836 president's address. 



practical possibilities of future science that the arrangement in 

 space of the material particles of protoplasm supposed", for 

 example, by such an hypothesis as Nageli's, may be sufficiently 

 attested and verified by other than optical means; it might even 

 be by the incidence on appropriate instruments of other than 

 optical radiations. Who can tell what structural facts may not 

 be borne witness to by future instruments of research 1 



It seems reasonable to believe that no limit can be assigned to 

 the efforts of science to supply an answer to all questions relating 

 to the " how" of phenomena— to the manner of their being and 

 becoming, past and pi-esent. 



As to their " wh}'," — their object, purpose or final cause, — that 

 is sometimes declared to be a matter of which we are not only 

 ignorant, but of which we cannot even hope ever to know any- 

 thing at all. And if what I have already said be true, then it 

 follows that upon such questions Science in the narrower sense 

 must be for ever dumb. We must be content to recognise that 

 its operations are conducted entirely on the plane of a mechanical 

 interpretation of phenomena even when its subject matter consists 

 of organised material and living process. 



What place, then, can be assigned to the notion of purpose or 

 final cause in a scheme of human knowledge 1 Is there any sense 

 in which its validity in the interpretation of the world must be 

 acknowledged 1 Thus stated, the question need no longer excite 

 the suspicion with which any claim on the part of teleology to 

 strictly scientific validity must be viewed. 



It cannot be denied that the adaptation of objects and pro- 

 cesses to ends or purposes is plainly and unmistakabl}^ suggested 

 to the ordinary human intelligence. It is true that this suggestion 

 is not obviously pressed upon us by a consideration of the facts 

 of the inorganic world. But whenever we enter the domain of 

 organism we find, even in the lowliest expression of living activity, 

 that we can no longer ignore the purposive character of that 

 activity. We seem to have entered upon the exploration of a 

 kingdom of ends, wherein all events that occur suggest not 

 merely, or even chiefly, a dependence upon preceding events, but 



