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must take care that " their notions of the Power that 

 rules the universe are not mere fanciful enlargements of 

 human power," and advocating that there must be 

 liberty of thought and enquir}^ yet says that this 

 enquiry (using a happy phrase) must be exercised with 

 " reverent freedom." 



Passing now from these various topics directed to 

 meet certain attitudes towards science, we may proceed 

 to consider the more affirmative side of our subject. It 

 will be readily granted that the study of the material 

 world around us is wise and useful in itself, giving man 

 the recognised power of knowledge, elevating his thoughts 

 from the less to the greater, and eventually it may be 

 from the greater to the Greatest. If, in his anxious 

 search for the causes of much that he has ascertained, 

 he finds himself lost in the wide expanse, " Mare et 

 tellus, et, quod tegit omnia, caelum," he may at least 

 rejoice that by his own industry, regulated thoughts, and 

 tempered imagination, he has partly understood, and 

 learnt to intelligently admire, the majesty of Nature. 

 In combining with industry and thought "imagination," 

 I am aware that the term is in our day too frequently 

 used in a depreciatory sense, and by some considered 

 to be in all but poets and certain other writers a 

 weakness, if not a treacherous instrument of the intellect. 

 I said, however, " tempered imagination," and under some 

 such domination it becomes a useful adjunct; for which 

 statement high authority can be quoted. Sir Benjamin 

 Brodie in the course of his address to the Royal Society 

 spoke as follows : — " Physical investigation more than 

 anything besides helps to teach us the actual value and 

 right use of imagination — of that wondrous faculty, 

 which, left uncontrolled, leads us astray into a wilder- 

 ness of perplexities and errors, a land of mists and 

 shadows; but which, properly controlled by experience 

 and reflection, becomes the noblest attribute of man, 

 the source of poetic genius, and the instrument of 



