PRESIDENT S ADDRESS—SECTION A. 43 
Atoms and Molecules not Real, but Representative of 
Reality.—Are we not from the preceding considerations justified, 
and, indeed, compelled to regard the atom and molecule, the 
ether, and so on, not as reality itself, but merely as representa- 
tive thereof? If we adopt a contact theory as the criterion of 
intelligible explanation, we have simply limited ourselves, in the 
elements of our conceptual world, to one of the crudest elements 
in our sense-experience. We cannot legitimately expect that any 
such limited conceptual construction shall completely coincide 
with actuality, nor that the mechanical interpretation of Nature 
will ever exhaust the mystery of its action. 
Character of the World tmagined in Natural Science.—We are 
apt to suppose that our dreams, even our mechanical dreams, 
about reality, and realty are identical; and the confidence with 
which conceptions have been put forward as true pictures of 
Nature, capable of revealing the deepest secrets of her being, 
has sometimes betrayed those who regard her mainly from the 
mechanical point of view, into positions that are difficult to 
defend. One can understand something of the, perhaps intem- 
perate, scorn of the philosopher who, seeing a conception almost 
at the moment of its birth, and without mature consideration, 
advanced as equal to the task of explaining the very foundations 
of the universe, delivers his soul as follows :—* The whole hypo- 
thesis of vibrating ether atoms is not say a chimeera, but 
equals in awkward crudity the worst of Democritus, and yet is 
shameless enough to profess to be an established fact ; and thus 
it has been brought about that it is orthodoxly repeated by a 
thousand stupid scribblers of all kinds, devoid of all knowledge 
of such things, and is believed in as a gospel” (m). The pen seems 
here to have been dipped in gall unnecessarily deeply. But did 
not the assurance with which these particular atoms were recog- 
nised as “ manufactured articles,” not as the manufacture of their 
real authors, but that of no human hand, and with which 
it was declared that their energy was being slowly dissi- 
pated, and, therefore, matter would ultimately vanish from 
existence; and that they afforded evidence that the material 
universe came into being at some particular moment of time ; 
did not this assurance almost justify such a fulmination ? 
One is disposed to think that the more temperate and invulner- 
able view is that conceptions, quite as valid as ul‘7mate explana- 
tions of the mysteries of Nature, may, nevertheless, as we see to 
be historically the case, be of brilliant service, not only to the 
material needs of humanity, but also to those of our higher 
being, if they serve the purpose of enabling us to schematically 
represent certain aspects of natural phenomena. 
de 2a papa Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Suppl. to Bk. 2, cap. 
XXIV 
