ELECTEICAL CONFERENCE AT PHILADELPHIA 623 



the mind which come most into play in the study of science. To the 

 mind of the ancients, where the imagination ran riot without the guide 

 of reason or a warning from their moral sense to speak the truth, it was 

 easier to attribute the attraction of rubbed amber to an inherent soul 

 or essence, which, awakened by friction, went forth and brought back 

 the small particles floating around, than to examine and find out the 

 truth. 



The simple experiment of the amber remained without investigation 

 for 2200 years. Had the reasoning of many modern persons been fol- 

 lowed, we should never have had a science of electricity. Why should 

 anybody investigate this phenomenon, this feeble force, which could 

 only attract a few particles of dust? The world could eat, drink, and 

 take its ease without doing anything in the matter, and it did so for 

 more than "two thousand years of intellectual, moral and physical degra- 

 dation. Then the awakening came, and men began to feel that they 

 were reasoning beings. They began to see that there were other pleas- 

 ures in the world besides animal pleasures, and that they had been placed 

 in this wonderful universe that they might exalt their intelligence by its 

 proper study. No question of gain entered into the minds of these 

 early investigators, but they were led by that instinct toward truth which 

 indicates the highest type of man. And yet their researches have trans- 

 formed the world, not only intellectually, but physically. Some would 

 say that science had been degraded by its applications, but who that 

 looks over the world at the present time can think so? There is no 

 danger of this view becoming general; the danger is in the other 

 direction, and that science shall be degraded in the estimate of the 

 world by the idea that its principal use is to be applied to the common 

 purposes of life. A thousand times no! Its use is in the intellectual 

 training of mankind and the high and noble pleasure it gives to those 

 who are born to understand it; to lift mankind above the level of the 

 brute and to make him appreciate the beauties and wonders of nature; 

 to cause him to stand in humiliation and awe before that universe 

 which the intellect of ages has attempted to understand and yet has 

 failed; to make even Newton say, " I know not what the world may 

 think of my labors, but to myself it seems to me that I have been but 

 as a child playing on the seashore; now finding some pebble rather more 

 polished, and now some shell rather more agreeably variegated than 

 another, while the immense ocean of truth extended itself unexplored 

 before me." 



But the great moral law of the universe here enters. If the world 



