142 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
daily painted for us by our sense organs as are the newest visions of 
the physical world, yet appealing as strongly to the intellectual and 
esthetic emotions. Few hold the quest for natural knowledge in right 
relation to other activities of the mind; few see it not merely and not 
in chief as a useful pursuit of power, but in its essence as a pursuit 
of truth. 
That knowledge of natural truth and of the changing pattern of our 
ideas of the natural world should be an unusual or quite subordinate part 
of a cultural equipment, in this and in recent generations, may be due 
to lack of interpreters, but it is due also to convention and educational 
habit, and these, perhaps, combine in special degree to shut out from 
the world of general culture the revelations of intricate beauty in the 
living body of man. Ancient and mistaken theological conceptions 
filtering through the Victorian age have tended to degrade the dignity 
and marvel of the body. Generations that have been nurtured upon 
narrowed classical studies have so far forgotten the spirit of Greece 
as to ignore the universal beauty of truth; it has been thought vulgar 
not to know the verbal details of an old mythology, but hardly respect- 
able not to be ignorant of the elementary laws of life and of the unseen 
beauties of the body unfolded in modern study. So have mnany sub- 
mitted to be enchained in ignorance and superstition as to vital matters 
of reality, victims of every passing charlatan. Out of this loss of 
instruction in the beauties and wonders of living substance, as they 
are becoming known, must come great loss of possible happiness, and 
indeed there comes, too, a loss of dignity, for we may fitly apply the 
rebuke of Robert Boyle, much more deserved now than in his darker 
century, who held it to be ‘ highly dishonourable for a Reasonable Soul 
to live in so Divinely built a Mansion. as the Body she resides in, 
altogether unacquainted with the exquisite Structure of it.’ 
Meanwhile the workers will proceed in their quest for further truth, 
caring little if, for the time being, other eyes are blind to its beauty. 
They will still be lured by it as all eager minds have been lured before ; 
some wil! confess the attraction of a call for help in human need and 
suffering, some will claim austerely that they follow only the bidding 
of a curiosity of mind, and some perhaps may work for fame. But, 
whether they know it or not, the effective lure that Nature holds out 
to those of her followers who have it within them to respond to it, and 
so to reach new knowledge, is a quickening hint of further beauty to be 
unfolded in further truth. Whether they know it or not, they might 
make the same Confession as that of St. Augustine: ‘ And I replied 
unto all those things which encompass the door of my flesh, ‘‘ Ye have 
told me of my God, that ye are not He: tell me something of Him.”’ 
And they cried, all with a great voice, ‘‘ He made us.’’ My questioning 
them was my mind’s desire, and their Beauty was their answer.’ 
