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lu- 



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POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



MAY, 1890. 





EDWARD LIVINGSTON YOUMANS:* 



THE MAN AND HIS ^VORK. 



Br JOHN FISKE. 



IN one of the most beautiful of all the shining pages of his His- 

 tory of the Spanish Conquest in America, Sir Arthur Helps 

 describes the way in which, through " some fitness of the season, 

 whether in great scientific discoveries or in the breaking into 

 light of some great moral cause, the same processes are going on 

 in many minds, and it seems as if they communicated with each 

 other invisibly. We may imagine that all good powers aid the 

 ' new light/ and brave and wise thoughts about it float aloft in 

 the atmosphere of thought as downy seeds are borne over the 

 fruitful face of the earth " (vol. iii, page 113). The thinker who 

 elaborates a new system of philosophy deeper and more compre- 

 hensive than any yet known to mankind, though he may work 

 in solitude, nevertheless does not work alone. The very fact 

 which makes his great scheme of thought a success and not a 

 failure is the fact that it puts into definite and coherent shape 

 the ideas which many people are more or less vaguely and loosely 

 entertaining, and that it carries to a grand and triumphant con- 

 clusion processes of reasoning in which many persons have al- 

 ready begun taking the earlier steps. This community in mental 

 trend between the immortal discoverer and many of the brightest 

 contemporary minds, far from diminishing the originality of his 

 work, constitutes the feature of it which makes it a permanent 

 acquisition for mankind, and distinguishes it from the eccentric 

 philosophies which now and then come up to startle the world 

 for a while, and are presently discarded and forgotten. The his- 



* An Address before the Brooklyn Ethical Association, March 23, 1890. 



TOL. XXXVII. — 1 



3176G 



