Marcellin Berthelot on Science

"Science... dominates all things, it alone is of any definite utility. No man, no institution shall henceforth have an enduring authority if they do not conform themselves to its precepts."

"Science carries its legitimate pretensions further. To-day it claims the material, intellectual, and moral direction of society. Under its impulse modern civilisation marches with an increasingly rapid stride."

"Hence the rôle of savants, as individuals and as a social class, has unceasingly developed in modern states. But our duties towards other men increase in the same ratio, and let it never be forgotten; let it proclaimed in this hall, in this palace of French science."

"In effect, it may be declared emphatically that no one has a right to claim the exclusive merit of the brilliant discoveries of the past century. Science is essentially a collective work, prosecuted during the course of time by the efforts of a multitude of workers of every age and every nation, succeeding each other and associated in virtue of a tacit understanding for the research of truth in its purity, and for the application of this truth to the continual transformation of the condition of all men."

"Chemistry is not a primitive science, like geometry or astronomy; it is constructed from the debris of a previous scientific formation; a formation half chimerical and half positive, itself founded on the treasure slowly amassed by the practical discoveries of, medicine, industry, and domestic economy. It has to do with alchemy, which pretended to enrich its adepts by teaching them to manufacture gold and silver, to shield them from diseases by the preparation of the, and finally to obtain for them perfect felicity by identifying them with the soul of the world and the universal spirit."