Part 7

About a year ago came the sad news of the sudden death of Professor Balfour, of Cambridge. If the loss was felt less severely in this country than in England it was only because he had fewer personal friends here, and to fully understand his worth one must have known and talked with him. It is true that it required no unusual insight to read the fine qualities of the man in his writings, but none save those who knew him could appreciate his remarkable personal attractiveness. Not the least part of the wonderful work of his short life was that which he accomplished as a teacher; here, as everywhere, his personal influence had a large share, and a sketch of Balfour’s scientific work would be incomplete without a recognition of the bearing which his noble character had upon it.

The meeting of leading biologists to found the memorial studentship was remarkable in many ways; rarely have been heard such words of admiration and love for one man as were then expressed for Balfour. Many spoke at length of the debt Cambridge owed him. It may be said that he divided with Foster the honor of giving the great impetus to the biological movement in the English universities. What Huxley had done for Foster the latter did for Balfour, giving him the first hearty encouragement and support; together they raised biology from the third to the level of the first rank of studies at Cambridge, equalling that held by mathematics. Oxford soon followed this important movement, trying to secure Balfour for the professorship left vacant by the death of Rolleston. His connection with natural science at Cambridge was described in warm language by Foster, his teacher, and by Sedgwick, one of his pupils; he advanced morphology there by his brilliant success in teaching and in research.

In teaching he combined manly force with a delicate regard for the feelings of his pupils. From the writer’s personal impressions of him as a lecturer, he did not aim at eloquence, but to be understood in every step. Rarely looking at his hearers, he spoke rapidly and with intense earnestness, crowding a vast deal into the hour. The main qualities of his character shone forth in his lectures: energy, which he infused into his hearers; truthfulness, which soon gave implicit confidence in his statements; modesty and sympathy, which inspired effort and free exchange of thought.

Balfour’s love of truth came constantly into play in his laboratory instruction. While looking over a student’s shoulder he would sometimes say with a laugh: “You must interpret that specimen with the eye of faith”; but this was very far from being a serious injunction, for he exacted of his students the greatest caution in the progress of their microscopic work. However tempting a certain interpretation of a specimen might be, Balfour never accepted it until it rested on the clearest evidence. An instance of this sort is recalled which related to the much disputed origin of a well-known embryonic structure. A number of sections had been prepared, seeming to confirm the view which Balfour himself had advocated some time before; it required considerable self-control not to attach a somewhat forced meaning to them. This was, however, forbidden, and it was not until several days afterward that fresh sections established the fact beyond question.

To Foster, Balfour repaid his student-debt by extending, in turn, continued encouragement to others. He did not fear, as many great teachers have, that joint labor with his juniors would derogate from his reputation. His joint articles are numerous; he was zealous to recognize research done by his pupils, seeming to be prouder of this than of his own work. Nothing could be more stimulating to the young men about him, still distrustful of their powers, than this generous co-operation. Is it surprising, then, that the voluntary attendance upon his lectures increased in seven years from ten to ninety and that at the time of his death twenty students were engaged in difficult research in his laboratory? Only those who are familiar by experience with the few incentives among younger students to the study of biology can appreciate what these numbers mean.

We need not attempt to give a full list of Balfour’s writings. They began in 1873, his twenty-second year, with a few short papers appearing over Foster’s name and his own in _The Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science_; they terminated nine years later with his fine work upon Peripatus, published posthumously in the same journal. His extensive intermediate works, “The Elasmobranch Fishes” and “Comparative Embryology,” are universally known.

From the first he devoted himself to embryology. While this, as among the youngest of the biological sciences, admits of rapid work, it is far from admitting rapid generalization. No other branch of morphology requires more painstaking; the very materials one has to study are minute and indefinite, and two minds will often place different constructions upon the same specimen. There is abundant opportunity for scientific guesswork, with the feeling of security that disproval will be difficult. Balfour understood the real value of guessing at truth, but he always made it very clear to the reader when he was so doing; his hypotheses were accompanied by definite statements in which the reasons pro and con were set forth in all impartiality to each. Herein lies the chief charm and merit of his work, its brilliant suggestiveness, side by side but never in confusion with well-established facts. Every chapter contains half a dozen invitations to other investigators to prove or disprove certain provisional statements. Vast as is the information contained in his “Comparative Embryology,” Balfour himself appreciated that, as far as mere facts went, the first volume would be somewhat out of date before the second was in press. Not so, however, with his masterly discussions of these facts, which are found on every page and the value of which, to embryologists, cannot be estimated. Moreover, to his authorship is largely due the rapidly spreading interest in embryology in England and America—a branch of science, it will be remembered, which had previously been mostly in German hands.

One frequently heard from him his own very modest opinion of his work; this was not at all inconsistent with striking independence and originality of thought and adherence to his convictions. His modesty added more to the recognition of his genius than any assertions of his own could have done. Many were pressing forward to assert his claims, and honors were showered upon him in England and abroad. He was admired and beloved by all who knew him. In scientific discussion he had the rare quality, which Richard Cobden is said to have possessed, of remaining on the pleasantest personal terms with his opponents.

His energy in all matters was great and his power of writing was unusually rapid; but, advised by kind friends, he rarely overtaxed his strength, which was limited. He spent most of his evenings with his friends, throwing off from his mind the labors of the day and talking vivaciously upon the topics of the time. When the first volume of his “Comparative Embryology” was being written, he generally worked but five hours daily, giving much time to physical exercise, bicycling or tennis, into which he entered with all the enthusiasm of his nature. He was courageous but not reckless, and nothing in his previous life would lead us to suppose that the mountain climb which proved fatal was undertaken in a foolhardy spirit.

Balfour in a few years accomplished the work of a lifetime. His influence was and is twofold: first, upon those with whom he came into personal contact, especially his scientific associates and students, an influence which cannot fail to endure (well expressed by Professor Kitchen Parker: “I feel that his presence is still with me; I cannot lose the sense of his presence”); secondly, the influence of his scientific work, which for genius, breadth, and truth can never be surpassed. May the splendid memorial which has been raised for him perpetuate his noble example as a teacher and man of science.

JAMES BRYCE 1838–1922

I had the privilege of knowing James Bryce for many years and enjoyed many long and delightful conversations with him. Beyond all other great men I have known he impressed me as most eager for broad and deep knowledge both of men and of nature. He gained more by travel and direct observation than by reading the works of others.

Although an address was carefully thought out, the following was entirely extemporaneous, because I was suddenly called upon to deliver it in the pulpit of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—quite a contrast to the customary platform of the college and university lecturer! I felt compelled by the surrounding religious atmosphere to use a text, which was happily afforded by the choir as it sang Newman’s beautiful hymn as a processional.

JAMES BRYCE

I am not permitted to have a text, because I am not a preacher. As a naturalist, I am speaking here by invitation of the Bishop and the Dean of this Cathedral on the life of James Bryce as a student of man and of nature. I find in the opening of the beautiful hymn sung by the choir on entering this Cathedral the words which I cannot resist paraphrasing as the central thought of what I am about to say: Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling confusion.

“Lead, Kindly Light,” was the inner motive of the life of James Bryce—the kindly light of the genial nature of a man of faith and confidence, of a man of rugged resolution and constant determination, who never faltered in his efforts, whether it was a physical, or social, or intellectual, or political problem, to throw upon it the light of most careful and thorough examination.

Then another line of the same beautiful poem of John Henry Newman,

O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent,

reveals the other aspect of the life of James Bryce which will impress you if you will read his four volumes as a traveler and explorer. When confused by the world and by the strife of political parties, Bryce would go off quietly on one of these great journeys of his, borne by his stout Scotch heart and by his indomitable energy as a mountain-climber. Brought up in a climate which brings out the best qualities in a man—that hardy nursery of strong Britons; born in northern Ireland, where the kindly qualities and genial nature of the Irish blend with the sturdy persistence of the Scotch, he was equipped by birth as well as by the early training of a remarkable father to enter life along many paths which opened out before him.

Follow him, no doubt somewhat confused, at the age of thirty-nine, after a period of political service in Parliament and lectureship in Oxford University, on that remarkable journey through and beyond the countries which he studied in his “Holy Roman Empire,” into and through Asia Minor, into the region on the borderland of Armenia, in search of Mount Ararat, and you observe an event in his life most typical and characteristic. Every one told him it was impossible to ascend Mount Ararat. One after another the parties that started with him fell behind, until, finally, about four or five thousand feet from the summit, he was entirely alone, and from that point he pushed on to the hollow between the twin peaks where the Bible myth tells us the Ark of Noah rested. He did not find any traces of the Ark, but he seems to have found, in that ascent and in the wonderful survey which the ascent gave him of the great tides of human history which have ebbed and flowed around the base of that mountain, a new and fresh perspective for all his future historical works. There, also, at the turning-point in life, when according to some men the critical age of forty is reached, James Bryce reversed the natural order of things, and until the age of eighty-three—during the latter part of which period I had the honor of making his acquaintance—became a younger man, a larger man, a greater man every year to all those who had the pleasure and privilege and inspiration of knowing him.

What a contrast his thoroughness with the superficiality of other men who have treated the same broad periods of human history, of human activity, and to whom many people appeal for light and guidance! Wells, writing his “Outline of History” from his armchair, guided by the work of all the authors upon whom he could lay his hand; Bryce, seeking out the fountains, the origins, the beginnings of these wonderful movements of peoples which are summed up in the words “Human History.” Himself retreading the paths worn by men for centuries, observing that wonderful variety of races of men where, in entering Transcaucasia, he came on the borders between Turkey and the Russian Dominions; again, when in South Africa, he touched the life of the Kaffirs, of the Hottentots, and of that race of Bushmen which stands at the very bottom of the human scale; finally, in South America, at the age of seventy-four, he entered the intimate life of a people he had not touched before, of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the native Indians of the South American Continent—always traveling with the same genial attitude, the same kindliness, the same lack of criticism, which distinguished his life and writings throughout.

Small wonder that, having as a boy and young man been brought up among the British people, among the Scotch, the Irish, the English, the Scotch-Irish, who are the fountains of our own American life, when he came to America he understood the Americans and was welcomed as one of us, as a man who could interpret our life, our institutions, who could tell us the truth about ourselves without our being offended, the most difficult message that any one coming from any other part of the world can give to the American!

Now we find that Bryce is not dead! James Bryce is not dead! James Bryce is living! He will live! Out of his inspiration, from those penetrating eyes, from that wonderful intellect, from those profound and unbiassed and unprejudiced studies, out of the fruits of years of personal experience, he finally surveys our American institutions in the last, and one of the greatest, of his works, “Modern Democracies.” Nothing could attest the truthfulness of his nature more clearly than the fact that the note of that volume is so different from the note of his early, confident writings as a young ardent Liberal, almost Radical. He found in our midst, and in the new democracies everywhere, so many confusing thoughts, so many unexpected counter-currents, that he comes out, as does every great and profound student of human life and human affairs who approaches the matter from the scientific standpoint of profound knowledge, with a clear warning of the dangers which surround us if we do not take heed and if we lose the art of choosing our leaders, our spiritual leaders, our intellectual leaders, our political leaders.

Leadership! Leadership is the last note, to my mind, of Bryce’s life. He is leading. He himself will lead because he has become now, and I believe for all time, the Kindly Light which will guide us through the interpretation of our American institutions.

LOUIS PASTEUR 1822–1895

To my mind Louis Pasteur is the greatest benefactor of mankind since the time of Jesus Christ, and as he was inspired by religious sentiment I claim that he should be enrolled among the saints and enshrined in our cathedrals. It is of this aspect of his life that “The New Order of Sainthood” deals. Contemplation of this aspect of his life led me to reflections upon Nature and Religion, in which I was greatly aided by my previous studies in the natural philosophy of the Greeks and of Augustine and was guided to the wonderful passages of Dante in “The Divine Comedy” by Bishop Boyd-Carpenter. The sequel to this address is to be found in “Evolution and Religion,” my reply to William Jennings Bryan.

THE NEW ORDER OF SAINTHOOD

Among all the great scientific men whom the nineteenth century produced Pasteur ranks supreme as a benefactor of mankind. He played the original and creative part in the movement for the prevention and relief of human suffering which Sir William Osler has aptly termed “Man’s Redemption of Man.” It is far under the truth to say that he has saved more lives than Napoleon destroyed. In nature he found the causes of a very large part of human suffering; in nature he also found the means of controlling or averting suffering. His attitude toward his fellow men was one of noble compassion. His first trial of the hydrophobia serum with a young sufferer brought to him, his agony of mind lest the remedy itself might be the means of causing death, his joy as the child was restored in perfect health to its parents, is one of the most beautiful episodes in human history. As recited by Radot, “Pasteur was going through a succession of hopes, fears, anguish, and an ardent yearning to snatch little Meister from death; he could no longer work. At night feverish visions came to him of this child, whom he had seen playing in the garden, suffocating in the mad struggles of hydrophobia, like the dying child he had seen at the Hôpital Trousseau in 1880. Vainly his experimental genius assured him that the virus of that most terrible of diseases was about to be vanquished, that humanity was about to be delivered from this dread horror—his human tenderness was stronger than all, his accustomed ready sympathy for the sufferings and anxieties of others was for the nonce centred in ‘the dear lad.’...

“Cured from his wounds, delighted with all he saw, gayly running about as if he had been in his own Alsatian farm, little Meister, whose blue eyes now showed neither fear nor shyness, merrily received the last inoculation; in the evening, after claiming a kiss from ‘Dear Monsieur Pasteur,’ as he called him, he went to bed and slept peacefully.”[4]

The life of Pasteur is typical of that of many students of nature, of less genius, perhaps, but of equal devotion and self-sacrifice. It is interesting to imagine what tributes might have been rendered to Pasteur if he had lived in the period of the early saints of the Church and had won the love of his generation and the reverence of succeeding generations by his mighty works. It is interesting to surmise what would have been the attitude of the early Church toward such a benefactor of mankind. Our belief today is that Pasteur should stand as a symbol of the profound and intimate relation which must develop between the study of nature and the religious life of man, between our present and future knowledge of nature and the development of our religious conceptions and beliefs.

In a very beautiful address[5] before the students of the University of Edinburgh Sir William Osler opens with the words: “To man there has been published a triple gospel—of his soul, of his goods, of his body.” What is and what shall be the attitude of the Church toward the gospel of the body, toward the men who have given us this gospel? The question turns our thoughts at once to the leading and greatest exponent of this gospel, and backward to the early centuries of the Church before there had arisen any divorce between the study of nature and the matters of the spirit.

We are now in a process of readjustment between the issues of two lines of thought, which are almost as old as human history; between laws derived from nature which were discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century as to the origin of man, and traditional laws which when traced to their very beginnings we find to have been purely of human conception. Let us imagine our descendants three or four hundred years hence looking back on the spiritual and intellectual history of man; with larger perspective, they will separate these two grand thought-movements:

First, the Oriental movement, marked by Oriental lack of curiosity about natural law, a great moral and spiritual movement developing three thousand years before Christ along the Nile, the Tigris, and Euphrates, out of five thousand years of hard human experience, and expressed in Judea in the faith that nature is the continuous handiwork of God, in a supreme standard of righteousness, the moral duty being finally summed up in the single phrase, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This was the spiritual redemption of man, which left the laws of his physical welfare unknown and uncared for.

The second movement begins six centuries before Christ in the inquiring mind of the West, which is always characterized by intense curiosity about nature. This movement is the search for natural law. Its rapid progress among the Greeks terminates with the fall of Greece. It is expressed in Cato’s reply to Scipio: “My wisdom consists in the fact that I follow Nature, the best of guides, as I would a God and am loyal to her commands.” After nineteen centuries it revives with Copernicus and Galileo and culminates in Darwin. Man is again perceived as a part of nature; in the study of nature man finds intellectual delight; in the laws of nature man finds his physical well-being; man through nature becomes the redeemer of physical man.

The Augustinian theology was imbued with a deeply theistic view of nature, a view which the modern Church professes but does not profoundly believe nor live by. As shown by Aubrey Moore, Augustine was entirely sound in counselling the entire separation of these two great lines of thought, the natural and the spiritual. “It very often happens,” says Augustine, “that there is some question as to the earth or the sky, or the other elements of this world ... respecting which one who is not a Christian has knowledge derived from most certain reasoning or observation [that is, a natural philosopher], and it is very disgraceful and mischievous and of all things to be carefully avoided, that a Christian, speaking of such matters as being according to the Christian Scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever talking such nonsense that the unbeliever, perceiving him to be as wide from the mark as east from west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing.”

Augustine held what may be regarded as a pristine faith in nature as a manifestation of the divine. This pristine theistic view is founded on passages in Genesis, especially Genesis 2:15 and Genesis 3:19:

And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. (Genesis 2:15.)

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (Genesis 3:19.)

These passages show that nature, typified by the garden, gives man his sustenance, and yet, as it has to be won by the sweat of the brow, man’s energy or art must work with nature. These passages, as Bishop Boyd-Carpenter observes in his inspiring studies of Dante, are also the foundation of the famous lines in the “Divine Comedy” in which the poet expresses the relation between the theistic view of nature and scientific or philosophical inquiry.