SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM 88 



While sympathizing with each of its departments, and 

 supplementing his culture bj knowledge drawn from all 

 of them, each student among us selects one subject for 

 the exercise of his own original faculty — one line, along 

 which he may carry the light of his private intelligence 

 a little way into the darkness by which all knowledge is 

 surrounded. Thus, the geologist deals with the rocks; 

 the biologist with the conditions and phenomena of life; 

 the astronomer with stellar masses and motions ; the math- 

 ematician with the relations of space and number; the 

 chemist pursues his atoms; while the physical investiga- 

 tor has his own large field in optical, thermal, electrical, 

 acoustical, and other phenomena. The British Associa- 

 tion then, as a whole, faces physical nature on all sides, 

 and pushes knowledge centrifugally outward, the sum of 

 its labors constituting what Fichte might call the sphere 

 of natural knowledge. In the meetings of the Associa- 

 tion it is found necessary to resolve this sphere into its 

 component parts, which take concrete form under the 

 respective letters of our Sections. 



Mathematics and Physics have been long accustomed 

 to coalesce, and here they form a single section. No 

 matter how subtle a natural phenomenon may be, whether 

 we observe it in the region of sense, or follow it into 

 that of imagination, it is in the long run reducible to 

 mechanical laws. But the mechanical data once guessed 

 or given, mathematics are all-powerful as an instrument 

 of deduction. The command of Greometry over the rela- 

 tions of space, and the far-reaching power which Analy- 

 sis confers, are potent both as means of physical dis- 

 covery, and of reaping the entire fruits of discovery. 

 Indeed, without mathematics, expressed or implied, our 



