TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT, DR. GEORGE BRUCE HALSTED. 
THE CULTURE GIVEN BY SCIENCE. 
To be a man of broadest culture is a high ideal. 
Fortunately the idea and the associations conveyed by this word 
“ culture” are still of the finest, the noblest. 
But when scanned in the new light of the present, has not the flower 
of culture, like everything else of the best, gained a living heart of 
science, taken on the pure, high, unfading colors of science, the benign 
empress of our modern world ? 
And with this change has not culture developed a firmer moral fibre 
from the inexorable, inevitable insistance of science on a moral courage 
in her votaries which would sacrifice all unflinchingly in the pure cult of 
truth ? 
Before the age of science the man of the then culture was as his fel¬ 
lows in fear of being known to have been wrong. 
Said Lowell: “ There are three short and simple words, the hardest of 
all to pronounce in any language (and I suspect the,y were no easier be¬ 
fore the confusion of tongues), but which no man or nation that can not 
utter can claim to have arrived at manhood. These three words are, 
I was wrong.” 
Even Goethe, the very highest type of culture not based on a core of 
science, even Goethe, with his calm and coldness as of the immortals, 
with his magnificent appetite and digestion, even Goethe mouths and 
sulks and rants like a stupidly obstinate boy when even his friends declare 
that in the explanation of colors he is wrong and the man of science, 
Newton, is right. 
He snarls and spits to the very last, and like his countryman, Hegel, 
makes himself disgusting by reviling Newton. Says J. H. Stirling, 
Hegel’s devoted apologist: “ One thing, however, he will not think ex¬ 
cusable even in a Hegel: this latter’s unsparing bitterness of tone to him 
—Newton—whom as a productive thinker mankind have so much reason 
sincerely to thank and supremely to honor.” Says Helmholtz: “To 
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