ADDRESS 
AT THE OPENING OF THE SESSION 1884-5. 
BY DANIEL SLATER, M.A. 
President. 
Ladies and Gentlemen, — 
A broad review of the age in which we live, and the 
circumstances amidst which we have our being, has filled different 
observers with the most opposite feelings, according as they have 
taken an optimist or a pessimist view of them. Of course we are 
too near our own age to form a just estimate of it ; it must retire 
to a distance before we can properly take in its exact perspective. 
But speaking for myself, I must confess that it fills me with 
feelings of gratitude and hope. Casting the eye back on preceding 
centuries, and round on the various nations whose life has been 
handed down to us by History, we cannot, it seems to me, avoid 
the conclusion that the present age is conspicuous for two things : 
First, the Love of Truth as a motive power in Thought; and, 
second, the Love of Humanity as a motive power in Action. 
Other forms of expression have been often used ; but what I 
have mentioned as the Characteristics of the Age seem to 
underlie them all. Thus it has been said that this is an Age of 
Doubt, that it is a Scientific Age, and so on. But it is a Scientific 
Age because the determination to find out the Truth, the whole 
Truth, and to accept nothing but the Truth, is first applying itself 
to phenomena, as coming naturally before the noumena, and being 
more easy of solution; and it is an Age of Doubt, not from 
choice or the love of Doubt for its own sake, but because Doubt 
is a necessary condition of mind in the investigation of Truth. 
The true and the false are being questioned only that those things 
that cannot be shaken may remain. 
Leaving then the Love of Humanity, and taking up, as I think 
I have a special right to do in this place, the Love of Truth as 
VOL. IX. B 
