Reproduced from Volume II of “The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell,” edited by W. D. Niven. By permission of the publishers, The University Press, Cambridge] Faraday’s discoveries in the electrical science during the first half of the nineteenth century attracted worldwide attention and admiration. I knew that much at Arran, and I also knew of the rapid growth of the practical applications of his discoveries, to telegraphy, to generation of electrical power for electrical lighting, electrical traction, and electrochemical work, and finally to telephonic transmission of speech. The world understood that all these wonderful things, which contributed so much to the comforts of mankind, came from those sources in the realm of abstract science which were opened up by Faraday’s discoveries. Scientific research began to assume a different aspect even in the eyes of the captains of industry who in those days showed lamentable indifference to science which did not promise immediate tangible returns. The advocates of scientific research, like Tyndall and his American and British friends, pointed with pride to Faraday’s work whenever a question arose concerning the practical value of research in the domain of the so-called abstract physical sciences. This helped very much to arouse in this country and in Great Britain a deeper interest in what Andrew White called “strength and hope for higher endeavor.” But Tyndall’s and Maxwell’s descriptions of Faraday and of his work convinced me that Faraday’s exalted position among his contemporaries like Maxwell, Henry, Tyndall, and Barnard was due not so much to the immediate practical value of his electrical discoveries, great as that value certainly was, as it was to the clear vision with which he searched for and revealed new morsels of the _eternal truth_. It was clear to me even at that time that inventions are the handwork of mortal man and that, though at first they appeal to us, as they ought to, as wonderful creations of human ingenuity, their ultimate fate is to become more or less commonplace. The telegraph and the telephone, the dynamo and the motor, the light of the electrical arc and of the incandescent filament, had lost much of their awe-inspiring character even at the time when I was a student at Cambridge. Inventions grow old and are superseded by other inventions, and, being the creation of the constructive schemes of mortal man, are themselves mortal. But the laws which the stars and the planets obey and have always obeyed in their paths through the heavens are unchangeable; they never grow old, and therefore they are immortal; they are a part of the _eternal truth_. We do not know of any natural processes by which eternal things have been evolved. Their existence is the best philosophic proof that back of all this changeable visible world there is the unchangeable, the eternal divinity.