Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (learn to read books txt) 📕

“But it can, sir!”

“Then why did you not make the equation?”

“Well⁠—I don’t know. I wasn’t enough of a mathematician.”

“Then you should not have published till you knew your math!”

“I⁠—Look, Dr. Gottlieb, do you really think I know enough to work here? I want terribly to succeed.”

“Succeed? I have heard that word. It is English? Oh, yes, it is a word that liddle schoolboys use at the University of Winnemac. It means passing examinations. But there are no examinations to pass here⁠ ⁠… Martin, let us be clear. You know something of laboratory technique; you have heard about dese bacilli; you are not a good chemist, and mathematics⁠—pfui!⁠—most terrible! But you have curiosity and you are stubborn. You do not accept rules. Therefore I t’ink you will either make a very good scientist or a very bad one, and if you are bad enough, you will be popular with the rich ladies who rule this city, New York, and you can gif lectures for a living or even become, if you get to be plausible enough, a college president. So anyvay, it will be interesting.”

Half an hour later they were arguing ferociously, Martin asserting that the whole world ought to stop warring and trading and writing and get straightway into laboratories to observe new phenomena; Gottlieb insisting that there were already too many facile scientists, that the one thing necessary was the mathematical analysis (and often the destruction) of phenomena already observed.

It sounded bellicose, and all the while Martin was blissful with the certainty that he had come home.

The laboratory in which they talked (Gottlieb pacing the floor, his long arms fantastically knotted behind his thin back; Martin leaping on and off tall stools) was not in the least remarkable⁠—a sink, a bench with racks of numbered test-tubes, a microscope, a few notebooks and hydrogen-ion charts, a grotesque series of bottles connected by glass and rubber tubes on an ordinary kitchen table at the end of the room⁠—yet now and then during his tirades Martin looked about reverently.

Gottlieb interrupted their debate: “What work do you want to do here?”

“Why, sir, I’d like to help you, if I can. I suppose you’re cleaning up some things on the synthesis of antibodies.”

“Yes, I t’ink I can bring immunity reactions under the mass action law. But you are not to help me. You are to do your own work. What do you want to do? This is not a clinic; wit’ patients going through so neat in a row!”

“I want to find a hemolysin for which there’s an antibody. There isn’t any for streptolysin. I’d like to work with staphylolysin. Would you mind?”

“I do not care what you do⁠—if you just do not steal my staph cultures out of the icebox, and if you will look mysterious all the time, so Dr. Tubbs, our Director, will t’ink you are up to something big. So! I haf only one suggestion: when you get stuck in a problem, I have a fine collection of detective stories in my office. But no. Should I be serious⁠—this once, when you are just come?

“Perhaps I am a crank, Martin. There are many who hate me. There are plots against me⁠—oh, you t’ink I imagine it, but you shall see! I make many mistakes. But one thing I keep always pure: the religion of a scientist.

“To be a scientist⁠—it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of ve‑ry obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious⁠—he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.

“He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is equal opposed to the capitalists who t’ink their silly money-grabbing is a system, and to liberals who t’ink man is not a fighting animal; he takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he ignores all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to the anthropologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all nice good-natured people should naturally hate!

“He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and chiropractors than he does of the doctors that want to snatch our science before it is tested and rush around hoping they heal people, and spoiling all the clues with their footsteps; and worse than the men like hogs, worse than the imbeciles who have not even heard of science, he hates pseudo-scientists, guess-scientists⁠—like these psychoanalysts; and worse than those comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are allowed in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one textbook and how to lecture to nincompoops all so popular! He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.

“He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis is a funny t’ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless⁠—so much less cold than the Professional Optimists. The world has always been ruled by the Philanthropists: by the doctors that want to use therapeutic methods they do not understand, by the soldiers that want something to defend their country against, by the preachers that yearn to make everybody listen to them, by the kind manufacturers that love their workers, by the eloquent statesmen and softhearted authors⁠—and see once what a fine mess of hell they haf made of the world! Maybe now it is time for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes around