ADDRESS. 13 
So far as natural science can tell us, every quality of sense or intellect 
which does not help us to fight, to eat, and to bring up children, is but 
a by-product of the qualities which do, Our organs of sense-perception 
were not given us for purposes of research ; nor was it to aid us in 
meting out the heavens or dividing the atom that our powers of calcu- 
lation and analysis were evolved from the rudimentary instincts of the 
animal. 
It is presumably due to these circumstances that the beliefs of all 
mankind about the material surroundiugs in which it dwells are not only 
imperfect but fundamentally wrong. It may seem singular that down to, 
say, five years ago, our race has, without exception, lived and died in a 
world of illusions ; ard that its illusions, or those with which we are here 
alone concerned, have not been about things remote or abstract, things 
transcendental or divine, but about what men see and handle, about those 
‘plain matters of fact’ among which common sense daily moves with its 
most confident step and most self-satisfied smile. Presumably, however, this 
is either because too direct a vision of physical reality was a hindrance, not 
a help, in the struggle for existence ; because falsehood was more useful 
than truth; or else because with so imperfect a material as living 
tissue no better results could be attained. But if this conclusion be 
accepted, its consequences extend to other organs of knowledge besides 
those of perception. Not merely the senses, but the intellect, must be 
judged by it ; and it is hard to see why evolution, which has so lament- 
ably failed to produce trustworthy instruments for obtaining the raw 
material of experience, should be credited with a larger measure of 
success in its provision of the physiological arrangements which condition 
reason in its endeavours to turn experience to account. 
Considerations like these, unless I have compressed them beyond 
the limits of intelligibility, do undoubtedly suggest a certain inevitable 
incoherence in any general scheme of thought which is built out of 
materials provided by natural science alone. Extend the boundaries 
of knowledge as you may; draw how you will the picture of the 
universe ; reduce its infinite variety to the modes of a single space-filling 
ether ; re-trace its history to the birth of existing atoms ; show how under 
the pressure of gravitation they became concentrated into nebulz, into 
suns, and all the host of heaven ; how, at least in one small planet, they 
combined to form organic compounds ; how organic compounds became 
living things ; how living things, developing along many different lines, 
gave birth at last to one superior race ; how from this race arose, after 
many ages, a learned handful, who looked round on the world which thus 
blindly brought them into being, and judged it, and knew it for what it 
was: perform, I say, all this, and though you may indeed have attained 
to science, in nowise will you have attained to a self-sufficing system 
of beliefs. One thing at least will remain, of which this long-drawn 
sequence of causes and effects gives no satisfying explanation ; and that 
