s it to me in his usual
chilled-through, ophidian, infallible way,--I never believe it, or at
least I believe it very softly and do not let him know it. But when a
large scientist, a man like Charles Darwin, makes a statement like this,
I believe it as hard, I notice, as if I had made it all up myself. The
statement that science requires the elimination of the feelings is true
or not true, it seems to me, according to the size of the feelings.
Considering what most men's feelings are, a man like Darwin feels that
they had better be eliminated. If a man's feelings are small feelings,
they are in the way in science, as a matter of course. If he has large
noble ones, feelings that match the things that God has made, feelings
that are free and daring, beautiful enough to belong with things that a
God has made, he will have no trouble with them. It is the feelings in a
great scientist which have always fired him into being a man of genius
in his science, instead of a mere tool, or scoop, or human dredge of
truth. All the great scientists show this firing-process down
underneath, in their work. The idea that it is necessary for a
scientific man to give up his human ideal, that it is necessary for him
to be officially brutal, in his relation to nature, to become a
professional nobody in order to get at truth, to make himself over into
matter in order to understand matter, has not had a single great
scientific achievement or conception to its credit. All great insight or
genius in science is a passion of itself, a passion of worshipping real
things. Science is a passion not only in its origin, but in its motive
power and in its end. The real truth seems to be that the scientist of
the greater sort is great, not by having no emotions, but by having
disinterested emotions, by being large enough to have emotions on both
sides and all sides, all held in subjection to the final emotion of
truth. Having a disinterested, fair attitude in truth is not a matter of
having no passions, but of having passions enough to go around. The
temporary idea that a scientist cannot be scientific and emotional at
once is based upon the experience of men who have never had emotions
enough. Men whose emotions are slow and weak, who have one-sided or
wavering emotions, find them inconvenient as a matter of course. The men
who, like Charles Darwin or some larger Browning, have the passion of
disinterestedness are those who are fitted to lead the human race