An Imperial Councillor under Napoleon; President of
the Council of Public Instruction and Chancellor of the University
under the restored Bourbons; Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour,
a Peer of France, Minister of the Interior, and President of the
Council of State under Louis Philippe; he was eminent in all these
capacities, and yet the dignity given by such high administrative
positions was as nothing compared to his leadership in natural
science. Science throughout the world acknowledged in him its chief
contemporary ornament, and to this hour his fame rightly continues.
But there was in him, as in Linnaeus, a survival of certain
theological ways of looking at the universe and certain theological
conceptions of a plan of creation; it must be said, too, that while
his temperament made him distrust new hypotheses, of which he had
seen so many born and die, his environment as a great functionary
of state, honoured, admired, almost adored by the greatest, not
only in the state but in the Church, his solicitude lest science
should receive some detriment by openly resisting the Church, which
had recaptured Europe after the French Revolution, and had made of
its enemies its footstool--all these considerations led him to
oppose the new theory.
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