THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
317 
own imagination or have done injustice to the views and aims of 
others, I will quote the words of Professor Seeley, which I met 
with subsequent to the formation of my own judgment. He 
says : 
" Science as distinguished from philosophy has always been 
more republican. Not that it refuses to reverence superior minds, 
not perhaps that it is altogether incapable of yielding to the temp- 
tation of trusting a particular authority for a while too much, or 
following a temporary fashion. But as a general rule it rejects as 
a superstition the notion that the most superior mind is at all in- 
fallible ; it dissents without scruple from those whom it reverences 
most; and, on the other hand, the most eminent members of it 
encourage this freedom, are well pleased to be contradicted, and 
avoid assuming the oracular style as a mark of charlatanry." 1 "It 
is a change of system in the intellectual world by which much 
established doctrine is branded with the mark of spuriousness." 2 
" Authoritative treatises are consigned to oblivion, ancient contro- 
versies cease, the whole store of learning hived up in many 
capacious memories becomes worthless." 3 " But the more important 
change is in the extending of the methods of Physical Science to 
the whole domain of knowledge. While one part of the ' wisdom 
of the world ' has been discredited as resting solely on authority, 
another large division of it is rejected as resting on insufficient in- 
duction, and another as resting on groundless assumption, disguised 
under the name of necessary truths, truths of the reason, truths 
given in consciousness, &c. No one needs to be told what havoc 
this physical method is making with received systems, and it pro- 
duces a sceptical disposition of mind towards primary principles 
which have been thought to lie deeper than all systems. Those 
current abstractions, which make up all the morality and all the 
philosophy of most people, have been brought under suspicion. 
Mind and matter, duties and rights, morality and expediency, 
honour and interest, virtue and vice — all these words which seemed 
once to express certain elementary realities, now strike us as just 
the words which, thrown into the scientific crucible, might dissolve 
at once." 4 
" As the victory of the Scientific Spirit becomes more and more 
decided, there passes a deep shudder of discomfort through the 
1 Natural Religion, pp. 6, 7. 
3 Ibid p. 7. 
4 Ibid. p. 8. 
2 
Ibid. p. 7. 
VOL. VIII. 
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