ANNUAL ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. LV 
matches, passes through the few centuries of which we have a 
record, illuminating an area which varies, but which has been grow- 
ing steadily larger. The individual members of the procession come 
from, and pass into, shadow and darkness, but the light of the stream 
remains. Yet it does not seem so much darkness, an infinite night, 
whence we come and whither we go, as a fog which at a little dis- 
tance obscures or hides all things, but which, nevertheless, gives the 
impression that there is light beyond and above it. In this fog we 
are living and groping, stumbling down blind alleys, only to find 
that there is no thoroughfare, getting lost and circling about on our 
own tracks as on a jumbie prairie; but slowly and irregularly we 
do seem to be getting on, and to be establishing some points in the 
survey of the continent of our own ignorance, 
In some directions the man of science claims to lead the way; in 
others the artist, the poet, the devotee. Far reaching as the specu- 
lations of the man of science may be, ranging from the constitution 
and nature of a universal protyle, through the building of a universe 
to its resolution again into primal matter or modes of motion, he 
ean frame no hypothesis which shall explain consciousness, nor has 
he any data for a formula which shall tell what becomes of the in- 
dividual when he disappears in the all-surrounding mist. Does he 
go on seeking and learning in other ways or other worlds? The 
great mass of mankind think that they have some information bear- 
ing on these questions; but, if so, it is a part of the wisdom of the 
Orient, and not of the physical or natural science of the Occident. 
Whether after death there shall come increase of knowledge, with 
increase of desires and of means of satisfying them, or whether there 
shall be freedom from all desire, and an end of coming and going, 
we do not know; nor is there any reason to suppose that it is a part 
of the plan of the universe that we should know. We do know that 
the great majority of men think that there are such things as right 
and duty—God and a future life—and that to each man there comes 
the opportunity of doing something which he and others recognize 
to be his duty. The scientific explanation of a part of the process 
by which this has been brought about, as by natural selection, 
heredity, education, progressive changes in this or that particular 
mass of brain matter, has not much bearing on the practical ques- 
tion of “ What to do about it?” But it does, nevertheless, indicate 
that it is not a characteristic to be denounced, or opposed, or neg- 
lected, since, even in the “struggle-for-existence” theory, it has 
