Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/163

 WHAT BOURGET THINKS OF US

I was even disquieted myself, although I am of a cold, calm temperament, and not easily disturbed. I feared for my country. And I was not wholly tranquilized by the verdicts rendered as above. It seemed to me that there was still room for doubt. In fact, in looking the ground over I became more disturbed than I was before. Many worrying ques tions came up in my mind. Two were prominent. Where had the teacher gotten his equipment ? What was his method?

He had gotten his equipment in France.

Then as to his method! I saw by his own inti mations that he was an Observer, and had a System that used by naturalists and other scientists. The naturalist collects many bugs and reptiles and butter flies and studies their ways a long time patiently. By this means he is presently able to group these creatures into families and subdivisions of families by nice shadings of differences observable in their characters. Then he labels all those shaded bugs and things with nicely descriptive group names, and is now happy, for his great work is completed, and as a result he intimately knows every bug and shade of a bug there, inside and out. It may be true, but a person who was not a naturalist would feel safer about it if he had the opinion of the bug. I think it is a pleasant System, but subject to error.

The Observer of Peoples has to be a Classifier, a Grouper, a Deducer, a Generalizer, a Psychologizer ; and, first and last, a Thinker. He has to be all these, and when he is at home, observing his own folk, he is often able to prove competency. But history has

�� �