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46 long after the essential scientific discovery, which, but for the pure love of investigation for its own sake, would never have been made at all. 'For myself', he said, 'I would, however, take higher ground, for I believe there exists, and I feel within me, an instinct for truth, or knowledge or discovery, of something of the same nature as the instinct of virtue, and that our having such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without any practical results ever ensuing from them.'

Or consider the following conversation. A distinguished American physicist met after many years a friend of his youth who had achieved success in business. He took his friend to the laboratory and showed him an extraordinarily fine grating of ruled lines he had been able to make. The business man listened and looked in silence and then said, 'And what is the use of it?' The physicist replied that by means of this grating the light from distant bodies could be analysed and we could find out, for instance, whether sodium exists in the sun. To this the business man: 'And who in hell cares whether sodium does exist in the sun?' It was a rhetorical question, but an allegory of Sir Michael Foster's supplies the answer. 'It was by curiosity', as I have heard him say, 'that our first parents lost the Garden of Eden; but in transmitting this same curiosity to their descendants they gave us a golden bridge by which we may re-enter Paradise.' And the man who cares whether sodium exists in the sun is to be found there and not in the 'other place.'

The contrast between science itself and its applications has been eloquently put by Huxley in a well-known passage. Speaking of the material advantages he says: