LOYALTY TO FACT.

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 129, 17 June 1937, Page 4

LOYALTY TO FACT.

n One of the hardest and mo^fc valuable lessons of lif e is to appreciate and be loyal at all costs to fact, objective impartial fact. To know the world is to get down to a true sense of fact, which remains true in spite of all Our opinions and partialities and attitudes. This lesson of the true value of fact is perhaps the greatest lesson that science can teach us. The test in science is by way of actual experiment, and the result is accepted as decisive, whatever our previous theories or expectations may have beeii. An ounce of fact is worth tons of theory. 11 He who in his life thus learns to respect facts, to be loyal and true to hard brute facts, as distinct from mere opinions and sentimeuts, and to build his world on solid facts, rather than on the ghifting sands of opinion, has distilled the true wisdom from the science which the university can teach him. Here is intellectual integrity and honesty. Here is the universality which harmonises the individual experience with the science which embraces the whole universe. The love of fact is the spirit of truth, in which not only all science but in the end all moral values are founded, Amid the evils of our public world of to-day, where the tendency is to follow slogans, to run after catchwords, to worship idealogies, or exalt party' politics unduly, the sovereign remedy is this disinterested loyalty to fact, this gospel of the sacrediiess of facts whieh i» (mpfwae message of scieiice to the world." — General Smuts.