Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/419

 LUDWIG GUMPLOWICZ'

I. KOCHANOWSKI Member ef the International Institute of Sociology, Paris

Warsaw, August 26

Deeply moved, still suffering from the paralyzing effect which the news of the self-destruction of the great scholar has made upon me, I write these lines.

"Professor Ludwig Gumplowicz and his wife committed suicide by poison today." This laconic telegram which filled the entire civilized world with reverent awe and deeply shocked the heart of everyone who knew the deceased more closely, relates the tragic final chapter of the life-history of as great a thinker as he was a man.

Without as yet attempting to give an exhaustive scientific valuation of the departed, I will here only try to throw some light on the torturing riddles of his life and death.

Gumplowicz, the writer, thinker, philosopher, sociologist, jurist, and historian, was an uncompromising pessimist; Gum- plowicz, the man, was inspired by an idealism that knew no bounds in the renunciation of his wants, in sacrifice, and the love of absolute truth.

His students called him an angel, and this title was no ex- aggeration applied to a man who — without willing it — surrounded himself with the halo of a great soul and a noble mind.

Gumplowicz died for his beloved wife, who adored him, to save her the terrible sight of his agony, the sight of the gradual dissolution of a man who had suffered for months from cancer of the tongue. She died with him. The heroic pair reached the shore of the great silence only after fifteen years of deep sad- ness over the death of their son, Dr. Max Gumplowicz, who had already earned a well-deserved reputation and departed from hfe voluntarily (1894).

^Reprint from the Vienna weekly journal. Die Wage; translated by Mrs. Johanna Odenwald-Unger.

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