Humphry Davy’s science lectures in the early 1800s were so enthralling that Samuel Coleridge attended them to increase “his stock of literary metaphors”
(from the biography Louis Pasteur: Free Lance of Science)
(from the biography Louis Pasteur: Free Lance of Science)
It just gets better:
This book is from 1950 and the author (René Dubos) is already complaining that science has lost its engagement with the public.
“The great pageant of science is still unfolding; but now, hidden behind drawn curtains, it is without audience and understandable only to the players. At the stage door, a few talkative and misinformed charlatans sell to the public crude imitations of the great rites”
“In 1899, A. R. Wallace … published under the title *The Wonderful Century* an enthusiastic account of the achievements of his age. To the 19th century he credited 24 fundamental advances, as against only 15 for all the rest of recorded history”
“He [Pasteur] warned that there are not two forms of science—pure and applied—but only science, and the application of science.”
An official orator at Pasteur's 70th birthday jubilee:
And Pasteur's own words on that occasion, that his “invincible belief is that Science and Peace will triumph over Ignorance and War”
Pasteur at the end of his days, still in thrall to the vision of science, but to weak to work:
“If you are alone, you belong wholly to yourself” –da Vinci
Pasteur making an impassioned plea for investment in science:
“Science knows no country because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world”
Pasteur on the enchantment of discovery:
Bacon on the dichotomy between experiment and reason
“Very few of the great discoverers have revealed their own mental processes; at the most, they have described methods of work—but rarely their dreams, urges, struggles and visions”
