244 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



contradict me when I said, ' In the present state of science 

 the doctrine of spontaneous generation is a chimera.' And 

 I add, with similar independence, ' All the worse for those 

 whose philosophical or political ideas are hindered by my 

 studies.' 



" This is not to be taken to mean that, in my beliefs and in 

 the conduct of my life, I only take account of acquired science : 

 if I would, I could not do so, for I should then have to strip 

 myself of a part of myself < <(There are two men in each one 

 of us : the scientist, he who starts with a clear field and 

 desires to rise to the knowledge of Nature through observa- 

 tion, experimentation and reasoning, and the man of senti- 

 ment, the man of belief, the man who mourns his dead 

 children, and who cannot, alas, prove that he will see them 

 again, but who believes that he will, and lives in that hope, 

 the man who will not die like a vibrio, but who feels that 

 the force that is within him cannot die. The two domains are 

 distinct, and woe to him who tries to let them tresspass on each 

 other in the so imperfect state of human knowledge." 



And that separation, as he understood it, caused in him 

 none of those conflicts which often determine a crisis in a 

 human soul. As a scientist, he claimed absolute liberty of 

 research ; he considered, with Claude Bernard and Littr<, that 

 it was a mistaken waste of time to endeavour to penetrate 

 primary causes; "we can only note correlations," he said. 

 But, with the spiritual sentiment which caused him to claim 

 for the inner moral life the same liberty as for scientific re- 

 search, he could not understand certain givers of easy explana- 

 tions who affirm that matter has organized itself, and who, 

 considering as perfectly simple the spectacle of the Universe 

 of which Earth is but an infinitesimal part, are in no wise 

 moved by the Infinite Power who created the worlds. With 

 his whole heart he proclaimed the immortality of the soul. 



His mode of looking upon human life, in spite of sorrows, 

 of struggles, of heavy burdens, had in it a strong element of 

 consolation: "No effort is wasted," he said, giving thus a 

 most virile lesson of philosophy to those inferior minds who 

 only see immediate results in the work they undertake and are 

 discouraged by the first disappointment. In his respect for 

 the great phenomenon of Conscience, by which almost all 

 men, enveloped as they are in the mystery of the Universe, 

 have the prescience of an Ideal, of a God, he considered that 



