THE BELFAST ADDRESS 213 



of a day; and as regards you, I thought you ought to 

 know the environment which, with or without your con- 

 Bent, is rapidly surrounding you, and in relation to which 

 some adjustment on your part may be necessary. A hint 

 of Hamlet's, however, teaches us how the troubles of com- 

 mon life may be ended; and it is perfectly possible for 

 you and me to purchase intellectual peace at the price 

 of intellectual death. The world is not without refuges of 

 this description; nor is it wanting in persons who seek 

 their shelter, and try to persuade others to do the same. 

 The unstable and the weak have yielded and will yield to 

 this persuasion, and they to whom repose is sweeter than 

 the truth. But I would exhort you to refuse the offered 

 shelter, and to scorn the base repose to accept, if the 

 choice be forced upon you, commotion before stagnation, 

 the breezy leap of the torrent before the fetid stillness of 

 the swamp. In the course of this Address I have touched 

 on debatable questions, and led you over what will be 

 deemed dangerous ground and this partly with the view 

 of telling you that, as regards these questions, science 

 claims unrestricted right of search. It is not to the point 

 to say that the views of Lucretius and Bruno, of Darwin 

 and Spencer, may be wrong. Here I should agree with 

 you, deeming it indeed certain that these views will un- 

 dergo modification. But the point is that, whether right 

 or wrong, we claim the right to discuss them. For 

 science, however, no exclusive claim is here made; you 

 are not urged to erect it into an idol. The inexorable 

 advance of man's understanding in the path of knowl- 

 edge, and those unquenchable claims of his moral and 

 emotional nature, which the understanding can never sat- 

 isfy, are here equally set forth. The world embraces not 



