11 



used to be a very bright young man!'" Happy 

 is the conceited youth who at the proper moment 

 receives such salutary cold water therapeutics as this 

 from one who, in other respects, is a kind friend. 

 We cannot all escape from being abstractionists. I 

 myself, for instance, have never been able to escape ; 

 but the hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me the 

 difference between all possible abstractionists and all 

 livers in the light of the world's concrete fulness, 

 that I have never been able to forget it. Both kinds 

 of mind have their place in the infinite design, but 

 there can be no question as to which kind lies the 

 nearer to the divine type of thinking. 



Agassiz' s view of Nature was saturated with 

 simple religious feeling, and for this deep but un- 

 conventional religiosity he found at Harvard the 

 most sympathetic possible environment. In the fifty 

 years that have sped since he arrived here our 

 knowledge of Nature has penetrated into joints and 

 recesses which his vision never pierced. The causal 

 elements and not the totals are what we are now 

 most passionately concerned to understand ; and 

 naked and poverty-stricken enough do the stripped- 

 out elements and forces occasionally appear to us 

 to be. But the truth of things is after all their liv- 

 ing fulness, and some day, from a more command- 

 ing point of view than was possible to any one in 

 Agassiz's generation, our descendants, enriched with 

 the spoils of all our analytic investigations, will get 

 round again to that higher and simpler way of look- 



