CHAPTER X.

After the foregoing pages had been for the most part prepared, I received from Professor Gurney, in Europe, a letter giving his recollections and impressions of Chauncey. It reached me just as I was pondering the matter of a general summing up of the qualities of our friend; but after reading it I have had no wish to say any thing more; and so I will add it here, with a few notes, as the best ending of this book: Mr. Gurney, having graduated with Wright in 1852, was a tutor in the College from 1857 to 1863; Assistant Professor of Latin from 1863 to 1867, of Philosophy from 1867 to 1868, and of History from 1868 to 1869; from 1869 to the present time he has been the University Professor of History. From 1869 to 1876, he was also Dean of the College. Mr. Gurney sends the letter in a rough draft, and with some expressions of misgiving as to the form of it. Illness and much occupation, he says, “have caused this letter to drag along, until it has lost all unity, and become a somewhat unwieldy mass of reminiscences and reflections, with many repetitions; yet I have neither the time nor the spirit to recast and rewrite it. The rheumatism, I dare say, has got into the joints of what I have written.” And he goes on to give me a very wide power of amendment. Although I quote this, out of justice to Mr. Gurney’s own literary conceptions, I feel sure that the reader will thank me for making no considerable changes. ⁹³ —

>“Rome, 1877.

. . . “Though we were classmates, I knew Chauncey but slightly in college: our real acquaintance began in the autumn after our graduation, in 1852. Then I lived for a few weeks in Cambridge; and he, Chase, and I fell into the way of spending our evenings together. By some freak of memory, one of these evenings remains still distinct in my mind, although all

the others are a blank. I can still see the room, — and almost the formulae of Taylor’s theorem, over a point in which the talk began, — as Chauncey sat discoursing to me till morning upon the metaphysical conceptions underlying the methods of fluxions and the Calculus. I mention this only because it illustrates to me how like in mental habit was the young fellow of two-and-twenty to the man of two-and-forty. That evening was the prototype of thousands we afterwards spent together; and had I, twenty years later, raised the same question, the chances are that he would have unconsciously reproduced in all essentials the same thoughts and in the same order. The tenacity, by the way, of Chauncey’s hold upon all the results of his past thinking was marvellous, and showed, if I may say so, how organically connected was his whole structure of thought. ‘You remember,’ he would say, ‘the definition I evolved of this, —or the law I formulated of that, — in such and such a talk with you,’ — and the conversation, it might be, had occurred five or ten years before.

“I said just now that it was by some freak of memory that I recalled so vividly one particular evening. Doubtless, however, the exceptional distinctness of it is due to my brain being already excited by a fever, which obliged me to return to Boston after a few weeks’ stay in Cambridge; and it was five years before I went back to Cambridge to live. In the course of these five years, the Club, as you remember, was established, in whose earlier and more literary days Chauncey played so important a part. See pages 39 and 40. ⁹⁴ During these years, I saw much less of our friend than you and several others did who lived in Cambridge. But besides meeting him in the Club, of which the head-quarters in those days may be said to have been in his rooms at Deacon Brown’s on Bow Street, I occasionally went out to spend an evening with him there. The talk, as well as I can now remember, always ran in much the same

channels. As the evening wore on, from whatever point the conversation started, it was sure soon to become a stream of psychological or metaphysical speculation on Chauncey’s part.

Cave hominem unius libri, says the proverb; which had probably a more frequent application once, when books were rarer. At any rate, Chauncey was the only striking illustration that has come in my way of the immense amount of nutriment that an original and meditative mind may draw from a single author. Sir William Hamilton, at this period of Chauncey’s life, held for several years substantially the same place in his intellectual life that was afterwards occupied by Mill and Darwin. In a letter of Mr. Darwin E. Ware, from which I have already quoted, he says: “The lateness of the development of Chauncey’s tastes and powers in the direction of philosophy, considering the aptitude he afterwards displayed, is quite remarkable. While in college, mathematics, the physical sciences, and natural history absorbed nearly all his attention. In these, he was recognized in the class as without a peer or rival. His capacity for philosophy, I think, was not then suspected by others, or even, as I believe, by himself: there were those in his class who showed a deeper interest in metaphysical studies. The notes of Sir William Hamilton contained in Dr. Walker’s edition of Reid, that was used as a college text-book, tempted here and there a fellow-student to go further, and examine whatever of Hamilton’s writings were then accessible. Late in the Senior year, I remember that Hamilton’s essay on the ‘Philosophy of the Conditioned,’ published in 1829, in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ was to him an unknown chapter in the history of speculation. A few years after, he was not more familiar with the simplest problems in geometry than with the whole of Hamilton’s philosophy down to the nicest attenuations of definition that pervade it. “The only subject related to philosophy in the course of the college exercises, which, as I remember, deeply interested Chauncey, was the question given out by Dr. Walker as the subject for a forensic, —whether the faculties of men and animals differ in kind or degree. Dr. Walker was then the Professor of Philosophy, and preached in the college chapel. His powerful influence was on the side of the transcendental school. It shows how normal to Chauncey’s mind was the philosophical system he afterwards espoused, developed, and taught as a master, that, in harmony with it, and notwithstanding the instruction given him in recitations, lectures, and sermons by a revered teacher, he, with the greatest earnestness, maintained that this difference was one of degree, and not of kind. “I think his interest in philosophy was not greatly aroused until after 1856. For in this year, while we roomed together, he was reading Whewell’s ‘History of the Inductive Sciences,’ and was deep in the Novum Organum of Bacon, whose aphorisms concerning the province of science and the interpretation of nature were constantly in his speech.” ⁹⁵ You will still remember how refreshing it was to us in

our college clays to pass from the text of Reid, with his homely, practical way of applying his common-sense to metaphysical problems, to the notes furnished by Dr. Walker from Hamilton’s edition of Reid, almost obtrusively precise, acute, and learned. It was like turning your eyes from the motions of a sturdy ploughman to those of a trained athlete. The taste then acquired for Hamilton was soon afterwards more fully gratified by the reproduction in this country of nearly all that he had then published, and the College Library copy of Hamilton’s edition of Reid supplied the rest. Later, after Hamilton’s death, came a fresh interest and new material from the publication of his lectures on Logic and Metaphysics. Though Chauncey, in after years, abandoned all that was peculiar in Hamilton’s system, as for instance his explanation of the origin of the so-called necessary truths, I doubt whether any other philosophical author would have aided his development in so many ways. Our friend all through his life, so far back at least as my acquaintance with him runs, was utterly averse to reading. All that he required from books, and all that his nature allowed him to obtain from them, was stimulus and direction to his own thoughts from the questions they raised, and to a less extent from the solutions they offered. Now, Hamilton, from the superabundance of the stores of learning which he brings forth upon all things, great and small, in the history of philosophy, was exactly suited to meet this want of Chauncey, while the easy mastery that he has over his learning and the new setting which he gives to others’ thoughts save him from becoming pedantic and tiresome. Chauncey’s relation to Hamilton in those days was in a way like that of a devout Christian to his Bible. Not that he was ever given to accepting the plenary inspiration of any one; but when he was in full sympathy with a method in philosophy, and felt a thorough respect for its representative, — as was then the case with Hamilton, and later with Mill and Darwin, — he was never weary of going back to the texts, so to speak, to find food for meditation, and starting-points for new developments and applications of his philosophical principles. One might truly, I think, carry the suggestion a step farther, and say that Chauncey’s intellectual adherence to a system sometimes took a tinge of personal loyalty to its founder, which inclined him to be forward to defend, at least against followers of a different school, even the obiter et incuriose dicta of the master. If, however, his judgment was ever unconsciously biassed in particulars by his regard for one thinker, or his strong disregard, if I may say so, for another, the intellectual foible was more than offset by the modesty and simplicity of character it revealed. Though in pure philosophical power he was quite worthy to rank with the first, and grew with years into a fitful consciousness of his own worth, his spirit led him always, as a matter of course, to subordinate himself to the recognized representative of his philosophical faith. In spreading this gospel, his labors almost always took the form of exposition, defence, illustration, or new application of that representative’s teachings, however original, subtle, fruitful, might be the contributions to the system which he thus furnished. The same loyal spirit showed itself in a different way in his contemptuous disregard, of which I just now spoke, for certain thinkers, not of the same modest type, who seemed to him over-hasty and over-eager to differentiate themselves into a new school.

“But, in reviving my remembrance of Chauncey during the early days after he left college, I have unwittingly been following the development of his mind into later years. Another book which, in his way, he read much at that time was Whewell’s ‘History and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences.’ This gave him such knowledge as he needed for his speculative purposes, of the development of science, just as Hamilton incidentally did of the progress of philosophy. Brande’s Cyclopædia served him as a ready repository of the scientific or other data he might happen to need in his meditations. I remember, too, his being interested in List’s ‘Political Economy’ in those early days, and the ingenious manner in which he used then to defend the theory of protection to domestic industry.

“In the spring of 1857, I went to Cambridge to live, and from that time, as you know, was on terms of the greatest intimacy with Chauncey. Not very long after my migration, he moved from his old quarters in Bow Street to Little’s Block, in which my rooms were; and, for eight or ten years, there were few days in which we did not spend several hours together. It was about this time, I think, that he began to teach philosophy in Professor Agassiz’s School; and the pleasure he took in this occupation for several winters was very great. It gave him a fresh motive for going systematically through Hamilton, with whom he was already so familiar; and it furnished him with the audience which alone was needed to make Chauncey’s happiness in following out his trains of thought complete. Not very far from this time, I should place the earliest of Chauncey’s review articles that I definitely remember, based on Blodgett’s ‘Meteorology of the United States.’ The Winds and the Weather: Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I. p. 272, January, 1858. ⁹⁶ These, too, were the days of the Septem, — the little knot of men who

passed so many pleasant evenings together in Little’s Block, — but whose motto, in the pentameter verse of one of their number, has something tragic in it, when I think of the one dark thread in our friend’s life, — quod placet his fas est, quod placet hi faciunt. On a photograph of this little company, the following lines were written: — “Foederis en juvenes socios sancti aspice septem; Quod placet his fas est, quod placet hi faciunt.” It is unnecessary to say that the motto was hardly a serious one. There was another reading, not wholly approved,— “quiddam placet hi faciunt.” This had the merit, such as it is, of hinting powerfully at the slang English phrase, — then a familiar one, — of which the last line was an adaptation. Ante, p. 343. ⁹⁷ How much Chauncey enjoyed those evenings and that society!

“It must have been in 1859 or 1860 that Chauncey first felt the influence which was to be more powerful than any other in giving direction and color to his intellectual life. This was the publication of Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species.’ The first English edition appeared in 1859. On February 12, 1860, Chauncey says that he has just finished reading the book. Ante, p. 43. ⁹⁸ We read it and re-read it aloud together, and talked over it and the reviews that appeared of it interminably. The ground had been prepared for the seed by Chauncey’s interest in theoretic geology, and the argument for the sufficiency of causes now in operation to explain past changes in the condition of the earth; by the discussions which had gone on for years in Cambridge between Agassiz and Gray concerning the true nature of the terms ‘genus’ and ‘species;’ and by the fruitfulness, already shown, of the historical method in dealing with social phenomena. I think I am not mistaken in putting the publication of Maine’s ‘Ancient Law’ — my interest in which was shared by Chauncey — very near that of the ‘Origin of Species.’ The first English edition of the “Ancient Law” was published in 1861. ⁹⁹

“Up to this time, however, the abstract theory of evolution

had not found favor in Chauncey’s mind. In illustration of this, I recall, years previously, a talk with him about the ‘ Vestiges of Creation,’ into which, I think, he had barely dipped, and how lightly he regarded the thesis itself, as well as the arguments. Mr. Sheldon, his teacher at Northampton, had discussed this book with his pupils; and it may be surmised that Chauncey retained the unfavorable estimate of it to which he was then accustomed. ¹⁰⁰ I remember, too, how decided were his leanings for Cuvier as against Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and how destitute of attraction for him had been the nebular hypothesis. To his mind, no theory of evolution would have commended itself on a priori grounds; but the cumulative argument, based on observation and experiment, of the ‘Origin of Species,’ in harmony as it was with his own habits of thought, carried with it complete conviction. A real explanation, so far as it went, had been furnished as to the manner in which the organic world had come to take its present form; and, more and more, as time went on, it became the predominant intellectual interest of his life to study the problems, physical and metaphysical, which the acceptance of this explanation presented.

“Not only was the direct influence of Darwin on Chauncey’s scientific views thus great, but hardly less curious and important was the reflex influence upon his purely speculative opinions of the questions in which he was now most interested and the methods employed in their solution. There was no sudden change; for Chauncey’s opinions had been too well considered, and were too organically connected to admit of any serious modification, except that which comes from a changed attitude of the mind as a whole. Such philosophical conversion, in a serious, powerful thinker like Chauncey, proceeds so gradually, that one who is in constant intercourse with him is almost as unconscious of the process as of the imperceptible changes that come with time in the expression of a face. As I look back on those years, however, I can see

that Hamilton was less and less resorted to, except for his learning and on points of which the treatment is not affected by fundamental philosophical conceptions; and that Bain and Mill came to furnish the topics of his thought. I put them in this order, because I think it the chronological one of his intimacy with them. The interest in the inductive and semi-physiological treatment of the old psychological problems which led so unpractised a reader through Bain’s two thick octavos, ponderous in every sense, was an indication of whither he was drifting in his philosophy. I remember that Professor Winlock was laid up for several weeks by lameness at about this time, and how great satisfaction Chauncey had in inducing him to read Bain, and in discussing with so acute a man Bain’s statements and solutions. Professor Winlock, Director of the Observatory at Cambridge, died no less suddenly than Wright, and but a few months earlier. The same number of the “Nation” (June 17, 1875) which contained a sketch of Winlock by Wright had in it, also, Mr. Lowell’s sonnet: — “Shy soul and stalwart, man of patient will Through years one hair’s breadth on our Dark to gain, Who, from the stars he studied not in vain, Had learned their secret to be strong and still, Careless of fames that earth’s tin trumpets fill; Born under Leo, broad of build and brain, He watched, while others slept, in that hushed fane Of Science, only witness of his skill: Sudden as falls a shooting-star he fell, But inextinguishable his luminous trace In mind and heart of all that knew him well. Happy man’s doom! To him the fates were known Of orbs dim-hovering on the skirts of Space, Unprescient, through God’s mercy, of his own.” It is startling to think of Wright’s reading these lines not three months before his own most sudden death. One who recalls certain points of resemblance between the two men, and the nature of Wright’s own astronomical calculations, finds an application of the sonnet to him in more respects than one. ¹⁰¹ Bain, however, was a specialist, and not a philosopher; and, after his facts had been fairly taken up by Chauncey’s mind, his volumes went upon the shelf as books merely of reference. It was Mill who succeeded Hamilton as Chauncey’s constant, cherished philosophical companion; and the tie grew stronger and stronger to the end of Chauncey’s life.

“Analytic as Hamilton’s method is, up to a certain point, he then stops short, declares that bottom has been reached, turns his face in the other direction, and proceeds to build up on the foundation of his ultimate truths of consciousness — buttressed by the veracity of the Creator of consciousness — a system of philosophy which can be shaken, he thinks, only by a scepticism that, with consciousness and its Creator, shall engulf the universe itself. How stoutly Chauncey originally held by these doctrines, I have the more reason to remember well, because, having been greatly interested in Mill’s Logic in my Senior year and subsequently, I spent afterwards many long evenings in discussions with Chauncey over it and the philosophical doctrines it presupposed. In these, I need not say that I was always driven to the wall. Thus, up to the time of his interest in Darwin, it was Chauncey’s synthetic powers that were most called into play in his philosophy. From that time, the analytic element became the more potent, and bit by bit the old foundations crumbled away. Occam’s razor, The maxim, “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.” ¹⁰² which Hamilton found so useful in lopping off superfluous causes from previous systems and in producing the trim neatness of his own, was used by Chauncey with more and more ruthless consistency, until nothing was left standing in the mind that was not rooted in experience. Experience of phenomena gave both the content and the form of knowledge; the ground and the sanction of moral judgments; the limits of the universe in its intelligible, credible relations with man.

“I have dwelt at this length upon the development of Chauncey’s philosophical opinions, because he was in a sense peculiar to himself among all the men I have known, ‘a being breathing thoughtful breath;’ and because I believe that I am the only friend who was continuously intimate with him during the whole period of their development, and also sufficiently interested in such questions to lead him to discourse upon them freely. During the last half-dozen years of his life, after my marriage, I saw him, to be sure, less constantly; but, happily for me, he always kept up his habit of reading to me what he had been writing, and of talking over the philosophical problems that were interesting him. I was thus kept fairly well acquainted with the thread of his speculations to the end.

“Let me try now, however imperfectly, to give form and proportion to my impressions of Chauncey’s character and mind. One so seldom attempts to bring to a focus the myriad impressions which lurk in the memory, that the best image one can hope to bring out will seem very rude to those who were familiar with the original.

“One would naturally begin with the physique, — so sound, so massive, so inert, and yet capable of so much effort and endurance! His body was like an engine that, if sufficiently stoked with sleep and food, however irregular the intervals, was always in condition to do what was required of it. Heavy as were the draughts he made at times on the reserves of his constitution, the springs of its strength long seemed unfailing. Save one ugly attack [in 1863], I can recall no ailment of his, great or small, during the many years of our daily intercourse. Especially notable was his exemption from all nervous discomforts, like headache. His sleep was profound beyond that of childhood. He always kept excessively late hours, but slept steadily from seven to nine hours, be his hour of going to bed what it might. He formed these habits in the days when, at

Mrs. Lyman’s, Mary Walker was ready and glad to give him his breakfast at whatever hour he presented himself; and, with characteristic phlegm, he adhered for life, without regard to the obstacles that boarding-house keepers or friends might throw in his way, to a disposition of his hours that suited him. So deep was his sleep, that you could pull him out of bed in the morning without fairly rousing him. For the first hour or two after he got up, he seemed to feel an owl-like strangeness in the bright world about him; and it was only by degrees that he recovered full possession of his faculties. He dreamed little; and his only recurring form of dream was that of flying, or rather floating in the air, a little distance above the ground. After the complete repose of these nights, by about twelve or one o’clock in the day, he began life again perfectly fresh, no matter how late his hours had been, nor for how long a time late hours had been kept. The sluggishness that accompanied the soundness of Chauncey’s body extended to his senses, with the exception of that of sight. This was marvellously keen, as well as alert: the others were content to respond when called upon. An exception should also be made of his sense of touch, which was hardly, if at all, less delicate and quick than his sight. ¹⁰³ Given a sound body, a sluggish temperament, and a mind always occupied on some purely intellectual problem, one might, I fancy, anticipate the chief features of Chauncey’s character, if one failed to do justice to its finer qualities. Calm, gentle, unassuming; ready to be pleased; demanding little of his friends; as pure as a woman in thought and speech; fond of children, and unwearied in giving them pleasure; free from passion to a defect; never selfish, though at times, from preoccupation of mind or from lack of imagination, not wholly considerate; deficient in ambition; devoid of jealousy and envy; perfectly honorable and perfectly amiable; — there stand out in the memory of his oldest friends, as the last impressions of his character, the same large features, great simplicity and great dignity, which would have struck an observer meeting him for the first time.

“One is impressed, in going through life, with the disparity among men in the use that is made of their Christian names. Some seem to lose them in childhood, and outside of their own families are known only by the family name, with or without a prefix, according to the degree of intimacy. At the other extreme stand those who have in truth a ‘given’ name, and with whom men slip easily and unconsciously into the use of it. One seldom sees so notable an illustration of this gift for creating easy relations as in our friend. When one considers how formidable to most men such an intelligence as his in itself would be, it speaks volumes for his simplicity, sweetness, and modesty of character that he should have been known as ‘ Chauncey ’ by all who came much in contact with him.

“Of this intelligence, which made Chauncey so marked a man, let me end this long letter by trying to give you my impressions with a little more method than came naturally in speaking of his philosophical development. Marvellous as that intelligence was, — quite unmatched, indeed, within its own great range, in my experience of men, —its limitations were very sharply marked.

“Chauncey’s intellect was very little fed through his emotions; and to the beauties of nature, of art, and of literature, his susceptibilities were neither quick nor cultivated, — striking and novel as were his comments at times on such matters, from acuteness of observation or force of intellect. With little relish for literature as literature, with little call for any class of facts that would demand much reading or a resort to foreign tongues, — whatever aptitudes he possessed for acquiring languages remained entirely dormant. History, except as occasionally a fact caught in conversation or chance reading

might furnish him a peg on which to fasten some thread of political or social speculation, had little interest for him.

“On the other hand, no fact concerning the mind itself or the material universe came amiss to him. Each at once fell into its proper place, determined by its relations to other facts already known; and, thanks to this web of natural association, it was seldom that what he had once acquired slipped out of his memory past recall. Hence, although he was no reader, as I have said, and not a student in the ordinary sense of that term, the amount of his knowledge was prodigious. The workings of Chauncey’s mind might well have suggested to Plato his doctrine of reminiscence; for one could easily fancy that the universe and its laws had been once mirrored in his mind in their completeness, and that experience and meditation were simply bringing out into consciousness the dim lines of the image they had left. The acquisitions of several men whom I have known have excited my admiration; but in the case of no one but Chauncey have they caused wonder. However vast the other structures, one knew the processes by which they had been reared, and could reckon, if I may say so, the number of days’ work which had gone into them; but of Chauncey’s knowledge one could only say, crescit occulto velut arbor aevo. ... You who knew Chauncey in his boyhood, when the foundation of his scientific acquisitions were laid by your excellent teacher at Northampton of whom he has often spoken to me, can doubtless recall the beginnings of his scientific knowledge; but when I became intimate with him, at twenty-five, his easy mastery of the principles of all the physical sciences and of psychology, the only subjects about which he ever much occupied himself, made his knowledge then seem as complete and round as it was fifteen years later. The increase that came with time seemed, even to one in constant intercourse with him, rather a process of development and expansion than, as

in the case of most men, one of accretion. He worked in no laboratory; neither botany nor geology drew him into the field; when he took up a book, it was only on a subject that interested him, and it was usually simply to look over the table of contents, and to read a page here and a page there to give him what was characteristic in the author’s treatment of his theme ; yet so thoroughly did he possess his subjects in their principles, so fully had he worked them out in his meditations, that, the place for every new fact being always ready, the new fact was sure to reach him as if through the air. Though a specialist in no scientific subject,—for he early gave up all continuous study of mathematics,—few specialists could have failed to find an hour’s talk with him fruitful in furthering their investigations.

“When scientific acquisitions so great had been made, as it were, by the way, without resort to the apparatus of books or instruments with which men commonly lay siege to their subjects, without the usual persistent application of months or years to the mastery of one, the question could not but arise in the mind of a friend of Chauncey, — What distinction might not this man achieve, if, enamoured of a science or stimulated by ambition, he should concentrate his powers within a narrower field? The better one knew Chauncey, however, the more clearly one saw how completely so exceptional a mind carried the laws of its workings within itself. His temperament was too sluggish, his interest in discoveries too purely philosophical, to allow him to make his mark as an investigator, — in spite of the subtilty and fertility of his mind in devising experiments, when he desired to satisfy himself upon a doubtful point. For continuous work in the field of theoretical physics, for which his mathematical ability and his large scientific imagination, seemed especially to fit him, I do not remember that he ever showed any inclination. Work of this kind would have involved an amount of drudgery to which

Chauncey would have hardly subjected himself, except from a keen interest in solving a particular problem. He showed his power to cope with such problems when they came in his way, but he did not seek them for their own sake. In a word, Chauncey’s mind did not work under the discipline of the will. It was not indolent: few brains indeed worked more incessantly; but it always shrunk from uncongenial work, and all effort with him that was not spontaneous was uncongenial.

“Few powerful minds had less of the artistic element, in the ordinary sense of that term, than his; yet the character of the satisfaction he found in making his mind a mirror of the intelligible world — the world of law without him and within — is best illustrated, I think, by the delight that the eye sensitive to material beauty finds in gazing at a lovely prospect or noble work of art, and the mind in analyzing the charm. He lived indeed in an intellectual paradise, in which all his powers found full activity, and were free from all constraint; nor was the friendly ear, which was his one need more, often lacking into which to pour the results of each day’s meditations. Was it a paradise, or was it rather a Circe’s garden, which sapped a feeble will, and beguiled him from the tasks that might have opened up some unexplored corner of the universe, or have given mankind a Wright’s law, and himself a name? I cling to the paradise theory; but I may be biassed by the consciousness of all that I have enjoyed and gained from the manner of life he led. Some of the external conditions of his life one would have wished changed, notably his mode of bread-winning. The computations which, for many years, he made for the Nautical Almanac, —as not demanding from him more than two or three hours’ work a day, and making no draughts on his thinking power,—furnished in one sense an occupation as favorable as could be imagined for a mind that desired simply leisure for speculation; but,

unfortunately, the temptation to him was irresistible to crowd the work into the last two or three months of the year within which it was to be finished, and to try to reduce himself during this period to the insensibility of a computing-machine, working from noon until two or three o’clock in the morning. For a time, the prospect of perfect independence for nine or ten months sufficed to carry him through this yearly period of purgatory; but, in the course of years, he found stronger stimulants necessary to support him, and was betrayed into the one serious failing of his life. Had he escaped this reef, and had his pecuniary position been a little more easy, there is little in Chauncey’s lot that I can look back upon, and wish it had been other, — he being the man he was, and so little capable of conforming himself to alien conditions of life.

“Our qualities are dogged by their defects as inevitably as our substance by its shadow. As in Chauncey’s mind trains of thought went on incessantly, with as little effort of will apparently as most men put into their day-dreams, so his will had too little power in controlling them when control was needed to make them most effective. A lack of sympathetic imagination in the most amiable of men — a deficiency which was, perhaps, an indispensable condition of such a life of solitary thought — went far to rob him of the pleasure which he prized next to that of thinking, the pleasure of finding a response to his thought in others. Neither as a teacher nor as a writer was Chauncey successful. I could name a pupil or two, indeed, who found him the most stimulating of instructors; and, as we know, some of the best minds in the world have prized his writings. Still, we must admit that, as a rule, pupils whom Chauncey himself would have pronounced competent, and readers whom he would have been the first to call intelligent, failed to appreciate him or to profit by him. He lacked the first condition of a successful teacher, whether

by voice or pen, — the power of catching by sympathy the wants of his audience; nor did he possess at all the sensitive flexibility of mind which makes so large a part of the literary gift. His writings were more like simple transverse sections from the web that was ever unrolling itself from the loom of his busy brain than like pieces woven for the occasion, in which a particular effect was to be produced by proper combination of the material at his command. I fear that my illustration may not seem a very pertinent one; but it presents itself naturally to me, as I recall the process of composition of the bulk of his published essays, and many more that never went beyond his friends. He wrote with pencil, usually in a notebook, and when he was in the mood of composition wrote pretty steadily all day and far into the night. He was too precise in thought and expression to need to correct much or to revise what he had written; and I can hardly recall an instance of his rewriting, or rather reshaping, an essay, short or long. The starting-point was usually some fruitful reflection that promised to reward development; and from this point he would proceed on what was really a voyage of discovery, though in waters that were in general familiar to him. What he wrote during the day would probably be read to me, or the friend that was nearest, the next day, and talked over in a way. The end often came quite as much because the afflatus had ceased, as because a natural conclusion had been reached. What he thus produced were rather studies than finished work. They aided him to make his own thought clear to himself, but were little fitted to impress that thought upon others. Original, solid, suggestive, as they always were, from the very manner of their production, they lacked proportion, relief, perspective. It seems a hard thing to say of our Chauncey, the most simple, modest, and unconscious of men, that he never knew how to sink himself in his subject; yet just here, in the lack of quick instinct to discern how the minds he was addressing would be affected, and in the lack of discipline to accommodate the workings of his own mind to their needs and not unreasonable demands, lies the explanation that an intelligence so rich and powerful, so eager to give of its abundance, has not left the world more in his debt. He fell dead at the very noon of intellectual life, as he would have wished to do, at his desk; but, from the qualities of which I have spoken, I doubt whether he would ever have been appreciated properly as a thinker, 'outside of a small circle of readers, had his life been prolonged ten or twenty years. I cannot recall any suggestion on his part that he ever contemplated, even for a moment, any more considerable or continuous book than such essays as he contributed to the ‘North American,’ the ‘Nation,’ and other journals. It would have continued to be, as it had been, by detached studies, and by the effect of these upon thinkers who had the ear of the world more perfectly than he that his influence would have been felt and would have grown.

“Not a little of Chauncey’s pleasure in the last years of his life came from the society of younger men than himself, undergraduates, advanced students, and junior instructors in the University largely, who sought his company as well for his amiable, companionable qualities of character as for the perennial flow of that wise talk in which he delighted above all things. Nothing could be more stimulating to young men full of intellectual life than Chauncey’s range and vigor of thought and boundless stores of scientific knowledge. Not a few clever men must feel that they owe more to him than to any other intellectual influence in their Cambridge life. To Chauncey these young men supplied a need which he felt more strongly as he grew older. He craved intellectual companionship, at the least an intelligent auditor, for the thoughts with which his mind was always teeming. The old friends in Cambridge on whom he could count for interest

and sympathy in his speculations were of necessity few, from the nature of the subjects with which he chiefly occupied himself and, in a measure, it must be confessed, from his invincible tendency to keep later hours than those could do whose duties began earlier in the day than his; but, of these younger and more thirsty souls, a great University town furnished an unfailing supply, as men came and went. The relation had its danger, however, as well as its pleasures and advantages, as one sees, I think, even in Plato’s ideal picture of Socrates. The reaction of too constant contact with minds less powerful or less mature will make itself felt in the soundest heads and the sweetest natures. Certainly, in Chauncey’s last years, one sometimes caught a glimpse of almost arrogance of manner in dealing with an absent opponent, and of something like contemptuous absoluteness and emphasis of language in expressing or criticising opinions, of which I cannot recall a trace in the days of my own greatest intimacy with him. The disturbance of his nervous system by physical causes was doubtless the source of this nascent foible, as the too predominant association with less ripe minds tended to foster it; but I doubt whether it had often, if ever, come to show itself in Chauncey except in the form of indignation at the condemnation of purely intellectual judgments on moral grounds. With his interest in the controversy over Darwinism in its manifold phases, he had occasion often to be angry and sin not; but, in earlier years, it would have been his mirth or his pity that would have been stirred, rather than his wrath.

“Chauncey was so purely intellectual and his intellect so predominantly scientific, with most precise canons of evidence rigidly applied, that it was hardly possible that he should do full justice to natures of a different type, into whose judgments the feelings are always filtering. He was so devoid of all desire to make up his mind on speculative points upon which the evidence left his judgment in doubt, so content to leave such

matters unsettled, — those of the greatest equally with those of the least moment, that he could not at all understand the state of minds impatient of uncertainty and eager for a decision, at least upon all important questions. Chauncey, in other words, was by intellectual temperament a sceptic, in the best sense of that term, an on-looker who is interested neither to prove nor to disprove, but to judge; and, when there is insufficient material for judging, to hold his mind in suspense, — a suspense, however, which contains no element of pain. Upon his chart of the Universe, the terra incognita of the not-proven that stretched between the firm ground of the proved and the void of the disproved, included some of the chief beliefs to which mankind has clung; but it should be said also that he admitted the entire rightfulness of the claim of Faith to take possession of any portion of this territory, provided she did it in her own name: there might even be much solid and goodly land there, and not mere mirage of tradition and the emotions; he denied only that it lay within the range of man’s experience, and therefore of knowledge in the sense in which he understood and used that term.

“Chauncey had given too much thought to the processes by which impressions on the senses are converted into knowledge not to be interested in the psychology of illusions. The satisfaction which he took in performing juggler’s tricks arose hardly less from the pleasure of analyzing the workings of the minds that he was deceiving than from the enjoyment that he knew he was giving his friends. He took up the practice of juggling quite late in his life, but became surprisingly skilful in it for an amateur. His power of observation, and still more his capacity for holding a complex impression or series of impressions steadily in thought, until the relations of the several elements of it to one another became clear, were never better shown than in his analysis and reproduction of some of the most difficult of Hermann’s tricks, after seeing them

performed once or twice. The same faculties were brought into play that would have been employed on a complicated problem in mechanics, and the process of thought was hardly less methodical. I have often regretted that a mind so well fitted by gifts and training to explore that border-land of abnormal phenomena, where physiology, psychology, and imposition meet, was never seriously tempted to do so. But that adventure seems to exercise no fascination upon the heads which are really strong enough to undertake it: those who attempt it return either subject to the sorcery, or with merely conjectural accounts of what they have experienced. Chauncey, like most scientific men, was satisfied with a rough, qualitative analysis of what he conceived the charm to be, though he would have recognized that only a thorough quantitative analysis would set at ease the mind of the world at large, and persuade it that no uncanny ingredient entered into the business.

“In commenting upon Chauncey’s character and conduct, I find myself always going back almost at once to that powerful intellectual machinery which was ever weaving his own experience and that of others into theories of Life and the Universe. Yet this does injustice to him and to me. It is not the philosopher, but the friend, that comes so often into my memory,— more often, indeed, as time passes than when he first departed from among us. That noble head recalls not so much the massive brain as the sweet smile and the eyes that brightened with enjoyment of every touch of humor. The playfulness of his manner stands out as distinctly as the sedateness and dignity which it lighted up so charmingly. What simple dignity his manners had! Like those of another friend (Dennett), likewise cut off in his prime, with literary gifts as exceptional as Chauncey’s in abstract thought, his manners had that stamp of innate nobility which makes, instead of learns, the rules of good-breeding. The manners, I

need not say, were but the expression of the qualities within. The perfect simplicity of his character, the inconsistency of it with the very idea of an arrière pensée, gave a singular attraction to the complexity and profundity of his thinking; but not less admirable was the reserve that never obtruded itself nor gave an opening for obtrusion on the part of others. My wife reminds me how ready he was to condescend in explanations to scientific intellects of low degree; but Chauncey had that genuine superiority, both of mind and character, which is never conscious of differences of degree. It is worth noting, however, what power he possessed, from his perfect mastery of his subjects, for making difficult things plain when he recognized what was a person’s need; but an explanation meant to his mind a reference of a particular case to a general law, — the more perfect, the higher the generalization; and he paid his pupils the unconscious compliment of supposing that they could keep pace with him, unless they constantly warned him to the contrary.

“It was pleasant to see in so masculine an intellect as Chauncey’s such thorough appreciation and enjoyment of women, and all that is most characteristic and fine in women. He was certainly catholic in his taste among men; but, as I run over in my mind the women who found a place in his regard, I am struck with the sureness of his instinct for what is charming, refined, and feminine. The friendship of such women was the strongest of testimonies, were testimony needed, to a singular rectitude and purity of soul in Chauncey, and to the native delicacy of spirit and absence of all personal claims, which make such relations cordial and easy. Like the friendship of children, which he always inspired, it gives a certain stamp as of sterling quality to the character. The praise of these would have been to Chauncey’s ear the final word of commendation, and I will add no other.”