The nature of science in itself tends to foster and encourage this disposition to enter into the lives of others, because by its abstract character and its larger aims and interests it inclines to reduce as much as possible the elements of self, and of self-interest and self-assertion. Indeed, here again it is curious to see how, when the pursuit of scientific truth rises to its highest intensity and white heat of ardor, it brings about a sort of self-abnegation, which approaches and suggests the mystical self-abandonment of Christian ecstasy. He shall leave all and follow me, says religion. And we have seen something of the same spirit in Darwin’s apparently colder declaration that the man of science should have neither wife nor child, but a heart of stone, and a brain altogether free for the vast, abstract researches which make the whole of his life. There is indeed something almost religious in the passion with which the true scientist casts aside all personal considerations, often all considerations of comfort and ease and indolent enjoyment, in the absorbing effort to attain the pure truth which he is seeking. With what intensity of delight does one fling an old delusion behind him. As Darwin puts it: ‘To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.’[145] With what rapture does one become aware of the progress of scientific thought: ‘How grand is the onward rush of science; it is enough to console us for the many errors which we have committed, and for our efforts being overlaid and forgotten in the mass of new facts and new views which are daily turning up.’[146] It is needless to say that thousands of others besides Darwin are infected with this rapture, and to quite the same or an even greater degree. In the dawn of scientific thought we have Lucretius, than whom none was ever more ardent, exulting in his passionate effort to dart the beams of intellectual day through the swirling, smothering mist of error and delusion. Or again, in our own time we have such excitement as is described by Pasteur, so nearly the correlative of Darwin in many ways, when he feels himself to be on the brink of discovery: ‘I was so happy that I was overcome by a nervous trembling that made it impossible for me to bring my vision again to the polarizing apparatus.’[147]