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Life's Enthusiasms by David Starr Jordan
page 4 of 23 (17%)
of intellect, a heredity of action, as subtle and as real as the
heredity of the continuous germ-plasm. Ask the teacher who has helped
mould your life, who in turn was his own master. In a very few
generations you trace back your lineage to one of the great teachers the
world knows and loves. Who was your teacher in Natural History in
America? Was he a pupil of Agassiz, or was he a student of one of
Agassiz's pupils? Or, again, are there three generations back from you
to the grand master of enthusiasms?

And there are masters in the art of living as well as in other arts and
sciences. "A log with Mark Hopkins at one end and myself at the other."
That was Garfield's conception of a university. It was said of Eliphalet
Nott at Union College, that he "took the sweepings of other colleges and
sent them back to society pure gold." The older students of Stanford
will always show the traces of the master teacher Thoburn. "In terms of
life," thus he construed all problems of Science, of Philosophy, of
Religion. In terms of life, Thoburn's students will interpret all their
own various problems, for in terms of life all things we do must finally
be formulated. Every observation we make, every thought of our minds,
every act of our hands has in some degree an ethical basis. It involves
something of right or wrong, and without adhesion to right, all thought,
all action must end in folly. And there is no road to righteousness so
sure as that which has right living as a traveling companion.

The very humanity of men at large is in itself a source of inspiration.
Study men on the trains, at the ferry, on the road, in the jungles of
the forest or in the jungles of great cities,--"through the ages, every
human heart is human." Look for the best, and the best shall rise up
always to reward you. One who has traveled among simple-living people,
men and women we call savages, because they live in the woods and not in
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