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Imagination, and Reason. To Reason we owe the knowledge 
of Mathematical and Physical, Psychological and Metaphysical 
science, or Natural Philosophy, in the widest acceptation of the 
term; to the Imagination belong the Belles Lettres, Poetry, and 
Fiction; to the Memory—History, Archeology—the knowledge of 
the Past. 
This account of the constitution of the Academy, as intended to 
embrace the whole circle of human knowledge, appears to me to give 
a more correct idea of the objects of our studies than the division 
suggested by one of my most distinguished predecessors in this 
Chair, who, on an occasion similar to the present, classified the 
objects proposed to us by our founders under the categories of the 
True, the Beautiful, and the Old. 
This classification (suggested evidently by Cousin’s Vrai, Beau, 
Bien) partakes largely of the poetical elegance which is so remark- 
able a characteristic of my distinguished friend’s mind; but ne- 
vertheless it may, I think, lead some to an erroneous conclusion, 
which he himself, I feel assured, would deprecate as much as 
Ido. Therefore, it is not as objecting to what he has said that I 
make this remark ; for I would rather call your attention to his 
Inaugural Address as containing much valuable matter, eloquently 
and beautifully expressed, which will at all times be read with in- 
terest and profit by the Members of the Academy. But I desire to 
guard against the inference, which he did not draw, and would have 
been, I know, the last to draw, that the study of the Beautiful and 
of the Old is not also as much the study of the True, as are those 
transcendental conceptions of mathematical thought,—those won- 
derful researches into the infinite,—which are the natural sphere 
of such rare minds as his, and which have established for the name 
of HamiLton a world-wide and lasting fame. 
Nay, there is a sense in which the speculations of the abstract ma- 
thematician are, perhaps, less entitled to the name of Truth, than the 
investigations of the philologist or the historian. .When we speak 
mathematically of points, and lines, and curves; of bars inflexible, 
imponderable; of orbits described by planets and comets in the 
fields of space,—we speak of mere abstractions or conceptions of the 
mind, which have not, and cannot have, a true or real existence in 
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