Demos Explores Reason At 'Cliffe Baccalaureate

"Your graduation marks the true commencement of your education," Raphael Demos, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, told approximately 175 members of the Radcliffe Class of 1961 yesterday afternoon at the traditional Baccalaureate Service in Memorial Church.

"In the future you will need a framework of values to determine your decisions," Demos declared. "The College has not provided this. We've tried to teach you how to decide, not what to decide. We respect you too much to indoctrinate you."

He urged the students to use the methods of reasoning the College has taught them in formulating their own values. But, he warned, "as you go out into the world, you will not find it easy to be reasonable. You will be tempted by passion, by the voices of the demagogue and the fanatic."

"Reason will not happen spontaneously," Demos said. "You will have to try with all your might to reflect dispassionately."

Calling science "the strongest cultural force in the world today," he noted that people tend to equate science and reason. "But science tells us nothing about right and wrong. It does not answer questions of values."

Demos emphasized the importance of men reasoning together. "We are suspicious of togetherness--but some kinds of togetherness are good." Because every man's perspective is different, his knowledge is partial. "When we get together, our views are supplemented and corrected."

The purpose of college "is to teach you to understand yourself," he remarked. In painful solitude, "you are free to discover and achieve your own identity."

"Women are distinguished by a special identity," Demos commented. Woman's life is harder than man's." Increased opportunities and responsibilities require a greater effort from women today than from their predecessors, he asserted.

Modern women, he noted, must resolve within themselves the conflict between homemaking and intellectual life, if they are to meet their own demands for the good life.