14 REPORT—1904. 
is knowledge itself. Natural science must ever regard knowledge as the 
product of irrational conditions, for in the last resort it knows no others, 
It must always regard knowledge as rational, or else science itself dis- 
appears. In addition, therefore, to the difficulty of extracting from 
experience beliefs which experience contradicts, we are confronted with the 
difficulty of harmonising the pedigree of our beliefs with their title to 
authority. The more successful we are in explaining their origin, the 
more doubt we cast upon their validity. The more imposing seems the 
scheme of what we know, the more difficult it is to discover by what 
ultimate criteria we claim to know it. 
Here, however, we touch the frontier beyond which physical science 
possesses no jurisdiction. If the obscure and difficult region which lies 
beyond is to be surveyed and made accessible, philosophy, not science, 
must undertake the task. It is no business of this Society. We meet 
here to promote the cause of knowledge in one of its great divisions ; we 
shall not help it by confusing the limits which usefully separate one 
division from another. It may perhaps be thought that I have dis- 
regarded my own precept ; that I have wilfully overstepped the ample 
bounds within which the searchers into Nature carry on their labours. 
Tf it be so, I can only beg your forgiveness. My first desire has been to 
rouse in those who, like myself, are no specialists in physics, the same 
absorbing interest which I feel in what is surely the most far-reaching 
speculation about the physical universe which has ever claimed experi- 
mental support ; and if in so doing I have been tempted to hint my own 
personal opinion, that as Natural Science grows it leans more, not less, 
upon a teleological interpretation of the universe, even those who least 
agree may perhaps be prepared to pardon, 
