7

Summary

I SHALL assume that I am writing for readers who are full, or have in the past been full, of a proper spirit of ambition. A man's first duty, a young man's at any rate, is to be ambitious. Ambition is a noble passion which may legitimately take many forms; there was something noble in the ambition of Attila or Napoleon: but the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind one something of permanent value—

Here, on the level sand,

Between the sea and land,

What shall I build or write

Against the fall of night?

Tell me of runes to grave

That hold the bursting wave,

Or bastions to design

For longer date than mine.

Ambition has been the driving force behind nearly all the best work of the world. In particular, practically all substantial contributions to human happiness have been made by ambitious men. To take two famous examples, were not Lister and Pasteur ambitious? Or, on a humbler level, King Gillette and William Willett; and who in recent times have contributed more to human comfort than they?

Physiology provides particularly good examples, just because it is so obviously a ‘beneficial’ study. We must guard against a fallacy common among apologists of science, the fallacy of supposing that the men whose work most benefits humanity are thinking much of that while they do it, that physiologists, for example, have particularly noble souls. A physiologist may indeed be glad to remember that his work will benefit mankind, but the motives which provide the force and the inspiration for it are indistinguishable from those of a classical scholar or a mathematician.