INAUGUEAL ADDRESS. 
93 
the human mind, fiction being not the least important and remark- 
able among them. It may be seen, I think, in the advance of the 
science of philology, and the increasing importance attached to 
that study. New words are now coined by wholesale, and old 
words are traced home to their derivation in a parent language, or, 
further, to a language which may be said to stand in the relation- 
ship of a grandmother or great grandmother tongue. The sciences 
threaten us with a new babel of tongues. It seems absolutely 
necessary for purposes of minute scientific inquiry, on the same 
principle of attention to detail, that each science should be fur- 
nished with a language of its own. If a student of history or of 
law were to take up a modern work on chemistry, he would find 
it utterly unintelligible, the tongue of a foreign nation, to him. 
Slang words and technical words are imported into polite conversa- 
tion, and appear in the pages of some of our great writers. In 
short, it is palpable that if the bent of our minds is towards detail, 
if the direction of our thoughts indicates a closer and closer analysis 
of ideas, language, which is the vehicle of thought, must follow, 
carrying with it the whole paraphernalia of literature. Fiction 
must echo the general tone, or it will fall into disrepute and neg- 
lect. A closer analysis of objects and ideas demands a language 
composed of a greater variety of words, with a more definite 
power of expression. 
If we are led to the conclusion that doubt is a prevailing cha- 
racteristic of the march of intellect at the present time, and that a 
state of doubt leads to minute inquiry into detail, we must carry 
the subject further, and not satisfied with a state of doubt as the 
condition of the human mind, which is, as I have observed, a 
negative quality, seek the positive quality which gives rise to 
doubt in the first place, find the active principle which now seems 
to lead the human understanding into a state of doubt. And here, 
I hope, we may light on a characteristic of the intellectual con- 
dition of the day which is far more general, far more satisfactory, 
and far more important, than a mere state of doubt. An intel- 
lectual condition of which doubt is only the sign, of which doubt 
is a mere indication, to which doubt occupies a position of com- 
plete subordination. This is the intellectual condition of the present 
day, which, I believe, is prominent above all others, to which the 
greatest importance ought to be attached, to which our attention, 
as members of this Institution, ought to be directed, and in which 
