838 president's address. 



we must look to enable us to determine the relation to the whole 

 of human experience of any one of the principles which appear to 

 be implied in that experience. Before this tribunal the com- 

 peting claims of teleology and purely physical determinism, as 

 principles explanatory of Nature, must ultimately be brought. 

 And when this is done it will invariably be found that it is impos- 

 sible to allow the discussion of the fundamental conceptions of 

 knowledge, like those of substance and cause, to proceed merely 

 Avith reference to the phenomena of Nature conceived objectively. 



In every criticism of the nature of knowledge which is not 

 wholly superficial it will be found that there is involved a 

 reference and a relation to the self-conscious subject of knowledge 

 as the indispensable condition of all experience whatsoever. 



This is neither the time nor the place to attempt to set forth 

 what I take to be the results of such a criticism of the conditions 

 of knowledge. I can only permit myself to affirm my own con- 

 viction that an impartial study of the problem thus suggested 

 will result in a recognition that the conception of the cosmos — 

 the object of human experience — as a mere system of material and 

 mechanical relations in space and time is after all highly abstract 

 and unreal. For certain purposes such a conception may be not 

 only useful but indispensable, just as are the professed abstractions 

 of mathematical science. But the hypothesis which regards 

 the cosmos of experience as reducible to an endless series of 

 phenomena in time and space, connected by a common bond of 

 external necessity, entirely ignores the fundamental relation of 

 all fact whatever to a knowing subject as the essential condition 

 of all experience. No hypothesis which abstracts from this reality 

 can possibly claim to offer a satisfactory interpretation of things. 

 And it will be found whenever full recognition is afforded to the 

 one inalienable condition of experience, that, amongst other ideas, 

 that of final cause or purpose must be reinstated as a valid and 

 necessary principle of explanation in any philosophical interpre 

 tation of the world. 



It is a consequence of the acceptance of such a philosophical 

 doctrine that although, even in biology, we must, if we wish to 



