Carl Christoph Vogt

“ Just as an organism evolves, out of two mutually hostile tendencies, inheritance of character derived from ancestry, and acquirement of new advantages in the struggle for life through adjustment to its environment, so the special nature of a people builds itself up out of the inheritance bequeathed by its forefathers and the conquests it has won for itself in its contest for being. In a people's life, as in the individual's life, there are times when the one or the other of these striving forces steps into the foreground and thrusts the other back. ”

“ THE striking feature of the present age is that outcropping of barbarism which has found in the persecution of the Jews an object for the full exercise of its passionate violence. It is our inheritance of centuries, hard to conquer, enduring as adamantine substance in those races that worked themselves out later than the rest into an existence worthy of man. ”

“ The Spanish mock stateliness of mediæval scholasticism is indivisible from the savagery of mediæval university life, and we have accepted it in these modern days along with the rest of our inheritance, and find it cherished and protected in our universities by the powers that be.
Our age strives and struggles for the recognition of the exact sciences which have thoroughly penetrated our life, as opposed to those systems of so called humanist education handed down to us from the middle ages. Unresting, unfaltering, exact science presses forward with its methods and results. ”

“ Not much improvement can be hoped for in the present generation; we may check and repress, if we choose, the manifestations of their indwelling brutality, but can not hinder its secret permanence, amazing as such impulses seem to close observers. But all who are seriously devoted to progress may keep this truth fixed in view, that all elevation of classical studies at the expense of other branches of knowledge is a step backward into barbarism, and all furtherance of the exact sciences in the teaching of youth is a step forward toward civilization. ”

“ Yet it may, perhaps, be said that, with a little less classical and philosophical training, and a little more education in natural science, it would probably earlier have become evident that, even without wishing or intending it, we were taking an active part in this disinterment from the dust of centuries. At all events, it is well that this conviction is now forcing its way: it is only to be hoped that it may gain clearer reality and wider range in those who have won it. ”

“ I believe that I have proved, on the other hand, that the order of writing was primarily dictated by exterior causes, which, in many cases, may have wholly disappeared, but the result of which has been retained by habit and hereditary transmission. Our organization permits us to write with equal facility from the top down, from right to left, from left to right; no physiological condition has compelled us to choose a particular direction. If we select a determined order and drop the others, it is because we have learned to do so from our ancestors ”

“ Haeckel rejects experiment as the highest means of proof, which Virchow requires; at the same time he asks: "What is there to be proved by experiments? What can experiment prove in this case?" But I must confess that I am not at all of his opinion. Haeckel is right in maintaining that the artificial breeding of our domestic animals, such as the horse, the pigeon, and the dog, and the culture of our garden plants and culinary vegetables sufficiently demonstrate the mutability of species; that the forms purposely developed by us differ from one another far more than wild species do ”

“ A complete analysis of all the external influences that can have acted on the manner of writing is necessary to decide whether there exists only a single order of letters and lines imposed by nature, or whether the diversity which we see to-day is produced solely by external causes. ”

“ MODERN investigations have shown us that certain parts of the brain, situated in the region of the temples, have a predominant share in the formation of articulate language; or, to express it in a short phrase, that the majority of men speak by means of the third frontal circumvolution of the left cerebral hemisphere. All who have occupied themselves a little with physiology know also that the nervous fibers cross each other in the brain, so that the movements of the left arm are commanded by the right hemisphere, while those of the right arm depend on the left hemisphere. ”

“ If Becquerel and Regnault were known only in professional circles, the name of Leverrier is familiar to all who have heard of the planet Neptune, which he so ingeniously discovered; and Claude Bernard is not unknown to cultivated people, as his fertile pen has popularized physiological knowledge and investigations. Only one of the four, Becquerel, was popular as a lecturer; Claude Bernard was the only one among them whose views reached far beyond his special field of knowledge, and, for this reason, he knew how to adapt the style of his writings to the requirements of cultivated society. ”

“ The root of the matter lies very much deeper. The world of antiquity, on which the education of our youth has been nourished since the middle ages, and is fed now, was founded on the institution of slavery; its whole existence would be as inconceivable apart from slavery as would be the aboriginal German world without woman's servile labor for her lazy lord and husband. The ancient German Tacitus drew was a hunter and fighter, stretched at odd times on his bear-skin, guzzling and gambling, while his Thusneldas and serfs did all the work for him, tilling the ground and sweating for his food. ”

“ The more frequently a man writes, the more also will the figurative images produced by writing be fixed in his brain. But as his impressions and images are transmitted to his brain only by the muscular sensation of the single right hand—with the coöperation of the eyes, indeed—we have a right to expect that experiments and observations made on certain cerebral parts of paralytic patients will cast some light on the manner in which these figurative and largely unilateral images of the writing are formed and preserved in the brain. ”

“ Nevertheless, I am the last person to question the importance of genuine literary education, or to suppose that intellectual culture can be complete without it. An exclusively-scientific training will bring about a mental twist as surely as an exclusive literary training. The value of the cargo does not compensate for the ship's being out of trim; and I should be very sorry to think that this scientific college would turn out none but lop-sided men. ”

“ I have sought for information respecting the manner in which the ancient Aryans wrote in the absence of chairs and desks, without finding anything which could furnish an explanation of our mode of aligning the letters, so contrary to those of other peoples. The direction has become hereditary with us, transmitted from generation to generation, and our furniture, implements, and positions have become conformed to it. In setting our tables and adjusting our positions, we always seek to bring the light from the left, while the Shemite looks to the right for it. ”

“ Berlin is steadily approaching the same state of affairs. It is a pity that German universities cannot be dissolved every thirty years and manned anew! Perhaps some life would then flow into those places of refuge, where the scientific big-wigs rest from the toils of their youthful years! ”

“ I find in it an agreement with my doctrine partly gratifying and partly saddening, since I can hardly understand how an author of so much insight should not long ago have felt the scales drop from his eyes. "Wherever our glance falls," he says, "nothing strikes us but ideas, laws, institutions, that existed a century ago, and yet have been set aside for ten years past or more, by the course of culture and increasing insight. ”

“ The question, we see, becomes general; it extends to the general movements in writing, and is concentrated at last in a single point: are there facts which force us to admit a particular cerebral center, on which the movements in writing depend? In other words, does the manner in which we write depend upon a physiological necessity—determined by the structure of the brain? All peoples write with the right hand. ”

“ Inasmuch as we are in the habit of writing with the right hand, it is evident that the movements necessary for the action of writing must be paralyzed by an affection of the left hemisphere. But we may learn to write with the left hand. ”

“ THEY die in such rapid succession! You hardly have time, after returning from a funeral, to think about who is to be the successor of the lamented dead, when you hear of the demise of another illustrious colleague. ”

“ Development does not advance with even flow, but by fits and starts—oftenest it is like that style of march in which two leaps are made backward after taking three forward.
We do leap—but it is backward, away into the middle ages, which we fancied we had got rid of. ”

“ We have no reason yet to affirm that the lowest animals possess psychic attributes; these we find only in the higher animals, and with perfect certainty only in the highest." Verily, Haeckel is right when he says that any zoölogist, on reading this sentence, must throw up his hands in astonishment and ask, "Where would Virchow fix the point at which the soul suddenly enters the previously soulless body?" ”

“ There was something that did not occur to the mind of this Englishman, enriched by trade and industry, who felt that every step in his path of life was almost a stumble, by reason of his defective knowledge of the exact sciences. "It is not impossible," says Huxley, "that we shall hear this express exclusion of 'literary instruction and education' from a college which nevertheless professes to give a high and efficient education sharply criticised. ”

“ When we remember that the natural sciences began only about a century ago to strive for a place in the state; that before that date they had been nothing more than the private affair of exceptional minds; that for the first half of our century even they played absolutely no part in public education, but only ran a tolerated subcourse with it in the universities, and were utterly unnoticed both in the lower schools and in special seminaries; that in my younger days a man might be regarded as cultivated without having the faintest notion of any natural science whatever ”

“ While this pamphlet is highly remarkable, as well for its contents as for its way of expressing them, it is perhaps yet more remarkable for that which it either hints or leaves unsaid—I mean, to speak plainly, for its indulgence toward that easy-going confidence with which some of the eminent minds of the past ten years have allowed themselves to believe that the whole nature of mankind is radically changed, because it has walked for a while with a varnished cane instead of a knotty club. ”

“ Either organisms were evolved in a natural way, or they were created in a supernatural way, independently of one another, Haeckel, then, considers the evolution theory, first, as a universal cosmic idea, which assumes one causal law for all natural phenomena—the theory of descent, according to which all animals and plants are derived from simple primordial organisms ”

“ If after a youth of terrible privations—very often he did not know in the morning how to get his dinner—he could now feel happy, seeing that everything which the ambition of the savant could wish for was offered to him, the highest positions at the universities and in the learned societies, a seat in the Senate, for which he was indebted to his scientific eminence, and not to any political services, he was weighed down, on the other hand, by serious bodily ailments and by the saddest of domestic misfortunes. ”

“ Leverrier and Regnault had originally been clerks in stores, and had studied in their leisure hours until they were able to gain admittance to the Polytechnic School; Claude Bernard had come to Paris with hardly anything in his pocket but a tragedy, and he had first dabbled in literature. Hard, indescribably hard work, untold privations, and struggles of all kinds, enabled these men to attain the high position which they will always hold in the history of science. ”

“ In Giessen, he said, there was no tailor competent to mend or only to imitate a Paris-made garment. One day Liebig entered the laboratory with a slender little Frenchman, who wore the same kind of blue coat, but without a spot, and introduced him to us as M. Regnault, a student of the Paris School of Mines, who was to familiarize himself here with organic analysis, then the hobby of savants. Demarçay was of dark complexion, with raven-black hair, witty, and fond of practical jokes; Regnault was ruddy and fair, with long, light-colored hair, grave, but confiding. ”

“ The members of the Paris Academy of Sciences can scarcely find competent successors for the dead celebrities among the few representatives of the new generation; yet the places of those celebrities must be filled, although everybody knows that the new men will but poorly fill those places. Leverrier, Becquerel, Regnault, Claude Bernard—where are the names among the younger savants that equal them, or that might be hoped one day to eclipse their predecessors? ”