Section D.— ANTHROPOLOGY, ETHNOLOGY, EDUCA- 

 TION, HISTORY, MENTAL SCIENCE, PHILO- 

 LOGY, POLITICAL ECONOMY. 



President of the Section : — W. A. Way, MA. 



TUESDAY, JULY 2. 

 The President delivered the following address : 



SOME RECENT SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL 



DEVELOPMENTS. 



I must, at the outset, express my opinion that the work of 

 this section is more difficult and controversial than the work of 

 other sections, owing to the indeterminate nature of the data. I 

 believe, however, that our knowledge in regard to some of the 

 subjects comprised within this section will not long remain in its 

 present inexact condition. 



Is it too wild a dream to see in imagination a state of things 

 in which boys at school may be tested by a simple instrument 

 its to their receptivity and energy and fitness for further work — - 

 in which a meeting may be adjourned when certain mechanisms 

 show that the creative brain capacity of the roomful has ceased to 

 be effective — when we may drag from the criminal's eye the 

 visualization of his crime or extract from his brain an automatic 

 confession of his motive and his guilt? I feel certain that we 

 shall be able to find in physical phenomena ex- 

 planations of conduct and action now hidden from 

 us. It has always amazed me that some deliberators, 

 for example, individually men of personal charm and unques- 

 tioned ability, should collectively and en masse do such, shall I 

 say, eminently unsatisfactory things. I feel sure there is some 

 combination of magnetic phenomena, some uncoefficient, as it 

 were, of friction which would explain sometimes almost inexplic- 

 able resolutions. We know that over great meetings waves of 

 some kind of feeling pass with wonderful results. There may 

 be some in this room who remember at a Diocesan Synod at 

 Grahamstown a wave of emotion, which one clerk described to 

 me as the clearest manifestation of a Holy Spirit he could ima- 

 gine. We know that panic and grief, humour and indignation 

 are supremely infections, and spread in currents through vast 

 throngs of people. Here we shall have to call in. I think, workers 

 fn other departments of knowledge, although it is depressing to 

 think that religious exaltation may be reduced to a chemical for- 

 mula or appreciation of art to a physical equation. 



With the need, then, before us of a deep scientific analysis 

 of emotion, of the very hardest and closest thinking and reason- 

 ing, it is somewhat perplexing and disappointing to find that the 



