The Green caldron - University Library

10 TJie Green Caldroji
ing the difference between right and wrong. What use humanity if all is
equality? Science will provide the world with three meals a day, and
happiness will reign.
Literature is full of noble ideas concerning moral and spiritual truths.
But wdiere is their success? They have only succeeded in filling the world
with prejudice and hate. They start wars, wars which science is called upon
to stop. No, it will not be love and understanding which produce peace.
It will be the largest H-bomb and the highest satellite. In these rest man's
hope for peace.
Scholars clamor for the knowledge of the ancient cultures. Could any-
thing be more useless? Expecting such knowledge to exert an influence
on modern society is like expecting a bark from a dead dog. Ancient
Greece and Rome have nothing to offer us. We have long since absorbed
their knowledge and surpassed their achievements. Proof of our superior
intellect lies in the complexity of our modern civilization. We may now
reject the past as if it were a faulty theorem. To believe that "the road
to tomorrow leads through yesterday" is to believe in retrogression.
The present is the door to tomorrow, and science is the key. Science
will provide us with the essentials of life : a full stomach, a warm house, and
a new car. Science will take a test tube and a slide rule and develop a
mass-producible philosophy. No longer will every individual be required to
struggle with literature's unanswerable questions. Any problem which is
not applicable to science's unyielding laws will be neatly eliminated like
a malignant cancer. A "soma pill" or a "hate hour" will get rid of any undesir-
able emotions. Wlien science has eliminated the idea that only man is of
interest to man, it will have eliminated literature. Then mankind will be
able to settle down to a life which is as systematic, definable, unchangeable,
and as completely enjoyable as science itself. Then we will be saved.
ONE
The Controlling Force
JoiiNiE M. Driver
Rhetoric 102, Theme 7
OF THE MOST FRUSTRATING THINGS THAT MEN
are required to endure is burning curiosity with no way of satisfying
that curiosity. One of the issues that has perplexed man for quite a
long time has to do with his origin, his direction and the impelling forces in
his life, and his destiny. A result of this curiosity is the theory of evolution—
theory on which many views have been expressed. An excellent treatise on the
subject of evolution is one by George Gaylord Simpson.^ One chapter in his
The Meaning of Evolution. (New York: The New American Library, 1954).
a