PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 221 



Government he freely gave, in many spheres of public usefulness, 

 all the time he could spare from his official duties. And it was 

 in one of these subsidiary public labors, as Chairman of the Light- 

 House Board, that he contracted, as he believed, the disease 

 v/hich carried him to the grave. 



A sense of rectitude presided over all his thoughts and acts. 

 He had so trained his mind to right thinking, and his will to right 

 feeling and right doing, that this absolute rectitude became a 

 part of his intellectual as well as moral nature. Hence in his 

 methods of philosophizing he was incapable of sophistical rea- 

 soning. He sat at the feet of nature with as much of candor as 

 of humility, never importing into his observations " the human 

 being's pride," or the " mystical predominance" of an overween- 

 ing fancy. He was sober in his judgments. He made no hasty 

 generalizations. His mind seemed to turn on " the poles of 

 truth." 



I could not dwell with enough of emphasis on this crowning 

 grace of our beloved friend if I should seek ^o do full justice to my 

 conception of the completeness it gave to his beautiful character. 

 But happily for me I need dwell upon it with only the less of em- 

 phasis because it was the quality which, to use a French idiom, 

 " leaped into the eyes" of all who marked his walk and conversa- 

 tion. In the crystal depths of a nature like his, transparent in all 

 directions, we discern as well the felicity as the beauty of that habit 

 of mind which is begotten by the supreme love of Truth for her 

 own sake — a habit which is as much the condition of intellectual 

 earnestness, thoroughness, and veracity in penetrating to the 

 reality of things, as of moral honesty, frankness, sincerity, and 

 truthfulness in dealing with our fellow-men. The great ex- 

 pounder of the Nicomachean Ethics has taught us, and one of our 

 own moralists has amplified the golden thesis,* that high moral 

 virtue implies the habit of "just election" between right and 

 wrong, and that to attain this habit we need at once an intelli- 

 gence which is impassioned and an appetite which is reflec- 

 tive. And so in like manner all high intellectual virtue implies a 

 habit of just election between truth and error — an election which 

 men make, other things being equal, according to the degree in 

 which their minds are enamored with the beauty of truth, as also 

 in proportion to the degree in which their appetencies for knowl- 



* Dr. Jame3 H. Thornwell : Discourses on Truth. 



