14 president's address. 



by preference the simplest and grandest facts, and find our highest 

 pleasure, sometimes in following the gigantic orbits of the stars, some- 

 times in the microscopic study of that minuteness which also is a 

 grandeur, and sometimes in piercing the secrets of geological times 

 which attract us because they ai'e remote. And we see that the cult of 

 the beautiful guides us to the same goal as the study of the useful. ' 



' Whence comes this harmony ? Is it that things that appear to us 

 as beautiful are simply those which adapt themselves best to our intelli- 

 gence, and are therefore the tools which that intelligence handles most 

 easily ; or is it all the play of evolution and natural selection ? In that 

 case, those races only survived whose ideals best conformed with their 

 interests, and while all nations pursued their ideals without regard to 

 consequences, some were led to perdition and others achieved an 

 empire. One is tempted to believe that such has been the course of 

 history, and that the Greeks triumphed over the barbarians, and 

 Europe, inheritor of Greek thought, rules the world, because the 

 savages cared only for the sensual enjoyment of garish colours and the 

 blatant noise of the drum, while the Greeks loved the intellectual 

 beauty which is hidden beneath the visible beauty. It is that higher 

 beauty which produces a clear and strong intelligence. ' If the mathe- 

 matician's imagination is fired by the beauty and symmetry of his 

 methods, if the moving spring of his action is identical with that of the 

 artist, how much truer is this of the man of science who tries by well- 

 designed experiments to reveal the hidden harmonies of Nature? Nor 

 would it be difficult, I think, to trace the gratification inhei'ent in the 

 successful accomplishments of other intellectual pursuits to the same 

 source. 



Though Poincare was, I believe, the first to lay stress on the 

 connexion between the search for the beautiful and the achievement 

 of the useful, the iiesthetic value of the study of science had previously 

 been pointed out, and well illustrated, by Karl Pearson in his ' Grammar 

 of Science.' As expressed by him: ' it is this continual gratification 

 of the aesthetic judgment which is one of the chief delights of pure 

 science.' Before we advance, however, any special claim for the 

 pursuit of science based on these considerations, we must pause to think 

 whether they do not equally apply to other studies or occupations. For 

 this purpose, the nature of the gesthetic enjoyment involved must be 

 reraem-bered. We do not mean by it, the pleasure we feel in the mere 

 contemplation of an impressive landscape or natural beauty, but rather 

 the enjoyment experienced on looking at a picture which, independently 

 of v/hat it may be trying to imitate, has a definite beauty due to 

 its contrast of colours or well-balanced arrangement. We have in one 

 case a number of pigments covering a space of two dimensions, and in 



