3. Facilitating the migration and the spread of nations holding the highest position in the scale of morality.
4. The increase of wealth, which multiplies the extent of the preceding means.
And now, let no man attempt to set bounds to this development. Let no man say even that morality accomplished is all that is required of mankind, since that is not necessarily the evidence of a spiritual development. If a man possess the capacity for progress beyond the condition in which he finds himself, in refusing to enter upon it he declines to conform to the Divine law. And “from those to whom little is given, little is required, but from those to whom much is given, much shall be required.”
SCIENTIFIC ADDRESSES.
Tyndall’s Addresses.
I.
On the Methods and Tendencies of Physical Investigation.
The celebrated Fichte, in his lectures on the “Vocation of the Scholar,” insisted on a culture for the scholar which should not be one-sided, but all-sided. His intellectual nature was to expand spherically, and not in a single direction. 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 labors of his own, the immense debt he owed to the labors 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.
Fichte’s idea is to some extent illustrated by the constitution and the labors of the British Association. We have here a body of men engaged in the pursuit of natural knowledge, but variously engaged. While sympathizing 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 faces the rocks; the biologist fronts the conditions and phenomena of life; the astronomer, stellar masses and motions; the mathematician the properties 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, faces nature on all sides, and pushes knowledge centrifugally outwards, while, through circumstance or natural bent, each of its working members takes up a certain line of research in which he aspires to be an original producer, being content in all other directions to accept instruction from his fellow-men. The sum of our labors constitutes 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.