XXXIV REPORT ON THE HENRY STATUE. 



one eyed dogmatism with the processes or conclusions of his scientific 

 thinking. Within the domain of Science proper he was a clear-eyed, 

 impersonal, and uncompromising arbiter and judge. Theorists might 

 complain, dogmatists might rage, zealots might bemoan, but not one of 

 them would dare accuse the judge of an ignorant or partisan decision. 



The multitude of fancied inventors, discoverers, and projectors who 

 came to him for help and encouragement, the crowd of scientific dreamers 

 who craved a favorable decision or official help or patronage, the scores 

 and hundreds whom he was forced to reject and disappoint often of the 

 hopes and dreams of their lives, these all felt that however mistaken 

 he might be, he was upright and kind so far as he knew. They were 

 always patiently listened to and gently dismissed, though they did not 

 always heed his benediction to go in peace. 



For all these high and varied functions, in his high position, Professor 

 Henry had one supreme advantage, in that he had not only studied and 

 mastered so many of the sciences of nature, but that he made science 

 itself in its principles and processes the subject of his profoundest reflec- 

 tion. We have abundant evidence that from the time when he made 

 his earliest discoveries his mind was not content to search after the 

 secrets of nature without, but was equally curious to discover the secret 

 of the processes by which man interprets the forces and laws which 

 nature hides with such studious reserve. From the time when he began 

 at Albany till the end of his life this was prominently and avowedly 

 the theme of his constant meditation. In making this a study he was not 

 singular among eminent scientists, but only in that from the beginning 

 to the end this seemed to haunt him as the most wonderful problem of 

 all. This habit forced him to contemplate all the sciences of nature as 

 an organic whole, having intimate relations that are broader and deeper 

 than those which are limited to any single class of phenomena. It 

 forced him to study and question most closely the process of knowledge, 

 the sublimest and most fundamental phenomenon in nature, that he 

 might know how far to trust its products and by what criteria to test its 

 conclusions. We find evidence of this habit of mind in the questions 

 which he suggests in his earlier essays and in the partial solutions 

 which he gives in his miscellaneous writings. Such a habit would 

 insensibly train him to exalt the human intellect in its higher functions, 

 with its principles and laws, its axioms and intuitions, its theories and 

 anticipations, its forecasting questionings, its creative hypotheses, its 

 tentative theories, and its decisive experiments, and to assure himself 

 that an agent or agency such as this could have no affinity with matter 

 and own no allegiance to physical laws. Even in the suggestion that the 

 thinking agency which interprets the universe by authoritative question 

 and answer, could once have slumbered in a fiery cloud or could have 

 been evolved from any material mind-stuff, by any series of physical 

 processes, however daintily phrased, seems never to have been enter- 

 tained by him for an instant as having the semblance of scientific prob- 



