22 president's address, 



myself, therefore, against one criticism which the trend of my remarks 

 may invite. At times, when the struggle for existence keeps masses 

 in permanent bondage, in a society in which a multitude of men and 

 women have to face starvation, and when unfortunate, though purely 

 accidental, suiTOundings in childhood drive the weak into misery, is it 

 not futile to speak of jBsthetic motives? Am I not, while endeavouring 

 to find a common bond between all sections of the community, in reality 

 drawing a ring round a small and privileged leisured class, telling them 

 these enjoyments are for you and for you alone ? Should I not have 

 found a surer ground for the claims of science in its daily increasing 

 necessity for the success of ouv manufactures and commerce? 



I have said nothing to indicate that I do not put the highest value 

 on this important function of science, which finds its noblest task 

 in surrendering the richness of its achievements to the use of humanity. 

 But I must ask you to reflect whether the achievement of wealth and 

 power, to the exclusion of higher aims, can lead to more than a super- 

 ficial prosperity, which passes away because it carries the virus of 

 its own doom within it. Do we not find in the worship of material 

 success the seed of the pernicious ambition which has maddened a nation, 

 and plunged Europe into war? Is this contempt for all idealistic 

 purposes not responsible for the mischievous doctrine that the power 

 to possess confers the right to possess, and that possession is desirable 

 in itself without regard to the use which is made of it? I must 

 therefore insist that if we delight in enlisting the wealth accu- 

 mulated in the earth, and all the power stored in the orbs of 

 heaven, or in the orbits of atomic structure, it should not be 

 because we place material wealth above intellectual enjoyment, 

 but rather because we experience a double pleasure if the efforts of 

 the mind contribute to the welfai'e of the nation, which includes spiritual 

 as well as material prosperity. When Joule taught us to utilize the 

 powers at our disposal to the best advantage he did it not — and his 

 whole life is a proof of it — to increase either his own wealth or that 

 of the nation, but because, brought up in commercial life and deeply 

 imbued with the deep insight and genius of science, he found his 

 greatest delight in that very combination of aesthetic satisfaction and 

 useful achievement which Poincar^ has so well described. And again, 

 when another of our fellow-citizens, Henry Wilde, showed how elec- 

 trical power can be accumulated until it became an efficient instrument 

 for the economic transmission of work, he found his inspiration in the 

 intellectual gratification it gave him, rather than in the expectation of 

 material gain. I am drawing no ring round a privileged class, but 

 maintain that the hunger for intellectual enjoyment is universal, and 

 urge that everybody should be given the opportunitv and leisure of 



