260 president's address — section j. 



As soon as we realise that the mind is active in building up its 

 knowledge, in speculating on the nature of the universe, and in striving 

 to achieve its ideals, we have left behind us the fiction of mind as con- 

 sisting of so many inert states, the products of physical movements. 

 I have no desire to minimise unduly the tremendous influence of physical 

 or physiological conditions. I do not doubt, for instance, the existence 

 of rare and abnormal cases of double or multiplex personality, con- 

 ditioned by strange and subtle changes in the brain. But, even so, 

 the unifying power of mind is illustrated in each of these so-called 

 personalities, where a limited or dissociated, or it may even be a brighter 

 and larger, consciousness is built up in a new synthesis. The unity of 

 consciousness does, indeed, arise in conjunction with the developing 

 organism which conditions our earthly being ; but under these con- 

 ditions a new and wonderful life appears, with activities peculiar to 

 itself. The awakened soul, with its hopes and fears, its purposes and 

 ideals, its desires and volitions, cannot be construed into a passive 

 accompaniment of bodily movement. When the human mind is a 

 centre of activity in the midst of its varied changes ; when by its com- 

 bining and selecting power it constructs its own world ; when it is 

 conscious of its own operations, and can criticise its imperfect know- 

 ledge ; when it transcends itself so far as to affirm laws that are valid 

 for all intelligence ; when it addresses itself to the great question of 

 the principle of the universe ; when it is drawn by the attractions of 

 love and hope, and reaches forward towards an end which stretches ever 

 on before, it is a miserably deficient account which resolves it into 

 so many passive phenomena, the eftects of so many mechanical changes. 



Materialism, as we have seen, is protean in its modes of expression. 

 But, in its most prevalent form, it is based on two assumptions : the 

 first, that matter, or the ether from which it may have sprung, is 

 original and fundamental as compared with mind ; the second, that 

 the principle of mechanical causation is adequate to the explanation 

 of all changes, mental as well as material. But when we look at matter 

 from the point of view of the physicist, or in abstraction from the mind 

 which knows it, we find that this supposed matter, per se, affords no 

 hint of the existence of mind. And thus, when matter is vaunted as 

 the source of all things, it sometimes turns out that what is thought 

 of is not the matter of the physicist or of ordinary thought, but a glorified 

 matter which has been invented to suit the occasion, and which ought 

 to have been called by some other name. The retreat from materialism 

 may be cloaked, as an army may conceal its retreat by leaving its watch- 

 fires burning, but it is none the less real. Thus, in a well-known passage 

 of his Belfast address, Tyndall asserts the control of mind by matter, 

 and discerns in matter " the promise and potency of all terrestrial life." 

 This is apparently, when taken by itself, a profession of materialism. 

 But in the same passage he speaks of matter as possessing " latent 

 powers." (Z) And in another address he asks if human thought and 

 feeling, differing so widely as they do from any material fact, can be 

 referred back for their origin to the nebulous haze from which the 



{I) " Fragments of Science," II., p. 193. 



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