MARCELIN BERTHELOT—MATIGNON. 679 
sources of Arabic works. These latter were translated into Latin in 
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 
Profoundly patriotic, Berthelot always considered it the duty of 
every scholar to place at the disposal of his country the results of his 
experience and of his learning. He never refused his services, when 
asked in the name of public interest, in any of the most varied direc- 
tions, especially in matters relating to industry or to the public de- 
fense, public instruction, or general governmental policy. He was 
attached to all the technical commissions connected with the several 
government departments and applied to the solution of the problems 
presented all the talents employed in work in his own laboratory. 
This multiple activity of Berthelot furnished occasion for various 
articles or discourses, combined in four volumes: “ Science et philo- 
sophie,” “Science et morale,” “ Science et education,” “ Science et 
libre pensée.” 
Like all creators, Berthelot had a powerful faith, a faith which 
served him as director and guide both in his private and public life, 
faith in science and his methods. For Berthelot science dominated 
everything; it alone rendered definite services, and its domain was 
not restricted to the study of positive facts. Material progress due 
to science was the least important product of his work. Science in- 
cluded a higher and broader field, that of the ethical or spiritual and 
the social world. 
In his letter to Renan on the ideal science and the positive science, 
after having explained in a masterly way, by a concrete example, how 
positive science proceeds in establishing facts and in attaching one to 
another by immediate relations, Berthelot extended the same method 
to the study of the domain outside the material world: “ In the do- 
main outside the material world, as in the material order of things, it 
is necessary at the start to establish the facts and to control them by 
observation, then to marshal them by constantly bringing to bear this 
same observation. All reasoning which tends to deduce them a priori 
from some abstract axiom is chimerical. It is the observation of the 
phenomena of the world outside the material, revealed either by psy- 
chology or by history and political economy, it is the study of their 
relations gradually generalized and at each step verified, that serves 
as a basis for a scientific understanding of human nature. The 
method by which each day are solved the problems of the material 
and industrial world is the only method by which can be solved and 
will be solved sooner or later the fundamental problems relative to the 
organization of society.” 
penihelon moreover, recognized that truth could not be attained 
with such a degree of certainty in the ideal science as in positive 
science. “It is in a way like a building hidden behind a cloud, of 
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