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Rh power for work, which may depend on the answers to all the questions that will come before us, this might be a measure of our responsibility. But we can not count it; let us imagine it; we can not even in imagination exaggerate it. Let us bear it always in our mind, and remind ourselves that our responsibility will constantly increase. For, as men become in the best sense better educated, and the influence of scientific knowledge on their moral and social state increases, so among all sciences there is none of which the influence, and therefore the responsibility, will increase more than ours, because none more intimately concerns man's happiness and working power.

But, more clearly in the recollections of the Congress, we may be reminded that in our science there may be, or, rather, there really is, a complete community of interest among men of all nations. On all the questions before us we can differ, discuss, dispute, and stand in earnest rivalry; but all consistently with friendship, all with readiness to wait patiently till more knowledge shall decide which is in the right. Let us resolutely hold to this when we are apart: let our internationality be a clear abiding sentiment, to be, as now, declared and celebrated at appointed times, but never to be forgotten; we may, perhaps, help to gain a new honor for science, if we thus suggest that in many more things, if they were as deeply and dispassionately studied, there might be found the same complete identity of international interests as in ours.

And then, let us always remind ourselves of the nobility of our calling. I dare to claim for it that, among all the sciences, ours, in the pursuit and use of truth, offers the most complete and constant union of those three qualities which have the greatest charm for pure and active minds—novelty, utility, and charity. These three, which are sometimes in so lamentable disunion, as in the attractions of novelty without either utility or charity, are in our researches so combined that, unless by force or willful wrong, they hardly can be put asunder. And each of them is admirable in its kind. For in every search for truth we can not only exercise curiosity, and have the delight—the really elemental happiness—of watching the unveiling of a mystery, but, on the way to truth, if we look well round us, we shall see that we are passing wonders more than the eye or mind can fully apprehend. And as one of the perfections of Nature is that in all her works wonder is harmonized with utility, so is it with our science. In every truth attained there is utility either at hand or among the certainties of the future. And this utility is not selfish: it is not in any degree correlative with money-making; it may generally be estimated in the welfare of others better than in our own. Some of us may indeed make money and grow rich; but many of those that minister even to the follies and vices of mankind can make much more money than we. In all things costly and vainglorious they would far surpass us if we would compete with them. We had better not compete where wealth is the highest evidence of success; we can compete with the world in