Apr., 1890 . 
CONSTANCE C. W. NADEN. 
79 
member until she left Birmingham. At our meetings at the 
Mason College she was an immense favourite—the genius 
loci in fact—and from the wide range of her knowledge, the 
lucidity and force of her intellect, and the richness of her 
illustrations, she never failed when speaking to impress her 
audience and carry complete conviction. But, although a 
scientist and a philosopher as well, her womanly grace and 
her womanly sympathy were always dominant. Even on 
removal to another home her interest in the Section did not 
cease, for she specially came down from London twice to 
take a prominent part in its proceedings, and, as one of the 
speakers happily remarked at a subsequent meeting, “ helped 
it in crises of its history.” 
Thoroughly equipped as she had been at the Mason 
College with a sound knowledge of the sciences—chemistry, 
physics, botany, zoology, physiology, and geology—with 
refined literary, artistic, and poetical tastes that were pursued 
as mere diversion, and following the example of the Master 
by not striving for the honours of a college degree, her broad 
sympathies lay beyond the somewhat exclusive work in the 
domain of the specialist, consequently the first determination 
of her bias for the philosophy of evolution, as embraced in 
the “ Synthetic Philosophy,” was doubtless manifested in her 
address on “ Special Creation and Evolution,” delivered 
before a meeting of the Section, held at the Mason College, 
January 22nd, 1885. Her second address on “ The Data of 
Ethics ” was given before the Section February 22nd, 1887. 
In the same year, and while still a student of the College, she 
wrote her brilliant prize essay, “ Induction and Deduction,” 
which gained the Heslop gold medal. It was a natural 
sequence from analysis to synthesis, and these contributions 
and others were the rich fruits of that determination. In 
further illustration of this mental attitude it is pleasant to 
relate, on the authority of her friend Dr. Lewins, an incident 
of her foreign tour. She told Lord Dufferin, in India, when 
he complimented her on her poems, that she meant her real 
mission to be philosophy, “not harsh and crabbed as dull fools 
suppose, but musical as is Apollo’s lute,” to which the 
Governor General replied, “ Ah ! I am no judge of that.” 
Ever since her connection with the Section, she brought 
to bear on her criticism the canons of the “ Synthetic Philo¬ 
sophy,” which are simply that the laws of evolution affecting 
inorganic phenomena are common also to organic and super- 
organic phenomena, and from this standpoint she rightly 
viewed society as an organism—a vast organism—as regards 
its genesis and many-phased development. 
