PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 37 
The mechanism whereby existence entrenches itself is manifest, or 
at least has been to a large extent discovered. Natural Selection is a 
vera causa, so far as it goes; but if so much beauty is necessary for 
insects, what about the beauty of a landscape or of clouds? What 
utilitarian object do those subserve? Beauty in general is not taken 
into account by science. Very well, that may be all right, but it exists 
nevertheless. It is not my function to discuss it. No; but it is my 
function to remind you and myself that our studies do not exhaust the 
Universe, and that if we dogmatise in a negative direction, and say 
that we can reduce everything to physics and chemistry, we gibbet 
ourselves as ludicrously narrow pedants, and are falling far short of 
the richness and fullness of our human birthright, How far preferable 
is the reverent attitude of the Eastern Poet :— 
‘The world with eyes bent upon thy feet stands in awe with 
all its silent stars.’ 
Superficially and physically we are very limited. Our sense organs 
are adapted to the observation of matter; and nothing else directly 
appeals to us. Our nerve-muscle-system is adapted to the production 
of motion in matter, in desired ways; and nothing else in the material 
world can we accomplish. Our brain and nerve systems connect us 
with the rest of the physical world. Our senses give us information 
about the movements and arrangements of matter. Our muscles enable 
us to produce changes in those distributions. That is our equipment 
for human life; and human history is a record of what we have done 
with these parsimonious privileges. 
Our brain, which by some means yet to be discovered connects us 
with the rest of the material world, has been thought partially to dis- 
connect us from the mental and spiritual realm, to which we really 
belong but from which for a time and for practical purposes we are 
isolated. Our common or social association with matter gives us certain 
opportunities and facilities, combined with obstacles and difficulties 
_ which are themselves opportunities for struggle and effort. 
Through matter we become aware of each other, and can communi- 
cate with those of our fellows who have ideas sufficiently like our own 
for them to be stimulated into activity by a merely physical process 
set in action by ourselves. By a timed succession of vibratory move- 
ments (as in speech and music), or by a static distribution of materials 
(as in writing, painting, and sculpture), we can carry on intelligent 
intercourse with our fellows; and we get so used to these ingenious 
and roundabout methods, that we are apt to think of them and their 
like as not only the natural but as the only possible modes of com- 
munication, and that anything more direct would disarrange the whole 
fabric of science. 
