Marcellin Berthelot Quotes

According as the bonds uniting the peoples of the world together are multiplied and lightened by the progress of science and by unity of the doctrines and precepts that it deducts from facts, and imposes without violence and yet in a relentless manner to all convictions, these ideas have assumed a growing and more and more irresistible importance. They tend to become a purely human basis of nature, morality, and politics.

It not by reason of the egoistical satisfaction of our private vanity that the world-to-day pays homage to savants. No; it is because it knows that a savant really worthy of the name devotes a disinterested life to the great work of our epoch—I mean to say to the improvement, too slow, alas! for our taste, of the condition of every one, from the richest and happiest to the humble, the poor, and the suffering. That is what the public declared nine years ago in this same hall when honouring Pasteur. That is what my friend Chaplain has tried to express on the beautiful medal which the President of the Republic will presently offer me. I do not know if I have completely fulfilled noble ideal traced by the artist, but I have tried to make it object and end, the directing idea of my existence.

Science is the real moral school; she teaches man the love and respect for the truth, without which all hope is chimerical.

If each one of us adds something to the common weal in the domain of science, or art, or morality, the reason is because long series of generations have lived, worked, thought, and suffered before us. The science which you honour to-day has been created by the patient labours of our predecessors.

Science... dominates all things, it alone is of any definite utility. No man, no institution shall henceforth have an enduring authority if they do not conform themselves to its precepts.

Thus it is that the tangible utility of scientific results has made the public authorities understand that laboratory work should be encouraged and sustained, because it is economically a benefit to all and for the public health.

In effect, it may be declared emphatically that no one has a right to claim the exclusive merit of the brilliant discoveries of the past century. Science is essentially a collective work, prosecuted during the course of time by the efforts of a multitude of workers of every age and every nation, succeeding each other and associated in virtue of a tacit understanding for the research of truth in its purity, and for the application of this truth to the continual transformation of the condition of all men.

Science is the benefactor of humanity.

In fact, what we are can only be attributed for a small part to our labour and personal individuality, because we owe it almost entirely to our forefathers, both of blood and mind.

Each one of us, whatever may have been his individual initiative, ought also to attribute a considerable portion of his success to his contemporaries who are working at the same time as himself at the great common task.

A new conception of human destiny results from a profound knowledge of the universe and the physical and moral constitution of man, directed by the fundamental notions of universal solidarity between all classes and all nations.

Hence the rôle of savants, as individuals and as a social class, has unceasingly developed in modern states. But our duties towards other men increase in the same ratio, and let it never be forgotten; let it proclaimed in this hall, in this palace of French science.

The most interesting of the services rendered by science is perhaps shown by comparing the servile and miserable condition of the popular masses in the past with their present state, already so much raised in dignity and comfort, without prejudice to the hopes which they are gradually realising.

There abides in nature a certain form of matter which, being discovered and brought by art to perfection, converts to itself, proportionally, all imperfect bodies that it touches. ...It rested on the indisputable appearance of an indefinite cycle of transformations, reproducing themselves in chemical operations, without either beginning or end.

Science carries its legitimate pretensions further. To-day it claims the material, intellectual, and moral direction of society. Under its impulse modern civilisation marches with an increasingly rapid stride.