18 REPORT—1899., 
If there be any truth in what I have been urging, that the pursuit of 
scientific inquiry is itself a training of special potency, giving strength to 
the feeble and keeping in the path those who are inclined to stray, it is 
obvious that the material gains of science, great as they may be, do not 
make up all the good which science brings or may bring to man. We 
especially, perhaps, in these later days, through the rapid development of 
the physical sciences, are too apt to dwell on the material gains alone. 
As a child in its infancy looks upon its mother only as a giver of good 
things, and does not learn till in after days how she was also showing her 
love by carefully training it in the way it should go, so we, too, have 
thought too much of the gifts of science, overlooking her power to 
guide. 
Man does not live by bread alone, and science brings him more than 
bread. It is a great thing to make two blades of grass grow where before 
one alone grew ; but it is no less great a thing to help a man to come toa 
just conclusion on the questions with which he has to deal. We may 
claim for science that while she is doing the one she may be so used as 
to do the other also. The dictum just quoted, that science is organised 
common sense, may be read as meaning that the common problems of life 
which common people have to solve are to be solved by the same methods 
by which the man of science solves his special problems. It follows that 
the training which does so much for him may be looked to as promising 
to do much for them. Such aid can come from science on two conditions 
only. In the first place, this her influence must be acknowledged ; 
she must be duly recognised as a teacher no less than as a hewer of wood 
and a drawer of water. And the pursuit of science must be followed not 
by the professional few only, but, at least in such measure as will ensure 
the influence of example, by the many. But this latter point I need not 
urge before this great Association, whose chief object during more than 
half a century has been to bring within the fold of science all who would 
answer to the call. In the second place, it must be understood that the 
training to be looked for from science is the outcome not of the accumula- 
tion of scientific knowledge, but of the practice of scientific inquiry. 
Man may have at his fingers’ ends all the accomplished results and all 
the current opinions of any one or of all the branches of science, and yet 
remain wholly unscientific in mind ; but no one can have carried out even 
the humblest research without the spirit of science in’ some measure 
resting upon him. And that spirit may in part be caught even without 
entering upon an actual investigation in search of a new truth. The 
learner may be led to old truths, even the oldest, in more ways than one. 
He may be brought abruptly to a truth in its finished form, coming straight 
toit like a thief climbing over the wall ; and the hurry and press of modern 
life tempt many to adopt this quicker way. Or he may be more slowly 
guided along the path by which the truth was reached by him who first 
laid hold of it. It is by this latter way of learning the truth, and by this 
