102 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



modern science, neither of them, indeed, friendly to that 

 spirit, has placed me here to-day. These men are the Eng- 

 lish Carlyle and the American Emerson. I must ever re- 

 member with gratitude that through three long, cold Ger- 

 man winters Carlyle placed me in my tub, even when ice 

 was on its surface, at five o'clock every morning ; not 

 slavishly, but cheerfully, meeting each day's studies with a 

 resolute will, determined whether victor or vanquished not 

 to shrink from difficulty. I never should have gone through 

 Analytical Geometry and the Calculus had it not been for 

 those men. I never should have become a physical inves- 

 tigator, and hence without them I should not have been 

 here to-day. They told me what I ought to do in a way 

 that caused me to do it, and all my consequent intellectual 

 action is to be traced to this purely moral source. To Car- 

 lyle and Emerson I ought to add Fichte, the greatest rep- 

 resentative of pure idealism. These three unscientific men 

 made me a practical scientific worker. They called out, 

 " Act ! " I hearkened to the summons, taking the liberty, 

 however, of determining for myself the direction which 

 effort was to take. 



And I may now cry, " Act ! " but the potency of action 

 must be yours. I may pull the trigger, but if the gun be 

 not charged there is no result. We are creators in the 

 intellectual world as little as in the physical. We may 

 remove obstacles, and render latent capacities active, but 

 we cannot suddenly change the nature of man. The " new 

 birth " itself implies the preexistence of the new character 

 which requires not to be created but brought forth. You 

 cannot by any amount of missionary labor suddenly trans- 

 form the savage into the civilized Christian. The improve- 

 ment of man is secular — not the work of an hour or of a 

 day. But though indubitably bound by our organizations, 

 no man knows what the potentialities of any human mind 

 may be, which require only release to be brought into ac- 



