Here one comes upon their dreams. Calm and contained as their words are, their hearts are aflame with passion for the undiscovered. They are akin to those who seek the theoretic poles of the earth, undaunted by endless defeats. With quickening breath they watch the electrons flame and fall, seeing the ultimate constitution of matter almost within their grasp, and yet they do not permit their dreams to blind or weaken them in their wearisome, hopeless quest.
They have their heroism for humanity, too. They meet death face to face, as they pry close into the cause of decay, the secret of morbid growth. There is more danger in certain germs than in lions. Blood-poisoning is to the surgeon a more constant menace than hunger to an Arctic explorer. These students never know what destroyer they may unwittingly unloose. Cross-section of abnormal tissue is more entrancing than a rose-leaf, a cluster of bacilli more beautiful than a snowflake. They have gone past all creeds, these calm young men, but they bow before the unspeakable majesty of the unknown. To them the Hebrew Scriptures are but the tales of minstrels in the childhood of the race, Mohammed a dreamer of baseless visions, and Christ but incarnate love in an age of war. The Creator they conceive is too profound to admit of any attribute. He neither thinks nor feels, and the life that pulses at the base of the first faint cell is a part of the same power that binds the stars to their circling suns.
Notwithstanding their daily contact with the most appalling cases of disease and death, they come and go briskly with jocular greetings on the stair-ways. They return to their homes each night to read, to smoke their pipes, deporting themselves like commonplace fathers and brothers and husbands. They even make love like other men; but, nevertheless, they may be overtaken in muse like alchemists, subject to fear and hope like children. To the business-man their ways are ways of silence and sorcery. Their deep-hid convictions are at variance with all theories of Christian redemption, and the realities of their realm more startling than any romance of war or peace. To them matter is as insoluble as the transforming forces which emanate from it. They play with nerves, laying bare the beating heart of life, forever finding, yet forever failing.