Oe ea 
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PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 33 
Most of them do their work by intense concentration, by narrowing 
down their scope, not by taking a wide survey or a comprehensive 
grasp. Suggestions of broader views and outlying fields of knowledge 
seem foreign to the intense worker, and he resents them. For his own 
purpose he wishes to ignore them, and practically he may be quite 
right. The folly of negation is not his, but belongs to those who mis- 
interpret or misapply his utterances, and take him as a guide in a 
region where, for the time at least, he is a stranger. Not by such aid 
is the universe in its broader aspects to be apprehended. If people 
in general were better acquainted with science they would not make 
these mistakes. They would realise both the learning and the lmita- 
tions, make use of the one and allow for the other, and not take the 
recipe of a practical worker for a formula wherewith to interpret the 
Universe. 
What appears to be quite certain is that there can be no terrestrial 
manifestation of life without matter. Hence naturally they say, or 
they approve such sayings as, ‘I discern in matter the promise and 
potency of all forms of life.’ Of all terrestrial manifestations of life, 
certainly. How else could it manifest itself save through matter? 
“I detect nothing in the organism but the laws of Chemistry and 
Physics,’ it is said. Very well: naturally enough. That is what 
they are after; they are studying the physical and chemical aspects 
or manifestations of life. But life itseli—life and mind and con- 
sciousness—they are not studying, and they exclude them from their 
purview. Matter is what appeals to our senses here and now; 
Materialism is appropriate to the material world; not as a philosophy 
but as a working creed, as a proximate and immediate formula for 
guiding research. Hverything beyond that belongs to another region, 
and must be reached by other methods. To explain the Psychical in 
terms of Physics and Chemistry is simply impossible; hence there is 
a tendency to deny its existence, save as an epiphenomenon. But all 
such philosophising is unjustified, and is really bad Metaphysics. 
So if ever in their enthusiasm scientific workers go too far and say 
that the things they exclude from study have no existence in the 
universe, we must appeal against them to direct experience. We 
ourselves are alive, we possess life and mind and consciousness, we have 
first-hand experience of these things quite apart from laboratory 
experiments. They belong to the common knowledge of the race. 
Births, deaths, and marriages are not affairs of the biologist, but of 
humanity ; they went on before a single one of them was understood, 
before a vestige of science existed. We ourselves are the laboratory 
‘in which men of science, psychologists and others, make experiments. 
They can formulate our processes of digestion, and the material 
1913. D 
