[9] Translated by Professor Halsted from "Science and Morals" in Dernières Pensées.
[CHAPTER IV]
ÉLIE METCHNIKOFF
Ever since the attempt has been made to discover a rational basis of morality, human nature, regarded essentially as good, has been taken as that basis. Religions and systems of philosophy, on the other hand, which have tried to find another foundation for morality, have regarded human nature as vicious at the roots. Science has been able to tell us that man, the descendant of animals, has good and evil qualities in his nature, and that his life is made unhappy by the evil qualities. But the constitution of man is not immutable, and perhaps it may be changed for the better.
Morality should be based not on human nature in its existing vitiated condition, but on human nature, ideal, as it may be in the future. Before all things, it is necessary to try to amend the evolution of the human life, that is to say, to transform its disharmonies into harmonies (Orthobiosis). This task can be undertaken only by science, and to science the opportunity of accomplishing it must be given.—Metchnikoff's "The Nature of Man", p. 288.
If Carlyle were writing now his "Heroes and Hero-Worship", he would have to add—however much he would have disliked to—a chapter on "The Hero as Scientist." For the popular ideal of greatness has been decidedly changed in the last half-century, and new standards of heroism have been established. Creative genius is beginning to take rank above destructive, and men are coming to recognize that the heroism of those who save life may be quite as great and is certainly more admirable than the heroism that is measured by a monument of skulls. A striking proof of this shifting of public appreciation is afforded by the referendum carried out by the Petit Parisien a few years ago to ascertain whom the French people regarded as the greatest names their country had produced during the nineteenth century. Fifteen million answers were sent in, so the result may be taken as representing the consensus of opinion in a larger degree than such newspaper plebiscites generally do. It was to be expected that the name of Napoleon would head such a list. It would have in almost any other country except France. But France, always devoted to the cult of La Gloire and hitherto chiefly captivated by the bellicose form of it; France, where every man is trained in the army and educated in schools established with the avowed purpose of increasing the military strength of the nation; France ranks Napoleon fourth in the list of eminent men and puts at the head of it the name of a modest chemist and physiologist, Louis Pasteur.[1] It is a common observation that new ideas and social tendencies are apt to become manifest in France earlier than elsewhere. The French clock seems to be fast, always keeping a bit ahead of mean European time. If so, we may expect that before long other countries may come to give due honor and, what is more important, due opportunity and encouragement to the scientists, inventors, and authors who confer glory upon their country by benefiting the whole world.
The worthy successor of Pasteur as Director of the Institute he founded is the subject of this sketch, Élie Metchnikoff. The foremost of French medical men, he was neither born a Frenchman nor trained as a physician. Like Pasteur, he entered the realm of medicine by crossing the frontier of another science. Any man who pursues a straight line of thought will find that it leads him across many of those imaginary lines which have been drawn between the sciences, just as an aviator crossing Europe in an air line pays no attention to the artificial and historic boundaries which divide state from state. Pasteur was a chemist, an inorganic chemist at that, and he was running down the cause of asymmetry in crystals when he found himself over in the field of biology. He had been engaged in separating the leftward skewed crystals of tartaric acid from those that skewed to the right by picking them out of the mixture by hand, but he discovered that he could throw the burden of selection off on an agency whose time was less valuable, namely, the yeast plant, which has an appetite for one kind of crystals, but disdains the other. This led him to the germ theory of life and of disease and enabled him to save millions annually to the farmer and stockraiser and unnumbered human lives.