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[Footnote: Presidential Address, delivered before the Birmingham and Midland Institute, October 1877; with additions.]
A MAGNET attracts iron; but when we analyse the effect we learn that the metal is not only attracted but repelled, the final approach to the magnet being due to the difference of two unequal and opposing forces. Social progress is for the most part typified by this duplex or polar action. As a general rule, every advance is balanced by a partial retreat, every amelioration is associated more or less with deterioration. No great mechanical improvement, for example, is introduced for the benefit of society at large that does not bear hardly upon individuals. Science, like other things, is subject to the operation of this polar law, what is good for it under one aspect being bad for it under another.
Science demands above all things personal concentration. Its home is the study of the mathematician, the quiet laboratory of the experimenter, and the cabinet of the meditative observer of nature. Different atmospheres are required by the man of science, as such, and the man of action. Thus the facilities of social and international intercourse, the railway, the telegraph, and the post-office, which are such undoubted boons to the man of action, react to some extent injuriously on the man of science. Their tendency is to break up that concentrativeness which, as I have said, is an absolute necessity to the scientific investigator.
The men who have most profoundly influenced the world from the scientific side have habitually sought isolation. Faraday, at a certain period of his career, formally renounced dining out. Darwin lives apart from the bustle of the world in his quiet home in Kent. Mayer and Joule dealt in unobtrusive retirement with the weightiest scientific questions. There is, however, one motive power in the world which no man, be he a scientific student or otherwise, can afford to treat with indifference; and that is, the cultivation of right relations with his fellow-men — the performance of his duty, not as an isolated individual, but as a member of society. It is duty in this aspect, overcoming alike the sense of possible danger and the desire for repose, that has placed me in your presence here to-night.
To look at his picture as a whole, a painter requires distance; and to judge of the total scientific achievement of any age, the standpoint of a succeeding age is desirable. We may, however, transport ourselves in idea into the future, and thus survey with more or less completeness the science of our time. We sometimes hear it decried, and contrasted to its disadvantage with the science of other times. I do not think that this will be the verdict of posterity. I think, on the contrary, that posterity will acknowledge that in the history of science no higher samples of intellectual conquest are recorded than those which this age has made its own. One of the most salient of these I propose, with your permission, to make the subject of our consideration during the coming hour.
It is now generally admitted that the man of to-day is the child and product of incalculable antecedent time. His physical and intellectual textures have been woven for him during his passage through phases of history and forms of existence which lead the mind back to an abysmal past. One of the qualities which he has derived from that past is the yearning to let in the light of principles on the otherwise bewildering flux of phenomena. He has been described by the German Lichtenberg as 'das rastlose Ursachenthier ' — the restless cause-seeking animal — in whom facts excite a kind of hunger to know the sources from which they spring. Never, I venture to say, in the history of the world has this longing been more liberally responded to, both among men of science and the general public, than during the last thirty or forty years. I say 'the general public,' because it is a feature of our time that the man of science no longer limits his labours to the society of his colleagues and his peers, but shares, as far as it is possible to share, with the world at large the fruits of enquiry.