PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS — SECTION F. 1 23 



actual experience between consciousness and its conditions, we 

 find that it is that between attention or concentration of effort 

 or individual interest and initiative on the one hand, and haibit 

 or mechanized tendency on the other hand. We have no right 

 to say, from the point of view of pure, i.e., immediate or concrete 

 experience, that mind is one thing and body another, that either 

 is more real or ultimately more causal than the other, or that 

 either could exist apart from the other. What we are entitled 

 to say is that our individual experience discloses to psychological 

 analysis the two poles or phases of habit and effort, automatism 

 and spontaneity. In other words, in actual experience there is, 

 on the one hand, the concentrated feeling or selective awareness 

 of things which we call consciousness, and which is the individual 

 being itse'if in the act of apprehending the circumstances or 

 environment to which its life has to be adapted at the present 

 juncture or with regard to its determinate behaviour ; and there 

 is, on the other hand, the mechanism of organized habit and 

 potentiality which we call the body, and which in its actual con- 

 crete character and constitution is the condition and at the same 

 time the instrument of the present manifestation of mind, and 

 develops further potentialities through every activity or 

 actualization of consciousness. Thus the body is just 

 the mechanism or organization of habits, tendencies, aptitudes. 

 avenues of impression and lines of action, which condition the 

 progressive or developing manifestation of consciousness, and 

 which is itselif continuously developed with the fuller realization 

 of individual activity. Body is habit or mechanism, conscious- 

 ness is attention or direction of effort. Such a conception enables 

 us, without in the least contradicting anything implied in the 

 detailed investigations of physics and ])hysiology, to unite in some 

 measure the results of science with the concrete facts of im- 

 mediate experience and the actual life of the individual, which 

 philosophy aims at interpreting. The working out of the implica- 

 tions of this conception may involve an ultimate reinterpretation 

 of the nature of what we are accustomed to call the material 

 v/orld ; but it is quite in keeping with the general attitude of 

 science, namely, that matter is known essentially as limiting or 

 conditioning the manifestation of mind. 



What present-day philosophy is bent upon, then, is the 

 endeavour to interpret experience in its concrete character — to 

 get a way of stating things which shall show what they are for 

 our actual concrete experience. Through this lies the way to 

 the union of philosophy and science. 



At the same time that philosophy is becoming more ex- 

 periential and therefore more scientific, science is becoming more 

 critical of its own procedure and import, and therefore more 

 philosophical. It is being more and more recognized that scientific 

 conceptions and principles, however well established by the most 

 thorough methods, are not direct statements of the nature of 

 reality or experience, but hypotheses that have approved them- 



