46 
are supreme, and they are sufficient to account for 
everything ! 
Well, they account for things up to a point; they 
account in part for the colour of a sunset, for the 
majesty of a mountain peak, for the glory of animate 
existence. But do they account for everything com- 
pletely? Do they account for our own feeling of joy 
and exaltation, for our sense of beauty, for the mani- 
fest beauty existing throughout nature? Do not 
these things suggest something higher and nobler 
and more joyous, something for the sake of which 
all the struggle for existence goes on? 
Surely there must be a deeper meaning involved 
in natural objects. Orthodox explanations are only 
partial, though true as far as they go. When we 
examine each parti-coloured pinnule in a peacock’s 
tail, or hair in a zebra’s hide, and realise that the 
varying shades on each are so placed as to contribute 
to the general design and pattern, it becomes exceed- 
ingly difficult to explain how this organised co-opera- 
tion of parts, this harmonious distribution of pigment 
cells, has come about on merely mechanical prin- 
ciples. It would be as easy to explain the sprouting 
of the cantilevers of the Forth Bridge from its piers, 
or the flocking of the stones of the Nile Dam by 
chemiotaxis. Flowers attract insects for fertilisation ; 
and fruit tempts animals to eat it in order to carry 
seeds. But these explanations cannot be final. We 
have still to explain the insects. So much beauty 
cannot be necessary merely to attract their attention. 
We have further to explain this competitive striving 
towards life. Why do things struggle to exist? 
Surely the effort must have some significance, the 
development some aim. We thus reach the problem 
of existence itself, and the meaning of evolution. 
The mechanism whereby existence entrenches itself 
is manifest, or at least has been to a large extent 
discovered. Natural selection is a vera causa, so far 
as it goes; but if so much beauty is necessary for 
insects, what about the beauty of a landscape or of 
clouds? What utilitarian object do those subserve? 
Beauty in general is not taken into account by science. 
Very well, that may be all right, but it exists never- 
theless. It is not my function to discuss it. No; 
but it is my function to remind you and myself that 
that our studies do not exhaust the universe, and 
that if we dogmatise in a negative direction, and say 
that we can reduce everything to physics and 
chemistry, we gibbet ourselves as ludicrously narrow 
pedants, and are falling far short of the richness and 
fullness of our human birthright. How far preferable 
is the reverent attitude of the Eastern poet :— 
“The world with eyes bent upon thy feet stands in 
awe with all its silent stars.” 
Superficially and physically we are very limited. 
Our sense organs are adapted to the observation of 
matter; and nothing else directly appeals to us. Our 
nerve-muscle-system is adapted to the production of 
motion in matter, in desired ways; and nothing else 
in the material world can we accomplish. Our brain 
and nerve systems connect us with the rest of the 
physical world. Our senses give us information about 
the movements and arrangements of matter. Our 
muscles enable us to produce changes in those dis- 
tributions. That is our equipment for human life; 
and human history is a record of what we have done 
with these parsimonious privileges. 
Our brain, which by some means yet to be dis- 
covered connects us with the rest of the material 
world, has been thought partially to disconnect us 
from the mental and spiritual realm, to which we 
really belong, but from which for a time and for 
practical purposes we are isolated. Our common or 
social association with matter gives us certain oppor- 
NO. 2289, VOL. 92] 
NATURE 
[SEPTEMBER I1, 1913, 
tunities and facilities, combined with obstacles and 
difficulties which are themselves opportunities for 
struggle and effort. 
Through matter we become aware of each other, 
and can communicate with those of our fellows who 
have ideas sufficiently like our own for them to be 
stimulated into activity by a merely physical process 
set in action by ourselves. By a time succession of 
vibratory movements (as in speech and music), or by 
a static distribution of materials (as in writing, paint- 
ing, and sculpture), we can carry on intelligent inter- 
course with our fellows; and we get so used to these 
ingenious and roundabout methods, that we are apt 
to think of them and their like as not only the natural 
but as the only possible modes of communication, and 
that anything more direct would disarrange the whole 
fabric of science. 
It is clearly true that our bodies constitute the 
normal means of manifesting ourselves to each other 
while on the planet; and that if the physiological 
mechanism whereby we accomplish material acts is 
injured, the conveyance of our meaning and the dis- 
play of our personality inevitably and correspondingly 
suffer. 
So conspicuously is this the case that it has been 
possible to suppose that the communicating mechan- 
ism, formed and worked by us, is the whole of our 
existence : and that we are essentially nothing but the 
machinery by which we are known. We find the 
machinery utilising nothing but well-known forms of 
energy, and subject to all the laws of chemistry and 
physics—it would be strange if it were not so—and 
from that fact we try to draw valid deductions as to © 
our nature, and as to the impossibility of our existing 
apart from and independent of these temporary modes 
of material activity and manifestation. We so 
uniformly employ them, in our present circumstances, 
that we should be on our guard against deception due 
to this very uniformity. Material bodies are all that 
we have any control over, are all that we are experi- 
mentally aware of; anything that we can do with 
these is open to us; any conclusions we can draw 
about them may be legitimate and true. But to step 
outside their province and to deny the existence of any 
other region because we have no sense organ for its 
appreciation, or because (like the ether) it is too 
uniformly omnipresent for our ken, is to wrest our 
advantages and privileges from their proper use and 
apply them to our own misdirection. 
But if we have learnt from science that evolution 
is real, we have learnt a great deal. I must not 
venture to philosophise, but certainly from the point 
of view of science evolution is a great reality. Surely 
evolution is not an illusion; surely the universe pro- 
gresses in time. Time and space and matter are 
abstractions, but are none the less real: they are 
data given by experience; and time is the keystone 
of evolution. ‘Thy centuries follow each other, per- 
fecting a small wild flower.” 
We abstract from living, moving reality a certain 
static aspect, and we call it matter; we abstract the 
element of progressiveness, and we call it time. 
When these two abstractions combine, co-operate, 
interact, we get reality again. It is like Poynting’s 
theorem. 
The only way to refute or confuse the theory of 
evolution is to introduce the subjectivity of time. 
That theory involves the reality of time, and it is 
in this sense that Prof. Bergson uses the great phrase 
“creative evolution.” 
I see the whole of material existence as a steady 
passage from past to future, only the single instant 
which we call the present being actual. The past is 
not non-existent, however, it is stored in our 
