sufficient supply of the best specimens. Teach your children to bring
them in themselves. Take your text from the brooks, not from the book
-sellers. It is better to have a few forms well known than to teach a
little about many hundred species. Better a dozen specimens thoroughly
studied as the result of the first year's work, than to have two
thousand dollars' worth of shells and corals bought from a curiosity
-shop. The dozen animals would be your own.
The study of nature is an intercourse with the highest mind. You
should never trifle with nature. At the lowest her works are the works
of the highest powers--the highest something, in whatever way we may
look at it.
It is much more important for a naturalist to understand the structure
of a few animals than to command the whole field of scientific
nomenclature.
Methods may determine the result.
The only true scientific system must be one in which the thought, the
intellectual structure, rises out of, and is based upon, facts.
He is lost, as an observer, who believes that he can, with impunity,
affirm that for which he can adduce no evidence.
Have the courage to say: 'I do not know.'
Since the ability of combining facts is a much rarer gift than that of
discerning them, many students lost sight of the unity of structural
design in the multiplicity of structural detail. [Footnote: _Atlantic
Monthly_ 33. 93.]
It cannot be too soon understood that science is one, and that whether
we investigate language, philosophy, theology, history, or physics, we
are dealing with the same problem, culminating in the knowledge of
ourselves. Speech is known only in connection with the organs of man,
thought in connection with his brain, religion as the expression of his
aspirations, history as the record of his deeds, and physical sciences
as the laws under which he lives. [Footnote: _Atlantic Monthly_
33. 95.]
The most advanced Darwinians seem reluctant to acknowledge the
intervention of an intellectual power in the diversity which obtains in
nature, under the plea that such an admission implies distinct creative
acts for every species. What of it, if it were true? Have those who
object to repeated acts of creation ever considered that no progress
can be made in knowledge without repeated acts of thinking? And what
are thoughts but specific acts of the mind? Why should it then be
unscientific to infer that the facts of nature are the result of a
similar process, since there is no evidence of any other cause? The
world has arisen in some way or other. How it originated is the great
question, and Darwin's theory, like all other attempts to explain the
origin of life, is thus far merely conjectural. I believe he has not
even made the best conjecture possible in the present state of our
knowledge.
The more I look at the great complex of the animal world, the more
sure do I feel that we have not yet reached its hidden meaning, and the
more do I regret that the young and ardent spirits of our day give
themselves to speculation rather than to close and accurate
investigation. [Footnote: _Atlantic Monthly_ 33. 101.]
X
PASSAGES FOR COMPARISON WITH THE METHOD OF AGASSIZ
BOECKH ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY AND LITERATURE
[Footnote: August Boeckh; _Encyclopadie und Methodobgie der
Philologischen Wissenschaften_, pp. 46-47.]
The person who first seeks to acquire a general survey of a science,
and then gradually to descend to details, will never attain to sound
and exact knowledge, but will for ever dissipate his energies, and,
knowing many things, will yet know nothing. In his lectures on the
Method of Academical Study, Schelling remarks with great justice that,
in history, to begin with a survey of the entire past is in the highest
degree useless and injurious, since it gives one mere compartments for
knowledge, without anything to fill them. In history, his advice is,
first study one period in detail, and from this broaden out in all
directions. For the study of language and literature (which corresponds
with history in its most general sense) a similar procedure is the only
right one. Everything in science is related; although science itself is
endless, yet the whole system is pervaded with sympathies and
correspondences. Let the student place himself where he will--so long
as he selects something significant and worth while,--and he will be
compelled to broaden out from this point of departure in every
direction in order to reach a complete understanding of his subject.
From each and every detail one is driven to consider the whole; the
only thing that matters is that one go to work in the right way, with
strength, intelligence, and avidity. Let one choose several different
points of departure, working through from each of them to the whole,
and one will grasp the whole all the more surely, and comprehend the
wealth of detail all the more fully. Accordingly, by sinking deep into
the particular, one most easily avoids the danger of becoming narrow.
PASSAGES FOR COMPARISON
FROM THE SYMPOSIUM OF PLATO
[The passage is thus summarized by Jowett: 'He who would be truly
initiated should pass from the concrete to the abstract, from the
individual to the universal, from the universal to the universe of
truth and beauty. [Footnote: Plato, _Symposium_. _The Dialogues
of Plato, translated by Jowett, New York, Oxford University Press,
1892, 1. 580-582.]]
_Diotima_.... These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which
even you, Socrates, may enter; to the greater and more hidden ones
which are the crown of these, and to which, if you pursue them in a
right spirit, they will lead, I know not whether you will be able to
attain. But I will do my utmost to inform you, and do you follow if you
can. He who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth
to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor
aright, to love one such form only--out of that he should create fair
thoughts. And soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one
form is akin to the beauty of another; and then, if beauty of form in
general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that
the beauty in every form is one and the same! And when he perceives
this, he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise
and deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms.
In the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more
honorable than the beauty of the outward form. So that if a virtuous
soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend
him, and will search out and bring to the birth thoughts which may
improve the young, until he is compelled to contemplate and see the
beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of
them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle. And
after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may
see their beauty, being not, like a servant, in love with the beauty of
one youth or man or institution, himself a slave, mean and narrow-
minded, but drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty,
he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless
love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at
last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the
science of beauty everywhere....
He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has
learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes
toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and
this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)--a nature
which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or
waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul in
another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place fair, at
another time or in another relation or at another place foul, as if
fair to some and foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or hands
or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or
knowledge, or existing in any other being, as, for example, in an
animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other place; but beauty
absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution
and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing
and perishing beauties of all other things. He who from these ascending
under the influence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is
not far from the end. And the true order of going, or being led by
another, to the things of love is to begin from the beauties of earth,
and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as
steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair
forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices
to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of
absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.
End of Project Gutenberg's Louis Agassiz as a Teacher, by Lane Cooper