“44 PRESIDENTS ADDRESS—SECTION A. 
If per impossibile we imagine a time when a consistent and 
complete representation of the whole range of phenomena has 
been fabricated, which, whatever our assiduity, could never in 
any of its lineaments be discriminated from reality, all signifi- 
cance as to the question of identity therewith will then have 
vanished. In the meantime we may regard the aggregate of the 
general conceptions of natural science as the depdt in which 
we hoard up our physical knowledge, rather than the place whence 
we draw it. It is the terminus ad quem, not a quo, and to 
change the figure, is at best a picture designed only to represent 
the world from one point of view. 
The activities of things are not, and never can be, accounted 
for, by the mechanical view. The ideas of matter and energy 
are instruments by means of which we represent, in the most 
elementary and conventional way, some items of that illimitable 
complex called Nature, instruments which render a magnificent 
service, it is true, but which, after all, are hopelessly imperfect 
and inadequate. Or we may say, the physical conceptions of the 
universe are creations evolved from the depths of that deepest 
of all mysteries, human consciousness, and assumed to be in the 
likeness of what is received in perception. They are in reality, 
but simulacra, in which, by refusing to allow any but mechanical 
elements to rise above the threshold of consciousness, we 
imagine we see the PHYSICAL WORLD PICTURE. 
