Editorial September 17, 1904 Issue

Confirmed by Culture

Students of English history are not surprised to learn that the chief political leader of the British empire is President of the Association for the Advancement of Science, and so intelligent in this field of thought as to deliver, at the late meeting of the Association, in Cambridge, an address which "exhibited a splendid grasp of an exceedingly difficult as well as well as novel scientific subject."

Mr. Gladstone was a conspicuous representative of a large number of British statesmen and Parliamentary leaders who have been no less distinguished for their literary or scientific attainments than for their political sagacity. No one, surely, would venture to say that the ability to wield the facile pen of a Disraeli, to think in Greek hexameters with a Gladstone, or to find recreation in solving the problems of the physical laboratory with a Salisbury, is essential to fitness for governmental leadership, but it is equally true that no one can question the significant relation of this breadth of culture in English statesmen, to those larger events of English history which have materially benefited many nations, and sensibly advanced the civilization of the world's thought.

The more vital interest of Mr. Balfour's address inheres, however, in the fact that he discussed, in what a prominent review has termed a "highly suggestive" way the theme which is just now engrossing the attention of the world; viz., the nature of matter. The latest investigation of the Curies, Professor Thomson, and others, which go to prove that "Matter is but a condition of energy" and wholly phenomenal, are accepted as the basis of his very pertinent and paradoxical declaration that to-day "Matter is explained, and is explained away." Phenomenal manifestations are reported to us only through the physical senses, which are being more and more generally discredited; and hence the distinguished speaker's far-reaching conviction that there is in the situation a suggestion of a "certain inevitable incoherence in any general scheme of thought which is built out of the material provided by natural Science alone," and that in the course of time such a scheme must be grounded in "an idealistic interpretation of the universe." This perception of the inadequacy and unsatisfactoriness of any attempted materialistic interpretation of nature, which physical Scientists are now so generally reaching, and the recognition that the only true and satisfying philosophy of things must be based on the proposition that "all is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation" (Science and Health, p. 468), came more than a generation ago to one who was not possessed of expert scientific learning, but who sought and found light upon the world's deepest problems in the study of the Word, and in prayer. That Mrs. Eddy should have thus reached an apprehension of Truth which in healing the sick has met the test of practical demonstrability that Jesus imposed, and that she should have presented to the world a philosophy of things and of experience which the most expert and scholarly authorities are being compelled to endorse,—these facts confirm yet more fully the truth of her simple explanation of her discovery; viz., that in her seeking she was divinely led and illumined.

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