And that separation, as he understood it, caused in him none of those conflicts which often determine a crisis in a human soul. As a scientist, he claimed absolute liberty of research; he considered, with Claude Bernard and Littré, that it was a mistaken waste of time to endeavour to penetrate primary causes; “we can only note correlations,” he said. But, with the spiritual sentiment which caused him to claim for the inner moral life the same liberty os for scientific research, he could not understand certain givers of easy explanations who affirm that matter has organized itself, and who, considering as perfectly simple the spectacle of the Universe of which Earth is but an infinitesimal part, are in no wise moved by the Infinite Power who created the worlds. With his whole heart he proclaimed the immortality of the soul. His mode of looking upon human life, in spite of sorrows, of struggles, of heavy burdens, had in it a strong element of consolation: “No effort is wasted,” he said, giving thus a most virile lesson of philosophy to those inferior minds who only see immediate results in the work they undertake and are discouraged by the first disappointment. In his respect for the great phenomenon of Conscience, by which almost all men, enveloped as they are in the mystery of the Universe, have the prescience of an Ideal, of a God, he considered that “the greatness of human actions can be measured by the inspirations which give them birth.” He was convinced that there are no vain prayers. If all is simple to the simple, all is great to the great; it was through “the Divine regions of Knowledge and of Light” that he had visions of those who are no more. It was very seldom that he spoke of such things, though he was sometimes induced to do so in the course of a discussion so as to manifest his repugnance for vainglorious negations and barren irony; sometimes too he would enter into such feelings when speaking to an assembly of young men. Those discussions at the Academy of Medicine had the advantage of inciting medical men to the research of the infinitesimally small, described by the Annual Secretary Roger as “those subtle artisans of many disorders in the living economy.” M. Roger, at the end of a brief account of his colleague’s work, wrote, “To the signal services rendered by M. Pasteur to science and to our country, it was but fair that a signal recompense should be given: the National Assembly has undertaken that care.”