Honors came to him, but left him modest as before. He was elected a member of the French Academy--one of the forty immortals. Only five times in the history of the Academy has the honor of membership been conferred upon a medical man. Before Bernard, Flourens, the father of brain physiology, had occupied a _fauteuil_, while Cabanis and Vicq d'Azyr are two other names of medical immortals. Bernard was elected to the 24th _fauteuil_, which had been occupied by Flourens, and according to custom had to pronounce his predecessor's panegyric. The conclusion of his address was the expression: "There is no longer a line of demarcation between physiology and psychology." Physiology had become the all-ruler for Bernard in human function, and he drifted into what would have been simple materialism only for the saving grace of his own utter sanity, his active imagination, and the unconscious influence of early training. During his most successful years of scientific investigation, wrapped up in his experiments and their suggestions, Bernard was drawn far away from the spiritual side of things. This partial view of man and nature could not endure, however. In an article on Bernard in the _Revue des Questions scientifiques_ for April, 1880, Father G. Hahn, S. J., says of him: "A man of such uprightness of character could not be allowed to persist to the end in this restless skepticism. His mental condition was really a kind of vertigo caused by the {287} depths of nature that he saw all around him. At the threshold of eternity he came back to his true self and his good sense triumphed. The great physiologist died a true Christian." Bernard was one of the great thinkers of an age whose progress in science will stamp it as one of the most successful periods of advance in human thought. He accomplished much, but much more he seemed to have divined. He seldom gave out the slightest hint of the tendencies of his mind, or of his expectations of discovery in matters of science, until fully satisfied that his theoretic considerations were justified and confirmed by observation and experiment. In one thing, however, he allowed favored friends to share some of his anticipations, and the notes published after his death show that he was on the very point of another great discovery in biology which has since been made. He was a firm friend of Pasteur's, and had ably seconded the great chemist-biologist's efforts to disprove spontaneous generation. Bernard's demonstration that air passed through a tube heated red hot might be suffered with impunity to come in contact with any sort of organic material, yet would never cause the development of germ life, was an important link in the proof that if life were carefully destroyed, no life, however microscopic in character, would develop unless the seeds of previously existent life were somehow brought in contact with the organic matter.