SCIENCE AND MAN. 597 
The men who have most profoundly influenced the 
world from the scientific side have habitually sought 
isolation. Faraday, at a certain period of his career, 
formally renounced dining out. Darwin lives apart from 
the bustle of the world in his quiet home in Kent. Mayer 
and Joule dealt in unobtrusive retirement with the 
weightiest scientific questions. There is, however, one 
motive power in the world which no man, be he a scientific 
student or otherwise, can afford to treat with indifference; 
and that is, the cultivation of right relations with his 
fellow-men the performance of his duty, not as an isolated 
individual, but as a member of society. It is duty in this 
aspect, overcoming alike the sense of possible danger and 
the desire for repose, that has placed me in your presence 
here to-night. 
To look at his picture as a whole, a painter requires 
distance; and to judge of the total scientific achievement 
of any age, the standpoint of a succeeding age is desirable. 
We may, however, transport ourselves in idea into the 
future, and thus survey with more or less completeness the 
science of our time. We sometimes hear it decried, and 
contrasted to its disadvantage with the science of other 
times. I do not think that this will be the verdict of 
posterity. I think, on the contrary, that posterity will 
acknowledge that in the history of science no higher 
samples of intellectual conquest are recorded than those 
which this age has made its own. One of the most salient 
of these I propose, with your permission, to make the 
subject of our consideration during the coming hour. 
It is now generally admitted that the man of to-day is 
the child and product of incalculable antecedent time. 
His physical and intellectual textures have been woven for 
him during his passage through phases of history and 
forms of existence which lead the mind back to an abysmal 
past. One of the qualities which he has derived from that 
past is the yearning to let in the light of principles on the 
otherwise bewildering flux of phenomena. He has been 
described by the German Lichtenberg as "das rastlose 
Ursacheuthier " the restless cause- seeking animal in 
whom facts excite a kind of hunger to know the sources 
from which they spring. Never, I venture to say, in the 
history of the world has this longing been more liberally 
responded to, both among men of science aud the general 
