110 
MORRISON: ADDRESS. 
barous nations. Men adopt the scientific methods of 
investigation ; and, recognising the essential difficulty and 
obscurity of the subject, can credit their opponents with 
good faith. They consider more the resemblances than the 
distinctions of religions and sects ; and we may hope that 
with the passing away of the old anthropomorphic notions of 
God, a more spiritual religion, a higher conception of and 
reverence for the divine nature will take their place 
generally among men. 
There seems indeed to me no more potent factor in 
modern society for raising our moral and intellectual 
standard than the general diffusion of scientific knowledge 
and scientific methods among the masses. 
One word more as to the English universities. I have 
already said that I hold them to have failed. They do 
nothing for the advancement of knowledge, or next to 
nothing. They fail to excite enthusiasm for knowledge 
among their students, unlike the Scotch and German univer- 
sities. But their wealth is enormous, and is very rapidly 
increasing as leases on lives fall in. For the most part the 
money spent on fellowships is wasted, the "idle" fellow 
becomes a mere London dilettante, or uses it in apprenticing 
himself to some already overcrowded profession. Can no 
better use be found for it ? Can we not endow research in 
some manner which will not paralyse research in the same 
way in which learning has been paralysed by excessive endow- 
ments ? I think we can. Some small part of the wealth 
now wasted might be devoted to pay the cost of special 
investigations by approved savans, such as now depend on 
the precarious resource of voluntary subscriptions of the 
British Association, or the occasional aid of the Government. 
Some small part might be used for professorships for men. 
who have made their mark in the world of science or 
scholarship, who have formed habits of steady work, and 
