LOUIS AGASSIZ AND GEORGE BERKELEY 32 1 



The modern naturalist knows that while the best powers of 

 the best minds may find endless pleasure and profitable employ- 

 ment in the study of those relations which bind the living world 

 together into one coherent whole, these relations include far more 

 than man can ever hope to master ; more in delicacy and perfec- 

 tion than his microscope can ever reveal ; more in intricacy and 

 complexity than his senses can follow; more in extent of space 

 and time than the utmost range of his powers ; far more of the 

 network of physical causation than his intellect can grasp. 



If he also knows that his work is beneficial to himself and to 

 all mankind; that his place among men is one of usefulness; that 

 the study of living things and their ways and works is good and 

 pleasant and instructive, — why does he hesitate to believe, with 

 Agassiz, that all this is intended, and that it proves that nature 

 is a language ? 



" If the power of thinking connectedly is the privilege of 

 cultivated minds only ; if the power of combining different thoughts, 

 and of drawing from them new thoughts, is a still rarer privilege 

 of a few superior minds; if the ability to trace simultaneously 

 several trains of thought is such an extraordinary gift, that the 

 few cases in which evidence of this kind has been presented have 

 become a matter of historical record (Caesar dictating several let- 

 ters at the same time) ; if all this is only possible to the highest 

 intellectual powers, — shall we by any false argumentation allow our- 

 selves to deny the intervention of a supreme intellect in calling 

 into existence combinations in nature by the side of which all 

 human conceptions are child's play ? " 



It is a well-known fact that modern naturalists have refused 

 to admit the cogency of Agassiz's reasoning, and all must feel 

 an interest in the reason why ; for it may be that this is due to 

 some error in the method by which Agassiz undertook to prove 

 his thesis, rather than to any weakness in the thesis itself. 



In order to prove that natural history is a language which we 

 learn and listen to, to our entertainment and profit and instruction, 

 he holds it essential to prove that it is nothincr but a language ; 

 that the relations between living things and the world about them, 

 being ideal relations, cannot possibly be physical ones also ; that 

 our "laws of biology" are not "necessary" but "arbitrary." 



