Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

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Professor Tingley was then a man of fifty, sparkling, alive, informal. Three years before, he had been one of the fifty chosen from many hundred applicants to spend the summer with Louis Agassiz on the island of Penikese in Buzzards Bay. Agassiz had planned with enthusiasm for the Penikese Summer School, and for those privileged to enter who could understand and appreciate it was an unforgettable experience; certainly it was for Jeremiah Tingley. He carried there Agassiz’s faith in observation and classification, as well as his reverence for Nature and all her ways. For both men the material world was but the cover of the spirit. Professor Tingley would quote Agassiz sometimes: “Nature always brings us back to absolute truth whenever we wander.”

This fervent faith had a profound and quieting effect on my religious tumult. I learned a new word: Pantheism. Being still in that early stage of development where there must be a definite word by which to classify oneself, I began to call myself a pantheist—and I had a creed which I repeated more often than the creed I had learned in childhood: