846 president's address. 



tion idea, "may be interpreted," says one writer, "in two very 

 different ways. It may lead us either to radically change our 

 notions of mind and its activities, or to ' radically change our 

 notions of matter.' We may take as the principle of explanation 

 either the beginning or the end of the process of development. 

 We may say of the simple and crass, ' There is all that your rich 

 universe really means '; or we may say of the spiritual activities 

 of man, ' This is what your crude beginning really was.' We 

 may explain the complex by the simple or the simple by the 

 complex." 



" And one of the most important questions for moralit}^ and 

 religion is the question, which of these two methods is valid. If 

 out of crass matter is evolved all animal and spiritual life, does 

 that prove life to be nothing but matter; or does it not rather 

 show that what we, in our ignorance, took to be mere matter was 

 really something much greater 1 If ' crass matter ' contains all 

 this promise and potency, by what right do we still call it 'crass' " 1 



" It is manifestly impossible to treat the potencies, assumed to 

 lie in a thing that grows, as if they were of no significance; first 

 to assert that such potencies exist, in saying that the object 

 develops; and then, to neglect them, and to regard the effect as 

 constituted only of its simplest elements. Either these potencies 

 are not in the object, or else the object has in it, and is, at the 

 first, more than it appears to be. Either the object does not 

 grow, or the lowest stage of its being is no explanation of its 

 true nature." 



In this way may a perfect loyalty to the evolution doctrine 

 throughout the entire domain of cosmic process, from its lowest 

 to its highest manifestations, bring with it an emancipation 

 from bondage to those mechanical principles which seem alone 

 suggested on the lower plane of the inorganic and which may, 

 for certain purposes, though with more conscious effort, be applied 

 throughout the whole sphere of objective science. 



