CAPACITY FOR SCIENTIFIC PURSUITS 



of diviner things." Nor was Horace, though less com- 

 pletely a recluse and more of a bon vivant, a strong man. 

 .Both of them, as scholars will rememher, sought the couch, 

 while Maecenas went off to the tennis court. Pope's life, 

 says Johnson, was a long disease. Johnson himself, though 

 large and muscular, had queer health and a tormenting 

 constitution. Schiller wrote most of his best work while 

 struggling against a painful malady, and Heine's " mat- 

 tress grave" is proverbial. France furnishes an excellent 

 example in Pascal. 1 



Some of the most noted leaders of thought in our own 

 era were likewise chronic invalids. Among these were the 

 scholarly theologian, E. B. Pusey, and J. A. Symonds, the 

 historian of the Renaissance. There was also Herbert Spen- 

 cer, who was frequently forced by nervous breakdowns to 

 take long periods of absolute rest. More remarkable still 

 was the case of the famous naturalist, Charles Darwin. ' ' It 

 is, ' ' writes his son, ' ' a principal feature of his life that for 

 nearly forty years he never knew one day of the health 

 of ordinary men, and that thus his life was one long 

 struggle against the weariness and the strain of sickness. ' '' 

 But, notwithstanding his continued ill health and the spinal 

 anemia from which he suffered, he was able to conduct 

 those epoch-making researches which put him in the fore- 

 front of men of science, and to write those famous books 

 which have completely revolutionized our views of nature 

 and nature 's laws. 



But a still more remarkable illustration of the fact that 

 there is no necessary relation between muscular and mental 

 power, between physical wellbeing and intellectual energy, 

 is afforded by the illustrious discoverer of the world of the 

 infinitely little, Louis Pasteur. Stricken by hemiplegia 



1 The Literary Advantages of Weak Health, in the Spectator for 

 October, 1894. 



2 The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, edited by his son, 

 Francis Darwin, Vol. I, p. 136, New York, 1888. 



