182 MEMORIAL OF JOSEPH HENRY. 



juncture of his life, much as the great mind of Pascal pleased 

 itself with musing how the fate of Europe might have been changed 

 if the Providential grain of sand in Cromwell's tissue had not 

 sent him to a premature grave ; or how the whole face of the earth 

 would have been changed if the nose of Cleopatra had been a 

 little shorter than it was, and so had marred the beauty of face which 

 made her, like another Helen, the teterrima causa belli for a whole 

 generation. Such fanciful speculations are well calculated to import 

 into the philosophy of human life, and into the philosophy of human 

 history, a theory of causation which is as superficial as it is false. 

 As honest Horatio says to Hamlet in the play, when the latter 

 proposes to trace the noble dust of Alexander the Great, in imagi- 

 nation, until perchance it may be found stopping a bung-hole, one 

 feels like saying in the presence of such fine-spun speculations, 

 "'Twere to consider too curiously to -consider so." The strong 

 intellectual forces which are organic in a great mind, as the strong 

 moral and political forces which are organic in society, do not depend 

 for their evolution, or for their grand cyclical movements, on the 

 casual vicissitudes which ripple the surface of human life and affairs. 

 To argue in this wise is to mistake occasion for cause, and by con- 

 founding what is transient and incidental with what is permanent 

 and pervasive, is to make the noblest life, with its destined ends and 

 ways, the mere creature of accident, and is to convert human history, 

 with its great secular developments, into the fortuitous rattle and 

 chance combinations of the kaleidoscope. We may be sure that 

 Henry was too great a man to have lived and died without making 

 his mark on the age in which his lot was cast, whatever should have 

 been the time, place, or circumstance which was to disclose the color 

 and complexion of his destiny. The strong, clear mind, like the 

 crystal, takes its shape and pressure from the play of the constituent 

 forces within it, and is not the sport of casual influences that come 

 from without. 



Armed, however, with his new enthusiasm, the nascent philoso- 

 pher hastened to join a night school in Albany, but soon exhausted 

 the lore of its master. Encountering next a peripatetic teacher of 

 English grammar, he became, under the pedagogue's drill, so versed 

 in the arts of orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, that 



