In Praise of Ignorance

As professor of philosophy and psychology, president of University of North Carolina, president of University of Illinois and finally chancellor of New York University, Harry Woodburn Chase has devoted his entire career to rescuing people from ignorance. Last week in Manhattan, Chancellor Chase uprose to dedicate a memorial tablet to his institution's most famed professor, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, inventor of the telegraph. Explaining that early 19th Century scientists held long distance telegraphy to be a physical impossibility, the Chancellor declared:

"Samuel F. B. Morse's ignorance of the best scientific thought a century ago saved him from impediment in his early experiments with the telegraph. . . . Had Morse been a physicist with a physicist's specialized knowledge of [contemporary] theory ... it is quite possible that his great plan of making the universe 'by kingdom right wheel' might never have passed beyond the stage of a dinner table conversation. It reminds me of the validity of a recent saying by Mr. Owen D. Young that our greatest assets are the things we do not know."

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