424 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



far removed from nineteenth-century needs as the priests of the Ho- 

 meric period. Omniscience might see in our brains the physical cor- 

 relatives of our differences ; and, were these organs incapable of change, 

 the world, despite this internal commotion, would stand still as a whole. 

 But happily that Power which, according to Mr. Arnold, " makes for 

 righteousness " is intellectual as well as ethical ; and by its operation, 

 not as an outside but as an inside factor of the brain, even the mis- 

 taken efforts of that organ are finally overruled in the interests of truth. 



It has been thought, and said, that, in the revised Address as here 

 published, I have retracted opinions uttered at Belfast. A Roman 

 Catholic writer, who may be taken as representative, is specially strong 

 upon this point. Startled by the deep chorus of dissent witli which 

 my dazzling fallacies have been received, he convicts me of trying to 

 retreat from my position. This he will by no means tolerate. " It is 

 too late now to seek to hide from the eyes of mankind one foul blot, 

 one ghastly deformity. Prof. Tyndall has himself told us how and 

 where this Address of his was composed. It was written among the 

 glaciers and the solitudes of the Swiss mountains. It was no hasty, 

 hurried, crude production ; its every sentence bore marks of thought 

 and care." 



My critic intends to be severe : he is simply just. In the " soli- 

 tudes" to which he refers I worked with deliberation; endeavoring 

 even to purify my intellect by disciplines similar to those enjoined 

 by his own Church for the sanctification of the soul. I tried in my 

 ponderings to realize not only the lawful, but the expedient ; and to 

 permit no fear to act upon my mind save that of uttering a single 

 word on which I could not take my stand, either in this or any other 

 world. 



Still my time was so brief, and my process of thought and expres- 

 sion so slow, that, in a literary point of view, I halted, not only be- 

 hind the ideal, but behind the possible. Hence, after the delivery of 

 the Address, I went over it with the desire, not to revoke its princi- 

 ples, but to improve it verbally, and above all to remove any word 

 which might give color to the notion of " heat and haste." In hold- 

 ing up as a warning to writers of the present the errors and follies of 

 the denouncers of the past, I took occasion to compare the intellectual 

 propagation of such denouncers to that of thistle-germs ; the expres- 

 sion was thought offensive, and I omitted it. It is still omitted from 

 the Address. There was also another passage, Avhich ran thus: "It is 

 vain to oppose this force with a view to its extirpation. What* we 

 should oppose, to the death if necessary, is every attempt to found 

 upon this elemental bias of man's nature a system which should exer- 

 cise despotic sway over his intellect. I do not fear any such consum- 

 mation. Science has already, to some extent, leavened the world, and 

 it will leaven it more and more. I should look upon the mild light 



