At the commencement he gave an introductory view of the nature and objects of the Royal Institution and of the particular plan of the lectures. Afterwards he proceeded to the subject of mechanics with the doctrine of motion. In the introductory lecture, when dwelling on the objects of the Royal Institution and the dissemination of elementary knowledge, he said: Those who possess the genuine spirit of scientific investigation, and who have tasted the pure satisfaction arising from an advancement in intellectual acquirements, are content to proceed in their researches without inquiring at every step what they gain by their newly-discovered lights, and to what practical purposes they are applicable; they receive a sufficient gratification from the enlargement of their views of the constitution of the universe, and experience in the immediate pursuit of knowledge that pleasure which others wish to obtain more circuitously by its means. And it is one of the principal advantages of a liberal education that it creates a susceptibility of an enjoyment so elegant and so rational. On the subject of the education of females at the Royal Institution he said: The many leisure hours which are at the command of females in the superior orders of society may surely be appropriated with greater satisfaction to the improvement of the mind, and to the acquisition of knowledge, than to such amusements as are only designed for facilitating the insipid consumption of superfluous time. The Royal Institution may in some degree supply the place of a subordinate university to those whose sex or situation in life has denied them the advantage of an academical education in the national seminaries of learning. With regard to the special objects of the Institution, the theory of practical mechanics and of manufactures, he said: We must be more practical than academies of science and more theoretical than societies for the improvement of arts; while we endeavour at the same time to give stability to our proceedings by an annual recurrence to the elementary knowledge which is subservient to the purposes of both and, as far as we are able, apply to practice the newest lights which may from time to time be thrown on particular branches of mechanical science. It is thus that we may most effectually perform what the idolised sophists of antiquity but verbally professed--to bring down philosophy from the heavens and to make her an inhabitant of the earth.