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is partly due, not, I think, to wilful dishonesty, but rather to enthusiasm of 
temperament and the association of an ambitious imagination with great 
knowledge and ' habits of close inquiry. I think there is nothing in more 
striking contrast than Professor Huxley earnestly and eagerly expounding 
an individual scientific truth, and the same man advancing a number of 
truths strung together in the form of a plausible hypothesis. The man 
in his two aspects is a totally different man ; and what I say with regard 
to Professor Huxley is equally true of Professor Tyndall. There is in both 
these men, along with keen intellectual power and great knowledge, a most 
dangerous imagination ; and not only this, but both have a remarkable 
power of exposition which I do not think I overstate when I say that it 
often completely runs away with them. All of us who have ever attempted 
to write for the public, and who have permitted ourselves to become 
enthusiastic on a theme upon which we have long meditated and in which 
we have become deeply interested, and have felt the glow’ of composition as 
we have found ourselves making a great point in a nice rhythmical, beauti- 
fully-rounded sentence, — all of us, I say, will remember how hard it w’as 
to strike that sentence out, though perhaps we may not have been able 
to see any great amount of sense in it. (Laughter.) I, for one, plead guilty 
to having passed through this experience, and when I catch Tyndall or 
Huxley writing such a passage I turn the page to see what I can come upon 
on the other side, saying to myself “ This is a man to be neither followed 
absolutely, nor put aside lightly.” (Hear, hear.) Having said this, let me 
also say that the fault is not all on their side. It is very much on the side 
of the public, — I mean, the reading public. We are living in an age which 
is very peculiar. I do not think there is any decadence of thought ; but 
there are ten thinking now where there was only one thirty years ago, and 
from many of those who do the thinking for us we are getting very poor 
stuff. We are setting large masses of the people reading, and all they require 
is a general idea of things given in a plain form so that it can be easily 
grasped, and when they get this they are satisfied and cry out, “ What a 
clever man ! so clear ! so convincing ! so logical ! ” And what follows ? 
Why, nine out of ten, — of course all here belong to the “ one ” and not to the 
“ nine,” — fall down and do worship. We put the author on a high pinnacle ; 
he is a Professor ; we applaud and follow him blindly, worshipping him as 
these men have been worshipped by the great mass of mankind, and thus we 
spoil him. As long as we continue to foUow him without question, ready to 
applaud his high-sounding sentences and accept his theories without having 
the courage to demand that he should prove his case, we may be sure that we 
shall be treated with the same sort of stuff we h^ve been receiving for the 
last few years. There is another thing for which the public at large are also 
to blame. They do not laugh when there is plenty of cause for laughter. 
If some of the wild statements made by a few of our scientific men, 
instead of being implicitly accepted as they often are by the public, were 
only treated as they have been treated by Professor Beale, — that is to say. 
