832 president's address. 



"vitalistic" views. I am willing to admit that the vitalistic 

 recognition of purpose does, in a sense, more justice to the facts of 

 organism than a method which ignores purpose. But I do not 

 think the idea of purpose helps us at all in strictly scientific and 

 experimental procedure, and its attempted scientific application 

 is simply an attempt to "find a gap in that circle of mechanical 

 motions " which alone constitutes the cosmos for experimental 

 science. 



In science properly so called, " the phantoms of life, the final 

 causes " which (as Mr. Caird says in this exact connection) 

 "distort the prose of science" must be resolutely put from us, 

 even though, with them, all hope of finality and unity in the 

 ultimate explanation of the world, from the point of view of 

 physical science, completely disappears. 



In a genuinely scientific explanation there is never reached a 

 stage at which we can forsake the mechanical method simply 

 because we can no longer recognise, nor easily imagine, the 

 nature of the unknown antecedents of a phenomenon. Vitalistic 

 or teleological interpretation is not a method which comes to our 

 rescue when a physical interpretation fails us. In so far as it is 

 valid at all, it is one which is present with us and which urges 

 itself upon us at every stage, forbidding us ever to mistake a 

 possible mechanical interconnection of the phenomena of life for 

 the real ground iia thought of purposive adaptation. This idea 

 indeed intrudes itself upon our apprehension as the s^^ecial cha- 

 racteristic of the organic world at any and every stage of scientific 

 development, but it is not a product of the scieidijic imagination. 

 Any apparent force which latter-day vitalistic objections to the 

 mechanistic procedure of science may possess would seem to 

 depend upon the mixing up of two possible modes of explanation. 

 The endeavour is made, b}' pointing to the incompetence of the 

 mechanical method to explain certain aspects of living process, 

 to make room within the circle of scientific experience itself for 

 a mode of explanation which has neither relevance nor validity 

 in the sphere of experimental science. 



