Olga Metchnikoff

“ Faith in the power of Science and in the possibility of modifying human nature itself through Science was the foundation of the optimistic philosophy of his maturity. Thoughts full of strength and hope shine like leading stars all along his philosophical works.
“Alone, Rational Science is capable of showing humanity the true path.”
“The real goal of human existence consists in an active life in conformity with individual capacity; in a life prolonged until the appearance of the death-instinct, and until Man, satisfied with the duration of his existence, feels the desire for annihilation.” ”

“ In one way, I should like to get well, but, on the other hand, I see no sense in living any longer. Illness has not provoked in me any fear of death, and I am more deprived than formerly of the joy of living. The reawakening of spring leaves me quite indifferent. There can be no question for me of that pleasure which convalescents often feel, nor indeed of any pleasure. To the despair that I feel in the face of medicine’s powerlessness to cure the ills of my friends is added the feeling of its powerlessness towards my own illness. ”

“ In some places the steppes are covered with small tamarisk bushes or with silky grass, but, as a rule, the chief growth is of silver wormwood. The monotony is not so great as one might think, for the steppes, like a mirror, reflect all the divers light-changes, and wonderful natural phenomena take place there. During the great heat, mirages are to be seen in the distance—a river, lakes, reed-grown shores; sometimes a sand-storm supervenes, more infernal than fairy-like, called here “smertch.” The wind raises the sand in tongues of flames or in funnels running up to the sky with giddy rapidity. ”

“ A character as powerful as his is capable of influencing and illuminating the life, not of one individual, but of a whole generation. I look upon it as the greatest good fortune of my life that I was able to spend my best years in his orbit and to impregnate my mind with his spirit, not his scientific spirit, but that which he manifested in facing life and humanity. ”

“ And as, one by one, the news came of the death in action of several of the young men who had left the Institute, Metchnikoff’s grief knew no limits. He could not bear the idea, now a terrible reality, that these brilliant young lives should be sacrificed, victims of those who should have directed the peoples towards peace and a rational life, and who, instead of that, threw the most precious part of humanity into the abyss of death. War became a dark, sinister background to his daily life. ”

“ We were saying to each other how inevitably superficial and incomplete such a biography was bound to be; how difficult such a task is for a biographer, even when fully informed; how necessary it is to be thoroughly acquainted with a man and with every phase of his existence in order to give a truthful picture of his character and of his life. The intimate side is bound to remain more or less closed to a stranger; in order to decipher it, it is indispensable for the writer of a biography to have lived in complete communion of spirit with its subject. ”

“ Scientific work still provokes in me an invincible enthusiasm, but I am becoming more indifferent to many of the pleasures of life.
And indeed he no longer had the joyous soul of former days; into his life a funereal note had crept, low but continuous and obstinate. He gave all the more energy to the study of those questions the solution of which was to bring about the reign of orthobiosis. He spent the whole winter in researches on the intestinal flora and on the completion of his studies on infantile cholera. ”

“ Though I always took a strong interest in scientific questions, Art was the real passion of my life. But, imbued as I was with the narrow, utilitarian views which surrounded my youth, I had looked upon Art as a luxury which should not be indulged in at a time when the poorer classes could not read and write. When at last I became emancipated from this fallacy, my husband did his best to encourage my artistic development though he himself did not appreciate plastic art. Form and colour in themselves or in harmony did not appeal to him ”

“ Before us spread a barren and sandy steppe, producing the sad impression of a land forsaken by God and man. How could life be possible there? But gradually, as we became captivated by the charm of the boundless space, the purity of the air, the harmonious colouring and the scent of wild heliotrope and wormwood which alone can grow in those sands, we began to understand that it was not only possible to live in those steppes, but also to love them. ”

“ The life and work of Elie Metchnikoff are so intimately bound together that, in a biography, it is impossible to separate them. That is why the description of his work necessarily has been dispersed along the story of his life; but, just as, in order to judge of a work of art, one has to draw back and contemplate the whole, we must also, after following the evolution and successive stages of E. Metchnikoff’s scientific works, take a full view of his work as a whole. ”

“ They were enclosed within an urn and placed in the library of the Pasteur Institute.
But his beautiful, ardent soul, his audacious and fertile ideas, all that rich inner life which had developed into a harmonious and puissant symphony, all that cannot be dead, cannot disappear! The ideas, the influence we give to life must persist, must live; they are the sacred flame which we hand on to others and are eternal. ”

“ The swarming microbes in our large intestine. They form the permanent source of a slow poisoning of our organism. This fact alone suffices to explain one of the principal causes of the enfeebling of our tissues. It is not simultaneous in all the cells because of their different powers of resistance. The struggle and destruction of the weak by the strong is the cruel law of nature; therefore the macrophages, more resisting to poisons, take advantage of the weakening of other cells in order to devour them, and this is one of the causes of senility. ”

“ When old age becomes physiological and no longer painful it will become proportionate with the other epochs of our lives and cease to alarm us. But how is the fear of death to be explained, since it is a general and inevitable phenomenon? How is it that we have no natural instinct for death? Metchnikoff supposes that this lack of harmony in our nature comes from the fact that death is as premature as senility and arrives before the natural instinct for it has had time to develop. ”

“ Metchnikoff answered that theory is much nearer to life than it seems, and that many benefits have been acquired for humanity by scientific observations of an abstract order. Thus, the discovery of the great unchanging laws of Nature give to Man the consciousness of being submitted to logical laws instead of an arbitrary force, and that is a benefit. When microbes were discovered, their part in human life was not suspected, and yet this discovery was afterwards of the greatest service to human welfare since it enabled man to fight against disease. ”

“ When, owing to the progress of Science, men reach the development of the instinct of death, they will look upon Death with the same calm as do very old people, and it will cease to be one of the principal causes of pessimism. It is for that reason that we must learn to prolong life and to allow all men to realise their complete and natural vital cycle, thus ensuring their moral balance. ”

“ One never fears to take advantage of it, for no scientific question ever finds you indifferent. Your ardour warms the indolent and gives confidence to the sceptical.
You are an incomparable collaborator as I know, I who have had the good fortune of being associated with your researches on several occasions. Indeed, you did nearly all the work!
More even than your science, your kindliness attracts; who amongst us has not experienced it? ”

“ The public at large and many critics did not understand the deep and general meaning of Metchnikoff’s thoughts. They reproached him with having an insufficiently exalted ideal, for they only saw in his doctrine the desire of postponing senility and living longer. They did not understand that to revolt against the lack of harmony in nature, through which all humanity has to suffer, not only physically but morally, was to aspire to perfection. They did not consider that, in order to attain that end, all human culture and the whole social state would have to be modified ”

“ In fact, as he ascended the scale of beings and studied their natural and artificial immunity, he ascertained that, in all of them, the essence of immunity, masked by the complexity of the organism, reduced itself to the phagocytes becoming accustomed to noxious agents. The mechanism of immunity in protozoa could therefore really be compared with that of immunity in multicellular beings.
Becoming accustomed and becoming immune are phenomena of a general order, for they can be manifested not only by animals, but also by plants. They, too, have to defend themselves against numerous diseases. ”

“ As time goes on, when Science has caused present evils to disappear, when men no longer tremble for the life and welfare of their dear ones, when individual life follows a normal course—then Man can attain a higher level and more easily devote himself to exalted goals.
Then Art and pure Science will occupy the place which is due to them and which they lack at the present moment in consequence of our many cares. Let us hope that men will understand their true interests and contribute to the progress of orthobiosis. ”

“ A warm welcome awaited Metchnikoff in Russia. At Petersburg, as in Moscow, he was received with cordial and enthusiastic sympathy not only by scientific and medical societies, but by all the intellectual youth of those cities. This warm reception contributed to efface the bitterness sometimes aroused in him by distant recollections of the reasons which caused him to leave his native country.
During our stay in Russia we made the acquaintance of our great writer, Léon Tolstoï. We spent a day with him in his estate, Iasnaïa Paliana, and the day left a lifelong impression upon us. ”

“ Elie and his sister-in-law reached Geneva, where they found Leo Metchnikoff and several relations, among whom he seems to have recovered himself. He even related some of their travelling experiences, meetings with Carlists, frontier incidents, etc., with some spirit. But his apparent calm concealed black despair.
He said to himself: “Why live? My private life is ended; my eyes are going; when I am blind I can no longer work, then why live?” ”

“ But, as long as senility is pathological and death premature, the apprehension that they inspire antagonises the normal evolution of optimism. A victory over those present evils will direct the normal course of life in the right way; one normal active period will succeed another; the accomplishment of individual and social functions corresponding with each period will become realisable; the death instinct will have time to develop, and Man, having been through his normal vital cycle, will sink, peacefully and without fear, into eternal sleep. ”

“ Metchnikoff’s anthropological researches led him to the study of childhood, which in its turn suggested reflections on questions of Pedagogy. His eyesight was still weak and his hunger for activity very great; in order to satisfy it, he gave lessons in a Lycée and public lectures in the Odessa University. Though time was passing, Metchnikoff could not get used to his solitude; he spent his active kindness on his friends and all around him, whilst living like an ascetic and giving away all that he could spare. But nothing could quench his thirst for a family life and affectionate intimacy. ”

“ But, in his maturity, he has no desire to grow old, and in his old age none to die. It is rare that one should aspire to die, and nobody wishes to grow old. These facts are in contradiction with other natural phenomena; they are all the more discordant that they play an immense part in our psychical life.
After a general review of opinions on human nature, Metchnikoff analysed it from the biological point of view; he revealed its discords and concluded that it is far from being perfect. In his eyes, the lack of harmony in the human being is an inheritance from our animal ancestors ”

“ What is to be done? the doctors can do nothing, for medicine is powerless. Unhappily, it will remain so for a long time. Much work will have to be done to rid humanity of the scourge of diseases. But, surely, one day science will succeed in doing so; that will be chiefly through prophylaxis and rational hygiene. There will also be a new science—the science of death ”

“ Such a possibility brought no surprise to a zoologist, accustomed to see that, in the struggle for existence, animals often devoured their enemies.
All the materials for the building up of the phagocyte theory were therefore ready in Metchnikoff’s mind when he asked himself, as by an intuition, whether the white globules of our blood, globules so similar to amœbæ, do not play the part of a defensive army in our organism when they envelope in accumulated masses intrusive bodies injurious to the organism. ”

“ It is fine to fall on the battlefield, especially at an age when life and activity are already on the wane. But all that was pure reasoning; instinctively I still felt a great desire to live, and it was with joy that I counted the days which separated me from the danger of having contracted typhoid fever. ”

“ In reality he was struggling against the inertia and reactionary forces which were shackling the normal development of culture and science in Russia. He called himself a “progressive evolutionist,” for he considered that alone a deep and conscious evolution could give stable results and lead to real progress. He thought that Revolution, and especially Terrorism, merely provoked a reaction which might be long-lived, and that, as long as the people were not sufficiently educated, a revolution might easily result in the transfer of despotism from one party to another. ”

“ A great and powerful figure, the superiority of his intelligence was almost crushing, while his sparkling wit and the nobility of his whole being endowed him with an incomparable and irresistible personal charm. Metchnikoff often said that no man had left a deeper impression on his life. ”

“ It is useless to say that I am indifferent to the quality of my food; my need of musical impressions has become so much less that I hardly feel the desire to satisfy it. The charm of spring no longer touches me and only provokes sadness in my mind. ”

“ In 1909 he gave another lecture at Stuttgart, “A Conception of Nature and of Medical Science,” in which he summed up his two works Études sur la nature humaine and Essais optimistes. The title of this lecture was intended to emphasise his view of human nature, according to which “Man, as he appeared on the earth, is an animal and pathological being belonging to the realm of medicine.” But he ended his paper by the same optimistic thought which illumines the whole philosophy of his later years. “With the help of Science, Man can correct the imperfections of his nature.” ”