EDWARD LIVINGSTON YOUMANS 



THE MAN AND HIS WORK. 



In one of the most beautiful of all the shining pages of 

 his ''History 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 Avise thoughts about it float aloft in the atmos- 

 phere 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 

 comprehensive 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 conclusion processes of reasoning 

 in which many persons have already begun taking the 

 earlier steps. This community in mental trend between 

 the immortal discoverer and many of the brightest contem- 

 porary minds, far from diminishing the originality of his 

 work, constitutes the feature of it which makes it a perma- 

 nent 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 })resently discarded 

 and forgotten. The history of modern physics as in the 

 case of the correlation of forces and the undulatory theory 

 of light furnishes us with many instances of wise 

 thoughts floating like downy seeds in the atmosphere until 

 the moment has come for them to take root. And so it has 



* An Address before the Brooklyn Ethical Association, 3Iarcli 23, 1890. 

 Reprinted from Tho /'ojnilcir Science Montlily, May, 1890, by permission of 

 Messrs. 1>. Appleton and Company. 



