694 THE century's great men in science. 



with fortunate opportunities, make them what they are. The heaviest 

 weight, intellectually, among these writers maintains, on the other 

 hand, that circumstances are as powerless to suppress the great man 

 as they would be to subject a himian being to a nation of dogs. But 

 it was only the blundering Malvolio Avho got the notion that some are 

 born great. The sentence of the astute Maria was: ''Some are become 

 great; some atcheeves greatnesse, and some have greatnesse thrust 

 uppon em.'' Amid this difference of opinion any detinition of great- 

 ness would l)e like a disputed rule of grammar. Just as a rule of 

 grammar does not render an expression l)ad English, ])ut only general- 

 izes the fact that good writei's do not use it, so, in order to establish a 

 definition of greatness, it would ])e necessary to begin by ascertaining 

 what men were and what men Avere not great, and that having Ix^en 

 done the rule might as well be dispensed with. My opinion will, I 

 fear, be set down by some intellectual men as foolishness, though it has 

 not l)een lightly fcu'med nor without long years of experimentation — 

 that th(> way to judge of whether a man was great or not is to put 

 aside all analysis, to contemplate attentively his life and Avorks, and 

 then to look into one's heart and estimate the impression one finds to 

 have been made. This is the way in which one would decide whether 

 a mountain were sublime or not. The great man is the impressive 

 personality, and the (piestioii whether he is gicat is a <iuestion of 

 impression. 



The glory of the nineteenth century has })een its science, and its 

 scientific great men are those whom I mean here to consider. Their 

 distinctive characteristic throughout the centur}', and more and more 

 so in each succeeding generation, has been devotion to the pursuit of 

 truth for truth's sake. In this century we have not heard a Franklin 

 asking, "'What signifies a philosophy which does not apply itself to 

 some use ? " — a remark that could be paralleled by utterances of Laplace, 

 of Rumford, of Buffon, and of many another well-tjualified spokesman 

 of eighteenth-century science. It was in the early dawn of the nine- 

 teenth that Gauss (or was it Dirichlet?) gave as the reason of his pas- 

 sion for the Theory of Numbers that "it is a pure virgin that never 

 has been and never can be prostituted to any practical application 

 whatsoever." It was my inestimable privilege to have felt as a boy 

 the warmth of the steadily burning enthusiasm of the scientific genera- 

 tion of Darwin, most of the leaders of which at home I knew intimately, 

 and some very well in almost every country of Europe. I particularize 

 that generation without having any reason to suspect that that flame 

 has since burned dimmer or less purely, but simply because if a word 

 belonged to one's mother tongue, one ma}' be supposed to know inierr- 

 ing\y the meaning the teachers of one's boj^hood attached to it. 



The word science was one often in those men's mouths, and 1 am quite 

 sure they did not mean by it "systematized knowledge," as former 



