In the daytime each offered to read to him. General Favé, whose active and inquiring mind was ever on the alert, brought him on one of his almost daily visits an ideal sick man’s book, easy to read and offering food for meditation. It was the translation of an English book called _Self-Help_,[28] and it consisted in a series of biographies, histories of lives illustrating the power of courage, devotion or intelligence. The author, glad to expound a discovery, to describe a masterpiece, to relate noble enterprises, to dwell upon the prodigies which energy can achieve, had succeeded in making a homogeneous whole of these unconnected narratives, a sort of homage to Willpower. Pasteur agreed with the English writer in thinking that the supremacy of a nation resides in “the sum total of private virtues, activities and energy.” His thoughts rose higher still; men of science could wish for a greater glory than that of contributing to the fame and fortune of their country, they might aspire to originating vast benefits to the whole of humanity. It was indeed a sad and a sublime spectacle, that of the contrast between that ardent, soaring soul and that patient helpless body. It was probably when thinking of those biographies--some of them too succinct, to his mind, Jenner’s for instance--that Pasteur wrote: “From the life of men whose passage is marked by a trace of durable light, let us piously gather up every word, every incident likely to make known the incentives of their great soul, for the education of posterity.” He looked upon the cult of great men as a great principle of national education, and believed that children, as soon as they could read, should be made acquainted with the heroic or benevolent souls of great men. In his pious patriotism he saw a secret of strength and of hope for a nation in its reverence for the memories of the great, a sacred and intimate bond between the visible and the invisible worlds. His soul was deeply religious. During his illness--a time when the things of this world assume their real proportions--his mind rose far beyond this earth. The Infinite appeared to him as it did to Pascal, and with the same rapture; he was less attracted by Pascal, when, proud and disdainful, he exposes man’s weakness for humiliation’s sake, than when he declares that “Man is produced but for Infinity,” and “he finds constant instruction in progress.” Pasteur believed in material progress as well as in moral improvement; he invariably marked in the books he was reading--Pascal, Nicole and others--those passages which were both consoling and exalting.