science brings, or may bring, to
man. We especially, perhaps, in these later days, through the rapid
development of the physical sciences, are too apt to dwell on the material
gains alone. As a child in its infancy looks upon its mother only as a
giver of good things, and does not learn till after days how she was also
showing her love by carefully training it in the way it should go, so we,
too, have thought too much of the gifts of science, overlooking her power
to guide.

Man does not live by bread alone, and science brings him more than bread.
It is a great thing to make two blades of grass grow where before one
alone grew; but it is no less great a thing to help a man to come to a
just conclusion on the questions with which he has to deal. We may claim
for science that, while she is doing the one, she may be so used as to do
the other also. The dictum just quoted, that science is organized common
sense, may be read as meaning that the common problems of life, which
common people have to solve, are to be solved by the same methods by which
the man of science solves his special problems. It follows that the
training which does so much for him may be looked to as promising to do
much for them.

Such aid can come from science on two conditions only. In the first place,
this her influence must be acknowledged; she must be duly recognized as a
teacher no less than as a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. And the
pursuit of science must be followed, not by the professional few only, but
at least in such measure as will ensure the influence of example by the
many. But this latter point I need not urge before this great
association, whose chief object during more than half a century has been
to bring within the fold of science all who would answer to the call. In
the second place, it must be understood that the training to be looked for
from science is the outcome, not of the accumulation of scientific
knowledge, but of the practice of scientific inquiry. Man may have at his
fingers' ends all the accomplished results and all the current opinions of
any one or of all the branches of science, and yet remain wholly
unscientific in mind; but no one can have carried out even the humblest
research without the spirit of science in some measure resting upon him.
And that spirit may in part be caught even without entering upon an actual
investigation in search of a new truth. The learner may be led to old
truths, even the oldest,