I'm on an academic article kick as of late, and found this wonderful paragraph in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's article, "The Image of Objectivity" (Representations, No. 40. "Seeing Science", 81-128):

What unites the negative and positive sides of mechanical objectivity is a heroic self-discipline: on the one side, the honesty and self-restraint required to foreswear judgment, interpretation, and even the testimony of one's own senses; on the other, the taut concentration required for precise observation and measurement, endlessly repeated around the clock. It is a vision of scientific work that glorifies the plodding reliability of the bourgeois rather than the moody brilliance of the genius. It is also a profoundly moralized vision, of self-command triumphing over the temptations and frailties of flesh and spirit. Like almost all forms of moral virtuoisity, it preaches asceticism, albeit of a highly specialized sort. The temptations and frailties had less to do with envy, lust, gluttony, and other standard sins than with seeing as rather than seeing that; with witting and unwitting tampering with the "facts." But in the view of late nineteenth-century scientists, these professional sins were almost as difficult to combat as the seven deadly ones, and required a stern and vigilant conscience.