THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 199 



at the less technical writings of its leaders of its 

 Helmholtz, its Huxley, and its Du Bois-Reymond 

 would show what breadth of literary culture they com- 

 mand. Where among modern writers can you find 

 their superiors in clearness and vigour of literary style? 

 Science desires not isolation, but freely combines with 

 every effort towards the bettering of man's estate. 

 Single-handed, and supported, not by outward sym- 

 pathy, but by inward force, it has built at least one 

 great wing of the many-mansioned home which man in 

 his totality demands. And if rough walls and pro- 

 truding rafter-ends indicate that on one side the edi- 

 fice is still incomplete, it is only by wise combination 

 of the parts required, with those already irrevocably 

 built, that we can hope for completeness. There is no 

 necessary incongruity between what has been accom- 

 plished and what remains to be done. The moral 

 glow of Socrates, which we all feel by ignition, has in it 

 nothing incompatible with the physics of Anaxagoras 

 which he so much scorned, but which he would hardly 

 scorn to-day. And here I am reminded of one among 

 us, hoary, but still strong, whose prophet-voice some 

 thirty years ago, far more than any other of this age, 

 unlocked whatever of life and nobleness lay latent in 

 its most gifted minds one fit to stand beside Socrates 

 or the Maccabean Eleazar, and to dare and suffer all 

 that they suffered and dared fit, as he once said of 

 Fichte, ' to have been the teacher of the Stoa, and to 

 have discoursed of Beauty and Virtue in the groves of 

 Academe/ With a capacity to grasp physical prin- 

 ciples which his friend Goethe did not possess, and 

 which even total lack of exercise has not been able to 

 reduce to atrophy, it is the world's loss that he, in the 

 vigour of his years, did not open his mind and sympa- 

 thies to science, and make its conclusions a portion of 



