Emil du Bois-Reymond

“ It is more than doubtful that man will ever fly; but the time never will come when he can tell how matter thinks. It is easier for us to reconcile ourselves to these limitations than to that everlasting age of ice which science remorselessly points out to us as the last scene in the drama of human affairs. Thus curiously enough it happens that, whereas natural science had seemed to promise to civilization a perpetual duration by insuring it against the inroads of barbarism, it again makes the assurance void and robs us of our hopes of a stable habitation on the earth. ”

“ Germany is become united and powerful, and the longing of our youth to see the German name again respected by land and sea has been fulfilled. Who would find fault with such an achievement? But go back in thought to the divided, powerless, provincial Germany of our youthful days—passing as it were from the cold splendor of the imperial city into the narrow streets of some old town in Middle Germany, with their overhanging gables, and the house-fronts hung with grape-vine and ivy—is there not something lacking in the noisy Present, with all its glittering and dazing magnificence? ”

“ It were a noble task to describe the revolution that natural science has quietly produced in the condition of the human race during the last two or three centuries. Just as it has lifted from over our heads the confining roof of a solid firmament, so, too, has it liberated us intellectually. For every one who hearkens to her teaching she has fulfilled the aspirations of the poet, who, amid the throng of courtiers in the antechamber of Octavian and all the splendor of historical greatness, wistfully bethought him of the disciple of Epicurus as he reposes in powerful calm ”

“ Whoever, having a nature like that of an academician of the old school, prefers to live a contemplative life far from the tumult of the market and the strife of the forum, or even from the stimulating competition of the lecture-room, intent only on the accumulation of the treasures of knowledge, the solution of intellectual problems, the enlargement of his inner circle of thought, he might well at this period long for the undisturbed rest and the quieting gloom of a middle-age Benedictine cell. ”

“ Again, it is a peculiarity of natural science that on the one hand it has a part in the highest aspirations of the human soul, while on the other by insensible gradations it passes into handicraft, into activities whose sole end is lucre. Under the ever-rising demands of every-day life, a steady deviation in the latter direction is inevitable. That side of scientific activity which has to do with the useful arts is ever, unnoticed, coming more and more into the foreground; generation after generation find themselves more and more bent on caring for material interests. ”

“ Thus an evil time is foreboded for pure science, without any definite hope for an immediate turn of the wheel. It is about as if one lived in the midst of a gradual, constant, self-completing change, such as the earth used to suffer in primitive geological times, when, in the course of physical, geographical, and climatic alterations, one so-called period of creation gave way to another, and as if the past of the perishing creation fell to us. ”

“ Above all, qualitative research, so called, has on the scientific mind an educating influence, like that of life on character. Being corrected at every step by nature, and constantly reminded of the uncertainty of his judgments and the fallaciousness of his apparently most firm conclusions; being sooner or later infallibly punished for every over-hasty opinion, for every act of blind trust in appearances: such is the discipline which accustoms the experimental scientist to be chary about rapid and brilliant conquests; to attack the truth which he fain would discover by gradual approaches ”

“ Without meaning any offense to the distinguished men who have taken an active part in organizing our gymnasia, or who are still so engaged, I cannot conceal my conviction that the spirit of the gymnasium does not sufficiently keep pace with the development of the human mind in modern times. As is evident from what has already been said, I am fully alive to the perils with which our intellectual culture is threatened by an excess of realism. At the same time, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that natural science has given a new aspect to human existence. ”

“ Here is the knot, here the enormous difficulty, that racks every understanding that would comprehend the universe. Whoever will not surrender all occurrences into the hand of Epicurus's Chance, whoever admits even the veriest tittle of the doctrine of teleology, must perforce accept Paley's disparaged natural theology, and this the more inevitably the more clearly and accurately he reasons, the more independently he exercises his judgment. But so weighty and so numerous are the facts which seem to favor teleology; so irresistibly do these facts daily force themselves upon us in common life ”

“ Is it not, then, a very curious circumstance that the resuscitation of classical studies should have given the impulse to the development of modern natural science?—that the ancients, who themselves could not think scientifically, nor experiment, nor even observe, should now, by their teaching and by their ideas, produce a race in whom these faculties were to go on steadily and incessantly developing—a race bearing to the authors of its intellectual culture the same relation as subsists between a brood of ducks and the hen that has hatched them out? ”

“ Do kings grow wiser, or peoples more sober-minded? On the contrary, does not the lesson taught by history seem to be this, that history teaches no lesson? Till modern times, did humanity steadily and consecutively advance from step to step in liberty, morality, power, art, well-being, and science? Does not the history of which we speak present to our view rather a labor of Sisyphus, and does not the very conception of different periods of civilization imply the downfall of those civilizations? ”

“ Alas! we know only too well that this kind of history was for a longtime the only one known to man; and for the mass of people it will continue to be the only one. The mighty game of chance, played for stakes the value of which is known of all men, and the strife of passions it calls forth—this drama, whereof man himself is at once the poet and the performer, irresistibly attracts the ingenuous mind, and is full of the profoundest lessons, however little they may be regarded. ”

“ Standing without vertigo on this mountain-summit of Pyrrhonism, he scorns to people the vacuity round about him with the images of his own phantasy and surveys unappalled the unpitying drift of nature without gods. He is not disheartened at the thought that he stands face to face with eternal enigmas. He does not, like an Empedocles, cast himself into the physical abyss whose secrets he is unable to fathom ”

“ The idea of a God who suffers no other gods beside him, who appears not as a human invention involved in unworthy fables, but as the highest, the absolute Being, who is the centre of all man's moral aspirations, and who with unerring omniscience notes every transgression—this idea of God, entertained for hundreds of years by generation after generation of men, accustomed the mind of man, even in scientific matters, to the thought that throughout the universe the cause of things is one only, and inspired him with the wish to know this cause. ”

“ The thread of intelligence, which stretches back into negatively-infinite time, is broken, and our natural science comes to a chasm across which is no bridge, over which no pinion can carry us: we are here at the other limit of our understanding.
This other incomprehensible is consciousness. I will now, conclusively as I believe, prove that not only is consciousness unexplainable by its material conditions in the present status of science, which every one will readily admit, but that, even in the nature of things, it never can be explained by these conditions. ”

“ Philosophers and physicists have attempted to explain the distant action of bodies upon each other through presumably empty space by means of a will dwelling within the atoms. A wonderful will, indeed, that must always belong to two!—that must will whether it wills or not, and that in the direct ratio of the product of the masses, and the inverse ratio of the square of the distance!—a will, the projected subject of which must move in a conic section—a will that reminds us of the faith that can move mountains, but which has never been taken account of in mechanics as a cause of motion. ”

“ Only at rare intervals is this dark picture relieved by the cheering apparition of genuine princely magnanimity, or of peace and prosperity among the people, oftener by the soul-stirring deeds of a heroism which, alas! too often is spent in vain. For, whither ultimately leads this road, whose track lies across rivulets of tears and through a sea of blood? Can we discern in political history any steady progress effected by the play of the forces which constitute its subject-matter? ”

“ Art and literature prostitute themselves to the gross and variable taste of the multitude, swayed hither and thither by the daily newspaper. Where fame lasts only for a day, one of the noblest incitements of human nature—the thought of being famous after death—ceases to have any effect. ”

“ The dreamless sleeper is comprehensible to us, like the universe previous to consciousness. But, as, on the first awakening of consciousness, the world became doubly incomprehensible, so too is it with the sleeper, at the first appearance of a faint image in dreaming.
The irreconcilable conflict of the mechanical view of the universe with freedom of will, and hence indirectly with ethics, is no doubt a matter of high importance. The ingenuity of thinkers in all times has been exhausted in trying to reconcile them, and this question will afford exercise to the mind of man forever. ”

“ The fearful earnestness of a religion which claimed for itself all knowledge, which threatened its adversaries with everlasting torture in the next world, and claimed the right even in this life of visiting them with the most horrible punishment, imparted to humanity in the lapse of centuries that character of sobriety and of profundity which certainly fitted them better for patient research than did the light-hearted joy of life favored by the heathen religions. ”

“ Geology does all that the divining rod was once supposed to do, giving us plentiful supply of water, salt, coal, and petroleum. The list of the metals is ever growing, and yet chemistry has not discovered the philosopher's stone; some day that too will be found, perhaps. In the mean time, it vies with organic Nature in producing things both useful and agreeable. From the black, noisome waste-products of coal-gas, which has transformed every city into another Baku, chemistry derives coloring-matters before which the splendor of tropic plumage pales. ”

“ In the investigation and subjugation of Nature alone there is no standing still; the store is ever increasing, and the creative force is ever producing more and more. Here alone does each successive generation stand securely on the shoulders of their predecessors. Here alone is the disciple disheartened by no nec plus ultra, oppressed by no weight of authority, and even mediocrity finds an honorable place, if it does but seek the truth diligently and conscientiously. ”

“ The fertile and ingenious mathematician who for more than a generation held a leading position among French men of science as the publisher of one of the best-known mathematical journals; the chemist who, by the first organic synthesis, helped to dispel the illusion of vital energy; the physiologist who solved one of the oldest problems of humanity—are men whose death leaves a void not easily filled up. But the luster of even such names as Liouville, Wöhler, and Bischoff pales before that of the first on our list, Charles Darwin. ”

“ We sometimes speak slightingly of Americanism, intimating that it bears utilitarianism on its shield. But who does not feel a patriotic pressure for old Europe at the wonders of the telephone and the phonograph? or at the report of the confirmation by Asaph Hall, with Alvah Clark's objective, of the discovery of the astronomers of Laputa? Hardly a year passes but that the newspapers report some new magnificent institution for purposes of pure science which American public spirit has called into life through private means, in a manner that is known on this side of the water only in England. ”

“ In the onward-pressing haste, every pause for survey or review seems lost time. With historical reflection passed away one of the most fruitful germs of greatness, Carlyle's hero-worship; with comprehensive survey, the possibility of comparing the different branches of science together, and of causing one to illustrate and fructify another. Instead of healthy generalization, the tendency to unrestrained speculation again prevails in Germany. ”

“ In view of the constant pressure of forces of every kind and degree, of the atomistic division of labor around us, of the unregulated assumptions, the short memory, of the overwhelmingly commonplace life of the present generation, the academies have an outer vocation in addition to their inner one. It is their duty to preserve the bond of connection in the division of labor, to have a look to the welfare of knowledge in the flight of the phenomena of the day. They should bring into competition with the dangerous enticements of technics, the charm of pure knowledge. ”

“ Physiology knows no such aesthetic, discriminations of rank. In the view of physiology the kidney secretion is a scientific object of just the same dignity as the investigation of the eye, or the heart, or any so-called "nobler" organ. Nor is Vogt's expression worthy of blame on the ground that it represents mental activity as being the result of material conditions in the brain. Its faultiness lies in this, that it leaves the impression on the mind that the soul's activity is in its own nature as intelligible from the structure of the brain, as is the secretion from the structure of a gland. ”

“ THE relation of man to Nature primordially and of savage races in the present day is, as we know, very different from what it has been represented to be by poets and philosophers. In the delightful pictures their fancy painted there was nothing true: the idyllic conditions amid which they fancied the still youthful human race as living never have existed anywhere. The history of man the world over has its beginning not in a golden age, but in an age of stone. ”

“ As mechanics and physics discovered their guiding star in the persistence of energy, and chemistry in the theory of equivalents, so is the sphere of life composed by the theory of descent into a picture which brings within a single frame the immense abundance of forms of the present with the invisible traces of the most remote past. ”