INAUGURAL ADDRESS. gH 
only burn in the pure atmosphere of truth and liberty. 
By no one, to my mind, has this been so forcibly and so 
convincingly pointed out as by Buckle. In his chapter on 
the French intellect, he draws a fine contrast between the 
ereat men who flourished in the early part of the 17th 
century, when Richelieu was curbing the church and 
defying the nobles, and the sycophantic writers of the 
next generation, who crawled about the throne of the 
Grand Monarque, when the protective spirit was again in 
the ascendant, and when the priests and the peers again 
had the power. And in speaking of one of the greatest of 
these great men, René Descartes, he says of him, ‘‘ The 
same disregard of ancient notions, the same contempt tor 
theological interests, the same indifference to tradition, 
the same determination to prefer the present to the past; 
in a word, the same essentially modern spirit is seen 
alike in the writings of Descartes and in the actions of 
Richelieu.”’ He traces, moreover, to the sturdy scepti- 
cism of Englishmen the fact that in literature and in science 
we preceded by nearly a century our more acute and 
brilliant neighbours the French, whose credulity, and 
whose reverence for the past, was antagonistic to that 
spirit of enquiry, which is impossible when we believe that 
all that is or has been is right or settled. Science lives 
upon healthy unbelief, and is poisoned by dogma and 
tradition. In all our work, therefore, we shall do well to 
take nothing for granted that is not demonstrated beyond 
the possibility of a doubt. 
When I spoke just now of scepticism, I used the word 
in its true sense, meaning thereby that reasonable doubt 
which induces a man to examine things for himself, in 
place of credulously accepting the dicta of those who 
arrogate to themselves the function of teachers. To the 
theological minds of former days all enquiry was more or 
