Annual Address by the President. 
9 
upon canvas than those laid by Nature upon living organs. The 
anatomist appreciates these as beauties, set though they be in blood 
and not in a gilded frame; in his hunt for homology and likeness 
he never overlooks this formal beauty. 
There is a high mental desire for the explanation, but at the same 
time the sensuous love of the object. It is the appreciation of this 
formal beauty that keeps him at his table, and his ideas of the 
beautiful are very much one with those of the artist. How much 
charm in the flower, in the living Medusa with its changing hues, 
in the iridescence of a shell, in the transparent but vivid colors of 
the surface organisms of the sea! All these a naturalist relishes to 
the full; a great part of his pursuit is aesthetic. He who does not 
see and cherish this beauty is not a true naturalist, a Nature-lover, 
and because he has not his heart in his work need expect no great 
results. 
This sense of the beautiful is closely bound up with another ele- 
ment in the scientific mind, that which Ribot has characterized as 
the creative imagination. Ribot argues that logic and reason alone 
can not give new interpretations, but can simply assort and arrange 
what is known. New working hypotheses, he explains, are products 
of the imagination, which is a mental process capable of taking 
greater steps than can the reason. Now its connection with the 
sense of the beautiful appears to me to be just this. The appreciation 
of the beautiful is not a conscious rational process, but rather a 
subconscious mental condition. So long as such appreciation is main- 
tained, so long is the mind kept receptive, not entirely overrun by 
reasoning, and therefore so much more open to processes of the 
imagination. It may well be that my characterization of these mental 
states is far from exact, but it suffices if my general meaning is 
clear; it is, that the appreciation of the beautiful in the phenomena 
keeps the mind in its pristine receptivity, and so allows for those 
creative musings and dreamings that are collectively known as imag- 
ination and that are so necessary for any progress in Science. 
Now this relation is not at all generally comprehended. For in 
an article published about a year ago in “Harper’s Magazine,” by 
President Hadley of Yale University, three groups of minds are 
distinguished as the literary, the scientific and the administrative. 
The last named is well characterized, and includes all those whom 
we speak of as men of affairs, those who have the handling of other 
men. But the distinction of the other groups is highly artificial, 
and shows an entire misunderstanding of the scientific spirit. Had- 
ley includes in his scientific group all those interested in facts, and 
classes together with those pursuing pure Science, engineers, physi- 
