APPENDIX A LXXI 



we call energy, and which under its manifestations we call heat, elec- 

 tricity, gravity, chemical attraction, and so on. Our familiarity 

 with these manifestations has led us to ignore the reality behind 

 them and to assume that it is in itself not only knowable but known, 

 but many a mind in the long ages to come will attempt to grasp the 

 significance of this ultimate element, the great enigma, which in the 

 end may be found to be one with the very Immanence of the Universe. 

 The age-long quest for solutions of such problems may thus develop 

 functions which will bring the human mind nearer and nearer to 

 "the imperious lonely thinking-power." To any one seeking the pur- 

 pose of existence, that, it may be believed, may appear the predestined 

 reward for mankind for laboriously, unflinchingly following the path 

 to the far-distant Altar of Truth. 



The advancement of pure science then has sanctions deeper and 

 more sacred than those derived from its utilitarian ends, valuable 

 as these are in serving our physical life. Every agency that can 

 promote this advancement ought to be engaged as in the performance 

 of a high duty, of a duty with a religious significance. In this 

 promotion human life may shed, as time passes, more and more of 

 the dross, the gross and the sordid, that now thwart the march of 

 the intellect. 



To the admirers of the older knowledge all this may appear as 

 portending its ultimate eclipse. There has been in the past a con- 

 flict between the two, arising from the claims of the older knowledge 

 to monopolize the intellectual domain, a claim which the men of 

 science during the last fifty years have resented. The representatives 

 of the older learning have been exceedingly unwise in decrying the 

 \'alue of the conquests that the modern mind has achieved over the 

 unknown and in failing to recognize that the great thinkers of an- 

 tiquity, regarding the ultimate constitution of the cosmos, would, 

 if they returned to the world to-day, be of the brotherhood of the 

 great explorers in the sciences of Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy and 

 Biology. Heracleitus, Democritus and Lucretius would be colleagues 

 of our Newton, Dalton, Faraday, Young, Thomson, and Helm- 

 holtz, while Empcdocles and Aristotle would claim kinship with the 

 great Biological thinkers of the last fifty years. Would not also 

 the great founder of Stoicism claim intellectual fellowship with the 

 Romanes Lecturer in his thoughts on Evolution and Ethics ? 



The old knowledge and the old literature derived from the Greeks 

 and the Romans have been of inestimable service to mankind. If 

 it had not been for the difïusion of all this learning and literature 

 after the fall of Constantinople, the civilization of Western Europe 

 on the intellectual side would in all probability not have ach'anced 



Proc., Sig. 6 



