For patience is as necessary to the true scientist as industry. When you think you are getting new facts, discoveries that will startle the world and perhaps affect the practical living of millions, there is a natural impulse to proclaim them, there is haste, eagerness, the desire for reward, for recognition, for material success. Or, there is the fear of anticipation, that some one else may be working on the same lines, and get in before you, and all your glory will be taken away. These considerations must be banished altogether. The slow, deliberate processes of nature must be accepted and awaited. If it takes years to develop the experiments that will, or that even may, lead to the desired results, then you must accept the years, unhurrying, unworrying, with the assurance that the work will be done in the end and that it makes no difference to the world or to the future, whether it is done by you or by another. And with the patience goes caution, the determination not to state results until you have confirmed them, not to overstate or give them forms that are misleading. In practical life, the necessity of acting at once often makes caution a dangerous luxury, and those who hesitate and debate too long are apt to arrive too late or not at all. A certain amount of chance and hazard must be taken and accepted. But the beauty of these larger intellectual realms of scientific thought is that you can wait calmly till all doubt and error are eliminated. The lesson of moderation is hard to learn. The best and the most careful never feel that they have learned it thoroughly: ‘The subject has begun to interest me to an extraordinary degree,’ says Darwin; ‘but I must try not to fall into my common error of being too speculative. But a drunkard might as well say he would drink a little and not too much.’[131] And elsewhere, after years had weighted his work with the teachings of experience, he sums up what seems to him one of the supreme needs of science, if not the supreme need: ‘Forgive me for suggesting one caution; as Demosthenes said, “Action, action, action,” was the soul of eloquence, so is caution almost the soul of science.’[132]