6 PRESIDENTS ADDRESS« 
our own desires, tastes, and interests as affording a key to the 
understanding of the world.’ 
This exclusive single-eyed attitude of science is its strength; but, if 
pressed beyond the positive region of usefulness into a field of dogmatic 
negation and philosophising, it becomes also its weakness. For the 
nature of man is a large thing, and intellect is only a part of it: a recent 
part too, which therefore necessarily, though not consciously, suffers 
from some of the defects of newness and crudity, and should refrain 
from imagining itself the whole—perhaps it is not even the best part— 
of human nature. 
The fact is that some of the best things are, by abstraction, excluded 
from Science, though not from Literature and Poetry; hence perhaps 
an ancient mistrust or dislike of science, typified by the Promethean 
legend. Science is systematised and metrical knowledge, and in 
regions where measurement cannot be applied it has small scope; or, as 
Mr. Balfour said the other day at the opening of a new wing of the 
National Physical Laboratory, 
‘Science depends on measurement, and things not measur- 
able are therefore excluded, or tend to be excluded, from its 
attention. But Life and Beauty and Happiness are not measur- 
able.’ And then characteristically he added:—‘ If there could 
be a unit of happiness, Politics might begin to be scientific.’ 
Emotion and Intuition and Instinct are immensely older than 
science, and in a comprehensive survey of existence they cannot be 
ignored. Scientific men may rightly neglect them, in order to do their 
proper work, but philosophers cannot. 
So Philosophers have begun to question some of the larger generali- 
sations of science, and to ask whether in the effort to be universal and 
comprehensive we have not extended our laboratory inductions too far. 
The Conservation of Energy, for instance,—is it always and every- 
where valid; or may it under some conditions be disobeyed? It would 
seem as if the second law of Thermodynamics must be somewhere dis- 
obeyed—at least if the age of the Universe is both ways infinite,—else 
the final consummation would have already arrived. 
Not by philosophers only, but by scientific men also, ancient postu- 
lates are being pulled up by the roots. Physicists and Mathematicians 
are beginning to consider whether the long-known and well-established 
laws of mechanics hold true everywhere and always, or whether the 
Newtonian scheme must be replaced by something more modern, some- 
thing to which Newton’s laws of motion are but an approximation. 
Indeed a whole system of non-Newtonian Mechanics has been 
devised, having as its foundation the recently discovered changes which 
