PRESIDENTS ADDRESS 35 
use of our own experience as living beings. Any positive instance serves 
to stem a comprehensive denial ; and if the reality of mind and guidance 
and plan is denied because they make no appeal to sense, then think how 
the world would appear to an observer to whom the existence of men 
was unknown and undiscoverable, while yet all the laws and activities 
of nature went on as they do now. 
Suppose, then, that man made no appeal to the senses of an observer 
of this planet. Suppose an outside observer could see all the events 
occurring in the world, save only that he could not see animals or men. 
He would describe what he saw much as we have to describe the 
activities initiated by life. 
If he looked at the Firth of Forth, for instance, he would see piers 
arising in the water, beginning to sprout, reaching across in strange 
manner till they actually join or are joined by pieces attracted up from 
below to complete the circuit (a solid circuit round the current). He 
would see a sort of bridge or filament thus constructed, from one shore 
to the other, and across this bridge insect-like things crawling and 
returning for no very obvious reason. 
Or let him look at the Nile, and recognise the meritorious character 
of that river in promoting the growth of vegetation in the desert. Then 
let him see a kind of untoward crystallisation growing across and begin- 
ning to dam the beneficent stream. Blocks fly to their places by some 
kind of polar forces; ‘ we cannot doubt’ that it is by helio- or other 
tropism. There is no need to go outside the laws of mechanics and 
physics, there is no difficulty about supply of energy—none whatever ,— 
materials in tin cans are consumed which amply account for all the 
energy ; and all the laws of physics are obeyed. The absence of any 
design, too, is manifest; for the effect of the structure is to flood an area 
up-stream which might have been useful, and to submerge a structure 
of some beauty ; while down stream its effect is likely to be worse, for it 
would block the course of the river and waste it on the desert, were it 
_ not thai fortunately some leaks develop and a sufficient supply still goes 
down—goes down in fact more equably than before: so that the ulti- 
mate result is beneficial to vegetation, and simulates intention. 
If told concerning either of these structures that an engineer, a 
designer in London, called Benjamin Baker, had anything to do with 
it, the idea would be preposterous. One conclusive argument is final 
_ against such a superstitious hypothesis—he is not there, and a thing 
plainly cannot act where it is not. But although we, with our greater 
advantages, perceive that the right solution for such an observer would 
be the recognition of some unknown agency or agent, it must be 
admitted that an explanation in terms of a vague entity called vital force 
would be useless, and might be so worded as to be misleading ; whereas 
D2 
