ADDRESS. 11 



sionally true, endeavour to the best of our power to reconcile with it all 

 the new facts we discover, and abandon or modify it when it ceases to 

 afford a coherent explanation of new experience. That procedure is 

 far as are the poles asunder from the presumptuous attempt to travel 

 beyond the study of secondary causes. Any discussion as to whether 

 matter or energy was the true reality would have appeared to Tyndall as 

 a futile metaphysical disputation, which, being completely dissociated from 

 verified experience, would lead to nothing. No explanation was attempted 

 by him of the origin of the bodies yve call elements, nor how some of such 

 bodies came to be compounded into complex groupings and built up into 

 special structures with which, so far as we know, the phenomena charac- 

 teristic of life are invariably associated. The evolutionary doctrine leads 

 us to the conclusion that life, such as we know it, has only been possible 

 during a short period of the world's history, and seems equally destined to 

 disappear in the remote future ; but it postulates the existence of a 

 material universe endowed with an infinity of powers and properties, the 

 origin of which it does not pretend to account for. The enigma at both 

 ends of the scale Tyndall admitted, and the futility of attempting to 

 answer such questions he fully recognised. Nevertheless, Tyndall did not 

 mean that the man of science should be debarred from speculating as to the 

 possible nature of the simplest forms of matter or the mode in which life may 

 have originated on this planet. Lord Kelvin, in his Presidential Address, 

 put the position admirably when he said ' Science is bound by the ever- 

 lasting law of honour to face fearlessly every problem that can fairly be 

 presented to it. If a probable solution consistent with the ordinary course 

 of Nature can be found, we must not invoke an abnormal act of Creative 

 Power' ; and in illustration he forthwith proceeded to express his convic- 

 tion that from time immemorial many worlds of life besides our own have 

 existed, and that ' it is not an unscientific hypothesis that life originated 

 on this earth through the moss-grown fragments from the ruins of another 

 world.' In spite of the great progress made in science, it is curious to 

 notice the occasional recrudescence of metaphysical dogma. For instance, 

 there is a school which does not hesitate to revive ancient mystifications 

 in order to show that matter and energy can be shattered by philosophical 

 arguments, and have no objective reality. Science is at once more humble 

 and more reverent. She confesses her ignorance of the ultimate nature 

 of matter, of the ultimate nature of energy, and still more of the origin 

 and ultimate synthesis of the two. She is content with her patient inves- 

 tigation of secondary causes, and glad to know that since Tyndall spoke in 

 Belfast she has made great additions to the knowledge of general mole- 

 cular mechanism, and especially of synthetic artifice in the domain of 

 organic chemistry, though the more exhaustive acquaintance gained only 

 forces us the more to acquiesce in acknowledging the inscrutable mystery 

 of matter. Our conception of the power and potency of matter has grown 

 in little more than a quarter of a century to much more imposing dimen- 

 sions, and the outlook for the future assuredly suggests the increasing 



