O the shinings and refinings!
O the sweetness of completeness!
_Via crucis via lucis_!
* * * * *
XXI.
HEROES OF SCIENCE.
MICHAEL FARADAY--SIR WILLIAM SIEMENS--M. PASTEUR.
The loftiest class of scientists pursue science because they love truth.
They derive no animation from the thought of any practical application
which they can make from their scientific discoveries. They have no
dreams of patents and subsequent royalties, although these sometimes
come. They enter upon their work, smit with a passion for truth. If to
any one of them it should happen to be pointed out--as Sir Humphrey Davy
showed the ardent young Michael Faraday--at the beginning of his career,
that science is a hard mistress who pays badly, they are so in love with
science that, really and truly, they prefer from their very hearts to
live with her on bread and water in a garret to living without her in
palaces in which they might fare sumptuously every day.
There are others by whom science is regarded only in the measure of its
fruitfulness in producing material wealth. Their great men are not the
discoverers of principles, but the inventors, the men who can apply the
discoveries of others to supplying such wants as men are willing to pay
largely to have satisfied. As has been said--
"To some she is the goddess great;
To some the milch-cow of the field;
Their business is to calculate
The butter she will yield.
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