In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, France produced a large number of great masters in all fields of thought---in literature, science, and the arts. She thus kept abreast of all intellectual progress in Europe, and often led the way.
These great men were usually skilful teachers as well as creators and discoverers; so that they had worthy disciples---groups of younger scholars who spread abroad the masters' ideas, and prolonged their influence by adding the needed interpretations and modifications. In many fields, the works of these French leaders set standards not only for France, but for the world.
Their intellectual work possessed, as a rule, certain qualities which characterize the French mind, such as broad sympathy, constructive imagination, and a tendency to prefer the concrete or realistic to the abstract, and fact to speculation. These intellectual characteristics of the French have proved to be extraordinarily permanent, abiding generation after generation, and surviving immense political and social changes. The French scholar is apt to be an open-minded man, receptive toward new ideas, and an ardent lover of truth fluent and progressive. The French scientists have rarely been extreme specialists, narrow in their interests and their chosen objects. They have recognized that no science can be pursued successfully in isolation; its affiliations and adjuncts must also be studied. They have not been subdued by the elaborate sorting and compiling machinery of modern scholarship.
The French people under all their forms of government---monarchical, imperial, or republican---have always shown cordial appreciation of intellectual achievements, and particularly of scientific investigation in philology, history, physical science, biology, sociology, and law. They place high among their national heroes their great scholars, writers, artists, and scientists. This popular appreciation has given vitality and enduring national influence to French scholarship in a great variety of fields.
All French masters in science and literature have had the advantage, in expounding and communicating the fruits of their labors, of expressing themselves in the French language, which lends itself to elegance and clearness, and to nice discrimination and perfect accuracy in statement. It is well-nigh impossible for teacher or expounder to be clumsy, obscure, or disorderly in the French language. Indeed, many of the most profound French philosophers and investigators have also exhibited a high degree of literary skill. A French style may be exaggerated, redundant, or diffuse, but it never fails to be clear. The French language, therefore, has been of great advantage to the French masters of thought, and through them to all the students who follow them--- native or foreign.
To an unexampled degree the spirit of liberty has animated all the French leaders and schools of thought for two centuries. For them intellectual inquiry has been free. This is true not only in the field of social and political ideas and the philosophy of government, but also in the institutions intended to promote the development of science, literature, and art. The French Academies of Science and Letters all illustrate it, and so do the noble professional traditions in French Courts of Justice and the French Bar, both the Courts and the Bar having set high examples of courage, independence, and bold insistence on judicial and professional privileges. Science, letters, and art in France have always shared, and often enkindled, the people's love of freedom and their passionate advocacy of democracy.
American students, thinking to take advanced studies in Europe, have often in times past supposed the French to be an inconstant, pleasure-loving, materialistic people. They have now learned through the Great War that the French are an heroic people, constant to great political and social ideals, a people intelligent, fervid, dutiful, and devoted to family, home, and country. They have also come to see that the peculiar national spirit of France is one of the great bulwarks and resources of civilization, which ought to be not only preserved, but reinforced.
Cambridge, 4 May, 1917.
That delightful American humanist, George Ticknor, whose Spanish library is one of the literary treasures of Boston, has given us in his Life and Letters an admirable picture of the University of Gottingen a century ago. The University of Berlin had just been founded, and the characteristics that were to mark this essentially modern German city were as yet unknown. Goethe still reigned at Weimar, and the academic calm of the university towns was a fit environment for the study and investigation that made them famous. Still wrapped in an atmosphere of classicism, they were about to feel the quickening spirit of the physical sciences, and to embark upon that rapid advance which has brought wealth and prosperity to modern Germany. Yet Humboldt, the cosmopolite, who epitomized the nascent science of his native land, still lingered among the brilliant leaders of the Paris Academy, although yielding at length, with the deepest reluctance, to the royal command to share the king's table at Potsdam.
Ever since that day of high ideals, when Goethe and Schiller talked in the quiet gardens of Jena or crossed the Alps to joint the literary colony of Rome, the universities of Germany have drawn to their hospitable halls the students of the United States. To these institutions we owe much of the regard for scholarship and much of the spirit of research that now characterize our own universities. Wolcott Gibbs at Harvard, in 1863, and Gilman at Johns Hopkins, in 1876, definitely fixed in our advanced courses the laboratory methods they had learned in Germany. Since their time, in a rapidly widening circle of universities, research leading to the doctor's degree has become universal, greatly to the advantage of American science. No faculty member, if perchance half-hearted in his desire for new knowledge, can afford to ignore completely the growing custom of original research. To be most successful as a teacher he must be counted among those who realize that inspiration springs from advancing knowledge---not from the sealed books of the Aristotelian, whose pedantic vision, which paralyzed progress in the past, would be no less deadly at the present day if the spirit of research were destroyed.
The influence of the German university on American education has thus been of incalculable value. It has taught the student to look beyond the bachelor's degree to the possibility of advancing knowledge by his own efforts, and to realize the high privilege of never-ceasing research. It has also taught him the advantage of foreign travel and experience, needed so imperiously in the midst of our slowly decreasing insularity. But, in working so much of good, it has almost inevitably involved an element of harm, by centering our educational ideals too exclusively in a single country. The time has surely come to look farther afield. And in widening our vision, the great debt we already owe to the Ecole des Beaux Arts is an ample assurance of the rich benefits we may reasonably hope to derive from the other schools of France.
When Ticknor sailed from Boston in 1815, the Paris Academy of Sciences was near the zenith of its fame. Never in the history of Europe had so brilliant a company of scientific men concentrated in one spot the superb productions of their genius.(3) Alexander von Humboldt, contrasting Paris and Berlin at a later period, characterized the latter as "an intellectual desert, an insignificant city devoid of literary culture." Goethe, too, longed for the intellectual joys of Paris. Writing to Eckermann in 1827, he said:
"Truth to say, we all lead a miserably isolated existence. We meet with but little sympathy from the common herd around us, and our men of genius are scattered over Germany. One is at Vienna, another at Berlin, a third at Königsberg, a fourth at Bonn or Düsseldorf---all separated by some hundreds of miles, so that personal intercourse and a viva voce interchange of thought is a matter of rare occurrence. I am vividly impressed with the keen enjoyment this would yield when I am in the company of men like Alexander von Humboldt, who in one day carry me farther toward all I am seeking and yearning to know than I could attain during years of solitary study.
"Only imagine, however, a city like Paris, where the cleverest heads of a great kingdom are grouped together in one spot, and in daily intercourse incite and stimulate each other by mutual emulation; where all that is of most value in the kingdoms of nature and art, from every part of the world, is daily open to inspection; and all this in a city where every bridge and square is associated with some great event of the past, and where every street-corner has a page of history to unfold. And withal not the Paris of a dull and stupid age, but the Paris of the nineteenth century, where for three generations such men as Molière, Voltaire, and Diderot have brought into play a mass of intellectual power such as can never be met with a second time on any single spot in the whole world."
It would be easy to fill this book with distinguished eulogies of French culture, of the clearness and precision of French thought and expression, of the optimism and charm of French life,---qualities that still remain the dominant characteristics of the civilization of France
The intellectual growth that reached its finest flower in the days of the First Empire was deeply rooted in a scholarly past. Under the sheltering walls of Notre Dame a colony of students rose into view in the twelfth century, and soon outgrew the confines of the Island of the City. Within a few decades the University of Paris had assumed definite form in its present locality, and its fame drew students from all quarters of the civilized world. The provinces were not without their schools of higher education, some of which attained great distinction. But the concentration that has both helped and hindered France focused in Paris the intellectual life of the nation. Favored by the Court, sharing the prestige which made and maintains the French language as the medium of diplomacy, and fostered by the world's approval, the higher spirit of France grew apace. Never in the world's history, excepting the single case of Alexandria, has one city sheltered so much of a nation's intellectual greatness. Woven for centuries into the fabric of the national life, it still finds expression in that high civilization which is so universally admired. And its appreciation by the State, generally withheld in other lands, is visibly demonstrated to every visitor to Paris.
If you would feel the inspiration of a great nation's centuries of thought and brilliant expression, go to the Luxembourg Gardens on a bright summer's afternoon. From this center you may set out to observe, as in no other region of the world, the widely recorded evidences of intellectual progress.
We are in the midst of the greatest of all wars, and the roar of the heavy guns at Verdun and on the Somme is almost audible. The nation has been stripped of able-bodied men to defend its frontier, and the crowd that still returns to these pleasant gardens, to rest among beds of flowers and pools of water, is made sombre by the ever-present marks of mourning. Yet the children, who must carry on the great traditions of France after the war has ended, mercifully spared the depression which their elders so bravely conceal, sail their boats across the pond as in happier days. A string orchestra, with many women now among its musicians, draws a group about it beneath the trees. In spite of the war the old life of Paris still goes on.
Encircling the pool, and stretching away on all sides, the busts and statues of eminent men look out of the past. Even the light reflected from the windows of the palace tells of great discoveries. For on a winter's day in 1808, while looking at one of these windows through a piece of Iceland spar, Malus detected for the first time that remarkable property of light---its polarization by reflection---which aided greatly in the establishment of the wave theory by Fresnel.
To our left rises the great dome of the Pantheon, inscribed "Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante," enshrining the tombs of Hugo, Lagrange, and Bougainville, and testifying, in the mural decorations of Puvis de Chavannes and in Rodin's "Le Penseur," to the perennial flow of French genius. Here, in 1851, Foucault suspended from the lantern of the dome an immense pendulum which, swinging in an unchanging plane as the floor turned beneath it, made visible the rotation of the earth. Close at hand stands the Bibliothèque de Sainte-Geneviève, with its rich collection of manuscripts and early printed books; flanked by the École de Droit, fronting on the broad Rue Soufflot. Book shops are everywhere, devoted to law or to medicine, to history, art or science, to theology or belles-lettres. On all sides the achievements of French civilization are honored or offered for public service.
Beyond the pond, the garden extends toward the south in the long rectangle of the Avenue de l'Observatoire. Crossing the Rue Auguste Comte, we leave the children's area behind, and watch the vista down the long rows of clipped horse-chestnuts. In May they are superb in their white wealth of blossoms, and now in early September, though their leaves are rusting, the effect of skilful massing is still retained. Beyond the Rue Herschell and the Rue Cassini rises the great stone structure of the Observatory, the domes at its two extremities coaxial with the alleys of trees. Built under Louis XIV by Claude Perrault, physician and architect, its lofty facade speaks eloquently of the enlightened appreciation of pure science which France has always shown. Here, during its early years, was housed the Academy of Sciences, and Leclerc has recorded for us in one of his engravings a visit of Louis XIV to the members assembled in the Observatory.
Four generations of the house of Cassini succeeded to the directorate of the Observatory, first held in 1671 by Giovanni Domenico Cassini, discoverer of the four Saturnian satellites and of the well-known division in Saturn's ring. Among their successors were Arago, the brilliant Perpetual Secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences, and Le Verrier, Senator of France, whose immortal researches on the irregular motions of Uranus led in 1846 to the discovery of Neptune. The statue of Le Verrier before the Observatory, and that of Arago in the Boulevard Arago, were erected by national subscription.
The same fine sense of fitness which has given the streets about the Observatory the names of great astronomers is repeatedly illustrated in adjoining regions of Paris. The broad area of the Jardin des Plantes, extending to the Seine, is bounded by the Rue Cuvier, the Rue de Buffon (named for the first director of the Garden), and the Rue Geoffroy St.-Hilaire. The vast menagerie's gardens, and exhibits, including the herbaria of Lamarck and Alexander von Humboldt and Cuvier's celebrated collection of comparative anatomy, together with the statues of many eminent men of science, are not the only attractions of this home of the naturalist. Here in a small laboratory, where their original instruments may still be seen, four generations of the family of Becquerel have carried on their classic investigations. Most significant of these is the discovery by Henri Becquerel, in 1896, of the invisible radiations of uranium, the starting point of research in radioactivity.
Were we to attempt to mention here even a tithe of the laboratories, the schools, the great names, or the fundamental contributions to knowledge, which press for recognition in all points of the Latin Quarter, these introductory pages would be multiplied beyond the reader's patience. But as we pass from the Jardin des Plantes through the Rue de Jussieu or the Rue Linné toward the core of France's scholastic heart, our gaze is often diverted. Across the Place Monge rises the École Polytechnique, flanked by the Rue Descartes and the Rue Laplace. Farther on we reach the Collège de France and the great pile of the Sorbonne. The statue of Claude Bernard before the College must appeal to every scholar; for his "Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale," unfortunately veiled from workers in other fields by its medical title, is one of the classics of science. Here, in the crystalline clearness of perfect French, devoid, in large part, of professional details, the general principles of scientific research are superbly presented. No investigator unfamiliar with this great work should leave it long unread.
If we elect to enter the Place de la Sorbonne through the Rue Champollion, a fascinating chapter in the history of science will rise before us. For the erudition of Germany in the field of Egyptology all goes back to the achievements of Champollion, first to decipher the royal cartouches on an obelisk and to read the trilingual inscription of the Rosetta Stone. Napoleon (who invariably signed himself while in Egypt "Membre de l'Institut, Général en Chef") had paved the way for Champollion by taking to Cairo a brilliant company of men of science, who recorded in the great "Description de l'Égypte" the inscriptions of the Nile, while a French officer had found the Stone itself at the Rosetta mouth. Since these distinguished beginnings, the stirring traditions of French archaeology have been ably maintained by Mariette, Maspéro, and their colleagues, both in Egypt and in France.
The Church of the Sorbonne affords a fitting entrance to the Sorbonne itself. The marble figure of Richelieu beneath his cardinal's hat suspended from the ceiling marks the tomb of the founder of the Académie Française and the builder of the Sorbonne. His private library, with many other valuable collections of early books and manuscripts, is still preserved; while the stimulus he gave to letters by his creation of the French Academy was soon emphasized in other fields by Colbert, under whom the Académie des Sciences, the Académie des Beaux Arts, and the French Academy at Rome were established. Colbert even conceived the plan of the Institute of France, but the Institute itself did not come into existence until after the Revolution.
The great amphitheater of the Sorbonne, with its superb mural paintings and its statues of Robert de Sorbon (founder of the original hostel for poor students), Richelieu, Descartes, Pascal, Rollin, and Lavoisier, is the chief place for university functions. These six figures epitomize the many-sided achievements of French intellectual progress. Even Pascal alone embodies an exceptional range of activity; we find him again represented at the base of the Tour St. Jacques, which he is said to have ascended to repeat his experiments proving the decrease in the pressure of the atmosphere with increasing elevation. Each of these tempting names, which might furnish a text for long discourse, must be passed by in favor of one more recent, which for the student represents most truly the spirit of modern France.
Memories of Louis Pasteur are best recalled in the regions associated with his life and work. The broad Avenue de Breteuil, coaxial with the Hôtel des Invalides, extends from the Tomb of Napoleon to the Boulevard Pasteur. At the center of the Place Breteuil stands the monument erected by France in Pasteur's honor. When it is remembered that by popular vote Pasteur was declared the greatest of Frenchmen, the national significance of this monument will be appreciated
Pasteur's later work was done in the Institut Pasteur, which stands in the Rue Dutot, not far from the Boulevard Pasteur. Here also is his tomb. But the reader of his biography by Vallery-Radot---a book to which every young investigator, in whatever field of science, should go for inspiration and guidance---will remember with keenest pleasure those simple beginnings when Pasteur, an obscure student from the little village of Dôle, embarked upon his career of discovery. He was studying the crystals of racemic acid, intent only on the advancement of knowledge, and with no thought of practical ends, when he noticed a curious dissymmetry, which had escaped even such skilled investigators as Mitscherlich and La Provostaye. Two crystals of precisely the same chemical composition were seen to be identical also in form, except in one respect: although the interfacial angles were the same, the two could not be superposed---the small facets were inclined in some cases to the right, and in others to the left. Carefully separated into two heaps and then dissolved, the two types of crystals in solution, though chemically identical, produced opposite effects on a beam of polarized light---one rotating it to the right, the other to the left. Mixed in equal parts, they caused no rotation.
This discovery, to the lay mind so valueless, excited Pasteur beyond measure. He rushed from the laboratory and in the long alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens unfolded his vision of its consequences to his friend Chappuis. The constitution of racemic acid, formerly so mysterious, had been found; a new class of isomeric substances had been discovered; the phenomenon of rotatory polarization and the properties of crystals had been illuminated: in short, a new and unforeseen route had been opened in science. Biot, when Pasteur repeated the experiment for him, exclaimed: "Mon cher enfant, j'ai tant aimé les sciences dans ma vie que cela me fait battre le cœur!"
Beautiful as this discovery appeared to the veteran Biot, it was still more marvelous in its possibilities to Pasteur himself. For his powerful imagination carried him far beyond its immediate applications in chemistry and physics toward the still greater consequences that he already half divined. Eager to pursue the new path he followed up his work. How is racemic acid produced? With the aid of Mitscherlich, Pasteur set out in hot haste for the chemical factories of Germany, Austria, and Bohemia. Everywhere he found traces of the acid in tartrates. Returning to Paris, he succeeded in producing racemic acid experimentally, and incidentally won the Chevalier's ribbon of the Legion of Honor.
Twenty years later, as a direct consequence of these experiments on crystalline dissymmetry, arose the new science of stereochemistry, which tells us of the arrangement in space of the atoms constituting a molecule. But far more important, Pasteur's studies of racemic acid showed him that while one class of crystals would ferment, the others remained inert in the liquid. Why should this be? Because, he replied, "Les ferments de cette fermentation se nourrissent plus facilement des molecules droites que des molecules gauches." But what, then, is fermentation, that strange process regarded by Liebig and others as a purely chemical phenomenon? The answer was immediately given by Pasteur, who showed it to be due to the presence of hosts of bacteria, which eagerly devoured one class of crystals and ignored the others.
Here was the beginning of that great study of putrefactive changes, and of the part played by bacteria in disease, which made the world Pasteur's debtor. Modern surgery, the cure of rabies, the germ theory of infection,---all go back to those simple experiments in pure science that laid the foundation of his career. What a privilege for the student to follow in his footsteps, to feel the stimulus of his example, to realize in some measure that high sense of devotion to truth, of obligation to humanity, best typified in Louis Pasteur!
But the fascination of Pasteur has tempted us far afield. Here in the Luxembourg Gardens, to which his talks with Chappuis have brought us back, we may well pause to reflect on the demands that the American student may fairly make on the country he elects for university work. Paris, as Goethe and Humboldt declared, and as those who are acquainted with French scholars today will heartily reiterate, is full of intellectual opportunity and charm. The admirable courses of instruction offered in every department of knowledge are fully set forth in the present volume. If in some fields there is room for improvement of the facilities now available for research, we have the strongest assurances that these will be rapidly augmented. Thus, from the intellectual standpoint, the scholastic attractions of Paris should leave nothing to be desired.
But may not the student ask for more? May he not hope to find, in the country he visits for graduate study, the inspiring qualities of an advanced civilization, the high ideals of a nation devoted to progress in the finest sense? Let us test France from this viewpoint.
Glance at the past, and realize how deep-rooted is her culture. The courtliness and taste of the old regime, its refinements in art, the elegance of its literature, the lasting contributions to civilization made by its greater statesmen, still find expression in the life and institutions of Paris. And this rich heritage stands free from the defects of an earlier social structure and the aggressive ambitions of imperial days. France, fortunate among nations, has conserved the good and rejected the evil experienced in her national progress. The dark passions of the Revolution have utterly disappeared, giving place to the spirit of liberty, equality, fraternity, truly expressed in the national life, and uniting France and the United States by unbreakable bonds.
But the present, not the past, must determine the student's choice. Here he will not hesitate, for France stands, as all the world knows, at the highest level of her moral attainment. The baseless charge of decadence, the ignorant depreciation based on an imperfect knowledge of the French people and an inability to perceive their deeper qualities---all this, occasionally heard in the past, has been forever silenced by the War, revealing a devotion to the State, a quiet but unyielding persistence in the defense of national ideals, which no opponent can overcome. The inspiring vision of war-swept France, indomitable in the face of sudden invasion, will draw to her universities in the coming days of peace many a student who would taste for himself the qualities he has admired and envied from the comfortable security of the United States.
PARIS, September, 1916.