Whereas we may be inclined to combine Nobel's name with the image of a hardboiled businessman, an extremely successful money-maker, Alfred Nobel was in reality a poet, a dreamer, an adventurer in science, an idealist at heart, a philosopher in essence-he did, in fact, leave a sketch for a novel in which he advocated a form of government along Platonic lines. Even in his most striking inventions, of which dynamite is only one, he saw not ends, but means.