Why do they [Americans] quarrel, why do they hate Negroes, Indians, even Germans, why do they not have science and poetry commensurate with themselves, why are there so many frauds and so much nonsense? I cannot soon give a solution to these questions...
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"The edifice of science not only requires material, but also a plan. Without the material, the plan alone is but a castle in the air—a mere possibility; whilst the material without a plan is but useles…"
"Experiment itself cannot give truth, but it gives the means of destroying erroneous representations whilst confirming those which are true in all their consequences."
"Knowing how contented, free and joyful is life in the realms of science, one fervently wishes that many would enter their portals."
"I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary."
"By gradually studying matter, people finally take command of it."
Observations on American society, likely from his travels or correspondence.
Date: Late 19th century
GeneralFound in 1 providers: gemini
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The speaker observes troubling contradictions in American society: widespread conflict, racial hatred toward Black, Indigenous, and even German populations, a lack of intellectual and artistic achievement matching the country's size and power, and pervasive dishonesty and absurdity. He admits he cannot quickly explain why such a wealthy, ambitious nation harbors these flaws, leaving the puzzle open rather than offering easy judgment.
Mendeleev visited Pennsylvania's oil fields in 1876 to study American petroleum production for Russia, and these are his firsthand impressions. As a systematic thinker who organized the elements by hidden patterns, he naturally sought underlying causes for social phenomena too. His disappointment reflects the values of a Russian scientist who prized rigorous scholarship, poetry, and ethical seriousness, and who expected a rising industrial power to cultivate deeper intellectual culture.
In 1876 America was a decade past the Civil War, deep in Reconstruction's collapse, with lynching rising, Indian Wars pushing tribes onto reservations, and German immigrants facing nativist suspicion. The Gilded Age was beginning: railroad fraud, Tammany corruption, and the Credit Mobilier scandal dominated headlines. European visitors routinely contrasted America's industrial might with its thin literary and scientific output, a critique Tocqueville had raised forty years earlier.
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