ADDRESS OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. xliii 
journeys ; and whether the mathematician’s study, or the astronomer’s 
observatory, or the chemist’s laboratory, or some rich distant meadow 
unexplored as yet by botanist, or some untrodden mountain-top, or 
any of the other haunts and homes and oracular places of science, be 
our allotted place of labour till we meet together again, I am persuaded 
that those influences will operate upon us all, that we shall all remember 
this our present meeting, and look forward with joyful expectation to 
our next reassembling, and by the recollection, and by the hope, be 
stimulated and supported. It is true, that it is the individual man 
who thinks and who discovers ; not any aggregate or mass of men. 
Each mathematician for himself, and not any one for any other, not 
even all for one, must tread that more than royal road which leads 
to the palace and sanctuary of mathematical truth. Each, for himself, 
in his own personal being, must awaken and cail forth to mental view 
the original intuitions of time and space ; must meditate himself on 
those eternal forms, and follow for himself that linked chain of thought 
which leads, from principles inherent in the child and the peasant, from 
the simplest notions and marks of temporal and local site, from the 
questions when and where, to results so varied, so remote, and seem¬ 
ingly so inaccessible, that the mathematical intellect of full-grown and 
fully cultivated man cannot reach and pass them without wonder, and 
something of awe. Astronomers, again, if they would be more than mere 
artizans, must be more or less mathematicians, and must separately 
study the mathematical grounds of their science ; and although in this 
as in every other physical science, in every science which rests partly 
on the observation of nature, and not solely on the mind of man, a faith 
in testimony is required, that the human race may not be stationary, 
and that the accumulated treasures of one man or of one generation 
of men may not be lost to another ; yet even here, too, the individual 
must act, and must stamp on his own mental possessions the impress 
of his own individuality. The humblest student of astronomy, or 
of any other physical science, if he is to profit at all by his study, 
must in some degree go over for himself, in his own mind, if not in part 
with the aid of his own observation and experiment, that process of in¬ 
duction which leads from familiar facts to obvious laws, then to the 
observation of facts more remote, and to the discovery of laws of higher 
orders. And if even this study be a personal act, much more must 
that discovery have been individual. Individual energy, individual pa¬ 
tience, individual genius, have all been needed, to tear fold after fold 
away, which hung before the shrine of nature; to penetrate, gloom 
after gloom, into those Delphic depths, and force the reluctant Sibyl to 
utter her oracular responses. Or if we look from nature up to nature’s 
d 2 
