School which over a hundred local elergymen and alumni attended, Professor Whitehead was for 13 years on the faculty of the University of London and has written several books, one in collaboration with Bertrand Russell, on subjects of philosophy.