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if we met them with a little sound intellectual chaff and ridicule, — we should 
soon chaff them out of existence. (Hear, hear.) We have the remedy in our 
own hands, and if, instead of dividing ourselves into two classes and dubbing 
this man as a theorist and that as orthodox, we were to analyse fairl}'-, 
and debate, and consider the questions that are being discussed, we should 
very soon break up this sort of thing. It has not been going on very long. 
It is but a phase of the intellectual fever through which the suddenly-aroused 
mind of the nineteenth century is passing. How long that phase will last 
depends very much on the way in which we meet it. Personally I have 
been indebted more than I can express to Dr. Beale for having saved me 
from an abyss into which I should have fallen ten or twelve years ago had it 
not been for his writings. I had been captivated by the splendid imagery 
in which some of these materialistic writers have placed their views before us. 
But the work on “Vital Action” by Professor Beale brought n)e back 
from the dream into which I was falling, to where I was when I first 
took up Mill’s Logic as a student and determined on following, fact by 
fact, line by line, and to accept no theory until it had been established. 
Professor Beale did me this service ; and I am delighted on the present 
occasion to see him here and to be able to tender him my personal thanks. 
(Applause.) 
Mr. J. Hassell. — I take it that the meaning of Professor Beale, in 
speaking of the decline of thought, is, not that there are no thinking men, 
but that the great mass of the public receive what is put before them with- 
out thinking. They 'accept the conclusions arrived at by scientific men, 
without endeavouring to ascertain whether they are true or not. I saw 
this exemplified a short time since at a meeting for the purpose of discussing 
the question of evolution. Many of those who took part in the discussion, 
instead of basing their conclusions on what they themselves had discovered, 
merely said that they accepted the hypothesis because Professor A and 
Professor B had said it was proved. Here, then, were men who, while they 
were capable of exercising their own minds, did not do so ; and, more than 
this, they showed their narrow-mindedness by regarding as bigots those who 
thought it right to express a contrary opinion on the matter. For any one 
to say, “ You must accept what Professor So-and-so says, or else you must 
be wrong,” evidences, to my mind, a decline of thought, and this is what I 
take Professor Beale’s meaning to be. 
Mr. D. Howard, V.P. Inst. Chemistry. — There are few things more attract- 
ive than the unities taught by modern science. There is a great charm in the 
study of such propositions as the correlation of force and the conservation of 
energy, and in the reduction of astronomical truths to simple laws, but there 
are few things that ought to be more carefully guarded against than being 
carried away by the fascination of simplicity, and endeavouring to explain 
a thing by known laws before we have got to the bottom of what it is we 
want to explain. There is no subject upon which we are more liable to this 
danger than the problem of vital force, with regard to which Professor Beale 
