Louis Pasteur

6 LOUIS PASTEUR
which was to result from his electrical and chemical discoveries,
preferred to be called a "philosopher,"
rather than a "scientist."
It was perhaps as a silent protest against the encroachment of so-
ciety into the activities of natural philosophers that, while still in
full scientific productivity, he withdrew from all his consulting
and industrial connections into the sanctuary of the Royal In-
stitution.
The integration of science and social economy, nevertheless,
had had several isolated sponsors before Pasteur's time. Francis
Bacon had pictured, in The New Atlantis, a society of scholars
organized for the acquisition of a knowledge that would permit
man to achieve mastery over nature. "The end of our Foundation/'
he wrote, "is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of
things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the
effecting of all things possible." In 1666 Colbert, that prototype of
American efficiency who conducted the business of France under
Louis XIV, had created the French Academy of Sciences and had
supplied it with funds for the support of academicians, and of their
instruments and experiments. As early as 1671, he organized a co-
operative project for the survey of the kingdom and its dependencies.
Thus, under that Most Christian Monarch, King of
France by Divine Right, was born a tradition which the leaders
of Communist Russia were to follow systematically two hundred
and fifty years later. In England, the Royal Society and the Royal
Institution were founded for the cultivation of "such knowledge
as had a tendency to use" and "to make science useful as well as
attractive." When, in 1751, the French Encyclopedists, under the
leadership of Diderot and d'Alembert, undertook the publication
of a universal dictionary of arts, sciences, trades and manufac-
tures, they devoted much of their attention to technical processes
as carried out in workshops. "Should not," they asked, "the in-
ventors of the spring, the chain, and the repeating parts of a
watch be equally esteemed with those who have successfully
studied to perfect algebra?" The Paris Academy of Sciences fol-
lowed this lead and published, between 1761 and 1781, twenty
volumes of illustrated accounts of arts and crafts. The activity of