THE VALUE OF SCIENCE 283 



because they were afraid of them. But why? It is because we have 

 seen the heavens enlarging and enlarging without cease; because we 

 know that the sun is 150 millions of kilometers from the earth and 

 that the distances of the nearest stars are hundreds of thousands of 

 times greater yet. Habituated to the contemplation of the infinitely 

 great, we have become apt to comprehend the infinitely small. Thanks 

 to the education it has received, our imagination, like the eagle's eye 

 that the sun does not dazzle, can look truth in the face. 



Was I wrong in saying that it is astronomy which has made us a 

 soul capable of comprehending nature; that under heavens always 

 overcast and starless, the earth itself would have been for us eternally 

 unintelligible; that we should there have seen only caprice and dis- 

 order; and that, not knowing the world, we should never have been 

 able to subdue it? What science could have been more useful? And 

 in thus speaking I put myself at the point of view of those who only 

 value practical applications. Certainly, this point of view is not mine ; 

 as for me, on the contrary, if I admire the conquests of industry, it 

 is above all because if they free us from material cares, they will one 

 day give to all the leisure to contemplate nature. I do not say: 

 Science is useful, because it teaches us to construct machines. I say: 

 Machines are useful, because in working for us, they will some day 

 leave us more time to make science. But finally it is worth remarking 

 that between the two points of view there is no antagonism, and that 

 man having pursued a disinterested aim, all else has been added unto 

 him. 



Auguste Comte has said somewhere, that it would be idle to seek 

 to know the composition of the sun, since this knowledge would be 

 of no use to sociology. How could he be so short-sighted? Have we 

 not just seen that it is by astronomy that, to speak his language, 

 humanity has passed from the theological to the positive state? He 

 found an explanation for that because it had happened. But how has 

 he not understood that what remained to do was not less considerable 

 and would be not less profitable ? Physical astronomy, which he seems 

 to condemn, has already begun to bear fruit, and it will give us much 

 more, for it only dates from yesterday. 



First was discovered the nature of the sun, what the founder of 

 positivism wished to deny us, and there bodies were found which exist 

 on the earth, but had here remained undiscovered ; for example, helium, 

 that gas almost as light as hydrogen. That already contradicted 

 Comte. But to the spectroscope we owe a lesson precious in a quite 

 different way; in the most distant stars, it shows us the same sub- 

 stances. It might have been asked whether the terrestrial elements 

 were not due to some chance which had brought together more tenuous 

 atoms to construct of them the more complex edifice that the chemists 



