1 34 The Ottawa Naturalist. [October 



Evidently something" is wrong with the purely scientific explana- 

 tion of the acquisition of truth and reality. As Mr. Balfour 

 declared, there is "a certain inevitable incoherence in any g^eneral 

 scheme of thought which is built out of materials provided by 

 natural science alone." Knowledge, which science regards as the 

 final outcome of irrational (animal) conditions, must be pronounced 

 essentially rational, or science itself disappears. 



As the speaker claimed, in an eloquent passage : — 

 " Extend the boundaries of knowledge as you may ; draw how 

 you will the picture of the universe ; reduce its infinite variety to 

 the modes of a single space-filling ether ; retrace its history to the 

 birth of existing atoms ; show how under the pressure of gravita- 

 tion they became concentrated into nebulee, into suns, and all the 

 host of heaven ; how at least in one small planet, they combined 

 to form organic compounds ; how organic compounds became 

 living things ; how living things, developing along man}^ different 

 lines, gave birth at last to one superior race ; how from this race 



arose, after many ages, a learned handful, who looked round on 

 the world which thus blindly brought them into being, and judged 

 it, and knew it for what it was— perform, I say, all thi>:, and, 

 though you may indeed have attained to science, in nowise will 

 you have attained to a self-sufficing system of beliefs." 



Thus, the more complete seems to be our explanation of what 

 we know, the more difficult it is to discover by what ultimate 

 criteria we claim to Know it. The President concluded by confess- 

 ing that the dilemma was not one for physical science to remove, 

 for here the confines of a territory were touched where philosophy 

 claims jurisdiction. 



If the senses and instincts of the lower animals are inadequate 

 to yield a true conception of the universe in which we find our- 

 selves, and if these, more refined and highly developed in man, are 

 still unreliable and misleading in the ordinary human mind at any 

 rate, and furnish, under the name of "experience" or " common 

 sense," grossly erroneous conclusions as to the realities of exist- 

 ence, the resulting paradox is strange indexed. The latest product 

 of human evolution, the scientific intellect, in its highest and most 

 daring flights, is compelled to rely more and more, not upon 

 actual common experience, but upon idealistic interpretations of 

 the universe. Such interpretations transcend the crude reports of 

 sense-perception : but they mould the results of experience and 

 sense-perception into harmony with ideas, preconceived and 

 necessary and full of light and satisfying meaning. 



