David Starr Jordan

“ The Twentieth Century will find room for pure science as well as for applied science and ingenious invention. Each Helmholtz of the future will give rise to a thousand Edisons. Exact knowledge must precede any form of applications. The reward of pure science will be, in the future as in the past, of its own kind, not fame nor money, but the joy of finding truth. To this joy no favor of fortune can add. The student of nature in all the ages has taken the vow of poverty. To him money, his own or others, means only the power to do more or better work. ”

“ All days are one for all good things. They are all holy-days; to the freshman of today, all joys of comradery, all delights of free enthusiasm are just as open, just as fresh as ever they were. From the teacher like influences should proceed. Plodding and prodding is not the teacher's work. It is inspiration, on-leading, the flashing of enthusiasms. A teacher in any field should be one who has chosen his work because he loves it, who makes no repine because he takes with it the vow of poverty, who finds his reward in the joy of knowing and in the joy of making known. ”

“ On the frontier men grow as the California white oak, which, in the open field, sends its branches far and wide.
With plenty of elbow-room the Californian works out his own inborn character. If he is greedy, malicious, intemperate, by nature, his bad qualities rise to the second degree in California, and sometimes to the third. The whole responsibility rests on himself. Society has no part of it, and he does not pretend to be what he is not, out of deference to society. "Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue," but in California no such homage is demanded or accepted. ”

“ What if there are so many of us in the ranks of humanity? What if the individual be lost in the mass as a pebble cast into the Seven Seas? Would you choose a world so small as to leave room for only you and your satellites? Would you ask for problems of life so tame that even you could grasp them? Would you choose a fibreless Universe to be "remoulded nearer to the heart's desire," in place of the wild, tough, virile, man-making environment from which the Attraction of Gravitation lets none of us escape? ”

“ It is worth all the work to see the gleam of a silver side as a half-pounder rises, and, with a flop, takes the fly excitedly to the bottom. And then the nervous thrill as, with a deft turn of the wrist, you hook him securely—whoever has felt that thrill cannot forget it. It will come back to him in his law office when he should be thinking of other things; and with it will come a longing for that dear remembered stream and the old days. That is the hold trout-fishing takes on a man. ”

“ He who leads a worthy life never vexes himself with the question as to whether life is worth living.
We know that all our powers are products of the needs and duties of our ancestors. Wisdom too great to be translated into action is an absurdity. For wisdom is only knowing what it is best to do next. Virtue is only doing it. Virtue and happiness have never been far apart from each other. To know and to do is the essence of the highest service. Those the world has a right to honor are those who found enough in the world to do. The fields are always white to their harvest. ”

“ To know this kind of joy is to put one's self beyond the reach of all others.
The joy of the blue sky, the bright sunshine, the rushing torrent, the songs of birds, "sweet as children's prattle is," the breath of the meadows, the glow of effort, the beauty of poetry, the achievement of thought, the thousand and thousand real pleasures of life, are inaccessible to him "who has a few jolts of liquor under his belt," while the sorrows he feels, or thinks he feels, are as unreal as his joys, and as unworthy of a life worth living. ”

“ For the university must ever be infinitely greater than the sum of all its parts. For its largest part is never present for our measurement, and this part we can not measure is the sum of all its future influence.
This university was founded on love in a sense which is true of no other. Its corner-stone was love—love of a boy extended to the love of the children of humanity. It was continued through love—the love of a noble woman for her husband; the faith of both in love's ideals—and as an embodiment of the power of love Stanford University stands to-day. ”

“ It is not true that the whole of man is occupied, with the effort "to live just asking but to live, to live just begging but to be." The world of thought and the world of action are one in nature. In both truth and love are strength, and folly and selfishness are weakness. There is no confusion of right and wrong in the mind of the Fates. It is only in our poor bewildered slave intellects that evil passes for power. All about us in the press of life are real men, "whose fame is not bought nor sold at the stroke of a politician's pen." ”

“ Will it be a brain unspoiled by lust or dissipation, a mind trained to think and act, a nervous system true as a dial in its response to the truth about you? Will you, boy of the Twentieth Century, let him come as a man among men in his time, or will you throw away his inheritance before he has had the chance to touch it? Will you turn over to him a brain distorted, a mind diseased, a will untrained to action, a spinal cord grown through and through with the devil grass of that vile harvest we call wild oats? ”

“ To know the glory of California scenery, one must live close to it through the changing years. From Siskiyou to San Diego, from Alturas to Tia Juana, from Mendocino to Mariposa, from Tahoe to the Farallones, lake, crag, or chasm, forest, mountain, valley, or island, river, bay, or jutting headland, every one bears the stamp of its own peculiar beauty, a singular blending of richness, wildness and warmth. ”

“ Only in the most general way can the history of any species be traced; but could we know it all, it would be as long and as eventful a story as the history of the colonization and settlement of North America by immigrants from Europe. But by the fishes each river in America has been a hundred times discovered, its colonization a hundred times attempted. In these efforts there is no co-operation. Every individual is for himself, every struggle a struggle of life and death; for each fish is a cannibal, and to each species each member of every other species is an alien and a savage. ”

“ Those who eat only sardines, packed in oil by greasy fingers, and herrings dried in the smoke, can have little idea how satisfying it is to have one's stomach full of them, plump and sleek, and silvery, fresh from the sea.
Thus they chased the herrings about and had a merry time. Then they were chased about in turn by great sea-lions, swimming monsters with huge half-human faces, long thin whiskers, and blundering ways. The sea-lions liked to bite out the throats of the salmon, with their precious stomachs full of luscious sardines, and then to leave the rest of the fish to shift for itself. ”

“ To the philosophy of Evolution, "every meanest day is the conflux of two eternities." Each meanest fact is the product of the world-forces that lie behind it; each meanest man the resultant of the vast powers, alive in human nature, struggling since life began. And these forces, omnipotent and eternal, will never cease their work.
To the philosophy of Pessimism, the child is a mere human larva, weak, perverse, disagreeable, the heir of mortality, with all manner of "defects of doubt and taints of blood," gathered in the long experience of its wretched parentage. ”

“ But we know men not by their likenesses, which are many, but by differences in emphasis, by individual traits which are slight and subtle, but all-important in determining our likes and dislikes, our friendships, loves, and hates. So with the centuries; we remember those which are past not by the mass of common traits in history and development, but by the few events or thoughts unnoticed at the time, but which stand out like mountain peaks raised "above oblivion's sea," when the times are all gathered in and the century begins to blend with the "infinite azure of the past." ”

“ It is to the training of the genuine man that the universities of the world are devoted. They call for the higher sacrifice, the sacrifice of those who have powers not needed in the common struggle of life, and who have, therefore, something over and beyond this struggle to give to their fellows. Large or small, whatever the gift may be, the world needs it all, and to every good gift the world will respond a thousand-fold. Strength begets strength, and wisdom leads to wisdom. "There is always room for the man of force, and he makes room for many." ”

“ A classic thought in the history of applied science is expressed in these words of Huxley: 'There can be no alleviation of the sufferings of man except in absolute veracity of thought and action, and a resolute facing of the world as it is.' 'The world as it is,' is the province of science. 'The God of the things as they are, is the God of the highest heaven.' And as to the sane man, the world as it is is glorious, beautiful, harmonious and divine, so will science, our tested and ordered knowledge of it, be the inspiration of art, poetry and religion. ”

“ To see nothing, to feel nothing—there could be no demand for action. With no failure of action there could be no weariness. From the varied environment of earthly life spring, through adaptation, the varied powers and varied sensibilities, susceptibilities to joy and pain as well as the rest. The greater the sensitiveness the greater the capacity for suffering. Hence the "quenching of desire," the "turning toward Nirvana, the desire to escape from the hideous bustle of a world in which we are able to take no part, is a natural impulse with the soul which feels but cannot or will not act. ”

“ The new century has come upon us with a rush of energy that no century has shown before. Let us stand aside for a moment that we may see what kind of a century it is to be, what is the work it has to do, and what manner of men it will demand to do it.
In most regards one century is like another. Just as men are men, so times are times. In the Twentieth Century there will be the same joys, the same sorrows, the same marrying and giving in marriage, the same round of work and play, of wisdom and duty, of folly and distress which other centuries have seen. ”

“ Hutten wished to know the world, not from books only, but to see all cities and lands; to measure himself with other men; to rise above those less worthy. The danger of such a course seemed to him only the greater attraction. Content to him was laziness; love of home but a dog's delight in a warm fire. "I live," he said, "in no place rather than another; my home is everywhere."
So he tramped through Germany to the northward, and had but a sorry time. In his own mind he was a scholar, a poet, a knight of the noblest blood of Germany ”

“ Pure science and utilitarian science merge into each other at every point. They are one and the same thing. Every new truth can be used to enlarge human power or to alleviate human suffering. There is no fact so remote as to have no possible bearing on human utility. Every new conception falls into the grasp of that higher philanthropy which rests on the comprehension of the truths of science. For science is the flower of human altruism. No worker in science can stand alone. ”

“ But if action is impossible, the mood remains. And here arises the despair of the highly educated. The purpose of knowledge is action. But to refuse action is to secure time for the acquisition of more knowledge. It is written in the very structure of the brain that each impression of the senses must bring with it the impulse to act. To resist this impulse is in turn to destroy it and to substitute a dull soul-ache in its place. "Much study is a weariness of the flesh, and the experience of all the ages brings only despair if it cannot be wrought into life. ”

“ What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses?
"Treason! Where does such treason take its rise? I cannot help thinking of you as ye deserve, ye governments! Can you dry up the fountain of thought? High treason, when it is resistance to tyranny here below, has its origin in the power that makes and forever re-creates man. When you have caught and hung all its human rebels, you have accomplished nothing but your own guilt. ”