14 Presidential Address 



full meaning of the consequences which are 

 involved. 



This readiness to accept and incorpo- 

 rate new facts into the scheme of physics 

 may have led to perhaps an undue amount 

 of scientific scepticism, in order to right 

 the balance. 



But a still deeper variety of compre- 

 hensive scepticism exists, and it is argued 

 that all our laws of nature, so laboriously 

 ascertained and carefully formulated, are 

 but conventions after all, not truths: 

 that we have no faculty for ascertaining 

 real truth, that our intelligence was not 

 evolved for any such academic purpose; 

 that all we can do is to express things in a 

 form convenient for present purposes and 

 employ that mode of expression as a 

 tentative and pragmatically useful ex- 

 planation. 



Even explanation, however, has been 

 discarded as too ambitious by some men 

 of science, who claim only the power to 

 describe. They not -only emphasise the 

 how rather than the why, as is in some 

 sort inevitable, since explanations are 



