ANNUAL ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. LI 
latter is contrived in such sort as to be “easiliest examined,” to 
cite the words of Bacon.* 
The Atomic Philosophy may, therefore, be said to offer a good 
type of all that is valid in physical metaphysics, and of all that is 
invalid in metaphysical physics. As the child in the infantile stage 
of his development dwells delightedly amid fays and talismans, 
because his metaphysic is stronger than his physics, so the savage 
man, artless child of nature, is easily pleased with the rattle of 
some lying legend, or tickled with the straw of some preposterous 
myth—the more preposterous the better. A cultivated race 
whose imagination is creative and artistic, but whose reason has 
not yet been developed by the processes of a rigorous logic, will 
demand, as has been already said, an artful and curious felicity in 
their physical theories—but they will demand nothing more, be- 
cause when this demand is met, their highest. intellectual demand 
has been met. It isnot until “the heir of all the ages” has learned 
to change the organon and method of his physical enquiries, and to 
put his reason over his imagination, by making imagination the 
hand-maid of reason, that Science is born. Long before this stage 
has been reached the children of Science may come to the birth, but 
there is not strength to deliver, because the true maieutic of science— 
experimentation with rational hypothesis, and rational hypothesis 
with experimentation—has not yet come to the teeming mind of 
philosophy. The goddess Experimentation is the Lucina of Science. 
The free surrender of all metaphysical conceptions to the hands of 
this Lucina, with the distinct knowledge that she will strangle them 
if they are not well formed, is the birth-pang of the scientific spirit. 
Until this stage of mental evolution is reached we shall have as 
many theories of the Universe as we have stages of culture, for 
every stage of culture will have a physics of its own, because it has 
a metaphysic of its own. Hence, the endless varieties of cosmol- 
ogy—the Hottentot physics, the Indian physics, the Stoical physics, 
the Epicurean physics, the Leibnitzian physics, the Cartesian phys- 
ics, and such like—all the coinage of the metaphysical imagination. 
Grote enumerates as many as twelve distinct physical philosophies 
which divided speculative opinion in Greece during the century 
and a half between Thales and the Peloponnesian war. 
* The Advancement of Learning, Book I, v, 9. 
