Los Angeles herald., 1908-06-08
WISEST PHILOSOPHIE /.
MUST YIELD TO FACTS
BURT ESTES HOWARD TALKS.
ON LIMITS OF MIND
breaches Bacealaureate Sermon Tor
College of osteopathy and Deeries
All Slavish Adherence to
Special Creeds

Rev. Burt Estes Howard, pastor OF
the First Unitarian church, preached
the baccalaureate sermon yesterday
morning for the College of Osteopatny'
He took for his text, whatsoever
things are true" and said in part
1.-THE only things that are worth
mans while are the things that are
true. Truth is never to be violated
for the sake of logic. 1t is better TO
be inconsistent than to be false to the
facts. Consistency is the bugbear of
little minds. One fragment OF the
truth is worth more than whole
system of articulated falsehoods.
an our search for the things that
are true we are confronted by the diff
ficulty of finding a fixed point OF de-
parture, some standard to which we
may refer things in order to determine
the truth or the falsity of them. We
seem to be living in a fiuctuating sea
of change, where nothing is stable and
sure. Do we really know anything at
all? So long as men have been think
ing they have woven beautiful theories
about what they conceived to be facts
of life, but one after another these
theories have been proved inadequate
and have been cast upon the rubbish
heap of worn-out things. Were they
all false? Did they possess no truth
theories we hold today are any more
true than these discarded ones? Well,
we may answer that question in short
order-We can't be sure. In fact, we
may be absolutely certain that the the
ories we hold today will be tossed aside
as useless by future generations. The
past is strewn with the ruins Of an
cient religions, PHILOSOPHERS and sci
ences, each of which claimed truth as
TO nft1oa in cnirit
in turn crumbled beneath the touch of
later research.
Nov, this shifting character of hu-
man knowledge need give us no
trouble If we will only remember two
or three things In the first place,
great facts are wholly Indifferent to
the label we choose to paste on them,
and to the theories we construct in or
der to account for them. They stand
there, serene and undisturbed, while
little men peep and spy about their
feet and make up their little minds in
little guesses about their place and
part in the vast economy of beings. Be
cause we confuse the stability of the
eternal verities with the integrity of
our own system of thinking and with
the soundness of our own views, we
become panic stricken whenever a new
discovery has exploded our theories or
shattered our scientific or theological
creed. The truth still lives though
our views concerning Ii are discarded
"All truth, looked at from the human
standpoint, is not absolute but rela-
tive. Whatever may be predicated of
truth from any other side than the
human is a matter of pure conjecture,
but so far as men are concerned, so
far as you and 1 are concerned, with
our limited vision, our partial grasp
of the scheme of things, truth is
thing of times and seasons. Truth has
to do with the relation between the
things that are true and our knowledge
of the true things Is constantly chang
ing. We are living in an evolving
world in which nothing is fixed and
constant, and our conceptions are part
of the flux and flow of It,
mo man or set of men have all the
truth. Truth is pretty sure to go
deal further than our little thoughts
can stretch. There is why schools of
theology, philosophy and medicine
thinking man is bigger than any school
of thought or than all of them. The
school which attempts to corner the
knowledge of the world has a large
contract on it's hands. To adhere
slavishly to 'allopathy' or homeopathy
or 'osteopathy' or any other 'opathy'
is to announce the fact that mentally
we nave gone TO Seeu. Every SCHOOl
of whatsoever thought has had to
yield sooner or later to better and
truer thinking.
"There is only one attitude for a
man to take with respect to truth. He
should be tolerant and kind, listen
without prejudice and criticise without
fear be open hearted yet not credu-
lous; weigh each claim to allegiance
with care yet with a due sense of pro-
norton. reject nothing because it is
new: hold fast to nothing because it
Is old. We should give ourselves with
fine fidelity to whatever evidences it,
self to our calmer and .saner moods as
true. To do this is to play a mans
whole part till the day breaks when
he shall see no longer through a glass
darkened, but face to face"