PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 493, 
in comparison with instincts derived from our early ancestors and traditions 
of more recent times grafted upon them. So little is known of science that 
to most people old women’s tales or the single testimony of a casual onlooker 
are as credible as the statements and conclusions of the most careful observers. 
Where exact knowledge exists, however, to place opinion by the side of fact 
is to blow a bubble into a flame. Within its own domain science is concerned 
not with belief—except as a subject of inquiry—but with evidence. It claims 
the right to test all things in order to be able to hold fast to that which 
is good. It declines to accept popular beliefs as to thunderbolts; living frogs 
and toads embedded in blocks of coal or other hard rock without an opening, 
though the rock was formed millions of years ago and all fossils found in 
it are crushed as flat as paper; the inheritance of microbic diseases; the pro- 
duction of rain by explosions when the air is far removed from _ its 
saturation point; the influence of the moon on the weather or of underground 
water upon a twig held by a dowser, and dozens of like fallacies, solely because 
when weighed in the balance they have been found wanting in scientific truth. 
Its only interest in mysteries is that of inquiring into them and finding a natural 
reason for them. Mystery is thus not destroyed by knowledge but removed to a 
higher plane. 
Never let it be acknowledged that science destroys imagination, for the 
reverse is the truth. ‘The Gods are dead,’ said W. E. Henley. 
‘The world, a world of prose, 
Full-crammed with facts, in science swathed and sheeted, 
Nods in a stertorous after-dinner doze! 
Plangent and sad, in every wind that blows 
Who will may hear the sorry words repeated :— 
“The Gods are dead.’’’ 
It is true that the old idols of wood and stone are gone, but far nobler 
ecnceptions have taken their place. The universe no longer consists of a few 
thousand lamps lit nightly by angel torches, but of millions of suns moving 
in the infinite azure, into which the mind of man is continually penetrating 
further. Astronomy shows that realms of celestial light exist where darkness 
was supposed to prevail, while scientific imagination enables obscure stars to 
be found which can never be brought within the sense of human vision, the 
invisible lattice work of crystals to be discerned, and the movements of con- 
stituent particles of atoms to be determined as accurately as those of planets 
around the sun. The greatest advances of science are made by the disciplined 
use of imagination; but in this field the picture conceived is always presented 
to Nature for approval or rejection, and her decision upon it is final. In 
contemporary art, literature, and drama imagination may be dead, but not in 
science, which can provide hundreds of arresting ideas awaiting beautiful expres- 
sion by pen and pencil. It has been said that the purpose of poetry is not truth, 
but pleasure ; yet, even if this definition be accepted, we submit that insight into 
the mysteries of Nature should exalt, rather than repress, the poetic spirit, 
and be used to enrich verse, as it was by some of the world’s greatest poets— 
Lucretius, Dante, Milton, Goethe, Tennyson, and Browning. With one or two 
brilliant exceptions, popular writers of the present day are completely 
oblivious to the knowledge gained by scientific study, and unmoved by the 
message which science is alone able to give. Unbounded riches have been 
placed before them, yet they continue to rake the muck-heap of animal passions 
for themes of composition. Not by their works shall we become ‘ children cf 
light,’ but by the indomitable spirit of man ever straining upwards to reach 
the stars. 
