Addresses Delivered at the Memorial Service for Frederick Slate

April the sixth Nineteen hundred and thirty University of California Berkeley, California Printed under the direction of the University of California Printer 1930

[1]

Introduction--

President William Wallace Campbell

It is inevitable that a certain degree of sadness attach to such occasions as this. It is the way of the world that the aged should leave us, and our philosophy must be adapted to that fact. But we are thinking of Frederick Slate's life and work and personality. Probably no man ever lived who had a more definite vision of his own objectives, whether those objectives referred to his studies in the domain of physics, or to the ethics and mode of his living. His objectives were always splendid, and he labored ably and unceasingly to achieve them. My colleagues will speak of these things at greater length.

Every person who has worked earnestly and continuously through several decades in a given field of endeavor learns to place high value upon the contributions of the pioneers in that field. Professor Slate's life was built into the foundations of the University as well as into the superstructure thereof. He became a member of the faculty of the University of California in 1874, 56 years ago, and he was intensively active through 44 years, until the date of his retirement in 1918.


2

At this point I shall venture to depart from the conventional and mention the late Mrs. Slate. All those who knew Professor and Mrs. Slate very well recognized in each of them a real personage. They exercised a wide and deep influence in this community. Great numbers of us will remember as long as we may live Mrs. Slate's inherent kindness, her quickness of comprehension, her remarkable degree of tact, her greatness of soul. In the passing of Mrs. Slate, five years ago, as well as in Professor Slate's recent death, our loss was severe and our sorrow keen.

Addresses--

Herbert M. Evans

PRESIDENT CAMPBELL:

The first speaker is Dr. Herbert McLean Evans, a graduate of the University of California in the Class of 1904, and our distinguished Professor of Anatomy during many years past. In his student days Mr. Evans learned to know Professor Slate and to admire greatly his splendid qualities. For nearly two decades the two men were intimate friends.


3

We are met here in this University today to recall in grateful remembrance the life and services of Frederick Slate, a man perhaps already unknown even to the students of his special subject here present, a man of traits which would forbid popularity in any ordinary acceptation of the word, but a man of very singular virtue and desert, in honoring whom we reaffirm our concepts of the loftiest impulse of humanity and loftiest purpose of an institution of learning. Though they knew him not, those current or recent students of the University here present may remember as they passed his garden front on the College Avenue entrance to the campus, a grizzled, grey-bearded man of slight stature in earnest work amongst his beloved white roses. This man was surely unknown even to the major part of the rapidly growing and changing faculty of the last few years. He was a man whose participation in this University was of consequence to it, in ways presently to be dwelt upon, as I cannot, by our colleagues, Professors Hall and Torrey. My task is rather to indicate briefly how a student of the natural sciences--a freshman in this University thirty years ago, was affected then and forever after by impact with Frederick Slate. The University in that fall of 1900 was perplexed about its rapid growth, and more particularly it had been full of concern about the growing separation


4
of students and faculty in all personal relations--and the Academic Senate, after due concern, had listed its members almost indiscriminately and assigned them, whether they had opposed or affirmed the scheme, as faculty advisors each to a group of freshmen. I found upon my card the name of Frederick Slate. We were told not to tarry upon formalities, not to wait for particular need, but to place ourselves, each and every mother's son of us, in immediate contact with our advisors. With grateful heart this particular freshman impulsively visited South Hall to seek out the unknown Professor and announce himself as belonging to his flock. I knocked timidly, and after stronger repetition, was called to enter by a barely audible but high-pitched voice. Professor Slate continued at work for a moment, which seemed interminable, and then with blunt question, asked my wants. My fright sought release in volubility--volubility before Frederick Slate! and in hurried repetitious words I poured forth all my plans to enter the college of Natural Sciences, to take this course now and to omit that. In short, I talked tremendously and discoursingly until my tongue suddenly failed me and silence made itself audible beyond noise, showing me the immensity of my aggression. To my great relief a smile, falsely said to be rare with Slate, o'erspread his face.
5

“Young man, have you anything in particular to request of me?”

This had not occurred to me. I said so! I desired to sink below the floor.

“Young man,” he said, “there is my door--come back when you have.”

I bolted from the room and from South Hall. At luncheon with sophomore engineers in my boarding house, I was counselled that my error would never be forgotten, and their derision led me to devote some hours to earnestly considering bolting college itself. I learned much about Slate in the next twenty-four hours and was, however imprudently, whetted to dare to attempt with him the only course for which my slight mathematical training had fitted me--Physics 10. In it I had brought home to me for the first time in my life, the beauty and scientific necessity of precision of expression, and I learned what I have never been able to sufficiently apply, the sin of employing many words when a concept may be defined by few.

Frederick Slate was a man of marked idiosyncrasies. His exactions for the whole of life, as well as for the class room, gave him the false reputation of aloofness from humanity, and for hardness. He had no use for the mentally unfit, and he was openly contemptuous of those without high aspiration. To the few he was counsellor and friend as could be no other. His circle of associates was


6
narrow, that of his pupils admitted to it just as narrow, but no earnest student failed to bear him respect if not affection. We would today be unfair to the memory of Professor Slate did we not attempt to characterize him accurately. There are many phases of man's simple social joy with his fellow-man that seemed lacking in seriousness and hence unworthy to Frederick Slate. He was not a good club-man, but he was a sympathetic companion to his chosen few. He knew the best in English literature, but he undervalued some delightful literature which, though clever in thought, subtlety, or artistry of expression, fell away from high seriousness. This was perhaps wrong. It was surely a supremely difficult level for the whole living of life.

In the faculty, Slate was called arbitrary and stubborn because he adhered to principles which could be dethroned only by adequate counter argument. I think he sufficiently recognized John Morley's noble definition of compromise. He was often pathetically solitary. He was shy. He respected other men's leisure as he put to use his own. His exactions of himself are typified by the ceaseless absolute rigour of his morning study hours until the very advent of his fatal illness, and by his insistence that he no longer remain recumbent a few minutes before his death.

Frederick Slate was a kindly man; few knew it. With Mrs. Slate, a woman of unique distinction


7
of heart and mind, Slate's home was open to his students and to his associates. The Slates had customs and adhered to them--in particular, for instance, Wednesday lunches and afternoons were always reserved for students and friends to drop in upon them without warning or special invitation. No tribute could be paid this phase of Slate's life without acknowledgment of what it owed to Mrs. Slate who in almost all ways was so beautiful a human complement to Professor Slate.

Whatever their careers, or wherever they wandered, Slate's students carried in their grateful hearts the memory of this open home. Strange as it may sound, Slate, so successful in the repression of all external signs of feeling, was a markedly sentimental being. No anniversary in his family or with friends was ever forgotten. One does not know how his preoccupied mind could have charged itself with these little things. With Frederick Slate these were among the important issues of life.

Professor Slate's front to the eternal problems of human existence resembled, as one might expect of him, that of Thomas H. Huxley. Fifty-five years ago, in rendering aid to an injured man, Mr. Edmund H. Sears, Slate made a friend, as he did all friends, for life. Mr. Sears is a devout adherent of a religious creed, and he has recently written Mrs. van Loben Sels of the sharp non-agreement


8
he had with Slate in their first long candid talk about the eternals. Then, he continues to say--from the vantage ground of an intimacy of fifty-five years' standing:

“We did not indeed find occasion to touch the question of immortality again for we had no common ground of conviction. I was a firm believer in the continuity of life to all eternity in the individual soul: he a reverent doubter. He saw nothing to convince him, so he would wait and see. And as we never opened the question again, I have supposed that in that attitude he remained to the end--he would wait and see.

“But how could the most ardent believer in the soul's endless existence have better fitted himself to take up life on the other side and be a joy to the self and a joy to others through power to be of use--honest, unselfish, loftily conceived and noble use? He had found the great secret, that life is for use. His use to the world was never marred or stained by an unworthy motive or an unworthy deed..... I think most happily of him as continuing just the life he lived here, a life devoted to good ends, to lofty purposes, with no sordid ambitions to outgrow or cast aside, no impure deeds to repent of, no thought of envy, malice or injustice to fetter the freedom of the spirit and cramp its usefulness and its full rich satisfactions.”


9

Elmer E. Hall

PRESIDENT CAMPBELL:

The next speaker, Professor E. E. Hall, joined the staff of the Department of Physics in the year 1899. Since 1919 he has been one of our Professors of Physics, and following the lamented and untimely death of Professor E. P. Lewis, Chairman of the Department of Physics. His intimate association with Professor Slate during a period of 19 years gave him unusual opportunities to observe and appreciate the services which Professor Slate rendered to the University through the Department of Physics.

In 1873, the year the University of California moved from Oakland to this campus, two graduate students enrolled. One of these was Frederick Slate Jr. He was continuously associated with the University from that day until his death on the 26th of February, 1930, and hence with the entire life of the University on this campus and with nearly fifty-seven of the University's total of sixty-two years.

Frederick Slate was born in London, within the sound of Big Ben, January 21, 1852. His family, having suffered financial reverses, moved to this country when he was a boy of twelve. Largely through his own efforts he secured an education, graduating from the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute with the degree of B.S. in 1871.


10
The next two years were spent as a civil engineer for the Oregon-California and the Northern Pacific railroads. The call of the student, however, was strong within him and he turned aside from the engineering career which was opening before him to enter this University as a graduate student in the fall of 1873. The following year he was Graduate Assistant in Chemistry and in 1875 became Instructor in Chemistry.

The idea of laboratory work on the part of the student as a means of instruction seems to have been first used in chemistry. While the physicist, Professor William Thompson, better known by his later title of Lord Kelvin, as early as 1845 had a group of students at Glasgow assisting him in research, the first proposal, at least in this country, that the institution “provide implements and apparatus with which the student may be exercised in a variety of physical processes and experiments” was made by William Barton Rogers, founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and adopted by the trustees of that institution May 30, 1864. It was not until five years later, in April 1869, that the plan was put in operation by Professor Pickering. Harvard adopted the plan the following year, Yale in 1871, and by 1877 four or five other institutions had established laboratories for instruction in physics. In 1877 it was decided by the Board of Regents to


11
establish such a laboratory at the University of California, and Frederick Slate was appointed to direct it, with the title “Superintendent of the Physics Laboratory,” and granted a two years' leave of absence to study abroad before taking up his duties. These years, 1877-79, were spent under Professor Helmholtz at Berlin and at the University of Strassburg. On his return to the University in 1879 laboratory instruction was begun. In the University register for 1879-80 we find these words, “Provision has been made for beginning practical exercises in physical measurements. A room has been fitted up for this purpose and instruction begun. The facilities will be increased as the necessary funds shall be available.” By special act of the legislature funds were soon made available and the experimental method of instruction vigorously put in operation. Thus Professor Slate inaugurated the first laboratory instruction in physics in the University and in the State, and while California did not actually introduce the laboratory method until ten years after its introduction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California was nevertheless not far behind the vanguard of institutions adopting the laboratory method, for many institutions were slow in following the lead.

The traditions which Professor John LeConte introduced by way of demonstration experiments


12
on the lecture table, and the high standards and clear thinking demanded by the experimental exercises inaugurated by Professor Slate, not only gave effective instruction at the time but their influence can be clearly seen in the Department at the present day.

Prior to 1883 the requirements for admission to the University called for English, mathematics, Latin, Greek, history, and geography. In 1883 there was added a choice of any two of the following subjects, physics, chemistry, botany, physiology, free-hand drawing, mineralogy, trigonometry. In 1884, largely due to Professor Slate's influence, knowledge of the elements of physics gained experimentally was announced as an entrance requirement. Provision was made for the acceptance, prior to 1887, of any one of the subjects added the previous year instead of the experimental physics. When it is realized that Harvard did not require experimental or laboratory physics until 1886 the vision of Professor Slate is manifest. The introduction of another laboratory science by the side of chemistry reacted to strengthen the secondary schools of the State.

The title of Instructor in Physics and Mechanics was soon added to that of Superintendent of the Physics Laboratory and in 1886 the Instructor was changed to Assistant Professor. In 1889 the triple title gave place to that of Associate


13
Professor of Physics, and on the death of Professor John LeConte in 1891 Mr. Slate was made Professor of Physics and Head of the Department, which position he held for twenty-seven years, until his retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1918.

Soon after the founding of the University it was realized that California had a free grammar school system and a free university, but with a gap between. There was no state provision whereby a graduate of a grammar school could prepare himself for the University. Attention was repeatedly called to this fact in the early reports of the President of the University to the Governor of the State. To fill this gap the high school system of the State gradually came into existence. There was needed at this time careful planning and wise guidance that the foundations of the developing system should be well laid and that high standards of instruction and accomplishment be attained from the first. One of the great debts which the State of California owes to Professor Slate is in connection with his contribution to her high schools. Not only did he take a prominent part in the legislation within the University concerning the relations of the University to the high schools, but as Chairman of the University Committee on Schools he visited the high schools over a long period of years, speaking frequently before institutes and teachers' conventions,


14
not merely in connection with the subject of physics but along the lines of solid foundations, high standards, and real scholarship. His advice and help, at this time, to the teachers and principals of the high schools can hardly be overestimated. I shall have occasion a little later to give an instance of this.

Prior to 1893, with the prescriptions as to courses then in effect, it was not possible for a student to get a broad training in science in connection with his four-year college course. Outside of the colleges of Engineering and Chemistry scientific courses did not receive full recognition. Professor Slate was one of a group of men who sought to bring about a change. As a result there was established in 1893 a College of Social Science and a College of Natural Science. Professor Stringham, who had previously been Dean of the Faculty of Letters and of the Faculties of Science, became Dean of the two colleges. In 1896 the deanship was divided, Professor Stringham continuing as Dean of the College of Social Science and Professor Slate becoming Dean of the College of Natural Science. He was Dean of this College continuously until 1909.

In the Academic Senate, in the Councils of the University, and as Dean of the College of Natural Science, Professor Slate ever stood for solid foundations and for exacting standards. His


15
keen, analytic mind saw the solution to many difficult and intricate problems, and his powers of clear argument and his ability in debate led in many cases to the adoption of his solution. The University owes him, along with other leaders in the period from 1880 to 1910, a great debt. What greater service could these men have rendered than that of wisely developing the policies of the expanding University and of contributing so effectively to its intellectual character?

On assuming the duties of Head of the Department, Professor Slate turned over the laboratory work to others. The scientific problem in which he became most interested was the precise formulation of the principles of the classical mechanics. The principles of mechanics were stated by Newton in 1687. During the succeeding two centuries these principles were extensively and successfully applied to the explanation of physical phenomena. During the last half of the nineteenth century, however, there arose a critical interest in the logical foundations of dynamics. One may mention Mach in Austria, Pearson and Heaviside in England, Stallo in the United States, and Neumann and Streintz in Germany. These men were all inspired by the ideal of a logical satisfactory system of mechanics. Professor Slate was a distinguished member of this group. His “Principles of Mechanics” which appeared in 1900, although


16
in intention an elementary text, was also an original contribution to the discussion of the foundations of classical mechanics. The second part of the Principle of Mechanics appeared in 1918 as one of the semicentennial publications of the University of California, under the title of The Fundamental Equations of Dynamics . This work is distinctly an original contribution to the discussion of the foundations of the classical mechanics. He says in the preface, “Every aspect of the thoughts here put down is framed in a personal experience,” and the following quotation, the closing sentence of the preface, is strongly indicative of the man. “On the occasion to be celebrated it seems particularly pertinent that there should be recorded in some permanent form the working of those influences which our University has not withheld from her graduates, to nourish in them the living root of independent thinking and of unflinching thoroughness without which constructive scholarship cannot exist.” His journal publications during this period were also largely concerned with mechanics and with the units of measurements. His high school text in physics, which appeared in 1902, differed markedly from other texts in that definitions and principles were not labeled for easy memory, but starting from experience and experiments the subject is developed by deductive thinking. In his
17
later years he was interested in reformulating the classical mechanics so that it would encompass the new results obtained by the theory of relativity. This work was only partly completed and published. His solution had been reached, but failing health prevented the putting of the final results in form for the printer. His life-work on the side of constructive scholarship was thus guided by the ideal of an exact and general formulation of mechanics.

In the class room Professor Slate was marked by strong individuality, as indeed he was in every other phase of activity. He was a student of language as well as of physics, and he practiced and demanded of his students clear thinking and exact expression. Whatever the size of the class his method dealt with the students as individuals, and, as a result, to many of his students his was a lasting inspiration. He did for his students what he so aptly stated in the paragraph quoted above, he nourished in them a living root of independent thinking and of unflinching thoroughness. Independent thinking, unflinching thoroughness, exactness in thought and expression, inspiration to attain the highest, characterized his teaching.

I have spoken of Professor Slate's contribution to laboratory instruction, to the high schools of the State, to the development of the standards and ideals of the University during its formative


18
period, to constructive scholarship, and to teaching. For these many contributions the University conferred on him the degree of LL.D. at Commencement 1925.

I cannot close without speaking of the personal side. My real acquaintance with Professor Slate began in the spring of 1898, when as one of the University visitors he came to the Long Beach High School where I was teacher of mathematics and science. To me that day stands out as unique. I learned more about teaching that day than ever I did in any other one day before or since. After the class work was over his invited suggestions and criticisms were many and all of the constructive helpful type. They were given kindly but tersely, clearly, and without possibility of misinterpretation. The following year his visit was cheerfully looked forward to, not only by the teacher but by the class which he had visited in chemistry, and which was now the class in physics. At the close of the day Professor Slate accepted the invitation to stay to a literary program the students were giving and on request he spoke. In his remarks he stated in clear characteristic fashion the elements making up the ideal high school as he saw it, and what a student should get from the course in such a school. Professor Slate's visit was an uplift and an inspiration to many students in that school. If any one of the


19
five or six seniors who were planning to enter the University in the fall were asked what subjects they were going to study at Berkeley, the first answer was physics under Professor Slate.

He was a man of enduring and faithful devotion to duty, of great sincerity and loyalty, and with a spirit of real helpfulness and kindliness. He adhered to his opinions, his convictions, and his ideals without regard to personal consequences. In the Riverside Addresses , a publication which came out in the late nineties, he makes a statement somewhat as follows, “Whoever has the courage of his convictions and makes them the basis of action is more akin to the generation that follows than the one in which his lot is cast.” He quickly saw through pretense, insincerity, sham, flattery, or false standards, and with these he had no patience.

I have received a letter from a personal friend, a Professor of Physics in a large middle-west university who was a student under Professor Slate in the late nineties. Referring to himself and wife, who was also a student under Professor Slate, he says, “During our college course, when students are in need of adequate guidance, it was our rare good fortune to be taken into his friendship, a relation which continued to exist through the years. Once you gained his friendship, there was opened a wealth of cordiality and sympathy


20
that was entirely hidden from others.” In an earlier letter, written immediately after hearing of Professor Slate's death, this same friend said, “His death makes me stop and think a bit. The main result is to consider how far I have carried out the ideals Professor Slate had when he spent his energies helping me.”

Unflinchingly thorough in every work, sincere and truthful in word and action, loyal to ideals and to friends, Frederick Slate, we would pay you tribute.

Harry Beal Torrey

PRESIDENT CAMPBELL:

The final speaker of this occasion is Professor Harry Beal Torrey, a graduate of the University in the Class of 1895, a member of the staff of the Department of Zoology through the period 1895 to 1912. During recent years he has been a professor in Stanford University, Department of Hygiene, with principal duties relating to the physical welfare of the men students. Professor Torrey and Professor Slate were intimate friends through many years and up to the time of the latter's death.


[21]

Frederick Slate was forty years old when I registered for his lectures in Physics and thereby took the first small step toward a friendship that increasing through the years has been a precious and significant possession.

In my freshman year I had passed my working days with Thomas R. Bacon, who made the great figures of Medieval Europe live again before us; with George C. Edwards, who reduced the abstractions of mathematics to simple common sense; with Cornelius Beach Bradley, who opened books of many sorts to me; with Edmond O'Neill who was patient with our ineptitudes as chemists; with Henry Senger who made friends of his students as he drilled them in the parts of German speech.

And now each week as a sophomore, I was to see Bernard Moses, and Alexis Lange, and Joseph LeConte, and Frederick Slate, whose names are now memories only, but whose personalities are woven for all time into the many colored fabric of lives and achievement that is the University. Each of these masterful teachers and others to follow in later years made his characteristic contribution to my experience.

In Slate's lecture room, I was first impressed by the pattern of his discourse, the clearness of its outline and structure, the precision of its carefully chosen words. He knew the meaning and the uses of logic. He also understood the power


22
of mere fact to speak for itself once it got a proper hearing. His lectures were not intended to be persuasive, but they were convincing. He detested fireworks. I remember that he could not demonstrate with entire pleasure the effects of electrical discharges through rarefied gases in the familiar Geissler tubes lest the spectacular colors should blind us to the soberer significance of the mechanism involved. The experiments that he repeated on his lecture table were classical in their simplicity, crucial in their decisiveness. They were thoughtfully chosen to illustrate a principle or to accumulate evidence toward an inevitable result. They were never performed for their own sake. They did not develop unexpectedly out of sudden inspirations. Unlike one or two of his beloved contemporaries, Slate never lost himself and his audience in a novel possibility on the lecture table. His thought was neither unexpected nor plastic. It marched inexorably to a predetermined goal.

And that, day after day, produced its effects. Physics came to be, in our eyes, a great moral force. Science began to emerge as organized veracity. And knowledge became, not an end in itself, but a pathway toward an honorable life; knowledge that was not hearsay, knowledge that was not vulgar hope or suspicion, knowledge that did not flinch under crucial tests, knowledge that could prove far-off predictions real, knowledge


23
that would free the human spirit in a universe of opportunity.

Then came the examination. It was not so much a test as a revelation--of my inadequacies, my fragmentary thinking, my inattention to essential details, my inexperience. It was all so clear, all so convincing. It was painful, for it shocked my self-esteem. It was wonderfully tonic, too, for it illuminated new horizons to explore and made us strangely restless to be at it.

His teaching had tractive power. This was due in large measure to what he expected of us. From our years of previous schooling, we should have brought intellectual curiosity and industry and endurance. His lectures were elevated to this level, on which he placed our real selves, however pallid or indifferent the masks we wore. He made no cheap assumptions about his students, and he had the probity and courage, the tenacity and the faith to accept with equanimity the consequences of his high standards.

His examinations were never snares for the unwary nor formal necessities demanded by administrative rules. They were of the essence of the educational process; tests, it is true, but, more truly, invitations. The test, indeed, was in our reaction to the invitation. And every year, seriously, desirously, he awaited our replies, with a touch of austerity, even, as from an enduring


24
hope long in leash awaiting the comforting justification of fulfilment. What he expected of his students he ceaselessly demanded of himself. It was not primarily achievement in physics or analytical mechanics; it was not primarily discovery; nor even the rigorous formulation of established laws. Like every great teacher he was at the foundations of his mind and heart a moralist. His objective for his students, as for himself, was to live righteously; and to live righteously was to apply to the solution of the manifold and delicate and intricate problems of conduct the same fundamental method that in the laboratory always led so surefootedly to pragmatic truth. To live righteously was not to live according to custom, but by judgment in all things. To live righteously was to be thoughtful and to honor the method as well as the result; the result not for itself but for its future significance as a catalyzer of further reaction, as a factor in a larger and increasingly more inclusive process.

To pursue this scientific ideal was obviously not to follow the crowd. It was a course too rigorously critical, too uncompromising, too sheer, too impersonal for men in general who commonly respond with far greater ease to the touch of the affections and of art.

For him virtue lay in action appropriate to inevitable facts. One did not act virtuously to


25
please another, nor to justify one's tastes. Feeling might accompany a virtuous act without being of it. Feeling, over-mastering feeling, might well come out of discovery, but as a result, not a determining cause. To make discoveries one need not be emotionally obtuse. Indeed, nothing shows more convincingly the fundamental kinship of the men of science and of art than their gifts of imagination and imagination without emotion is as a rainbow without color.

It was this dominance of the method of science in the varied routine of Frederick Slate's life that made of it a rare and significant experiment, and it was the studied objectivity with which he viewed a human problem that gave his counsels exceptional weight.

It was not easy to satisfy him with the form of our questions. But while we sometimes wondered at his criticism, they gradually took on new and revealing shapes. He taught us how to use a question as a tool, how to clarify a problem by lopping off its inessentials, how to shorten our search by straightening our path.

He preferred to help us with our procedure, rather than formulate the result. Thereby he gave us a method without relieving us of effort; and we gained both judgment and power.

This was his way when, in later years I sought his counsel. As we looked over the facts together,


26
whatever the exigency, he purified my judgment; and at the moment of decision, the final responsibility was mine.

I have felt his criticism, and I have often seen it cut through dilemmas of discussion sharply, clearly, ruthlessly, if you will; but with the ruthlessness inherent in the facts, without admixture of personal considerations. His interest was in methods and results, not reputations. He wished events to be right. He had a feeling for mechanical perfection--for the accurate meshing of the cogs of conduct. He abhorred dishonesty in all its forms, petty insincerities and calculating theft, timorous silences when the truth was in speech, and wrong-headed ignorance that turned irrelevantly from enlightening knowledge. These did not lead to rightness and justice, to large generosities and fundamental kindness. His passion was for inclusive perfection. He loved deeply, and his affections were sensitive to enduring fitness as well as to the momentary fact. He loved, consistently, movingly, abstract qualities and the institutions that made them real. He loved the University not merely for its clustered associations but for what among all human institutions it especially could achieve toward the liberation of the human spirit, the disciplining of judgment, the promotion of veracity in thought and deed.


[27]

He was hospitable to discussion, but hostile to debate. He would force an issue to obtain new light upon it; but he did not delight in verbal fence. His criticism was not competitive. His objective was never personal success against another. He was not impressed by natural selection as an exemplar of the natural order and thereby a foundation stone of ethics. He saw conflict in the organic world and the elimination of the unfit. He saw cooperation also as equally characteristic of it. But beyond and enveloping them both, he saw the impersonal vastness of inorganic nature, its movement, its incompatibilities, its stabilizings, its disarrangements and reconstructions; where there was neither personal conflict nor the problem of survival; where, in the midst of change, there was no competition.

It was this perfection that he unremittingly promoted, less strenuously, perhaps, in his later years, when other considerations not defined by logical accountability added their color to both imagination and regime. Thus he mellowed, content to let his thought take its accustomed path toward rectitude while he enjoyed more openly the charm in unessential error and the recognition that the tool-marked surface had endearing virtues of its own.

Thus he ripened without growing old. Always he had disciplined both body and mind to the end


28
of complete effectiveness. He knew the racer's secret of supreme performance. With exceptional persistence he applied it to the routines of his life. To waver in one's stride was not infrequently to fail. So, eliminating as far as possible all accidental variations, he maintained a steady pace. His office hours were strictly kept, for the convenience of others. He kept as strictly the hours reserved for his own concerns. He avoided commitments that, without distinct readjustments in his carefully organized program, he could not fulfil. It happened that my initial appearance before the Philosophical Union followed the acceptance of an invitation which he, perhaps with larger wisdom, had previously declined. Many years ago, he broke the neck of a thigh bone--always a serious fracture. After weeks of enforced quiet came many more of carefully planned routines to restore it to full usefulness. He was a perfect patient who cooperated to a perfect result.

His kindnesses were studied, too. I well remember how, when a certain small child once sought to listen to the ticking of his watch, his permission carried this characteristic reservation: “I will let you play with it as much as is good for you and no more.” More vividly still I remember how, during my undergraduate days, he sought me out in the laboratory to say that when, in filing a letter in support of the candidacy of


29
another student for a competitive award, he had chanced upon my candidacy, he had at once attached an equivalent statement to my record also. It was a matter of fact announcement, and he had gone before I could stammer my appreciation. Its kindness touched my heart--though for reasons peculiar to myself I didn't get the award.

Even his humor had a certain seriousness. He never fully shared his dear friend Bradley's subtle satisfactions in the rough and tumble tropes of our imaginative common speech. Language was to him first of all an instrument of accurate expression. In his joking, he favored logic and line rather than whimsy and color. Ridicule he never favored, either for himself or others.

He was a capital companion in the mountains. He loved the open, and strenuous hiking without odds. It was an experience to follow him on an unbroken trail where seasoned muscles and a practiced judgment and a calm and hardy spirit all contributed to speed and success. We always began our march with his unvarying slogan: “En avant, die ganze Companie!” And when we returned from our days on mountain trails with this polyglot beginning,--he never forgot his chores.

To the end he retained his youth. Through well-ordered days he continued to produce his


30
best in body and mind. His passing was before his time, due in no sense, however, to any relaxation of lifelong habit. Helpless before an unseen and insidious fact, he never thought to compromise with reality. It is profoundly comforting to know that he was spared long suffering as, clear-eyed and strong-hearted and faithful always, he essayed the Great Adventure.

PRESIDENT CAMPBELL:

I am certain you will join me in taking satisfaction in the knowledge that the good that men do lives after them, and that the real values in their accomplishments endure.

About this text
Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb9c6008w6&brand=oac4
Title: Addresses delivered at the Memorial Service for Frederick Slate, April the sixth Nineteen hundred and thirty
By:  University of California (System) Academic Senate, Author
Date: 1930
Contributing Institution:  University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
Copyright Note:

Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commericially exploited without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user

University of California Regents

Academic Senate-Berkeley Division, University of California, 320 Stephens Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-5842