36 JOSEPU PRIESTLEY i 



Hutton, have all been carried on since Priestley 

 discovered oxygen; and consider that they are 

 now things of the past, concealed by the industry 

 of those who have built upon them, as the first 

 founders of a coral reef are hidden beneath the 

 life's work of their successors; consider that the 

 methods of physical science are slowly spreading 

 into all investigations, and that proofs as valid as 

 those required by her canons of investigation are 

 being demanded of all doctrines which ask for 

 men's assent; and you will have a faint image of 

 the astounding difference in this respect between 

 the nineteenth century and the eighteenth. 



If we ask what is the deeper meaning of all 

 these vast changes, I think there can be but one 

 reply. They mean that reason has asserted and 

 exercised her primacy over all provinces of human 

 activity; that ecclesiastical authority has been 

 relegated to its proper place; that the good of the 

 governed has been finally recognized as the end of 

 government, and the complete responsibility of 

 governors to the people as its means; and that 

 the dependence of natural phenomena in general 

 on the laws of action of what we call matter has 

 become an axiom. 



But it was to bring these things about, and to 

 enforce the recognition of these truths, that 

 Josei^h Priestley laboured. If the nineteenth 

 century is other and better tlian the eighteenth, 

 it is, in great measure, to him, and to such men as 



