Establishing
Certainty
"I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty."
Sir Frances Bacon
When I was a young lad of 12, there was a teacher in our
school with hair the color of a lion’s mane, somewhat longer than the vogue in
1955. His subjects included chemistry, geometry, and physics. His classroom was
in the basement of our high-school building, just across the hall from the
industrial arts and vocational agriculture departments - - concrete floors, pipes
and conduits along the ceiling, lead-lined sinks in the back of the room with
tall, arched faucets above which were black shelves with strangely shaped
glassware: retorts, beakers, pipettes, and such like scientific apparatus. Along
the walls were glass-front cases, within which were placed in fastidious order
neatly labeled jars of substances with mysterious names like Potassium Cyanide,
Sodium Thiosulphate, and Phenolphthalein. At the front of the room were a dozen
wooden chair-desks, well initialed, uncomfortable, rigidly facing forward.
Mr. Webster stood at the front, chalk in hand, thumbing
the lapels of his laboratory frock, glaring at me with his peculiar gaze of
benevolent menace, demanding an answer.
"Graves! What’s the story?"
On the blackboard were presented for my contemplation an
assortment of markings he'd carefully drawn with his ubiquitous stub of white
chalk. Lines, angles, points, dimensions, letters designating vertices of
polygons. To me had fallen the duty to give an impromptu discourse on the nature
of those markings, to tell my class and teacher what they were or what they
symbolized. Dutiful to my charge, I stood at my station and recited in a voice
that could be clearly heard, "Nothing at all, sir!"
By and large, that was the correct answer. Occasionally it
was a foolish one, triggering a tirade of derision from my fellow classmates.
But, not infrequently, the only correct answer was a challenge to our teacher’s
sanity, an outright denial that a single thing of meaning had been drawn on the
blackboard by our teacher. Indeed, I occasionally won approval by replying
simply, "Lines and dots drawn with chalk upon a slate, sir!"
Mr. Webster was no ordinary teacher. He made no attempt to
infuse us with rote knowledge. He cared nothing for our ability to regurgitate
some stream of facts spontaneously like trained Mynah birds. Mr. Webster
demanded more from his students. He knew what too few of us ever come close to
understanding. Mr. Webster wanted his young charges to acquire the skill of
recognizing certainty and to discern its counterfeits. That was his first
priority, and by his efforts I was changed forever.
Mr. Webster was a true Renaissance man. He lived with his
mother in the nearby village of Quaker City, Ohio. Population 700. Many thought
he was entirely mad. He never married. He drove an old Chevrolet sedan. He
understood the use of navigation books and instruments like sextants and
chronometers. He built telescopes and jet engines in the high school laboratory.
And, he persisted (over objections of matronly mothers and a politically
entrenched public school board) in the enjoyment of a frequent game of
three-cushion billiards at the town pool hall, where he was known and loved as
Joe and could not be defeated at the game. He was a tall man, slim and erect. He
was athletic, could shoot a basket from mid-court, and acted as assistant coach
for our track team. He conducted the town’s symphonic orchestra, reminiscent
of Beethoven, tossing his unruly mane of hair, slashing the air with his baton
to demand more vigor from the players during militant passages of Eroica or the
Fifth.
But, most of all, he was a true educator, a man with
something valuable to give his students. Unlike others of that profession, Mr.
Webster insisted on imparting to his students nothing short of perfection. It
didn’t matter if we learned a great deal. It only mattered that we came away
convinced of the certainty of what he had taught us, put in possession of
a treasure none could ever take away. The knowledge we learned from him was not
premise or conjecture but a sound and systematic appreciation of the truth,
erected firmly on a foundation we could trust and rely upon in future years as
the adults we soon became.
There were some in our class who never could complete the
rigorous proof of Pythagoras’ Theorem, yet every student was important to this
kind-hearted man. Some of my classmates were bright and quick, like John
Berryhill and Pete Bennett. Some were dumb as a post, like a few of your own
childhood chums, no doubt. Yet, every student benefited from his tutelage. It
was far more important to Mr. Webster that we obtain a quality of mental
discipline than any quantity of encyclopedic facts. It mattered nothing if we
could remember the atomic weight of rubidium, so long as we could describe to
him such processes as the method for determining the density of an odd-shaped
object by water displacement.
The first was memory. The second was genius.
I still receive a letter from him now and then. Last
winter solstice he went out with a homemade backstaff to make certain the sun’s
declination at noon had not diminished during the year, unreported by the
authorities. He honored me by writing, "We scientific types must undertake
these rigors now and then, just to make certain all is well."
I hope all is well with him at this hour.
And I hope with all my heart that in the pages of this
work I may impart to you a sense of what Mr. Webster gave us long ago and, in
particular, that you will find yourself agreeing with his methods as we search
for certainty together.
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