LECTURE.

Evening Star, Issue 3795, 23 April 1875, Page 3

LECTURE.

Mr R. Stout, M.P.0., last evening delivered . a lecture ou ** The Future,” to a large audience, in the lower hall of the Athenaeum. It was syeiimider the auspices of the Leith Lodge, 1.0.0. F., of which body Mr Stout is a member, and. its object was to increase the widows’ and orphan’s fund of the Lodge. Bro. B. C. Haggitt P.C.M., occupied the chair. Mr Stout, in opening his subject, said the individual bias maintained in ordinary things must be kept in view when taking a glance at the future. He would not, in endeavoring to point; out the ten.dencies of the present age, deal with the! ® subjects of the soul’s immortality or •the existence of a life before the present, but would rather confine himself to the probable future of our world and the' humaurace. There were at least two marked! .schools of philosophers—the intuitioualists and! ,the experimentalists. The former assert that' ©very person has certain ideas implanted in; bim from Jus very existence; the latter con-j tend these ideas are not bom with tho man.! Evolution had been-introduced, a doctrine; borrowed' from science, and the process by! which-this planet had risen from a nebulous! mass. Mr Stout went into the doctrine of evolution, and its bearing on philosophy and! science, in order to lead up to several practical! ; such as the necessity of cleanliness SB. forming the basis of health, and the, as yet! unproved, docttfcfce. of hereditary transom-: He then moke of .the impetus given to the age in Jrhich we lived by a man ’of genius, , but said we never expect to ’■ee Cultivated intellect without education.' Spain was sc&ihe country of philosophers, but -’Gfertnauy ; Scotland waajamed for the number, of its students of mentinr science ; Americans ■tuned their attentions tolaw more than to theology, and the consequence was that their works Were now the text-books, of England ;for eminent classical scholars we looked to Oxford and. Dublin; Cambridge supplied us with profound mathematicians; for the highest class of literary criticism we went to Germany. These things came not in a day—everythin? must have a beginning. Having stated that he would not touch upon individualism and socialism, the ™™ ier concluded by saying that everything that came up in our newspapers and the course caour eyerjday life involved something more than was apparent oh the surface—that evolu a man as with divinity. He hoped our future would be better than our present. T l’he lecture was received with loud applause, anff at its conclusion a vote of thanks to Bro. BtouiL proposed by Bro. Braithwaite, and seconded by Bro. Bracken, was'carried 4nani-