president's address. 845 



confusion of different categories of explanation; to " put himself 

 aside and let Nature speak," Nature, that is to say, which is 

 for him a purely mechanical system. 



And it is just such a confusion of thought which on the other 

 hand permits the presentation of scientific and physical formulas 

 as if these exhausted the reality of living or conscious activity 

 or were other than lame and often grotesque travesties of the 

 actual content of the phenomena in question. 



I have already tried to show that at the root of the modern 

 doctrine of natural selection (survival of the luckily endowed) there 

 lies the mechanical principle of external necessity in a determin- 

 ing environment. I have indicated my conviction that it is this 

 aspect of it which vitiates its attempt to explain by itself the 

 ethical aspect of human evolution, and which seemed to give point 

 to the self-contradictory notion of a conflict between the cosmic 

 and the ethical principle. 



The fact of a continued process of human evolution cannot be 

 withstood. But we may readily follow Mr. Huxley in his assertion 

 that natural selection does not satisfactorily account for the later 

 phases and stages of it. If, then, we are to retain our grasp of 

 the essential identity of all cosmic process, we must be prepared 

 to recognise that if the end is not intelligibly to be conceived as 

 mere mechanism neither can the beginning be so explained. 



And what is true in relation to the ethical aspect of cosmic 

 process as revealed in human society, is true also of the organic 

 aspect of that process as revealed in plant and animal life. The 

 mechanical interpretation is only a convenient, a provisional, 

 above all a working, hypothesis. As a final or philosophical 

 interpretation it is false, because it ignores one, and that the 

 really significant aspect of the facts viewed from the general 

 philosophical point of view. 



And, exactly as in the case of the ethical process, it does not 

 help us much that we are able, by the aid of the doctrine of 

 evolution, to trace back the series of living forms to their 

 simplest, most formless, and structureless beginnings. " The 

 continuity of all existence," which is the essence of the evolu- 



