THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
327 
Science to promote accurate observation and general mental habits 
useful to society apart from scientific studies. This is not a new- 
thing, though the wider diffusion of the mental habitudes is 
happily a modern blessing. In one respect the early interpreters 
of Nature had a harder task, and spent more power in original 
observation and classifying facts, inasmuch as they had to create 
the alphabet of knowledge, without which nothing could be done — 
to work out de novo the main channels of thought, and prepare in 
various ways for the superstructure of knowledge. Their failures, 
the value of which we too often ignore or forget, were the inevita- 
ble sacrifice they made in saving their successors from loss of time 
and strength. We stand on solid rock formed by generations of 
patient mental toil, and in the elevation of view it affords us we 
overlook the vast amount of minute observation and exact though, 
for want of full data, fruitless thinking its existence implies. It is 
said of Kepler's laws, which are now the basis on which all 
astronomers proceed, " that they were the outcome of a lifetime of 
speculation, for the most part vain and groundless. But Kepler's 
name was destined to become immortal on account of the patience 
with which he submitted his hypotheses to comparison with observa- 
tion, the candour with which he acknowledged failure after failure, 
and the perseverance with which he renewed his attack upon the 
riddles of Nature." 1 
Moreover, it should be considered that the development of 
Physical Science is only one of the occasions of a wider diffusion 
of the beneficial habits of thought from which we are yet to reap 
a fuller harvest of knowledge. There is another world beside the 
visible and ponderable, and other kinds of close observation and 
perception of relations than those which note the qualities and re- 
lations of extended bodies. The study of Pure Mathematics is an 
entirely mental operation, and it would be difficult to estimate too 
highly the immense service it has rendered to mankind for ages, 
and more especially during this generation, in promoting keen dis- 
crimination, regard for exactitude, and power to think right through 
along clear lines to valid conclusions. The contents of the mental 
sphere, and the laws which govern the antecedence and sequence of 
the very ideas which render Physical Science possible, give scope 
for a scrutiny in some respects requiring more keenness of percep- 
tion and an analysis more delicate than can ever be required for 
1 Jevons, Principles of Science, p. 578. 
