To the Editor of the Crimson:

Dear Sir:

In the article from the Princetonian and the accompanying editorial comment dealing with the four recent undergraduate suicides which you publish in today's Crimson, lack of synthesis in the intellectual development afforded students in our present educational system is given as the possible reason. The assumption that men are motivated chiefly by intellect, rather than by an inseparable mixture of thought and feeling, is essentially false.

It seems to me that what the student needs is not "to see life clearly, and to see it whole", but to see a certain element in life which no end of college training will if unaided fail to give him. i. e. worthwhileness. The only possible cause of suicide for the sane human being is that values have lost their meaning for him. When his mental acuteness is being sharpened in the process of education, he becomes gradually more conscious with his increasing introspective powers, of his own failure to grasp any significance in life which will make it seem worthwhile to him. Hence the catastrophe of self-destruction. The man whose mind has not been so highly developed may go through life with the vague feeling that he is missing something, but he rarely becomes so fully aware of this vital lack that he is tempted to suicide.

How, then, is it possible to attain to a view of life as something of intrinsic value? The answer to this question entails a complete philosophy of life which each man must construct for himself. My own feeling in the matter is that one gets an experience of infinite worth in certain relations with fellow-men. A real friendship may be the means of giving a lasting sense of values to the men bound by this tie. Hard work of the Carlyle or Emerson type is a possible answer to this riddle.

Whatever the answer, however, it is chiefly important to realize that a man must have the deep conviction that human life is worth while before he can hope to experience the best in his own life. How to get this conviction is the main problem for him. Very truly yours,   Samuel C. Landers '28.