The Tercentenary Conference of Arts and Sciences, which opened on August 31 with a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, came to a close on Friday, September 11 as the last addresses of the Social and Physical Science Symposia were delivered.

Three Sections

The Conference was divided into three major sections, one on Social Sciences and Humanities, another on the Biological Sciences, and a third on the Physical Sciences. The latter two, stretching over the entire period of the Conference, consisted merely of papers delivered by outstanding scientists on the researches they have been currently pursuing; the first-named section, on the other hand, which did not start until the second week of the session, took the form of a well-integrated and novel plan for consolidating the various branches of learning concerned with the study of mankind as a whole.

This plan was carried out by three symposia dealing with as many different aspects of human society: "Factors Determining Human Behaviour", "Authority and the Individual", and "Independence, Convergence and Borrowing in Institutions, Thought and Art".

All three were concerned with Man and his actions. In the first, in the investigations were of a physiological and psychological nature, an exposition of the individual's potential behavior. In the second were examined the economic and social forces, the cultural conditioning, which reaches an individual through society; and in the third were seen the interactions of one culture upon another.

Plan of Approach

With an examination of the Symposia, the plan and purpose of the three-fold approach became apparent. In the early days of university life, the heritage of classical antiquity and the medieval tradition of theology were guiding forces in education. Harvard itself was founded, as so many know, by the early settlers, "fearing to leave an illiterate ministry" to the churches. But a growth in the Humanities and the Sciences led scholars to diverse paths as the years passed, and men became more concerned with their separate fields than with the connection of these fields with one another.

Of late specialization had become so intense and progress so rapid that even experts in the same field were becoming mutually unintelligible. The time was thought right for a recapitulation; it was necessary that a consolidating action between all associated fields should take place. Such will be the motives of the roving professors whom Dr. Conant has recently proposed; such has been the successful purpose of the Tercentenary Conference.

Double Purpose

The addresses delivered at these three symposia under the general heading of "Social Science and the Humanities" served a double purpose. Each, in itself, was a significant contribution to knowledge; their really great importance, however, lay in the fact that each represented a different approach to the fascinating study of man, and taken together they constitute a systematic attempt to solve the many-faceted problem of human society.

In the symposium on "Factors Determining Human Behavior," the question was treated from the physiological and psychological angle. Among the eminent thinkers who contributed their opinions to this discussion were Edgar Douglas Adrian, Charles Gustay Jung, Rudolf Carnap and Bronislaw Mallnowski, representing respectively the view-points of physiology, psychology, philosophy and anthropology.

"All-or-none"

The influence of the nervous system on our behavior was discussed in the opening address by Professor Adrian, who is a Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, was co-winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1932, and established the important "all-or-none" law of nervous reaction. This law states that the intensity of sensation depends on a factor inherent in the nerve itself, and not on the strength of the stimulus.

Tribute to James

Charles Gustav Jung, Professor of Analytic Psychology at the Technische Hochschule in Zurich, addressed the session on "Psychological Factors Influencing Human Behavior." Jung, who has a world reputation as an exceedingly profound and stimulating thinker in the realm of the psychology of the unconscious, was, with Sigmund Freud, one of the leaders of the psychoanalytic movement until he rejected Freud's views on mental processes.