(1852, November 2) The Evening Courant, p. 3. Philosophical Institution Public Lecture—29 October 1852, Segment 1.
PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTION.
The opening address of the session was delivered (as we briefly stated on Saturday), by Professor Ferrier, of the University of St Andrews, in Queen Street Hall, on Friday evening. The Lord Provost presided on the occasion; and among the directors and other gentlemen occupying the platform were—Charles Cowan, Esq., M.P.; Mr Sheriff Gordon; Professors Pillans, More, and Blackie; W. Smith, Esq., Vice President of the Institution; Dr Daniel Wilson; John Blackwood, Esq.; James Campbell, Esq., advocate; F. Hallard, Esq., advocate; W. H. Thomson, Esq., advocate; Blair Wilson, Esq.; A. Cassels, Esq., W. S.; R. W. Smith, Esq.; J. Tod, Esq., W.S.; Dr Cox; Adam Mossman, Esq.; &c. &c. The attendance was, as usual, very numerous.
Professor Ferrier said—The two principal agents in the work of human civilisation are the power of industry and the power of literature. These agencies have been too often divorced and held asunder from each other. Too often has the man of industry forsworn the companionship of letters, and too often has the man of letters withheld his sympathies from the avocations of industry. But the existence of this flourishing institution, a new session of which we are this evening assembled to inaugurate, affords an assurance that a better spirit is abroad, and that these two powers stand in no unfriendly relation to each other, but admit of an auspicious, and I cannot doubt, a permanent combination. They are, indeed, in themselves connected by close and fine affinities; for if it be true that literature (and I use that word in its most comprehensive sense, as the aggregate of all the emanations of intellect, of all the researches of science), if it is true that literature by supplying man's spiritual wants, is the power which ministers to the loftiest and purest enjoyments of the soul, it is equally true that industry, by providing for man's physical wants, is the power which first enables literature, with disencumbered wings, to pursue a free flight and put forth all her energies. The obligations which literature owes to industry are greater than perhaps most people are aware of. It is only after man's physical necessities have been adequately relieved, that the loftier cravings of his nature can come into existence; and it is only after these higher aspirations have declared themselves that science and literature obtain a footing in the world. And, therefore, it is evident that industry, which provides for man's bodily wants, and ensures his physical well-being, is also the remote cause, or at any rate the essential condition, of all those blessings and advantages which we enjoy as members of the great commonwealth of humanising letters. No truth is more certain than this, that the dawn of the imagination, and of the scientific reason, always follows, and never precedes, the epoch in which a nation is assured of a commodious physical subsistence; and that not only must a people be supplied with necessaries, but also with many of the superfluities of life, before its sense of the beautiful and the true can be developed. But by what
