Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2822

Undated and unidentified newspaper clipping, quoted remarks by President Dodds of Princeton underscored in pencil by Heath

 

 

 

FOR FRESHMEN

 

Princeton’s freshmen will have to study hard during the next four years if they are to find a good answer to the question President Dodds put to them the other day. He asked: “How can we construct a scheme of life in which social change can be accomplished peacefully, without recourse to the violence of war and revolution into which our instincts repeatedly lead us?” Such a scheme would be more useful than a whole battery of mechan­ical inventions to a world in which there .. has developed, as President Dodds said, “a collective distrust of in­telligence and the exaltation of emotional impulses.”

 

 Dr. Dodds did not mean to imply, of course, that we can or should get rid of emotional impulses. The impulse to get rid of them is in itself an emotional impulse. Strictly speaking, everything we think, say or do is colored with emotion and will be so to the end of human time.

 

The solution, if the Princeton boys do finally discover it, will doubtless consist in the use of the intelligence to guide the action which our emotions dictate. Dr. Dodds made a good case for the belief that violence is always reactionary — that it always sets the clock back. A careful adding up of figures would show that no war ever pays, that no violent revolution ever pays and that no violent counter-revo­lution ever pays. That is, these acts of violence are never profitable to the ma­jority of mankind, however useful they may be to a minority — for example, to munitions makers.

 

A thoroughly informed majority opinion would never try to achieve its ends by violence, for the simple reason that it would know that they cannot be achieved that way. If Princeton or any other institution of learning can teach this lesson to even a few young men or women, there will be that much more hope for the future.