THE RELATION OF SCIENCE TO HUMAN LIFE.* 
By Prof. ADAM SEpDGwICcK, F. R. S. 
In casting about for a suitable introduction for my address this 
afternoon, I came across some words written by a great Englishman, 
which, with your permission, I will read to you: 
Remember the wise, for they have labored and you are entering into their 
labors. Every lesson which you learned in school, all knowledge which raises 
you above the savage and the profligate—who is but a savage dressed in civil- 
ized garments—has been made possible to you by the wise. Every doctrine 
of theology, every maxim of morals, every rule of grammar, every process of 
mathematics, every law of physical science, every fact of history or of geog- 
raphy, which you are taught, is a voice from beyond the tomb. Either the 
knowledge itself, or other knowledge which led to it, is an heirloom to you from 
men whose bodies are now moldering in the dust, but whose spirits live forever 
and whose works follow them, going on, generation after generation, upon the 
path which they trod while they were upon earth, the path of usefulness, as 
lights to the steps of youth and ignorance. 
They are the salt of the earth, which keeps the world of man from decaying 
back into barbarism. They are the children of light. They are the’ aris- 
tocracy of God, into which not many noble, not many rich, not many mighty 
are called. Most of them were poor; many all but unknown in their own 
time; many died and saw no fruit of their labors; some were persecuted, some 
were slain as heretics, innovators, and corruptors of youth. Of some the very 
names are forgotten. But though their names be dead their words live, and 
grow, and spread over every fresh generation of youth, showing them fresh 
steps towards that temple of wisdom which is the knowledge of things as they 
are; the knowledge of those eternal laws by which God governs the heavens 
and the earth, things temporal and eternal, physical and spiritual, seen and 
unseen, from the rise and fall of mighty nations to the growth and death of 
moss on yonder moors. 
So spake Charles Kingsley, and his words I make use of as an in- 
troduction which strikes the keynote of what I have to say to you 
to-day. 
The subject which I have chosen for my address—the relation of 
pure science, and especially of biological science, to human life, 
and inferentially the relation which ought to exist between pure and 
“Address delivered at the Imperial College of Science and Technology on 
December 16, 1909. Reprinted, after author’s revision, from Nature, London, 
No. 2095, vol. 82, December 23, 1909. 
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