482 SECTIONAL COMMUNICATIONS. 
questions open and will not tolerate any unnecessary limitation of the horizon 
of their souls. They have as little fellowship. with the atheist who says 
there is no God as with the theist who professes to know the mind of God. 
“Two things,’ said Kant, ‘fill me with awe, the starry heavens and the 
sense of moral responsibility in man,’ and in his hours of: health and strength 
and sanity, when the stroke of action has ceased and the pause of reflection 
has set in, the scientific investigator finds himself overshadowed with the 
same awe. 
The study of natural science is the study of truth. The laboratory, though 
at times reluctant and elusive, never tells a lie, and every research in pure 
science is a prayer for a revelation. 
I admit that character is the product of home life, of the playground, and 
—under wise guidance—of contact with one’s fellows, rather than of the 
classroom, All I claim in this respect is that in one all-important matter, 
the cultivation of a desire for truth and intellectual honesty, the study of 
natural science is—amongst all studies—pre-eminent. 
No thought can be more encouraging to the student of science than that 
some time, it may be long after his time, his labours will be productive 
of benefit to succeeding generations. This idea is well expressed by the 
following fine passage in Buckle’s ‘ History of Civilisation ’ :— 
‘The actions of bad men produce only temporary evil; the actions of good 
men only temporary good; and eventually the good and the evil altogether 
subside, are neutralised by subsequent generations, absorbed by the incessant 
movement of future ages. But the discoveries of great men never leave us; 
they are immortal, they contain those eternal truths which survive the shock 
of empires, outlive the struggles of rival creeds, and witness the decay of 
successive religions. All these have their different measures and their different 
standards; one set of opinions for one age, another set for another. The 
discoveries of genius alone remain; it is to them that we owe all that we 
now have; they are for al] ages and all times; they are essentially cumulative, 
and giving birth to the additions which they subsequently receive, they thus 
influence the most distant posterity, and after the lapse of centuries produce 
more effect than at the moment of their promulgation.’ 
Another charge that has been made, and wrongly made, is that the study 
of science has a cramping effect; that it tends to restrict the sympathies and 
limit the use of the imagination, one of the greatest gifts to man. ‘This 
accusation has been well dealt with by Tyndall in that delightful work ‘The 
Scientific Use of the Imagination,’ from which I give the following extract :— 
‘There are Tories in science who regard the imagination as a faculty 
to be feared and avoided rather than employed; they have observed its actions 
in weak vessels, and were unduly impressed by its disasters; but they might 
with equal justice point to exploded boilers as an argument against the use 
of steam. Nourished by knowledge patiently won, bounded and conditioned 
by co-operant reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the 
physical discoverer. Newton’s passage from a falling apple to a falling moon 
was at the outset a leap of the prepared imagination.’ 
Also the following passage from an address to the Royal Society by Sir 
Benjamin Brodie in 1859 :— 
‘Lastly, physical investigation, more than anything besides, helps to teach 
us the actual value and right use of imagination, that wonderful faculty which, 
left to ramble uncontrolled, leads us to stray into the wilderness of perplexity 
and error, a land of mist and shadows; but which, properly controlled by 
experience and reflection, becomes the noblest attribute of man, the source 
of poetic genius, the instrument of discovery in science, without the aid of 
which Newton would never have invented Fluxions, nor Davy have decomposed 
the earth’s alkalies, nor Columbus have found a new continent.’ 
If these things be true, again I ask, are we not justified in claiming the 
study of natural science as one of the highest forms of intellectual effort? 
The effects of discoveries in natural science extend far beyond its own 
bounds. Reflect on the whole change in the mental outlook consequent on the 
establishment of the law of gravitation and the discoveries of the geologist. 
There is no branch of intellectual effort which has not been quickened and 
invigorated by the great generalisations of Darwin. 
