Johns Hopkins Magazine -- April 2000

In photographs, Arthur Onken Lovejoy does not look playful. According to those who knew him, he was of slight build. But in a portrait from the Hopkins archives, he seems physically imposing. It's the gaze that does it. Sober and appraising and direct, it seems to ask the viewer to account for himself. A former student of his named Marjorie Nicolson once described Lovejoy's eyes as "blue steel that pierced through my youthful shallow ignorance and arrogance on the occasion when I first ventured a remark in his seminar." An imposing figure, but one who wrote the following: "Whatever other definitions of man be true or false, it is generally admitted that he is distinguished among the creatures by the habit of entertaining general ideas. Like Br'er Rabbit he has always kept up a heap o' thinking; and it has usually been assumed--though the assumption has been nominally disputed by some schools of philosophers--that his thoughts have at all times had a good deal to do with his behavior, h

In photographs, Arthur Onken Lovejoy does not look playful. According to those who knew him, he was of slight build. But in a portrait from the Hopkins archives, he seems physically imposing. It's the gaze that does it. Sober and appraising and direct, it seems to ask the viewer to account for himself. A former student of his named Marjorie Nicolson once described Lovejoy's eyes as "blue steel that pierced through my youthful shallow ignorance and arrogance on the occasion when I first ventured a remark in his seminar." An imposing figure, but one who wrote the following: "Whatever other defin