Land Speaks On Science, Metaphysics

A heady blend of physics and metaphysics held sway in Sanders Theater yesterday as Edwin H. Land '30, chairman and director of research of the Polaroid Corporation, delivered the honors oration at the initiation of 110 Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Land, in a lecture entitled "Process as Reality," told the crowd of about 650 that research in photography and optics has given society "a clue to the solution of the principal metaphysical question" of how man relates to his environment.

Recent studies indicate that human perception of color and from depend greatly on the interaction of individuals with their surroundings rather than just the inherent qualities of light rays, he said.

"The mechanism [of perception] has no separate existence of its own," Land said, adding that each object in the environment "is locked by a thousand chains and gossamers" to its observer's internal processes of perception.

Noting that "color doesn't really exist without the observer," Land added that the relationship between the human mind and the outside environment must reflect the close links in the perception process.

"What meaning is a mind itself without the world? That is tragedy," Land said.

Attempts to study the "new reality" of photographic and optical effects can only succeed in examining the human processes that control perception, Land added, because "the process is the reality."

Land compared the nature of the perception process to a symphony that poses a question to the audience in its opening bars, only to provide the answer in the closing passages.

"And the question is itself the answer," he concluded.

Noted Author

Land's address followed the reading by Robert Penn Warren, professor emeritus at Yale and a noted author and poet, of his most recent poem.

Warren, who won fame and a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his novel "All the King's Men," as well as an unprecedented second Pulitzer in 1958 for "Promises," a collection of poems, delivered a lengthy work entitled "Red-Tailed Hawk and the Pyre of Youth."

Speaking in the soft nasal twang of his native Kentucky, Warren admitted that he wrote the poem as a response to a colleague's discussion of the frequent appearance of hawk-images in his poetry.

"Hawks never crossed my mind" when he was writing his earlier poems, Warren said, but he added that he decided after the discussion to devote an entire new work to the topic.

"That's proof that criticism has some bearing on what hopes to be a poem," he added.