INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 
91 
Mr. Froude, then, considers Shakespeare to be our best historian. 
A dramatist, a poet, and a man of high imaginative genius, who 
has written historical plays from which very little indeed, a mere 
atom, can be extracted that affords us any information whatever 
as to the constitution of our country, the habits of our people, or 
the government imposed upon us by our kings. I think we shall 
find that Mr. Froude himself furnishes us with a very good 
indication of the direction in which the current of thought is now 
setting. He is a writer of laborious research. He has mastered 
the languages of many countries in all their detail, for the purpose 
of exploring their state papers, their collections of letters, and 
their long-hidden documents. And he has spent much of his life 
in their capital cities, absorbed in tracing the threads of our history 
through such labjnrinths as these. Is the result of all this pains- 
taking industry a verdict in favour of imagination as the best 
qualification for an historian ? That is not Mr. Fronde's meaning. 
The word douht at once expresses the impression left on hie mind 
as the final result of his labours, and also, I venture to say, points 
out a presiding impulse which guides the intellectual movements 
of men at the present day. 
If doubt may be set down as one of the intellectual character- 
istics of the present age, concerning which we wish to inquire, it 
will be well to consider what is the nature of doubt, and how it 
operates on the mind. Philosophers will say that it is the most 
hopeful condition in which the intellect can be placed. It acts as 
the impulsive force to all inquiry ; it implies a state of mind urged 
to activity by the hope of solving a difficulty ; and far from being 
a negative quality, in which sense it is usually understood, it is 
the positive incentive that induces us to endeavour to escape from 
uncertainty, and to discover a state of repose in certainty. 
Picture to yourself a man who doubts nothing; a man who 
would have no doubts with respect to anything that he might hear, 
see, or feel. Into what an inextricable state of confusion his mind 
would soon fall ! If no man had ever doubted the evidence of his 
senses, which would lead him to believe that the sun moves round 
the earth, we never should have discovered that the earth moves 
round the sun. 
Doubt is of course no new quality. It is no new phase of 
thought now exhibiting itself for the first time. But regarding it, 
not as a negative condition of mind, but as a positive source of 
