Slosson

“ The public is to be congratulated upon the fact that the writer of the present volume is better qualified than any other man in the country to bring home to his readers some of the great results of modern chemical activity as well as some of the big problems which must continue to engage the attention of our chemists. Dr. Slosson has indeed the unique quality of combining an exact and intimate knowledge of chemistry with the exquisite clarity and pointedness of expression of a born writer. ”

“ I was curious to know why he had left Leipzig and chemistry for Gross-Bothen and philosophy, had abandoned one of the greatest of universities and the most popular of the sciences for the Saxon village and a field of thought reputed as unproductive. He explained to me that in early years he had a leaning toward philosophy, but in those days the subject was looked upon with disfavor. Now things have changed. People realize that it is necessary to take a wide as well as a close view. Civilization advances by alternating periods of specialization and generalization. ”

“ The proper use of force is, in Dewey's opinion, "the acute question of social philosophy in the world to-day", and "a generation which has beheld the most stupendous manifestation of force in all history is not going to be content unless it has found some answer to the question." In an article on "Force, Violence and Law" [8] he discusses the possibilities of the peace movement in the following fashion:
At various times of my life I have, with other wearied souls, assisted at discussions between those who were Tolstoyans and—well, those who weren't. ”

“ This is eminently characteristic of Ostwald. His own researches, great as they are, may without injustice be regarded as of less importance than the unique service he has rendered to his science by the discovery and prompt utilization of original theories and generalizations, whether found in the forgotten files of the journals and transactions, in the papers of his contemporaries or the work of his students. This was a task requiring both genius and generosity. What he did for Gibbs, the American, he did for van't Hoff, the Dutchman, and Arrhenius, the Swede, and many others, living and dead. ”

“ What brutal slave owner at any time forbade women to beautify canvas with satisfying hues and lines depicting life or nature? As in music, man has encouraged women to do these things, yet where are your Raphaels, your Leonardos, your Rubenses? Have women been forbidden to mold, carve, or draw? ”

“ To serve the spirit and the purpose that has been breathed into our lives. We fight not for ourselves—for we are but the momentary hands and eyes of the Life of the World. Through us and through the little folk the Spirit looks and learns. ”

“ Et la pitié, pareille à un nouveau-né chevauchant la tempête, ou à un cherubin céleste qui monte les coursiers invisibles de l'air, soufflerait l'acte horrible dans les yeux de tout homme jusqu'à noyer le vent parmi les larmes. ”

“ If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Of course I do not here speak of that beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and of appearances; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science; I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp. ”

“ Our glance would seize in passing, sculptured in the living marble of the human body, bits of statuary as beautiful as those of antiquity. We would hear singing in the depths of our souls like music, sometimes gay, more often plaintive, always original, the uninterrupted melody of our interior life. ”

“ Incomprehensible as it may seem, to his simple intellect the fisherman's art was a whole system of morality, a guide for every-day life, an education, a gospel. It was all any poor mortal man, woman, or child, needed in this world to make him or her happy, useful, good. ”

“ In Maeterlinck's writings, various though they be in form and topic, may be continuously traced the changing moods of the philosophy of the last twenty years, for he has always retained his sincerity of thought and courage of expression.
To look fearlessly upon life; to accept the laws of nature, not with meek resignation, but as her sons, who dare to search and question; to have peace and confidence within our soul—these are the beliefs that make for happiness. But to believe is not enough; all depends on how we believe. ”

“ I may believe that there is no God, that I am self-contained, that my brief sojourn here serves no purpose; that in the economy of this world without limit my existence counts for as little as the evanescent hue of a flower—I may believe all this, in a deeply religious spirit, with the infinite throbbing within me; you may believe in one all-powerful God, who cherishes and protects you, yet your belief may be mean, and petty, and small. ”

“ Maeterlinck does not seem to me so much an original thinker as an exquisitely sensitive personality who is able to catch the dominant note of the times in which he lives, and to give it artistic expression, as a musician upon a high tower might take as his key the fundamental tone of the streets below, modulating his music as the rhythm of the city changes, not to obtain applause, but because his soul is in sympathy with the life around him. ”

“ To grow according to the will of God! To grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light! Greater, he said, speaking with slow deliberation, greater, my Brothers! ”

“ It is a verification of his faith that a man creates his own environment. The surrounding forest, the old house with its long corridors, the garden where the broken pillars and arches of the buried temple appear here and there among the vines and flowers, are the familiar scenes of all his dramas. All that is lacking is the sea, which is so often in his thoughts, and some dank, dark caves and dungeons underneath. But Maeterlinck does not need nowadays such subterranean accessories, for he has passed through his Reign of Terror, and come up into the sunshine. ”

“ For forty years it had hidden itself away, growing and blossoming and casting abroad its tiny seeds in its watery home, unseen, or at least unnoticed, by living soul, save by the keen, soft, limpid eyes of Fishin' Jimmy. ”

“ The cobble-stoned streets stroll out from the market place in a casual sort of a way and change their minds about where they are going without notice, twisting about Gothic churches, diving under old towers, wandering slowly along the banks of the Saale, or starting suddenly straight up hill. ”

“ Of even more vital moment is chemistry in the domain of health: the pitiful calls of our hospitals for local anesthetics to alleviate suffering on the operating table, the frantic appeals for the hypnotic that soothes the epileptic and staves off his seizure, the almost furious demands for remedy after remedy, that came in the early years of the war, are still ringing in the hearts of many of us. No wonder that our small army of chemists is grimly determined not to give up the independence in chemistry which war has achieved for us! ”

“ I shall be happier than you, and calmer, if my doubt is greater, and nobler, and more earnest than is your faith; if it has probed more deeply into my soul, traversed wider horizons, if there are more things it has loved. ”

“ I am convinced myself that there is no more evil thing in this present world than Race Prejudice; none at all. I write deliberately—it is the worst single thing in life now. It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any other sort of error in the world. Through its body runs the black blood of coarse lust, suspicion, jealousy and persecution and all the darkest poisons of the human soul. ”

“ If reality struck our senses and our consciousness directly; if we could enter into immediate communication with things and with each other, I believe that art would be useless, or rather that we would all be artists, for our souls would then vibrate continuously in unison with nature. Our eyes, aided by our memory, would cut out in space and fix in time inimitable pictures. ”

“ Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilization to the beginning of the next. ”

“ Elder Welcome was one of the old-fashioned sort not so common in these days, a good man, but stern and somewhat harsh. He preached only the terrors of the law, dwelt much upon the doctrines, the decrees, election, predestination, and eternal punishment, and rarely lingered over such themes as the fatherhood of God, his love to mankind, and his wonderful gift to a lost world. ”

“ The trees, that for so many slow-moving years have serenely dwelt on its borders, shrink back in dread of disaster. They seem to be hastening one to the other, to approach their green heads, and in startled groups to debate how to bar the way of the strange apparition. ”

“ Before man found that he could make all the dyes he wanted from the tar he had been burning up at home he searched the wide world over to find colors by which he could make himself—or his wife—garments as beautiful as those that arrayed the flower, the bird and the butterfly. ”

“ Tramp, tramp, they march, doing what they have been told to do, incapable of doing anything they have not been told to do, trustful and pitiful, marching to wounds and disease, hunger, hardship, and death. ”

“ But his love for our dog Dash became a passion, for Dash was an angler. Who that ever saw him sitting in the boat beside his master, watching with eager eye and whole body trembling with excitement the line as it was cast, the flies as they touched the surface—who can forget old Dash? His fierce excitement at rise of trout, the efforts at self-restraint, the disappointment if the prey escaped, the wild exultation if it was captured, how plainly—he who runs might read—were shown these emotions in eye, in ear, in tail, in whole quivering body! ”

“ Nor was it desirable, even for the science of mind, for there would always have been wanting to that science something infinitely precious—the precision, the anxiety for proof, the habit of distinguishing that which is certain and that which is simply possible or probable. The sciences concerned with matter can alone give to the mind that precision, that rigor, those scruples. ”

“ In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. ”

“ He is a triple-starred scientist man who can bring down the highest flying scientific fact and tame it so that any of us can live with it and sometimes even love it. He can make a fairy tale out of coal-tar dyes and a laboratory into a joyful playhouse while it continues functioning gloriously as a laboratory. ”

“ Generals in our day grow obsolete as rapidly as inventions and sciences. The war has taught us that the blood of nations, the incalculably precious blood, is to be entrusted only to the freshest, the most elastic, the most gifted of military spirits, the very cream of the crop. ”

“ I look and I believe I see, I listen and believe I hear, I study myself and I believe I read to the bottom of my heart. But what I see and what I hear from the external world is simply what my senses extract from it in order to throw light upon my conduct; what I know of myself is what flows on the surface, what takes part in action. ”

“ This earth is no resting place; this earth is no playing place, else indeed we might put our throats to the little people's knife, having no greater right to live than they. And they in their turn might yield to the ants and vermin. We fight not for ourselves but for growth, growth that goes on forever. To-morrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through us. ”

“ Then they will stroll across a common bridge, along the common embankment, by the light of the common street lamp shining alike on the just and the unjust, up the common street and into the common Trafalgar Square where on the smallest hint that communism is to be tolerated for an instant in a civilized country, they will be handily bludgeoned by a common policeman and hauled off to the common gaol. ”

“ Jimmy saw him holding up one paw helplessly, and looking at him with wistful, imploring brown eyes, heard his pitiful whimpering cry for aid, and never doubted his great distress and peril. Was Dash not a fisherman? And fishermen, in Fishin' Jimmy's category, were always true and trusty. So the old man without a second's hesitation started down the steep, smooth decline to the rescue of his friend. ”

“ We have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin to realize that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which Dickens was called a caricaturist, all that Victorian universe in which he seemed vulgar—all that is itself—breaking up like a cloud-land. ”

“ He had missed the boys, leaving the path by which they had returned, and while stumbling along in search of them, feeble and weary, he had heard far below a sound of distress. Looking down over a steep, rocky ledge, he had seen his friend and fishing comrade, old Dash, in sore trouble. Poor Dash! He never dreamed of harming his old friend, for he had a kind heart. ”