Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/204

194 Matterhorn, their demon of adventure shows them all the kingdoms of the world of science, and the glory of it; for in fact, the inaccessible sky surrounds them still, and clouds obstruct their vision in every direction. I have no fancy for such mountain-climbing, and think lightly of exploits so barren of results.

I seize the occasion, rather, to awake to your remembrance some thoughts of common interest, which the multiplying avalanches of facts and theories threaten to bury out of sight, as the pure ice of the glacier gets covered over with a sordid sheet of débris, perpetually tumbling from the cliffs between which it flows.

Consider, then, first, that the final cause of a glacier is not to carry moraines, lateral or medial; that these are mere accidents of its existence; and that, were it endowed with intelligence, it would feel little interest and less pride in the heterogeneous, variable, and for the most part useless, burden, which it can not escape, and throws away at the close of its career. Such are the loads of science which we are compelled to carry forward through life, in the forms of fact and theory; misshapen, accidental droppings upon us from our local surroundings; fragmentary specimens of knowledge, of which we construct our confused and shapeless heaps of learning, most of which is of little use, either to ourselves or to the world. The life of the glacier is an elaboration of the universal moisture into snow, nevé, and pure ice, by a slow process of internal constitution; and such is the happy destiny of the true man of science, worked out in wisdom of character, apart from all accidental accumulations of learning, and mainly irrespective of them.

Let us avoid the sacrifice of character to science. As the saying of Jesus of Nazareth, that the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath, has rung through the centuries, a tocsin of alarm to rouse mankind to resist ecclesiasticism, so let the warning cry fill the air of our association, from meeting to meeting, that science is our means, and not our end. Self-culture is the only real and noble aim of life. And as the magnificence, beauty, and utility of a glacier, as a perpetual reservoir of solid moisture, are not gauged by the size, arrangement, or constitutional features of its moraines, neither are the greatness and usefulness of the philosopher measured by his amount of the knowledge of the physical fact-and-theory science of the times.

Of all kinds of intellectual greatness, the greatest is achieved by the philosopher who stands before the thinking world as a model of scientific virtue; deaf to flattery; insensible to paltry, hostile criticism; patient of opposition; dead to the temptations of self-interest; calmly superior to the misjudgments of the short-sighted; whom nothing diverts from the endeavor to live nobly, and to whom noble means are as indispensable as noble ends; in whom the most brilliant successes foster neither vanity nor arrogance; to whom fame is unimportant, and poverty a trivial circumstance; whose joys, like fragrant