The Life of Pasteur quotes

And modern Pantheism has never had a greater disciple, whose life and work set forth the devotion to an ideal—that service to humanity is service to God:—

“Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it: ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions; they all reflect light from the Infinite.”

The future belongs to Science. More and more she will control the destinies of the nations. Already she has them in her crucible and on her balances. In her new mission to humanity she preaches a new gospel.

The students of the Barbet school attended the classes of the Lycée St. Louis. In spite of his willingness and his passionate love of study, Louis was overcome with despair at being away from home.

Never was homesickness more acute. “If I could only get a whiff of the tannery yard,” he would say to Jules Vercel, “I feel I should be cured.”

M. Barbet endeavoured in vain to amuse and turn the thoughts of this lad of fifteen so absorbed in his sorrow. At last he thought it his duty to warn the parents of this state of mind, which threatened to become morbid.

Louis entered and found a man sitting at a small table at the back of the shop, his face in his hands. It was his father.

“I have come to fetch you,” he said simply.

No explanations were necessary; the father and son understood each other’s longings.

he saw in the perfecting of self the great law of man, and nothing that could assist in that improvement seemed to him without importance. Books read in early life appeared to him to have an almost decisive influence.

In his eyes a good book was a good action constantly renewed, a bad one an incessant and irreparable fault.

There lived at that time in Franche Comté an elderly writer, whom Sainte Beuve considered as the ideal of the upright man and of the man of letters.

And in a strange sentence, where it would seem that a presentiment of her approaching death made worldly things appear at their true value:

“Whatever happens to you, do not grieve; nothing in life is more than a chimera. Farewell, my son.”

On March 20, 1848, Pasteur read to the Académie des Sciences a portion of his treatise on “Researches on Dimorphism.” There are some substances which crystallize in two different ways.

Biot first placed in the apparatus the solution which should deviate to the left. Having satisfied himself that this deviation actually took place, he took Pasteur’s arm and said to him these words, often deservedly quoted:

“My dear boy, I have loved Science so much during my life, that this touches my very heart.”

“It was indeed evident,” said Pasteur himself in recalling this interview, “that the strongest light had then been thrown on the cause of the phenomenon of rotatory polarization and hemihedral crystals; a new class of isomeric substances was discovered;

According to him, faith, respect, all was being destroyed; he anathematized Instruction without Education, and stigmatized village schoolmasters as “obscure apostles” charged with “preaching the doctrines of revolt.” This violence was partly oratory, but oratory does not minimize violence, it excites it.

Every pamphleteer ends by being a bond-slave to his own phraseology.

When Romieu appeared in Strasburg as an Envoy Extraordinary entrusted by the Government with a general inquiry, he found that M. Laurent did not answer to that ideal of a functionary which was entertained by a certain party. M.

In his report (postponed until October 28) Biot was more enthusiastic. He praised the numerous and unforeseen results brought out by Pasteur within the last two years.

“He throws light upon everything he touches,”

he said.

de Senarmont wished in his turn to examine the crystals. No one approved more fully than he the expressions of the old scientist, who ended in this way his 1851 report:

“If M. Pasteur persists in the road he has opened, it may be predicted of him that what he has found is nothing to what he will find.”

And, delighted to see the important position that Pasteur was taking at Strasburg and the unexpected extension of crystallography, Biot wrote to him: “I have read with much interest the thesis of your brother-in-law, M. Loir.

Mitscherlich believed that the tartars employed by this Saxony manufacturer came from Trieste. “I shall go to Trieste,” said Pasteur;

“I shall go to the end of the world. I must discover the source of racemic acid, I must follow up the tartars to their origin.”

Was the acid existent in crude tartars, such as Kestner received in 1820 from Naples, Sicily, or Oporto?

Great problems were working in his mind; but he was careful not to propound them hastily, for he was the most timid, the most hesitating of men until he held proofs in his hands.

“In experimental science,” he wrote, “it is always a mistake not to doubt when facts do not compel you to affirm.”

In September he lost his eldest daughter. She died of typhoid fever at Arbois, where she was staying with her grandfather. On December 30 Pasteur wrote to his father:

Biot would not be convinced. But Pasteur, in spite of his quasi-filial attachment to Biot, could not stop where he was; he had to go through to the end.

“You will never find your way out,” cried Biot.

“I shall try,” said Pasteur modestly.

Spallanzani and rejected by whoever has studied nature at all.” “It is now demonstrated to sight and to reason that there is no vegetable, no animal but has its own germ.” In his Philosophic Dictionary, at the word God,

“It is very strange,” said Voltaire, “that men should deny a creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels!”

The Abbé Needham, meeting with these religious arguments, rather unexpected from Voltaire, endeavoured to prove that the hypothesis of spontaneous generation was in perfect accordance with religious beliefs. But both on Needham’s side and on Spallanzani’s there was a complete lack of conclusive proofs.

After a year’s study, Pasteur reached this conclusion:

“Gases, fluids, electricity, magnetism, ozone, things known or things occult, there is nothing in the air that is conditional to life, except the germs that it carries.”

Pouchet defended himself vigorously. To suppose that germs came from air seemed to him impossible. How many millions of loose eggs or spores would then be contained in a cubic millimetre of atmospheric air?

“Mycoderma,” he said, “can bring the action of combustion of the oxygen in air to bear on a number of organic materia.

If microscopic beings were to disappear from our globe, the surface of the earth would be encumbered with dead organic matter and corpses of all kinds, animal and vegetable.

It is chiefly they who give to oxygen its powers of combustion. Without them, life would become impossible because death would be incomplete.”

Several of his colleagues vainly endeavoured to dissuade him from that intention; Pasteur hearkened to no one. He took with him his provision of wooden crystals, and gave a vivid and impassioned lecture.

“If you know the question,” he asked his adversaries, “where is your conscience? If you know it not, why meddle with it?”

And with one of his accustomed sudden turns, “What is all this?” he added. “One of those incidents to which we all, more or less, are exposed by the conditions of our career; no bitterness remains behind.

His eagerness during a conflict was only equalled by his absolute forgetfulness after the conflict was over. He answered some one who, years later, reminded him of that past so full of attacks and praises.

“A man of science should think of what will be said of him in the following century, not of the insults or the compliments of one day.”

Pasteur, anxious to regain lost time, hurried to return to his studies on wine.

Claude Bernard and Pasteur afterwards tried blood taken from patients, and many other things; they were associated in those experiments, which gave no result. Henri Sainte Claire Deville once said to Pasteur, “Studies of that sort require much courage.”

“What about duty?” said Pasteur simply, in a tone, said Deville afterwards, worth many sermons.

The cholera did not last long; by the end of the autumn all danger had disappeared.

In the course of their private interview, Napoleon and Eugénie manifested some surprise that Pasteur should not endeavour to turn his discoveries and their applications to a source of legitimate profit.

“In France,” he replied, “scientists would consider that they lowered themselves by doing so.”

He was convinced that a man of pure science would complicate his life, the order of his thoughts, and risk paralysing his inventive faculties, if he were to make money by his discoveries.

Pasteur took pleasure in adding to his own tribute praise from other sources. He quoted, for instance, J. B. Dumas’ answer to Duruy, who asked him, “What do you think of this great physiologist?”

“He is not a great physiologist; he is Physiology itself.”

“I have spoken of the man of science,” continued Pasteur. “I might have spoken of the man in everyday life, the colleague who has inspired so many with a solid friendship, for I should seek in vain for a weak point in M. Bernard;

“...The boldest conceptions,” he wrote, “the most legitimate speculations can be embodied but from the day when they are consecrated by observation and experiment.

Laboratories and discoveries are correlative terms; if you suppress laboratories, Physical Science will become stricken with barrenness and death;

it will become mere powerless information instead of a science of progress and futurity; give it back its laboratories, and life, fecundity and power will reappear. Away from their laboratories, physicists and chemists are but disarmed soldiers on a battlefield.

Laboratories and discoveries are correlative terms; if you suppress laboratories, Physical Science will become stricken with barrenness and death; it will become mere powerless information instead of a science of progress and futurity; give it back its laboratories, and life, fecundity and power will reappear.

Away from their laboratories, physicists and chemists are but disarmed soldiers on a battlefield.

“The deduction from these principles is evident:

Ask that they may be multiplied and completed.

They are the temples of the future, of riches and of comfort.

There humanity grows greater, better, stronger; there she can learn to read the works of Nature, works of progress and universal harmony, while humanity’s own works are too often those of barbarism, of fanaticism and of destruction.

While these periods of calm, agitation, renewed hopes, and despair were succeeding each other in the course of those thirty-six hours, Pasteur’s friends hastened to his bedside. He said to Henri Sainte Claire Deville, one of the first to come:

“I am sorry to die; I wanted to do much more for my country.”

Sainte Claire Deville, trying to hide his grief under apparent confidence, answered, “Never fear; you will recover, you will make many more marvellous discoveries, you will live happy days; I am your senior, you will survive me.

Another phrase in the same book seemed to him applicable to experimental method as well as to the conduct of life:

“The greatest aberration of the mind consists in believing a thing because it is desirable.”

With December, joy began to return to the Ecole Normale: the laboratory was progressing and seemed an embodiment of renewed hopes of further work. M. Godélier’s little bulletins now ran: “General condition most satisfactory. Excellent morale;

Gernez writes: “The operations, of which we watched the phases through the microscope, fully justified his anticipations; and he rejoiced that he had not given up the game.” In the world of the Institute his departure was blamed by some and praised by others; but

Pasteur merely considered that one man’s life is worthless if not useful to others.

Dumas wrote to him early in February: “My dear friend and colleague,—I have been thinking of you so much! I dread fatigue for you, and wish I could spare it you, whilst hoping that you may successfully achieve your great and patriotic undertaking.

Articles and letters came to Arbois in that early September, bringing an echo of the sorrows of Paris. Pasteur was then reading the works of General Foy, wherein he found thoughts in accordance with his own, occasionally copying out such passages as the following:

“Right and Might struggle for the world; Right, which constitutes and preserves Society; Might, which overcomes nations and bleeds them to death.”

General Foy fought for France during twenty-five years, and, writing in 1820, recalled with a patriotic shudder the horrors of foreign invasions. Long after peace was signed, by a chance meeting in a street in Paris, General Foy found himself face to face with Wellington.

And there are public universities where they teach the Beautiful, the True, and the Right.”

“Might goes before Right,” Bismarck said.

A German journalist invented another phrase which went the round of Europe: “the psychological moment for bombardment.” On January 5, one of the first Prussian shells sank into the garden of the Ecole Normale; another burst in the very ambulance of the Ecole.

Pasteur put the whole theory into this concise formula, “

Fermentation is life without air.

”

The almost daily habit of advising and counselling was added to that idea of haughty or benevolent superiority to the rest of the world; and, accustomed to dictate his wishes, the physician frequently adopted an authoritative tone and became a sort of personage.

“Have you noticed,” said Claude Bernard to Pasteur with a smile under which many feelings were hidden, “that, when a doctor enters a room, he always looks as if he was going to say, ‘I have just been saving a fellow-man’?”

Pasteur knew not those harmless shafts which are a revenge for prolonged pomposity. Why need Claude Bernard trouble to wonder what So-and-so might think? He had the consciousness of the work accomplished and the esteem and admiration of men whose suffrage more than satisfied him.

“Are not all the researches I have pursued for seventeen years, at the cost of many efforts, the product of the same ideas, the same principles, pushed by incessant toil into consequences ever new?

The best proof that an observer is in the right track lies in the uninterrupted fruitfulness of his work.

”

… a hasty epitome of many very different things spread over a very simple biography), to give to a reader unfamiliar with such studies a certain idea of one of the most interesting chapters in the history of civilization, affecting the preservation of innumerable human lives.

“A pin-prick is a door open to Death,” said the surgeon Velpeau.

That open door widened before the smallest operation; the lancing of an abscess or a whitlow sometimes had such serious consequences that surgeons hesitated before the slightest use of the bistoury.

True theories, on the contrary, are the expression of actual facts and are characterized by being able to predict new facts, a natural consequence of those already known.

In a word, the characteristic of a true theory is its fruitfulness.

”

“Let us therefore strive in the pacific field of Science for the pre-eminence of our several countries.

Let us strive, for strife is effort, strife is life when progress is the goal.

“You Italians, try to multiply on the soil of your beautiful and glorious country the Tecchi, the Brioschi, the Tacchini, the Sella, the Cornalia....

But it was chiefly in his private life that his open-heartedness, his desire to love and to be loved, became apparent.

That great genius had a childlike heart, and the charm of this was incomparable.

He once said: “The recompense and the ambition of a scientist is to conquer the approbation of his peers and of the masters whom he venerates.” He had already known that recompense and could satisfy that ambition.

A worker in the laboratory had had a series of furuncles.

Pasteur, whose proverb was “Seek the microbe,”

asked himself whether the pus of furuncles might not have an organism, which, carried to and fro,—for it may be said that a furuncle never comes alone—would explain the centre of inflammation and the recurrence of the furuncles.

But Pasteur was supported and inspired during that period, perhaps the most fruitful of his existence, by the prescience that those notions meant the salvation of human lives, and that mothers need no longer be torn by death from the cradle of their new-born infants.

“I shall force them to see; they will have to see!”

he repeated with a holy wrath against doctors who continued to talk, from their study or at their clubs, with some scepticism, of those newly discovered little creatures, of those ultra-microscopic parasites, trying to moderate enthusiasm and even confidence.

He had, in his childhood and youth, been passionately loved by his parents and sisters, and now, in his middle age, his tenderness towards his wife and children was eagerly repaid by the love they bore him.

He made happiness around him whilst he gave glory to France.

A new microbe now became the object of the same studies of culture and inoculation as the bacillus anthracis. Readers of this book may have had occasion to witness the disasters caused in a farmyard by a strange and sudden epidemic.

Hens, believed to be good sitters, are found dead on their nests. Others, surrounded by their brood, allow the chicks to leave them, giving them no attention; they stand motionless in the centre of the yard, staggering under a deadly drowsiness.

A young and superb cock, whose triumphant voice was yesterday heard by all the neighbours, falls into a sudden agony, his beak closed, his eyes dim, his purple comb drooping limply.

Other chickens, respited till the next day, come near the dying and the dead, picking here and there grains soiled with excreta containing the deadly germs: it is chicken cholera.

He felt that nothing could arrest the course of his doctrine, of which he said—“The breath of Truth is carrying it towards the fruitful fields of the future.” He had that intuition which makes a great poet of a great scientist.

The innumerable ideas surging through his mind were like so many bees all trying to issue from the hive at the same time.

So many plans and preconceived ideas only stimulated him to further researches; but, when he was once started on a road, he distrusted each step and only progressed in the train of precise, clear and irrefutable experiments.

Indeed, M. Pasteur’s expression of equivocation seemed to us moderate!”

How many such futile incidents, such vain quarrels, traverse the life of a great man!

Later on, we only see glory, apotheosis, and the statues in public places; the demi-gods seemed to have marched in triumph towards a grateful posterity.

It seemed as if, through caprice or cruelty, quite uselessly at any rate, this and that man of science had the unique desire of inflicting on bound animals, secured on a board, sufferings of which death was the only limit.

It is easy to excite pity towards animals; an audience is conquered as soon as dogs are mentioned.

Which of us, whether a cherished child, a neglected old maid, a man in the prime of his youth or a misanthrope weary of everything, has not, holding the best place in his recollections, the memory of some example of fidelity, courage or devotion given …

If people spoke to Pasteur of the danger of infection, “What does it matter?” he said.

“Life in the midst of danger is the life, the real life, the life of sacrifice, of example, of fruitfulness.”

He was vexed to find his arrival notified in the newspapers; it worried him not to be able to work and to travel incognito.

with his intellectual humility, Pasteur bowed before a Power greater than human power. He continued with the following words, worthy of being preserved for ever, for they are of those which pass over humanity like a Divine breath:

“Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it; ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions; they all reflect light from the Infinite.”

Pasteur concluded by a supreme homage to Littré. “Often have I fancied him seated by his wife, as in a picture of early Christian times: he, looking down upon earth, full of compassion for human suffering; she, a fervent Catholic, her eyes raised to heaven:

She escapes when apparently caught, but gives herself up if patiently waited for; revealing herself after farewells have been said, but inexorable when loved with too much fervour.” And further:

“Nature is plebeian, and insists upon work, preferring horny hands and careworn brows.”

He then commenced a courteous controversy. Whilst Pasteur, with his vision of the Infinite, showed himself as religious as Newton, Renan, who enjoyed moral problems, spoke of Doubt with delectation.

Able as he was to define every human feeling, he went on from the above comparison, painting divergent intellectual capabilities, to the following imprecation against death: “

Death, according to a thought admired by M. Littré, is but a function, the last and quietest of all. To me it seems odious, hateful, insane, when it lays its cold blind hand on virtue and on genius.

A voice is in us, which only great and good souls can hear, and that voice cries unceasingly ‘Truth and Good are the ends of thy life; sacrifice all to that goal’;

Pasteur, once more in Paris, returned eagerly to his studies on divers virus and on hydrophobia. If he was told that he over-worked himself, he replied:

“It would seem to me that I was committing a theft if I were to let one day go by without doing some work.”

But he was again disturbed in the work he enjoyed by the contradictions of his opponents.

the merely curious hearers of that discussion had an opportunity of enjoying medical eloquence, besides acquiring information on the new treatment of typhoid fever. There were some vehement denunciations of the microbe which was suspected in typhoid fever.

“You aim at the microbe and you bring down the patient!”

exclaimed one of the orators, who added, amidst great applause, that it was time “to offer an impassable barrier to such adventurous boldness and thus to preserve patients from the unforeseen dangers of that therapeutic whirlwind!”

Whilst military service was not compulsory, epidemics in barracks were looked upon with more or less compassionate attention. But the thought that typhoid fever had been more destructive within the last ten years than the most sanguinary battle now awakened all minds and hearts.

Is then personal fear necessary to awaken human compassion?

Bouley, who was more given to propagating new doctrines than to lingering on such philosophical problems, thought it was time to introduce into the debate certain ideas on the great problems tackled by medicine since the discovery of what might be called a fourth kingdom …

Such hypotheses can be considered but as a sort of intuition.”

“Hypotheses,” said Pasteur, “come into our laboratories in armfuls; they fill our registers with projected experiments, they stimulate us to research—and that is all.”

One thing only counted for him: experimental verification.

Everything leads us to hope that rabies will also soon be conquered.” When Paul Bert was congratulated on his report, he said,

“Admiration is such a good, wholesome thing!!”

The Bill was voted by the Chamber, and a fortnight later by the Senate, unanimously. Pasteur heard the first news through the newspapers, for he had just gone to the Jura.

From every part of the world, letters reached Pasteur, appeals, requests for consultations. Many took him for a physician.

“He does not cure individuals,” answered Edmond About one day to a foreigner who was under that misapprehension; “he only tries to cure humanity.”

Some sceptical minds were predicting failure to his studies on hydrophobia. This problem was complicated by the fact that Pasteur was trying in vain to discover and isolate the specific microbe.

The letter ended with an affectionate invitation.

“Perhaps one of the great medical facts of the century is going to take place; you would regret not having seen it!”

Pasteur was going through a succession of hopes, fears, anguish, and an ardent yearning to snatch little Meister from death; he could no longer work.

they were accompanied by a doctor and by the mother of the youngest of them, a boy only five years old. After the first inoculation, this little boy, astonished at the insignificant prick, could not help saying,

“Is this all we have come such a long journey for?”

The children were received with enthusiasm on their return to New York, and were asked “many questions about the great man who had taken such care of them.”

The very little ones who then only saw in him a “kind gentleman” bending over them understood later in life, when recalling the sweet smile lighting up his serious face, that Science, thus understood, unites moral with intellectual grandeur.

Good, like evil, is infectious; Pasteur’s science and devotion inspired an act of generosity which was to be followed by many others.

He received a visit from one of his colleagues at the Académie Française, Edouard Hervé, who looked upon journalism as a great responsibility and as a school of mutual respect between adversaries.

The patients under treatment walked about cheerfully amidst these surroundings, looking like holiday makers in a Zoological Garden. Children, whose tears were already dried at the second inoculation, ran about merrily.

Pasteur, who loved the little ones, always kept sweets or new copper coins for them in his drawer.

One little girl amused herself by having holes bored in those coins, and hung them round her neck like a necklace;

and to hear at the same time a constant echo of those angry debates. Anonymous letters were sent to him, insulting newspaper articles—all that envy and hatred can invent; the seamy side of human nature was being revealed to him.

“I did not know I had so many enemies,” he said mournfully.

He was consoled to some extent by the ardent support of the greatest medical men in France.

It is now finished, this great building, of which it might be said that there is not a stone but what is the material sign of a generous thought.

All the virtues have subscribed to build this dwelling place for work.

“Alas!

He believed in the realization of his wishes for peace, work, mutual help among men. Whatever the obstacles, he was persuaded that science would continue its civilizing progress and that its benefits would spread from domain to domain.

Differing from those old men who are ever praising the past, he had an enthusiastic confidence in the future;

he foresaw great developments of his studies, some of which were already apparent. His first researches on crystallography and molecular dissymmetry had served as a basis to stereo-chemistry.

In October, 1889, though his health remained shaken, he insisted on going to Alais, where a statue was being raised to J. B. Dumas. Many of his colleagues tried to dissuade him from this long and fatiguing journey, but he said:

“I am alive, I shall go.”

At the foot of the statue, he spoke of his master, one of those men who are “the tutelary spirits of a nation.”

he had a kind word for every one, often substantial help for the very poor. The children interested him most; whether severely bitten, or frightened at the inoculation, he dried their tears and consoled them. How many children have thus kept a memory of him!

“When I see a child,” he used to say, “he inspires me with two feelings: tenderness for what he is now, respect for what he may become hereafter.”

Already in May, 1892, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway had formed various Committees of scientists and pupils of Pasteur to celebrate his seventieth birthday.