With this thought in her mind my mother was most happy when I bade her good-by and, repeating her own words, told her that I must go back to “Cambridge, the great temple which is consecrated to the eternal truth.” “Go back, my son,” she said, “and may God be praised forever for the blessings which you have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy in your life among the saints of Cambridge.”
VII
END OF STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
When I returned to Cambridge from little Idvor I often thought of my mother’s words saying that I was living among the saints of Cambridge. These words sounded like the language which the minstrel of the old Serbian ballads would have used, to convey the meaning which she wished to convey. Whenever I saw one of the great dons of Cambridge, like the famous mathematician Cayley, or the still more famous mathematical physicist George Gabriel Stokes, the discoverer of fluorescence, I asked myself: “Are they the saints of Cambridge?” The answer was in the negative; most of these men were too mobile to pass for saints. One of them, for instance, although quite old and blind, was the stroke of a boat which was very prominent on the river Cam. Its crew consisted of Cambridge dons. When this aged stroke was not rowing he was riding a spirited horse, usually galloping briskly, with his young daughter chasing alongside of him, her long golden hair, like that of a valkyrie, lashing the air as she made strenuous efforts to keep up with her speedy father. It was impossible to associate one’s idea of saints with men of that type. But, nevertheless, my mother was right: Cambridge had its saints; their memory was the great glory of Cambridge.
Nature, published in London, was then, as it is to-day, the most popular scientific weekly in the United Kingdom. Many scientists of Cambridge used it as a medium for discussing in a popular way the current scientific events of the day. Among the files of Nature, which I consulted often, I found once a beautiful steel engraving of Faraday, together with a brief account of Faraday’s work. It was written by Maxwell, as I found out later. Speaking of the activity of teachers of science, the writer said that they are expected “to bring the student into contact with two main sources of mental growth, the fathers of sciences, for whose personal influence over the opening mind there is no substitute, and the material things to which their labors first gave meaning.” In the light of this thought I saw that in his two little classics, “Matter and Motion” and “Theory of Heat,” Maxwell had brought me into contact with the fathers of dynamical sciences, and that La Grange, in his “Méchanique Analytique,” had shown me the men who were the fathers of the science of dynamics, and that for this service I owed them everlasting gratitude.
Jim, the humble fireman in the Cortlandt Street factory, told me once: “This country, my lad, is a monument to the lives of men of brains and character and action who made it.” From that day on the name “United States of America” recalled to my mind Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Lincoln, and the other great men who are universally regarded as the fathers of this country; and when I learned to know and to appreciate them I felt that I was qualified to consider myself a part of this country. Maxwell and La Grange had taught me that Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Carnot, Helmholtz, and other great investigators had made the dynamical sciences; and from that time on these sciences like monuments recalled to my mind the names of the men who made them. I never saw a man handling a crowbar without remembering that it was the historic lever which in the philosophy of Archimedes served as the earliest foundation for the science of statics. The word force always recalled the picture of Galileo dropping heavy bodies from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and watching their uniformly accelerated motions, produced by the force which was impelling the falling body to the earth. The picture reminded me that by these ideally simple experiments Galileo had banished forever the mediæval superstition that bodies fall because they are afraid of the vacuum above, and had substituted in its place the simple law of accelerating force, which prepared the foundation for the science of dynamics. I never saw a moving train being brought to a standstill by the frictional reactions of the brakes without seeing in my imagination the image of Newton formulating his great law of equality between physical actions and physical reactions, the crowning point of modern dynamics. These pictures illustrated what Maxwell meant when he spoke of the material things to which the labors of Archimedes, Galileo, and Newton gave a meaning, and when I caught that meaning I felt that I was no longer a stranger in the land of science. Their highest meaning, I knew, was the recognition that the truth which they conveyed was a part only of what my mother called the “Eternal Truth.”
My work in Cambridge, guided principally by Maxwell and La Grange, reminded me, therefore, continually of the fathers of the sciences which I was studying and of the material things to which their labors gave a meaning. These thoughts gave me a satisfactory interpretation of my mother’s words: “Cambridge is a great temple consecrated to the eternal truth; it is filled with icons of the great saints of science. The contemplation of their saintly work will enable you to communicate with the spirit of eternal truth.” My description of the scientific activity of Cambridge had produced this image in her mind, which was dominated by a spirit of piety and of reverence. This spirit, I always thought, is needed in science just as much as it is in religion. It was the spirit of Maxwell and of La Grange.
The atmosphere of Cambridge was most favorable to the cultivation of a spirit of reverence in scientific thought. At that time, just as to-day, Newton’s name was the glory of Trinity College, and the name of Darwin was regarded with the same feeling of reverence at Christ College. Every college at Cambridge had at least one great name which was the glory of that college. These, one may say, were the names of the patron saints of Cambridge; their spirit was present everywhere, and its influence was certainly wonderful. It reminded me of my mother’s words: “May God be praised forever for the blessings which you have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy in your life among the saints of Cambridge.”
It may seem strange that a Cambridge student of science should have worried so much about interpreting his pious mother’s words in terms of his expanding scientific knowledge. But that student was once a Serb peasant in whose early childhood the old Serbian ballads were his principal spiritual food. The central figure of these ballads was Prince Marko, the national hero, who at critical moments of his tempestuous life never appealed for aid to any man. When he needed counsel he asked it from his aged mother Yevrosima, and when he needed help in combat he appealed to Vila Raviyoyla, Marko’s adopted sister, the greatest of all the fairies of the clouds. A mother can have a wonderful influence over her boy whose early mental attitude is moulded by impressions of that kind. When she has that influence, then she is her boy’s oracle, and no amount of subsequent scientific training will disturb that relationship.
I often think of an old idea which I first conceived while a student at Cambridge. It is this: Our American colleges and universities should have days consecrated to the memories of what Maxwell called the fathers of the sciences, like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Darwin, Helmholtz. I mention these names, having physical sciences in mind, but similar names can be mentioned in other departments of human knowledge. Why should not science follow the beautiful example of religion, which has its saints’ days? On these memorial days, say Newton’s birthday, an address on Newton and his work should tell the young student why Newton is the father of the science of dynamics. Dynamics is not a mere collection of inexorable physical laws which to a young student often sound like dry scientific facts and mute formulæ. Many text-books, unfortunately, represent it that way. It is a record of the life-work of men who lived human lives and became what my mother called “saints of science,” because they devoted their life-efforts to the deciphering of divine messages which, through physical phenomena, God addresses to man. The young mind should know as early as possible that dynamics had its origin in the heavens, in the motions of heavenly bodies, and that it was brought to earth by Galileo and Newton when they had deciphered the meaning of the divine message conveyed to them by these celestial motions. The Greeks of old sacrificed to their gods a hecatomb of oxen whenever one of their philosophers discovered a new theorem in geometry, and the philosopher’s memory was praised forever. The modern nations should not remain indifferent to the memory of the “saints of science,” whose discoveries have advanced so much the physical and the spiritual welfare of man. My life among the saints of Cambridge suggested this idea, and my students, past and present, know that I have always been loyal to it, because I always believed that in this manner every American college and university could raise an invisible “temple consecrated to the eternal truth” and fill it with “icons of the great saints of science.” A spirit of reverence for the science which the student is studying should be cultivated from the very start. I observed that spirit among my friends, the mathematical tripos men, at Cambridge; it was there as a part of local traditions. I certainly felt its influence, and the longer I stayed at Cambridge the more I felt convinced that “Cambridge is a great temple consecrated to the eternal truth.” This enabled me to recognize while still at Cambridge that nothing was more characteristic of the mental attitude of many scientific men in America and in England at that time than their reverence for the “saints of science” and their strong desire to build great temples “consecrated to the eternal truth.” Maxwell was one of their leaders, and the best illustration of that mental attitude. I have already referred to this in my short allusion to the Cambridge craving for scientific research, and I shall now attempt to describe a much wider intellectual movement of which this craving was a local manifestation only. I felt the force of its current during my Cambridge days, and I recognize to-day that at that time I moved along following more or less unconsciously the stream-lines of this current.