It was à propos of a candidature to the Académie des Sciences, Sainte Beuve was asked to help that of a young friend of his, Charles Robin. Robin occupied a professor’s chair specially created for him at the _Faculté de Médecine_; he had made a deep microscopical study of the tissues of living bodies, of cellular life, of all which constitutes histology. He was convinced that outside his own studies, numerous questions would fall more and more into the domain of experimentation, and he believed that the faith in spiritual things could not “stand the struggle against the spirit of the times, wholly turned to positive things.” He did not, like Pasteur, understand the clear distinction between the scientist on the one hand and the man of sentiment on the other, each absolutely independent. Neither did he imitate the reserve of Claude Bernard who did not allow himself to be pressed by any urgent questioner into enrolment with either the believers or the unbelievers, but answered: “When I am in my laboratory, I begin by shutting the door on materialism and on spiritualism; I observe facts alone; I seek but the scientific conditions under which life manifests itself.” Robin was a disciple of Auguste Comte, and proclaimed himself a Positivist, a word which for superficial people was the equivalent of materialist. The same efforts which had succeeded in keeping Littré out of the Académie Française in 1863 were now attempted in order to keep Robin out of the Académie des Sciences in 1865. Sainte Beuve, whilst studying medicine, had been a Positivist; his quick and impressionable nature had then turned to a mysticism which had inspired him to pen some fine verses. He had now returned to his former philosophy, but kept an open mind, however, criticism being for him not the art of dictating, but of understanding, and he was absolutely averse to irrelevant considerations when a candidature was in question. The best means with Pasteur, who was no diplomat, was to go straight to the point. Sainte Beuve therefore wrote to him: “Dear Sir, will you allow me to be indiscreet enough to solicit your influence in favour of M. Robin, whose work I know you appreciate? “M. Robin does not perhaps belong to the same philosophical school as you do; but it seems to me--from an outsider’s point of view--that he belongs to the same scientific school. If he should differ essentially--whether in metaphysics or otherwise--would it not be worthy of a great scientist to take none but positive work into account? Nothing more, nothing less. “Forgive me; I have much resented the injustice towards you of certain newspapers, and I have sometimes asked myself if there were not some simple means of showing up all that nonsense, and of disproving those absurd and ill-intentioned statements. If M. Robin deserves to be of the Académie why should he not attain to it through you?...