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UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA

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that can come from the new curriculum of the college is essential not
only to a student's better understanding of himself and the most acute
problems of the modern age, but is essential also to a view of the
universe.

We listen to a great American physicist as he traces the steps
in the gradual integration of the six formerly rigorously separated
branches of physics on the way to becoming one great whole. The
professor of theoretical physics in the University of Berlin recently
writes that the study of philosophy, once in scientific disrepute, is
coming back with a new meaning and a wide power. Professor Planck
points out that, as scientific research by its conquest of the world
of sense "simplifies the world picture of physics, the structure of the
physical world moves further and further away from the world of
sense." What Professor Planck points out as the increasing simplifi-
cation of the world picture becomes the basis for a more complete
view of the universe. We deeply need the values in the general view
of the great philosophers. The scientist and philosopher are approach-
ing a more respectful meeting in the presence of the mystery of life
and the universe. Haldane moves from matter to mechanism to life
to personality to spirituality. Personality, as an evolutionary achieve-
ment, reveals the spiritual quality of the materialistic process. From
physics we go into metaphysics. Matter becomes energy, and energy
brings us to the borderland of a universe, seen and unseen, the
reverberations of whose moral sovereignty are in the inner man in
answer to the intuitions and aspirations of the human spirit.

As in life so in college, subjects, ideas, and processes cannot
be kept in separate departments. We should in college, if for no
other reason than convenience, have departments of subjects but not
compartments of knowledge. The very fluidity of ideas and the organic
nature of life processes make it necessary that in our very respect
for specialization and the value of departments we should from time
to time reexamine the curriculum. Let us welcome the scores of
experiments under way all over America and not adopt any of them
by way of imitation but adapt what is good as we venture on our
own account according to our own needs. In no other way than by
the integrated view can we understand the wider implications of the
specialized knowledge. Only with the whole view can we build up
correlative social control of the new forces and mechanisms let loose
upon the world by specialized knowledge with the power to destroy
or rebuild the structure of the modern world.