The contrasts in his mind had their parallel in his character: this usually thoughtful, almost dreamy man, absorbed in one idea, suddenly revealed himself a man of action if provoked by some erroneous newspaper report or some illogical statement, and especially when he heard of some unscrupulous silkworm seed merchant sowing ruin in poor _magnaneries_ for the sake of a paltry gain. When, on his return to Paris, he found himself mixed up with the small revolution in the Ecole Normale, he was seen to efface himself modestly before his masters when honours and titles came in question. Now he had interrupted his researches in order to do a kindness to the people of Orleans, who, practical as they were, and perhaps a little disdainful of laboratory theories, had been surprised to find him as careful of the smallest detail as they themselves were.
He was then in the full maturity of his forty-five years. His great intuition, his imagination, which equalled any poet’s, often carried him to a summit whence an immense horizon lay before him; he would then suddenly doubt this imagination, resolutely, with a violent effort, force his mind to start again along the path of experimental method, and, surely and slowly, gathering proofs as he went, he would once more reach his exalted and general ideas. This constant struggle within himself was almost dramatic; the words “Perseverance in Effort,” which he often used in the form of advice to others, or as a programme for his own work, seemed to bring something far away, something infinite before his dreamy eyes.
At the end of the year, an obstacle almost arrested the great experiments he contemplated. He heard that the promises made to him were vanishing away, the necessary credit having been refused for the building of the new laboratory. And this, Pasteur sadly reflected, when millions and millions of francs were being spent on the Opera house! Wounded in his feelings, both as a scientist and a patriot, he prepared for the _Moniteur_, then the official paper, an article destined to shake the culpable indifference of public authorities.
“...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.
