So the pursuit of pure truth, and the giving one’s life to the achievement of it, elevates, and clarifies, and chastens, almost like the pursuit of virtue, and the two tend even to merge in one another, as in Goethe’s noble saying: ‘The real love of truth shows itself in this, that one knows how to find and cherish the good everywhere.’ Or to conclude with another of Darwin’s sentences, all the more impressive for its simplicity and restraint: ‘For myself I would however, take higher ground, for I believe there exists, and I feel within me, an instinct for truth, or knowledge, or discovery, of something the same nature as the instinct of virtue and our having such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without any practical results ever ensuing from them.’[148] III It seems to be of interest to consider one or two types of the scientific spirit in lines quite different from Darwin’s. There is Sainte-Beuve, to whom I have referred in earlier chapters. The great French critic was almost exactly contemporary with Darwin, being born in 1803 and dying in 1870. I do not discover that he ever mentions Darwin’s books, though he must have known something of them. In any case, he typifies admirably many of the scientific methods and qualities, the vast curiosity, the research, the labor, the patience, the passion for seeing all sides and allowing for all points of view. Only, he was concerned, not with plants and animals, not with the material, evolutionary world, but with the subtle phases and motives and passions and developments of the human spirit. He studied human life and character with endless curiosity and the results of his study are embodied in the forty volumes of portraits and in the seven solid volumes of the History of the Monastery of Port Royal, one of the most profound and searching investigations of religious psychology that has ever been made. Sainte-Beuve himself liked to compare his work with the researches of the more specific scientists. I have quoted earlier his brief statement: ‘I analyze, I herborize, I am a naturalist of souls.’[149] And elsewhere he puts it more elaborately, ‘It is absolutely as in botany for plants and in zoology for the species of animals. There is a moral natural history, with a method (as yet hardly developed), of the natural families of souls.’[150] And he loved to analyze souls of all sorts, good and bad, strong and weak, happy and unhappy, to analyze them and compare them and classify them, and bring out in them the profound common elements of human nature, under the endless play and diversity of the superficial differences.