all abstractionists and would-be biological philosophers. More than
once have I heard him quote with deep feeling the lines from Faust:
"Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie.
Und grun des Lebens goldner Baum."
The only man he really loved and had use for was the man who could
bring him facts. To see facts, not to argue or _raisonniren_, was what
life meant for him; and I think he often positively loathed the
ratiocinating type of mind. "Mr. Blank, you are _totally_ uneducated!"
I heard him once say to a student who propounded to him some glittering
theoretic generality. And on a similar occasion he gave an admonition
that must have sunk deep into the heart of him to whom it was
addressed. "Mr. X, some people perhaps now consider you a bright young
man; but when you are fifty years old, if they ever speak of you then,
what they will say will be this: 'That X,--oh, yes, I know him; he used
to be a very bright young man!'" Happy is the conceited youth who at
the proper moment receives such salutary cold water therapeutics as
this from one who, in other respects, is a kind friend. We cannot all
escape from being abstractionists. I myself, for instance, have never
been able to escape; but the hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me
the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in
the light of the world's concrete fulness, that I have never been able
to forget it. Both kinds of mind have their place in the infinite
design, but there can be no question as to which kind lies the nearer
to the divine type of thinking.
Agassiz's view of Nature was saturated with simple religious feeling,
and for this deep but unconventional religiosity he found at Harvard
the most sympathetic possible environment. In the fifty years that
have sped since he arrived here our knowledge of Nature has penetrated
into joints and recesses which his vision never pierced. The causal
elements and not the totals are what we are now most passionately
concerned to understand; and naked and poverty-stricken enough do the
stripped-out elements and forces occasionally appear to us to be. But
the truth of things is after all their living fulness, and some day,
from a more commanding point of view than was possible to any one in
Agassiz's generation, our descendants, enriched with the spoils of all
our analytic investigations, will get round again to that higher and
simpler way of looking at Nature. Meanwhile as we look back upon
Agassiz, there floats up a breath as of life's morning, that makes the
work seem young and fresh once more. May we all, and especially may
those younger members of our association who never knew him, give a
grateful thought to his memory as we wander through that Museum which
he founded, and through this University whose ideals he did so much to
elevate and define.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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