ADDRESS.

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 1926, 6 March 1875, Page 3

ADDRESS.

ETC. An impulse inherent in primeval man turned his thoughts and questionings berimes towards the sources of natural phenomena. The same impulse, inherited and intensified, is the spur, of scientific action to day. Determined by it, by a process of abstraction from experience we form physical theories which lie beyond the pale of experience, but which satisfy the desire of the mind to see every natural occurrence resting upon a cause. In forming their notions of the origin of thulgs, our earliest historic (and doubtless, we might add, our prehistoric) ancestors pursued, as far as their intelligence permitted, the* same course. They also fell back upon experience, but with this difference— that the particular experiences which furnished the weft and woof of their theories were drawn,, not from the study of nature, but from what lay much closer to them, the observation of men. Their theories accordingly took an anthro-

pombrpljic form. To supersensual beings, which, ' however potent and invisible, were nothing but a species of human creatures, perhaps raised from among mankind, and retaining all human passions and appetites,' (1) were handed over the rule and governance of natural phenomena.

Tested by observation and reflection, these early notions failed in the long run to satisfy the more penetrating intellects of our race. Far in the depths of history we find men of exceptional power differentiating themselves from the crowd, r«----j acting these anthropomorphic notions, and seeking to connect natural pheno« mena with their physical principles, But long prior to these purer efforts of the understanding the merchant had been abroad, and rendered the philosopher possible; commerce had been developed, wealth amassed, leisure for travel and speculation secured, while races educated under different conditions, and therefore differently informed and endowed, had been stimulated and sharpened by mutual contact. In those regions where the commercial aristocracy of ancient Greece mingled with its eastern neighbours the sciences were born, being nurtured and developed by free-thinking and courageous men. The state of things to be displaced may be gathered from a passage of Euripides quoted by Hume. 'There is nothing in the world; no glory, no prosperity. The gods toss all in confusion; mix everything with its reverse, that all of us, from our ignorance and uncertainty, may pay them the more worship and reverence.' Now, as science demands the radical extirpation of caprice and the absolute reliance upon law in nature* there grew with the growth ©f scientific notions a desire and determination to sweep from the field of theory this mob of gods and demons, and to place natural phenomena on a basis more congruent with themselves,