masses. We recognise them as men like ourselves, and their actions
and thoughts, being more free from the influence of passion, and
recorded more accurately than those of other men, are all the better
materials for the study of the calmer parts of human nature.

But the history of science is not restricted to the enumeration of
successful investigations. It has to tell of unsuccessful inquiries,
and to explain why some of the ablest men have failed to find the key
of knowledge, and how the reputation of others has only given a firmer
footing to the errors into which they fell.

The history of the development, whether normal or abnormal, of ideas
is of all subjects that in which we, as thinking men, take the deepest
interest. But when the action of the mind passes out of the
intellectual stage, in which truth and error are the alternatives,
into the more violently emotional states of anger and passion, malice
and envy, fury and madness; the student of science, though he is
obliged to recognise the powerful influence which these wild forces
have exercised on mankind, is perhaps in some measure disqualified
from pursuing the study of this part of human nature.

But then how few of us are capable of deriving profit from such
studies. We cannot enter into full sympathy with these lower phases
of our nature without losing some of that antipathy to them which is
our surest safeguard against a reversion to a meaner type, and we
gladly return to the company of those illustrious men who by aspiring
to noble ends, whether intellectual or practical, have risen above the
region of storms into a clearer atmosphere, where there is no
misrepresentation of opinion, nor ambiguity of expression, but where
one mind comes into closest contact with another at the point where