The worship of the eternal truth and the burning desire to seek an ever-broadening revelation of it constitute the mental attitude which I call “idealism in science.” Its growth in the British Empire, and particularly at the University of Cambridge, has been most remarkable since the great movement started under the leadership of Maxwell a little over fifty years ago. What progress have we made since Tyndall’s visit to this country in 1872? If in my narrative I succeed in answering this question I shall be more than satisfied, and I shall certainly send a translation of it in part to my scientific friends in Belgrade. It will tell them what I ought to have told them four years ago.
I return now to the point in my story where I digressed. The 14th of April, 1896, is recorded in my calendar as a happy day. The 15th started with a balmy spring morning full of glorious sunshine. The suggestion to walk through Central Park to Columbia College to my morning lecture could not be resisted, and I reached the lecture-room full of the joy of life which fills the heart of every healthy youth. My students told me later that the first part of my lecture that morning displayed that joy. But, near the end of the lecture, I suddenly collapsed. A sudden chill struck me like a bolt from a clear sky. Five days later my life hung in the balance; there was a desperate struggle between a stout heart and the busy poisons of dreaded pneumonia. The heart won out. But when the crisis had passed, and my physician thought that I was sufficiently strong to stand the shock of terrible news, he told me that my wife had died several days before, a victim of dreaded pneumonia. She had caught the seed of this merciless disease while nursing me. My weakened heart stood the shock, but every one of my nerves seemed to snap in two. For the first time in my life I recognized the full meaning of will-power; I recognized it because I knew that the spiritual motor, the power of which I had always felt, was there no longer. For the first time since leaving my native Idvor, twenty-six years before, I had to be steered and looked after by others. Life never looked so hopeless as it did during that awful spring of 1896. But I wanted to live, because I had a little daughter to bring up. That, in fact, was the only thing that I wanted to live for; everything else seemed either devoid of interest, or much beyond my reach. It is an awful thing to lose one’s self-reliance. Aims and aspirations appeared to me like little toy balloons that children play with; our nerves, I thought, are the strings which keep them afloat within the reach of our vision. When these strings snap in two, our aims and aspirations, like toy balloons, disappear rapidly into thin air.
My physician recommended that during that summer I should settle down in Norfolk, Connecticut, to give the bracing climate of this New England town in the Berkshire hills a chance to rebuild what overwork, under nervous tension, and pneumonia had undermined and torn down. A New York physician, who knew me through my X-ray work, offered to rent me his summer residence, facing Haystack Mountain, the highest peak in Norfolk, and I accepted it. This mountain is really only a hill, hardly one thousand feet higher than the road at its foot, but as I sat on the piazza in front of that little cottage and looked at the so-called observatory, a square frame structure on the top of this hill, from which people caught the distant view of the Housatonic valley, I wondered whether I should ever be strong enough to climb to its top. I recalled my exploits in Switzerland, thirteen years before, and, utterly discouraged by the comparison, I accepted with calm resignation that I had grown old and decrepit in less time than it takes other people to become middle-aged. Whenever I thought of my past, present, or future, I always managed to draw some gloomy conclusion of that kind, and, so far as my cloudy fancy could see, I felt that I had finished my career in dismal failure. People told me that these were queer notions due to mental depression, from which I would soon recover. But, as time went on and there was no relief, I resented it when people tried to console me with, what I considered, empty promises of a brighter future. There suddenly appeared an angel who promised nothing but gave much.
Another New York physician, the well-known Doctor Frederick Shepard Dennis, also an admirer of my X-ray work, had a summer residence at Norfolk. He was practically a native of this quaint New England town, and believed in its great virtues as a resort for convalescents. He was very anxious that my summer vacation there should put me on my feet again, but he saw that my introspective life on the lonely piazza facing Haystack Mountain blocked every road which might lead to my physical and mental restoration. “Professor,” said he one day to me, “if you do not stop thinking about yourself you will never get well.” “But,” said I, “what else is there to think about? I hate to think about that horrible green phosphorescence of vacuum tubes, about the X-rays, fluorescent screens, and skeletons of hands and feet and ribs. Those are the things which haunted incessantly my burning brain during the pneumonia fever, and I shall never think of them again if I can help it. I should like to think about some other problems which are waiting in my laboratory, but what is the use? I have no hope of living long enough to solve them, or that, if I live, I shall have the necessary brain energy to work out their solution. Besides, whenever I begin to think of something pleasant or interesting my heart suddenly gives a violent thump, and sends a cold shiver through my timid veins. I must think of myself, because I am always on my guard against something that might happen at any moment to cut the last thread of my shaky vitality. It is this everlasting fear that keeps me thinking about myself.” The good doctor looked thoughtful, but said nothing; a few days later he drove up in a little yellow runabout, drawn by a pair of cobs of beautiful dark chestnut color, which were a splendid product of his stud farm; they shone like old mahogany. “How do you like them, professor?” asked the doctor, as he scrutinized my admiring gaze. “They are a thing of beauty and a joy forever,” said I, and I meant what I said. The next day the cobs, with wagon and harness, were mine; they were only three years old, and, although broken to harness, they were quite raw and needed training. I got them after pledging my word to the doctor that I would train them. My native Banat is like Kentucky. Everybody raises horses, and everybody knows by intuition how to handle a horse. I was told by experts that I handled those cobs just right. While training them I really trained my own nerves. They needed it more than the cobs did. “Horse sense” has meant to me ever since a sense which enables man to train a horse, and that means to give up your whole heart and soul to the horse. The trainer must never think of himself, but always of his beloved animal. He must be patient and persistent, kind and affectionate, forgiving mistakes and showing full appreciation for even the smallest honest effort. Only by the exercise of these virtues can he succeed in developing in the horse the habit of being a splendid horse. Doctor Dennis was a great lover of horses, and he knew all that, and thought, as he told me later, that it was the best medicine for me.
My cobs acquired the best of habits, and at the end of a year they were two beautifully balanced animals, carrying their proud heads on high, and stepping up in perfect unison. They seemed, when in full action, to be anxious to strike their foreheads with their knees. To sit behind those animals, and watch their swaggering motion around the horse-show ring, gave a thrill never to be forgotten. The New York horse-show in Madison Square Garden, in the autumn of 1897, and the Philadelphia horse-show at Wissahickon, in the spring of 1898, established the great reputation of Comet and Princess Rose, the cobs that I had been training during eighteen months. They won many prizes, but none of them was as welcome as the prize of my restored health. I got well without knowing that I was getting well; the only improvement that I was watching and thinking about was the improvement of my beautiful cobs, but, nevertheless, my laboratory assistant Cushman noticed in the early spring of 1897 that I had already begun to speak much more encouragingly about some of my old laboratory problems; he noticed it, and he was happy again. The X-ray problems were not among them; I never recovered from the feeling of horror which the thought of them gave me during my sickness in April, 1896.
Reginald Rives, one of the social leaders of New York, was the judge at Wissahickon who awarded the prizes to my cobs. We had been in college together, but when he saw me at the horse-show he did not recognize me at first, because, as he informed me later, he did not expect to see a college professor driving high-steppers at a horse-show. He spoke very highly of my cobs, which won from a competitor like millionaire Widener’s stable in Philadelphia.
“Pupin,” exclaimed Rives, “if you can handle your students as well as you can handle your cobs, you are the greatest professor in America.” “I could,” said I, “if I had to handle only two students at a time, but not two hundred.” Rives repeated this remark to his brother, a trustee of Columbia University, and the trustee saw in it quite a chunk of educational philosophy. The preceptorial system at Princeton reminds one of this philosophy. Will the American colleges ever adopt it?
A famous Boston lover of horses, a Mr. Jordan, saw my cobs at the Wissahickon horse-show and made me a handsome bid for them in cash besides “throwing in” a very handsome Irish hunter which had won a prize in the jumping class. The hunter became my saddle-horse, and served me loyally for fully twelve years. No better saddle-horse ever cantered over the hillsides of Litchfield County than Clipper, the Irish hunter, my trusty friend and companion, particularly during my summer vacations. Thanks to Comet and Princess Rose, and to good old Clipper, and to the bracing climate of Norfolk hills, the joy of life returned again.
My first job after landing at Castle Garden was on a farm, and there I had vowed that as soon as I could afford it I would buy myself a real American farm. A little over twenty years later, in 1897, I bought a farm at Norfolk; this blessed spot, where I regained my health and happiness, became my real American home, and I have never had a desire to seek a better haven of happiness in any other place, either here or in Europe.