.
.
Here, indeed, we arrive at the barrier which needs to be perpetually pointed out; alike to those who seek materialistic explanations of mental phenomena, and to those who are alarmed lest such explanations may be found. The last class prove by their fear almost as much as the first prove by their hope, that they believe Mind may possibly be interpreted in terms of Matter; whereas many whom they vituperate as materialists are profoundly convinced that there is not the remotest possibility of so interpreting them.
-HERBERT SPENCER.
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[Footnote: President's Address to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association at Norwich.]
1868.
THE celebrated Fichte, in his lectures on the 'Vocation of the Scholar,' insisted on a culture which should be not one-sided, but all-sided. The scholar's intellect was to expand spherically, and not in a single direction only. In one direction, however, Fichte required that the scholar should apply himself directly to nature, become a creator of knowledge, and thus repay, by original labours of his own, the immense debt he owed to the labours of others. It was these which enabled him to supplement the knowledge derived from his own researches, so as to render his culture rounded and not one-sided.
As regards science, Fichte's idea is to some extent illustrated by the constitution and labours of the British Association. We have here a body of men engaged in the pursuit of Natural Knowledge, but variously engaged. While sympathising with each of its departments, and supplementing his culture by knowledge drawn from all of them, each student amongst us selects one subject for the exercise of his own original faculty — one line, along which he may carry the light of his private intelligence a little way into the darkness by which all knowledge is surrounded. Thus, the geologist deals with the rocks; the biologist with the conditions and phenomena of life; the astronomer with stellar masses and motions; the mathematician with the relations of space and number; the chemist pursues his atoms; while the physical investigator has his own large field in optical, thermal, electrical, acoustical, and other phenomena. The British Association then, as a whole, faces physical nature on all sides, and pushes knowledge centrifugally outwards, the sum of its labours constituting what Fichte might call the sphere of natural knowledge. In the meetings of the Association it is found necessary to resolve this sphere into its component parts, which take concrete form under the respective letters of our Sections.