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Sierra Club Bulletin. 



unemotional doctrines which are dignified and sanctified 

 with the name of laws — the law of wages, the law of 

 supply and demand, the law of population and subsistence, 

 the law of the survival of the fittest, and the rest. These 

 do credit to the human mind as a thinking machine, an 

 intellectual engine, but are hardly creditable as ideals for 

 an immortal spirit, whose wealth is not in the abundance 

 of the things it possesses here but cannot take into the 

 hereafter. 



Fortunate is the institution of learning whose influ- 

 ential teachers are men, rather than dispensers of for- 

 mulse^ men whose measure of success is the effect upon 

 the character of the student rather than conformity with 

 abstract laws. 



Fortunate indeed also are the students whose impel- 

 ling ideas, however severely scientific, are yet alive, not 

 excavated from books, but throbbing with the human 

 grace of such a teacher as Joseph Le Conte — alive to pity, 

 and to kindness, and to the service of mankind. 



Professor Joe was a scientist, but science to him was 

 not merely clods and beasts and laws and logic. Human 

 nature, human ambitions, human affections he rated far 

 above these. For him science was but the stepping-stool 

 for aspirations and for ideals which do not halt at the 

 grave — which indeed can come to full fruition only 

 beyond the grave. He knew well, and he made his hear- 

 ers know, that scientific methods are only contrivances, 

 man-made artifices, to be made use of where useful; but 

 that to be bound by them is to be enslaved by one's own 

 servants. In the great crises of life it is not any of the 

 "ologies" that save. It is the homely truths consecrated 

 by the experience of the whole race of man, and €m- 



