SCIENCE AND MAN. 



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 ill 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 

 Ursachenthier " 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 

 i ponded to, botli among niun of science and the general 



