16 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



physics, became for a time tiie fashion. Its subtle but widespread 

 influence was curiously reinforced by the sudden irruption of evolu- 

 tionism into the arena of human thought. Man could now be ex- 

 hibited as physiologically a machine, and genetically a monkey. 

 The soul which Descartes never openly repudiated but kept in splendid 

 isolation as a fragment of the Divine lodged in an animal organism, 

 now seemed threatened with final extinction. Theology took up 

 arms for a lost cause and numberless essays or books were produced 

 under titles which were all variations of one topic — science and the 

 faith. These have hardly yet faded from the memory of living men; 

 eminent divines and famous politicians joined in that historic struggle 

 and witnessed to at least one thing — the importance of scientific 

 thought in questions of public morality and social progress. 



I have called this a lost cause for one particular reason: the 

 opponents of science ignored the question of method and challenged 

 the facts. On that ground they were destined to inevitable defeat. 

 This in time became evident and a more fruitful line of thought 

 emerged as soon as it was possible to see that the analytic method of 

 science was not identical with the historical method as applied to social 

 and political movements. Then a new school of thought arose which 

 concerned itself less with traditional beliefs than with the foundations 

 of belief, and broke away from the whole mechanical school by making 

 science the instrument rather than the arbiter of human purposes. 

 There, to a large extent, human thought stands to-day. Science is 

 regarded as a vast organisation of means, but the ends which it serves 

 are not created by it; they arise in a world of desires and purposes 

 which neither physics nor chemistry nor even psychology can so much 

 as pretend to resolve into atoms or "mind-stuff." 



The deliverance from mechanism to which Bergson has perhaps 

 given the most widely influential expression, leaves us in a precarious 

 position. There can be little doubt that this deliverance has been 

 mistaken for a proclamation of lawlessness. For science the unit is 

 always a strictly definable ultimate regulated by the laws of the 

 system to which it belongs; this is an indispensable requisite of 

 strictly scientific method. But the individual creature is not such a 

 unit, or at least cannot be known sufficiently to be recognized as such. 

 It has accordingly seemed justifiable to speak of a creative element 

 in individual activities, a creative synthesis or a creative evolution 

 as the case requires. If we go from the individual to the group or 

 the society a further difficulty arises; for there may be laws of groups 

 that are not laws of individuals, and laws of social progress which, 

 like calculations of probability, are true of the whole without being 



