“That’s my cellar, sir.”
“Is that your cellar?”
“I have no other.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes, that is all, alas!”
“Really!”
Not a word more; nothing further from the savant. Pasteur, that was evident, had never tasted the highly-spiced dish which the vulgar call la vache enragée. Though my cellar—the dilapidated chair and the more than half-empty demi-john—said nothing about the fermentation to be combated by heating, it spoke eloquently of another thing which my illustrious visitor seemed not to understand. A microbe escaped from it and a very terrible microbe: that of ill-fortune strangling good-will. [[247]]
In spite of the unlucky introduction of the cellar, I remain none the less struck by his serene assurance. He knows nothing of the transformation of insects; he has just seen a cocoon for the first time and learnt that there is something inside that cocoon, the rough draft of the moth that shall be; he is ignorant of what is known to the meanest school-boy of our southern parts; and this novice, whose artless questions surprise me so greatly, is about to revolutionize the hygiene of the silk-worm nurseries. In the same way, he will revolutionize medicine and general hygiene.
His weapon is thought, heedless of details and soaring over the whole question. What cares he for metamorphoses, larvæ, nymphæ, cocoons, pupæ, chrysalises and the thousand and one little secrets of entomology! For the purposes of his problem, perhaps, it is just as well to be ignorant of all that. Ideas retain their independence and their daring flight more easily; movements are freer, when released from the leading-strings of the known.
Encouraged by the magnificent example of the cocoons rattling in Pasteur’s astonished ears, I have made it a rule to adopt the method of ignorance in my investigations into instincts. I read very little. Instead of turning the pages of books, an expensive proceeding quite beyond my means, instead of consulting other people, I persist in obstinately interviewing my subject until I succeed in making him speak. I know nothing. So much the better: my queries will be all the freer, now in this direction, now in the opposite, according to the lights obtained. And if, by chance, I do open a book, I take care to leave a pigeon-hole in my mind wide open to doubt; for the soil which I am clearing bristles with weeds and brambles. [[248]]