"The man who gives up his place in a boat that will not hold all, in favour of younger and weaker beings; the physician, the sister of charity, and nurse who stir not from the bed-side of patients dying of an infectious fever; the man of science who wastes his life in brain-work and fatigue and knows he is so wasting it and yet is offering it day after day and night after night in order to discover some great law of the universe, the discovery of which may bring in its results some great boon to mankind; the mother that throws herself before the wild beast, that attacks her children, to screen and give them the time to fly; all these are not suicides. The impulse which prompts them thus to contravene the first great law of animated nature--the first instinctive impulse of which is to preserve life--is grand and noble."