34 PRESIDENTS ADDRESS: 
concomitants of willing, of sensation, of thinking; but the hidden 
guiding entities they do not touch. 
So also if any philosopher tells you that you do not exist, or that the 
external world does not exist, or that you are an automaton without free 
will, that all your actions are determined by outside causes and that 
you are not responsible,—or that a bady cannot move out of its place, 
or that Achilles cannot catch a tortoise,—then in all those cases appeal 
must be made to twelve average men, unsophisticated by special studies. 
There is always a danger of error in interpreting experience, or in 
drawing inferences from it; but in a matter of bare fact, based on our 
own first-hand experience, we are able to give a verdict. We may be 
mistaken as to the nature of what we see; stars may look to us like 
bright specks in a dome; but the fact that we see them admits of no 
doubt. So also Consciousness and Will are realities of which we are 
directly aware, just as directly as we are of motion and force, just as 
clearly as we apprehend the philosophising utterances of an Agnostic. 
The process of seeing, the plain man does not understand ; he does not 
recognise that it is a method of etherial telegraphy ; he knows nothing 
of the ether and its ripples, nor of the retina and its rods and cones, 
nor of nerve and brain processes; but he sees and he hears and he 
touches, and he wills and he thinks and is conscious. This is not an 
appeal to the mob as against the philosopher; it is appeal to the 
experience of untold ages as against the studies of a generation. 
How consciousness became associated with matter, how life exerts 
guidance over chemical and physical forces, how mechanical motions are 
translated into sensations,—all these things are puzzling, and demand 
long study. But the fact that these things are so admits of no doubt; 
and difficulty of explanation is no argument against them. ‘The blind 
man restored to sight had no opinion as to how he was healed, nor could 
he vouch for the moral character of the Healer, but he plainly knew 
that whereas he was blind now he saw. About that fact he was the 
best possible judge. So it is also with ‘ this main miracle that thou art 
thou, With power on thine own act. and on the world.’ 
But although Life and Mind may be excluded from Physiology, they 
are not excluded from Science. Of course not. It is not reasonable to 
say that things necessarily elude investigation merely because we do not 
knock against them. Yet the mistake is sometimes made. The ether 
makes no appeal to sense, therefore some are beginning to say that it 
does not exist. Mind is occasionally put into the same predicament. 
Life is not detected in the laboratory, save in its physical and chemical 
manifestations; but we may have to admit that it guides processes 
nevertheless. It may be called a catalytic agent. 
To understand the action of life itself, the simplest plan is not to 
think of a microscopic organism, or any unfamiliar animal, but to make 
