Now, the interesting point that emerges from this comparison is that Cavendish, in virtue of his scientific purity, _could not_ have exhibited those qualities which allied Huxley to the ordinary run of men. A man’s characteristics are not disconnected. Cavendish’s cold passion for knowledge required for its gratification qualities of the spirit as well as of the mind. No man was ever more single in his desire to _know_; no man ever was so little hindered by having other interests to serve; no man, therefore, had a greater measure of the purely scientific spirit. This is the important point for our question; it is comparatively irrelevant that very few men have ever had so great a mind to place at the service of their passion. That his actual scientific standing should be so much greater than Huxley’s is an accident; he would still have been more purely scientific than Huxley had his ability been less than Huxley’s. Cavendish is all of a piece. His very perfection as a recording and measuring instrument tended to deprive him of “personality.” The less personal he was, in fact, the more dispassionately open he could be. Other passions were incompatible with his perfection; they would derange this exquisite instrument. Judgments of good and evil would not have been natural to him. His reaction to anything was exhausted in the act of _understanding_ that thing. So far as we have gone, it would seem that Nietzsche’s description of what he calls the “objective man” is exactly what we mean by the ideal man of science. “The objective man is in truth a mirror: accustomed to prostration before everything that wants to be known, with such desires only as knowing or ‘reflecting’ implies ...” he will regard such personality as he has, Nietzsche goes on to say, as accidental and arbitrary. He cannot take himself seriously and devote time to himself. His love is constrained, his hate artificial. He is only genuine so far as he can be objective; he is unable to say either “Yea” or “Nay” to life; he is concerned solely to understand, to “reflect.” He says, with Leibniz: “Je ne méprise presque rien.” This description is undoubtedly the result of genuine psychological insight. When we try to disentangle the purely scientific element in a man of science we find that, so far as he is scientific, he approximates to Nietzsche’s objective man. If this, then, is the ideal scientific man, what place does he occupy? Where does he stand in relation to the rest of mankind? According to Nietzsche he is merely an instrument; “he is an instrument, something of a slave, though certainly the sublimest sort of slave, but nothing in himself.” He is no goal, no termination, no complementary man in whom the rest of creation justifies itself. As compared with the _true_ philosopher, the philosopher in Nietzsche’s sense, the man who gives a new direction to life, the ideal man of science is merely the most costly, the most easily tarnished, the most exquisite of instruments.