This steadfast belief in the power of man was an unalloyed childhood instinct, an intuition and a childhood faith which never for a day forsook him, but grew stronger, like an indwelling daemon. As day by day passed on, he saw power grow before his eyes, as each unsuspected and new world arose and opened to his wonder eyes; he saw power intensify and expand; and ever grew his wonder at what men could do. He came in a manner to worship man as a being, a presence containing wondrous powers, mysterious hidden powers, powers so varied as to surprise and bewilder him. So that Man, the mysterious, became for him a sort of symbol of that which was deepest, most active in his heart. As months passed and the years went by, as world after world unfolded before him and merged within the larger world, and veil after veil lifted, and illusion after illusion vanished, and the light grew ever steadier, Louis saw power everywhere; and as he grew on through his boyhood, and through the passage to manhood, and to manhood itself, he began to see the powers of nature and the powers of man coalesce in his vision into an idea of power. Then and only then he became aware that this idea was a new idea—a complete reversal and inversion of the commonly accepted intellectual and theological concept of the Nature of man.
That idea which had its mystical beginning in so small a thing as a child’s heart, grew and nurtured itself upon that child’s varied consistently continuing and metamorphosing experiences in time and place, as has been most solicitously laid bare to view in detail, in the course of this recital. For it needs a long long time, and a rich soil of life-experience, to enable a simple, single idea to grow to maturity and solid strength. A French proverb has it that “Time will not consecrate that in which it has been ignored,” while the deep insight of Whitman is set forth in the line, “Nature neither hastens nor delays.”
Louis’s interest in engineering as such, and in the two bridges in particular, so captivated his imagination, that he briefly dreamed to be a great bridge engineer. The idea of spanning a void appealed to him as masterful in thought and deed. For he had begun to discern that among men of the past and of his day, there were those who were masters of ideas, and of courage, and that they stood forth solitary, each in a world of his own. But the practical effect of the bridges was to turn Louis’s mind from the immediate science of engineering toward science in general, and he set forth, with a new relish, upon a course of reading covering Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and the Germans, and found a new, an enormous world opening before him, a world whose boundaries seemed destined to be limitless in scope, in content, in diversity. This course of reading was not completed in a month, or a year, or in many years; it still remains on the move.
What Louis noted as uppermost in the scientific mind, was its honest search for stability in truth. Hitherto he had regarded his mathematics as an art; he had not followed far enough to see it as a science. Indeed he had hitherto regarded every constructive human effort as an art, and to this view he had been held through the consistent unfolding of the Idea. Inevitably this view was to return in time; through the channels of science itself. For that which at once impressed Louis as new to him and vital, was what was known as “The Scientific Method.” He saw in it a power of solution he long had fruitlessly been seeking. His key to an outlook took shape in the scientific method of approach to that which lay behind appearances; a relentless method whereby to arrive at the truth by tireless pursuit. He now had in his hands the instrument he wanted. He must learn to use it with a craftsman’s skill. For the scientific method was based on exact observation from which, by the inductive system of reasoning, an inference was drawn, an hypothesis framed, to be held tentatively in “suspended judgment” until the gathering of further data might raise it to the dignity of a theory, which theory, if it could stand up under further rigorous testing, would slowly pass into that domain of ordered and accepted knowledge we fondly believe to be Truth. Yet science, he foresaw, could not go either fast or far were it not for Imagination’s glowing light and warmth. By nature it is rigid and prosaic—and Louis early noted that the free spirits within its field were men of vision—masters of imagination, men of courage, great adventurers—men of one big, dominant idea.
In the course of Louis’s daily working life, conditions were steadily improving. His engagements in offices grew longer, he began to prosper. The quality of work was improving. He had passed the day of his majority, and was now looking out for himself. His success in this regard made him
