Among all the great scientific men whom the nineteenth century produced
Pasteur ranks supreme as a benefactor of mankind. He played the original
and creative part in the movement for the prevention and relief of human
suffering which Sir William Osler has aptly termed “Man’s Redemption of
Man.” It is far under the truth to say that he has saved more lives than
Napoleon destroyed. In nature he found the causes of a very large part
of human suffering; in nature he also found the means of controlling or
averting suffering. His attitude toward his fellow men was one of noble
compassion. His first trial of the hydrophobia serum with a young
sufferer brought to him, his agony of mind lest the remedy itself might
be the means of causing death, his joy as the child was restored in
perfect health to its parents, is one of the most beautiful episodes in
human history. As recited by Radot, “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. At night feverish
visions came to him of this child, whom he had seen playing in the
garden, suffocating in the mad struggles of hydrophobia, like the dying
child he had seen at the Hôpital Trousseau in 1880. Vainly his
experimental genius assured him that the virus of that most terrible of
diseases was about to be vanquished, that humanity was about to be
delivered from this dread horror—his human tenderness was stronger than
all, his accustomed ready sympathy for the sufferings and anxieties of
others was for the nonce centred in ‘the dear lad.’...
“Cured from his wounds, delighted with all he saw, gayly running about
as if he had been in his own Alsatian farm, little Meister, whose blue
eyes now showed neither fear nor shyness, merrily received the last
inoculation; in the evening, after claiming a kiss from ‘Dear Monsieur
Pasteur,’ as he called him, he went to bed and slept peacefully.”[4]
The life of Pasteur is typical of that of many students of nature, of
less genius, perhaps, but of equal devotion and self-sacrifice. It is
interesting to imagine what tributes might have been rendered to Pasteur
if he had lived in the period of the early saints of the Church and had
won the love of his generation and the reverence of succeeding
generations by his mighty works. It is interesting to surmise what would
have been the attitude of the early Church toward such a benefactor of
mankind. Our belief today is that Pasteur should stand as a symbol of
the profound and intimate relation which must develop between the study
of nature and the religious life of man, between our present and future
knowledge of nature and the development of our religious conceptions and
beliefs.
In a very beautiful address[5] before the students of the University of
Edinburgh Sir William Osler opens with the words: “To man there has been
published a triple gospel—of his soul, of his goods, of his body.” What
is and what shall be the attitude of the Church toward the gospel of the
body, toward the men who have given us this gospel? The question turns
our thoughts at once to the leading and greatest exponent of this
gospel, and backward to the early centuries of the Church before there
had arisen any divorce between the study of nature and the matters of
the spirit.
We are now in a process of readjustment between the issues of two lines
of thought, which are almost as old as human history; between laws
derived from nature which were discovered in the middle of the
nineteenth century as to the origin of man, and traditional laws which
when traced to their very beginnings we find to have been purely of
human conception. Let us imagine our descendants three or four hundred
years hence looking back on the spiritual and intellectual history of
man; with larger perspective, they will separate these two grand
thought-movements:
First, the Oriental movement, marked by Oriental lack of curiosity about
natural law, a great moral and spiritual movement developing three
thousand years before Christ along the Nile, the Tigris, and Euphrates,
out of five thousand years of hard human experience, and expressed in
Judea in the faith that nature is the continuous handiwork of God, in a
supreme standard of righteousness, the moral duty being finally summed
up in the single phrase, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This
was the spiritual redemption of man, which left the laws of his physical
welfare unknown and uncared for.
The second movement begins six centuries before Christ in the inquiring
mind of the West, which is always characterized by intense curiosity
about nature. This movement is the search for natural law. Its rapid
progress among the Greeks terminates with the fall of Greece. It is
expressed in Cato’s reply to Scipio: “My wisdom consists in the fact
that I follow Nature, the best of guides, as I would a God and am loyal
to her commands.” After nineteen centuries it revives with Copernicus
and Galileo and culminates in Darwin. Man is again perceived as a part
of nature; in the study of nature man finds intellectual delight; in the
laws of nature man finds his physical well-being; man through nature
becomes the redeemer of physical man.
The Augustinian theology was imbued with a deeply theistic view of
nature, a view which the modern Church professes but does not profoundly
believe nor live by. As shown by Aubrey Moore, Augustine was entirely
sound in counselling the entire separation of these two great lines of
thought, the natural and the spiritual. “It very often happens,” says
Augustine, “that there is some question as to the earth or the sky, or
the other elements of this world ... respecting which one who is not a
Christian has knowledge derived from most certain reasoning or
observation [that is, a natural philosopher], and it is very disgraceful
and mischievous and of all things to be carefully avoided, that a
Christian, speaking of such matters as being according to the Christian
Scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever talking such nonsense that
the unbeliever, perceiving him to be as wide from the mark as east from
west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing.”
Augustine held what may be regarded as a pristine faith in nature as a
manifestation of the divine. This pristine theistic view is founded on
passages in Genesis, especially Genesis 2:15 and Genesis 3:19:
And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to
dress it and to keep it. (Genesis 2:15.)
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto
the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto
dust shalt thou return. (Genesis 3:19.)
These passages show that nature, typified by the garden, gives man his
sustenance, and yet, as it has to be won by the sweat of the brow, man’s
energy or art must work with nature. These passages, as Bishop
Boyd-Carpenter observes in his inspiring studies of Dante, are also the
foundation of the famous lines in the “Divine Comedy” in which the poet
expresses the relation between the theistic view of nature and
scientific or philosophical inquiry.
... He thus made reply:
“Philosophy, to an attentive ear,
Clearly points out, not in one part alone,
How imitative Nature takes her course
From the celestial Mind, and from its art:
And where her laws[6] the Stagirite unfolds,
Not many leaves scann’d o’er, observing well,
Thou shalt discover that your art on her
Obsequious follows, as the learner treads
In his instructor’s step; so that your art
Deserves the name of second in descent
From God. These two, if thou recall to mind
Creation’s holy book,[7] from the beginning
Were the right source of life and excellence
To humankind....”
The preceding is Cary’s version.[8] Another version of this passage is
that of Longfellow.[9]
“Philosophy,” he said, “to him who heeds it,
Noteth, not only in one place alone,
After what manner Nature takes her course
From Intellect Divine and from its art;
And if thy Physics carefully thou notest,
After not many pages shalt thou find,
That this your art as far as possible
Follows, as the disciple doth the master,
So that your art is, as it were, God’s grandchild.
From these two, if thou bringest to thy mind
Genesis at the beginning, it behooves
Mankind to gain their life, and to advance.”
As Bishop Boyd-Carpenter remarks, Virgil’s answer to Dante is to this
effect: We learn from philosophy that the operations of nature proceed
directly from God, and those of art indirectly, because art consists in
the imitation of nature. (“Inferno,” XI, pp. 97–105, Longfellow’s
translation.) Again, the Bible teaches us that it is by these two
principles, nature and art, that the system of man’s life should be
ordered. (“Inferno,” XI, pp. 106–108.)
If we are guided by the spirit of Augustine and of Dante we cannot fail
to see that the Church has passed through a very critical period of
scepticism as regards nature. This is perhaps an original view of
scepticism, but there is no way of evading its application; if nature
represents the wisdom and goodness of God, to be blind to its
interpretation is a form of scepticism—devout and well-intentioned
though it may be. Especially the Roman Church has been led away from its
pristine faith in nature as a manifestation of the divine, while the
Protestant Church, in consequence of this loss of faith during the
nineteenth century, has suffered a loss of influence in the world which
it will require a long period to regain. If the laws of nature are
manifestations of the divine power and wisdom, as we proclaim in our
services, the attitude of the Church toward these laws should not be
hesitant, defensive, or apologetic, but active, receptive, and
aggressive.
Considered in this way, the great scientific inquiry of the latter half
of the nineteenth century, so far from being regarded as destructive, is
a constructive, purifying and regenerating movement; it takes us back to
the lost faith of our fathers, a faith which spiritualized the Old
Testament, a faith which finds in nature a manifestation of the divine
order of things. Pasteur showed the way to the physical redemption of
man, as Newton had opened to us the new heavens and Darwin the new
earth. If we were to rewrite the Litany in the twentieth century, for
the passage, “From plague, pestilence, and famine, good Lord, deliver
us,” we should read, “From ignorance of Thy Laws and disobedience of Thy
Commands, good Lord, deliver us.”
From the standpoint of this older teaching of Augustine and Dante the
life-work of Louis Pasteur was more than humanitarian, it was more than
scientific; it was religious. He regarded natural processes which in
their superficial view appear relentless, cruel, wholly inexplicable, as
part of a possibly beneficent order of things; he again revealed through
his profound insight, through his unparalleled toil, discouragement, and
even scorn on the part of his contemporaries, deeper laws, which are
beneficent, protective, and restorative in action. He was the evangelist
of Osler’s “third gospel”: “And the third gospel, the gospel of his
body, which brings man into relation with nature—a true _evangelion_,
the glad tidings of a conquest beside which all others sink into
insignificance—is the final conquest of nature, out of which has come
man’s redemption of man....
“If in the memorable phrase of the Greek philosopher Prodicus, ‘that
which benefits human life is God,’ we may see in this new gospel a link
betwixt us and the crowning race of those who eye to eye shall look on
knowledge, and in whose hand nature shall be an open book, an approach
to the glorious day of which Shelley sings so gloriously:
Happiness
And Science dawn though late upon the earth;
Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;
Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,
Reason and passion cease to combat there,
Whilst mind unfettered o’er the earth extends
Its all-subduing energies, and wields
The sceptre of a vast dominion there.”
Should we not institute a new order of sainthood for men like Pasteur?
Could we find one more eminent for consecration, piety, and service in
life and character than this devout investigator? Entrance to this order
would be granted to those who through the study of Nature have extended
the bounds of human knowledge, have bestowed incomparable blessings on
the human race, have relieved human suffering, have saved or prolonged
human life. Would not a statue of Louis Pasteur in the Cathedral of St.
John the Divine proclaim the faith of the modern Church that the two
great historic movements of Love and of Knowledge, of the spiritual and
intellectual and the physical well-being of man, are harmonious parts of
a single and eternal truth? On the base of such a statue might be
inscribed the words written by Pasteur in the most perplexing period of
his life:
“GOD GRANT THAT BY MY PERSEVERING LABORS I MAY BRING A LITTLE STONE TO
THE FRAIL AND ILL-ASSURED EDIFICE OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THOSE DEEP
MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND DEATH WHERE ALL OUR INTELLECTS HAVE SO
LAMENTABLY FAILED.”
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Gutekunst_
JOSEPH LEIDY
]
JOSEPH LEIDY
1823–1891
Joseph Leidy may be known as the founder of vertebrate palæontology in
America, since he followed the pioneers in this branch of science, in
which America has become so famous, and since he was succeeded by
Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Marsh. Leidy and Cope were the very
last representatives in America of the older school of naturalists and
anatomists, who covered a very broad field. They both covered this
field with consummate ability. In studying Leidy’s life we observe him
as a master of detail, whereas Cope was a master of generalization.
Their devotion to the _École des Faits_ rendered most distinguished
service to American science.