FAITH AND FACTS

One of the most remarkable features of last night's Ingersoll Lecture was the almost complete absence of undergraduates. There is no doubt but that the subject. "The Immortality of Man" requires for proper appreciation and understanding a deeper and broader experience than the undergraduate is likely to have had. At the same-time, there was much of a stimulating and unusually interesting nature, to grasp which required only attention.

One cannot help but think that Mr. Cabot's distinction between the "head" and the "heart" as guides to action was somewhat unwarrantably prejudiced in favor of the latter. When one reflects that almost all of the present and past ills of mankind have been brought about by the following of the dictates of the "heart"--if by "heart" is meant everything except "head" and that the only advances which have been made by humanity--advances of an unusually materialistic sort--have resulted more or less directly from the efficient "headword" of those who have trained themselves to doubt--one is inclined to distrust ahe murmurings of the heart and to search for facts upon which the head can work. At present, there is no fact more certain than that the heart does indeed control the springs of action. If this must always be so, the future of man looks dark.

There seems, however, to be a small ray of hope in Mr. Cabot's admission that his college training not only did not counteract, but emphasized his incipient skepticism. For as he also says, it is folly to act on faith when one may have fact. One ascertains facts only with great difficulty and by constantly forcing one's self to demand the facts. This is the point of skepticism, only by highly developed doubt can the mysteries of the world ever hope to be penetrated, and the facts, which Mr. Cabot regards as preferable to faith, ever be discovered.

Pherhaps it is puerile to entertain the idea that such facts will be available even in the remotest future. But the habits of thinking which have accomplished the only successes of the past and those which one hopes to acquire by a college training still constitute the only key to progress of any sort. Doubt pursued to its natural end, investigation remains the only instrument ofr obtaining the facts, which may perhaps at some time replace their present substitute faith.