president's address. 13 



dinates his personal convictions to the will of a pi-operly constituted 

 authority. This discipline is not an inborn quality which belongs more 

 to one nation than to another ; it is acquired by education and training. 

 In an emergency it is essential to success, but if it be made the guiding 

 principle of a nation's activity, it carries dangers with it which are 

 greater than the benefits confeiTed by the increased facility for advance 

 in some directions. 



If there be no fundamental difference in the mental qualifications 

 which lead to success in our different occupations, there is also none 

 in the ideals which move us in childhood, maintain us through the 

 difficulties of our manhood, and give us peace in old age. I am not 

 speaking now of those ideals which may simultaneously incite a whole 

 nation to combined action through religious fervour or ambition of 

 power, but I am speaking of those more individual ideals which make 

 us choose our professions and give us pleasure in the performance of 

 our duties. 



Why does a scientific man find satisfaction in studying Nature ? 



Let me once more quote Poincar^ ' : — 



' The student does not study Nature because that study is useful, 

 but because it gives him pleasure, and it gives him pleasure because 

 Nature is beautiful; if it were not beautiful it would not be worth 

 knowing and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, be it 

 understood, of the beauty of its outward appearance ; not that I despise 

 it — far from it — but it has nothing to do with science : I mean that more 

 intimate beauty which depends on the harmony in the order of the 

 component parts of Nature. This is the beauty which a pure intelli- 

 gence can appreciate and which gives substance and form to the 

 scintillating impressions that charm our senses. Without this intellec- 

 tual support the beauty of the fugitive dreams inspired by sensual 

 impressions could only be imperfect, because it would be indecisive 

 and always vanishing. It is this intellectual and self-sufficing beauty, 

 perhaps more than the future welfare of humanity, that impels the 

 scientific man to condemn himself to long and tedious studies. And the 

 same search for the sense of harmony in the world leads us to select 

 the facts which can most suitably enhance it, just as the artist 

 chooses among the features of his model those that make the 

 portrait and give it character and life. There need be no fear that this 

 instinctive and unconscious motive should tempt the man of scienc-6 

 away from the truth, for the real world is far more beautiful than any 

 vision of his dream.s. The greatest artists that ever lived — the Greeks — 

 constructed a heaven ; yet how paltry that heaven is compared to ours ! 

 And it is because simplicity and grandeur are beautiful that we select 



Loc. cit. p. 15. 



