Prof. Le Conte as a Philosopher. 225 



scientific needs of some of the greatest biologists that have 

 lived. Cuvier, Owen, Agassiz, and Le Conte held it, and it 

 is worth while to be reminded that the last three were con- 

 temporaries for much of their lives and that all of them were 

 born a number of 5'ears before Cuvier died. Of them all, Le 

 Conte was the only one who gave up the doctrine and became 

 an evolutionist. 



For a man of such nature as Joseph Le Conte's to have 

 wholly reconstructed his religious faith and philosophy on a 

 higher plane after forty-five, is certainly one of the hardest, 

 noblest acts he could possibly perform. 



PROFESSOR LE CONTE AS A PHILOSOPHER. 



BY CHARLES M. BAKEWELL. 



« 



STUDENTS of philosophy have especial occasion to mourn 

 the loss of Professor Le Conte. He was one of the last 

 representatives of that nobler race of scientists who labored in- 

 cessantly to find through their very scientific investigations a 

 larger and richer world-view; who sought through science a 

 way of life more religious than that of the ordinary traditional 

 believer, more philosophic than that of the ordinary cloistral 

 philosopher. Scientists of the present generation are apt to be 

 more timid, to have an unwholesome dread of the charge of 

 being "unscientific," and to hesitate, at least in print, to step 

 beyond the prescribed limits of their chosen fields of investi- 

 gation. 



Professor Le Conte was, to be sure, interested in his science 

 for its own sake, and attained marked eminence among his 

 specialist brethren; but he was, first of all, a man, interested 

 in all things human, and particularly in those questions that 

 go deepest into human nature, which are precisely the ques- 

 tions of philosophy and religion. He knew that, as a man, he 

 did not live merely in the world of geologj', or in the world 



