272
12 Coda
extraordinarily fine observer, having come from abroad a short time earlier, once
said to Willem de Sitter: ‘What kind of a person was this Kapteyn? When you
pronounce his name, something special comes into your voice and your face’.
These are very simple things that I can tell about him, but one cannot speak of
them other than very simply and unselfishly. When someone in his seventies,
– was he really that old, that boyish, youthful one? – dies, then one usually
testifies that he was able to give what had. In Kapteyn there were still treasures
of labor and interest and love of mankind and things left. I had always imagined
him working until his nineties. At Westerveld, last Tuesday, under Van Anrooy’s
organ play, I had to think of the spaces that this spirit has passed through, and
how they have become for him now less than the size of his hand.
And finally I quote Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892–1965). Dijksterhuis is
known as a historian, who wrote the well-known book The mechanization of
the world picture in 1950. He studied mathematics in Groningen (and was a
teacher at an HBS for many years) and there he attended lectures by Kapteyn.
He wrote in a magazine for secondary education [117]:
The whole scientific world honored Kapteyn for the great work he had done in
the service of astronomy; his students also thanked him for the imperishable gift
he had personally given them when he gave them the best that a teacher could
give them, the love, admiration, and enthusiasm for the magnificent science to
which he had dedicated his rich life.
12 Coda
extraordinarily fine observer, having come from abroad a short time earlier, once
said to Willem de Sitter: ‘What kind of a person was this Kapteyn? When you
pronounce his name, something special comes into your voice and your face’.
These are very simple things that I can tell about him, but one cannot speak of
them other than very simply and unselfishly. When someone in his seventies,
– was he really that old, that boyish, youthful one? – dies, then one usually
testifies that he was able to give what had. In Kapteyn there were still treasures
of labor and interest and love of mankind and things left. I had always imagined
him working until his nineties. At Westerveld, last Tuesday, under Van Anrooy’s
organ play, I had to think of the spaces that this spirit has passed through, and
how they have become for him now less than the size of his hand.
And finally I quote Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892–1965). Dijksterhuis is
known as a historian, who wrote the well-known book The mechanization of
the world picture in 1950. He studied mathematics in Groningen (and was a
teacher at an HBS for many years) and there he attended lectures by Kapteyn.
He wrote in a magazine for secondary education [117]:
The whole scientific world honored Kapteyn for the great work he had done in
the service of astronomy; his students also thanked him for the imperishable gift
he had personally given them when he gave them the best that a teacher could
give them, the love, admiration, and enthusiasm for the magnificent science to
which he had dedicated his rich life.