82 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



lives with the lives of any other class. If the Vice-President will 

 permit me, I think the life of a man of science is a great deal 

 happier than the life of a politician or the life of a statesman, 

 who, as we know, is many pegs above the politician (laughter), 

 because the politician is occupied, as the Vice-President has said, 

 in endeavoring to promote the interests of his party and not the 

 interests of his country; and I discovered, during my experience 

 in the House of Commons in England, that a legislative assembly 

 is the worst place in the world for the discovery of abstract truth. 

 (Laughter.) 



Or, take the case of the lawyer. So far from seeking to dis- 

 cover the truth, in one-half of the cases which he conducts, he 

 is endeavoring to obscure the truth. (Laughter.) Or, even take 

 the case of the artist or the literary man, who has a subject to 

 work upon, delightful and interesting in itself, in evoking from 

 the stone, or by colors, shapes or forms of beauty, which will far 

 outlive him. But these forms of beauty will profit him very little 

 if they do not commend themselves to the popular tastes, and 

 he is constantly under the temptation of doing something less 

 good than he wishes, in order to meet the tastes of his patrons. 



It is the man of science who has the really happy life. He is 

 engaged in the discovery of the truth, and nothing but truth. 

 The applause of the multitude is nothing to him. He is working 

 for a mistress more exalted than any popular assembly or any 

 multitude that we can conceive of. He is working for Truth 

 herself, and for the future. He is consecrating his efforts to the 

 highest task that God can lay before man, and in that he needs 

 nothing but the sense of what he is adding to the sum of human 

 knowledge, and he has the incomparable pleasure of feeling that 

 the more he knows, the more the immense ocean of knowledge 

 stretches itself out before him. The further he outlines any path 

 into the untrodden solitudes of ignorance, and the more he 

 blazes those paths and makes them paths of knowledge, the more 

 he sees other paths branch out before him, leading further and 

 further away into the realms which others after him will traverse. 



